How do you earn the trust of enterprise buyers when you’re competing against companies with longer track records and established relationships?
As a new or smaller brand, the natural thing that comes to mind is, “Let’s go out there, spend money and create awareness.” You can do that if you have a big budget, but it may not always turn out well because the companies you’re competing with also have big budgets. They’ve already been in the market, established relationships and built market share.
My personal strategy has been to focus on three things. The first is to identify the business issues that matter to the buyers. It’s about going out there, listening, interviewing and talking to people. I’m not trying to sell. I’m just trying to understand. From all these interviews, you begin to understand things customers are not even talking about, but that your product can use as a unique advantage.
When you can identify issues that are pertinent to them, sometimes even issues they don’t explicitly state but experience, they will pay attention.
Secondly, because we’re built in Africa for Africa, I turn the local understanding that we have of this terrain and our regulatory environment into a commercial advantage. In financial services, buyers want to know whether a provider understands their infrastructure realities, regulatory environment, implementation risks and support expectations. That level of context can be more persuasive than simply having a big brand name.
Being able to go to a customer and say, “More than knowing you, I know the business you’re in. I know what CBN is requesting from you. And I’m here in the same country and region with you. So if you need me, I’m here.” That closeness you’re promising an enterprise company can mean more than having the biggest name.
The third is that I have to build credibility by showing evidence. In B2C, they call it social proof. In B2B, I call it evidence. Evidence can be anything from case studies, customer references, implementation outcomes and technical demos to access to products and leaders in places where you’ve already deployed. You give them enough confidence and enough material to go and make the case for you internally.
“If you’re a CTO and you sanction the move from one core banking provider to another and the core banking ends up failing, which affects the bank, that CTO’s career is done.”
“We weren’t trying to sell based on the features we had because every core banking product has features. There were two things. One, proof that it has worked somewhere and worked seamlessly. Two, reassurance that your career is safe with us because we own the career together.”
“Look, your career is safe with us, and these are all the things we’ve put in place to ensure that nothing will go wrong. God forbid, if anything goes wrong, this is what we’ll do for you.”
So as a smaller company or a new brand, you can still win by understanding your buyer better, addressing a high-priority problem for them and proving that your solution can deliver with little or no friction. The process can be more tedious. If you’re not spending a lot of money, you have to do a lot of legwork, handwork and brainwork. But it’s usually more effective when you don’t have a big budget to work with.
Can you think of a specific enterprise opportunity where the value proposition was strong, but trust was actually what was holding the deal back?
There was one example involving a microfinance bank. They were going to move away from a popular core banking provider. Our value proposition was strong, but the real concern was whether they could trust us as a company. We are native to Africa, while they were using a provider that was more global. They wanted to know if they could trust an African company with their core banking.
We realised that simply talking about our product benefits and features would not address their concern. So we focused on giving the bank enough evidence to evaluate the decision confidently. One of the things we did was arrange a detailed technical session with a large team. The bank’s technical team, finance team and others were able to test the architecture, integration, data migration, security systems and everything they needed to build confidence.
We showed them our cutover approach. We did testing and contingency planning and showed them that we could offer post-migration support in case anything went wrong. Again, our understanding of the local environment was important. We showed how our system was built for CBN realities. We could also say, “Even if CBN introduces a new regulation tomorrow, this is how quickly we can ensure your system adapts.”
They knew who would be responsible for support during and after implementation, and how quickly we would respond. They knew it. They tested it. They saw it. And today, they are one of our best customers.
Once you’ve won a few enterprise customers, how do you turn the trust into a repeatable growth process?
In my own case, I’m still building the process. What we’re doing right now is turning each opportunity we come across into a source of learning that improves the next opportunity. There is a postmortem, whether it’s a successful deal or not.
After key engagements, we review: what did we do right? What moved the opportunity forward? Where did trust become an issue? Which stakeholders became influential at what time? What questions were people asking repeatedly? All of those things have to be documented intentionally. Then we convert some of these, like the questions and objections, into assets that can be reused: objection-handling guides, stakeholder-specific messaging, case studies, proposal templates, implementation documentation.
There are some documents I’m still looking at that are on version 31. That’s how consistently we improve these playbooks based on what we’re seeing in the market.
We also document patterns, especially in the sales process, because we don’t assume that every customer will follow the same process. Enterprise buyers have different priorities. There is internal politics and approval structures you need to understand. And sometimes, to keep the business from becoming too transactional, we stay focused on the customer’s business beyond the immediate deal. We’re not just here to sell the software to you. We’re here to grow with you.
Beyond revenue and pipeline, what tells you that an enterprise growth engine is actually solid?
How many relevant stakeholders know us? How many of them engage with us? How many understand our value? If the relationship depends on one champion, the opportunity is fragile. If you’re only talking to one person in an organisation, you can’t count that as a real deal. It’s just an entry point.
We also track movement. How does the conversation move from marketing engagement to technical or product demos, then commercials and finally purchase? How quickly does that happen? One of the things that helps us know whether we’re wasting time is average time to close per prospect type. We’ve gathered enough data to know that a Tier 1 bank takes a certain amount of time because of all the internal processes, a Tier 2 bank is different, and a microfinance bank or fintech is different again.
A customer who introduces us to another institution is a strong signal that the relationship can compound.
For existing customers, once you’ve made that purchase, we watch your product adoption. We evaluate the support experience to make sure what we’ve promised is consistent with what you’re getting. We build engagement before renewals so those conversations are easier. And there’s willingness to refer us, but there’s a process. You first have to enjoy the product over a period before we ask for a reference, then a case study, then a referral. If you haven’t built that level of confidence, it will be difficult to ask somebody to experience something you’re not enjoying.
Once you’ve earned a customer’s trust, what allows you to expand the relationship beyond the initial contract?
Expansion is majorly a customer success and growth conversation. It starts with delivering on the promise you made to the customer. If your implementation, support and product performance meet expectations, the customer becomes more open to conversations about what more they can get from the brand.
That’s how a lot of us became Apple fans. You probably started with the iPod, thought it was good, then went to the iPhone, bought the smartwatch. If your product performance meets expectations, expansion becomes natural. You don’t even need to sweat it.
One of the biggest growth levers in any organisation is your capacity to maintain stable product performance and prioritise customer retention. Once you can do that, your growth costs less to acquire or maintain.
If I’m already serving you well on your core banking and I want to sell you a business process automation tool that integrates easily with it, nobody is going to be strongly against it. The goal is to use our proven results from the first engagement to build a credible business case for subsequent ones, rather than treating expansion like we have to start the cold sale from scratch again.
What’s the fastest way an enterprise company can destroy trust that took months to build?
The fastest way to lose trust is to make a lot of promises during the sale about your product, support and service, and then not fulfil them after the customer has paid. Or becoming difficult to reach after you’ve collected money from the customer.
Enterprise customers naturally expect that things will happen after the sale. They expect challenges. But once you start hiding, taking too long to respond, missing your commitments or treating support as somebody else’s responsibility after they’ve paid, it becomes a way to never trust you again. And once you lose the trust of your customer, it takes ten times the effort you used to gain it the first time to regain it.
Trust can also disappear when customers start hearing different answers from different teams. The sales team is saying one thing. The product team is saying another. It starts looking like there is no internal alignment, and the buyer begins questioning whether the company knows what it’s doing.
Sell what the team can deliver. Communicate issues early. Take ownership and remain responsive even after the contract has been signed.
Because when something goes wrong, the quality of the response often determines whether the relationship becomes weaker or stronger. Once you don’t hide, they trust you. They can call you at 2 a.m. and you’ll answer. That’s it.