Sectors
Outsourced SDRs for finance software selling to group finance.
A planning platform sold to the people who own the numbers, at organisations that already have a system and a reason to ignore every vendor who rings. We took an FP&A platform into group finance leadership in the UK and the US, up to multinational scale. What is different, and what it took.
Finance software competes with the status quo before it competes with anyone else: Excel, the planning tool that came with the ERP, and a finance team that has learned to live with both. The person who decides already has a system, reports to the CFO, and takes calls about their month-end rather than calls about a platform. Outbound into this market is an argument about how planning actually happens, made to the person who owns it.
What is different about this market
- Everyone is calling the same people. The field is Anaplan, OneStream, Power BI and the rest, and the Group FP&A Director has heard every one of them. A feature list does not get a second sentence; a question about the close does.
- The buyer sits at the top of finance and stays there. Group FP&A, the Finance Director, the finance systems lead - an analyst will pass it up and it will not come back down.
- The organisations are large by definition: multiple entities, multiple locations, hundreds of reports a month, a close measured in weeks. That is what makes the problem worth a meeting and the person hard to reach.
- Timing follows the ERP. Organisations mid-way through an Oracle or SAP programme are the ones asking what planning looks like afterwards.
What running it taught us
For Metapraxis, a financial planning and analysis platform, we built the account lists at group finance level across law, banking, healthcare, infrastructure and professional services in the UK, opened more than eight hundred new accounts in US life sciences and multi-site hospitality, and ran multi-threaded outreach into each one. The pitch was rebuilt around industry comparison - how a business of their size in their sector runs planning, and where they sit on an FP&A maturity curve - which turned a vendor call into a benchmarking conversation. Every meeting was with finance leadership, up to the global head of FP&A at a multinational restaurant group, and every one came with a handover pack: the role, the tenure, the prospecting journey and the discovery notes. The detail is on the case study.
Who gets called
The person who owns FP&A for the group, the Finance Director and the finance systems lead, multi-threaded inside each account so one person going quiet does not close it. The opener is the month-end: how many reports the team produces by hand, how many locations feed the consolidation, how long from period end to a number the board will trust. A finance leader answers that in a sentence, and the sentence says whether there is a conversation.
Do finance leaders take cold calls?
They take calls about their month-end from someone who can describe it back to them. They do not take calls about a platform. The difference is the whole method.
Can you work the US as well as the UK?
Yes. The engagement above ran both markets, and in the US, life sciences and multi-site hospitality answered first.
What do our closers get before a meeting?
A handover pack: company profile, the prospect’s role and tenure, the prospecting journey from first email to booked meeting, and the discovery notes - what they run today, what they said hurt, what they want to see.
Do you sell against an incumbent system?
Nearly always. The restaurant group above was already running a tier-one ERP with a planning tool on top and still wanted to see the comparison. The conversation is about where the current setup falls short, which is a question the buyer is usually glad to be asked.
The other markets we have sold into: B2B software and SaaS, healthcare and the NHS, technology firms and Microsoft partners, deep tech selling to enterprise, agencies and estate agents. All of them are on the sectors page.
Group finance, from the top down.
Fifteen minutes on the sectors, the sizes and the month-end question that opens the door.
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