Selling to Banks: Inside Entrio’s Enterprise Sales Strategy

“If you’re trying to be a fintech entrepreneur or enterprise software entrepreneur selling to banks, you have to think twice,” warns Avi Cohen in a recent Category Visionaries episode. “Because this is not an easy domain to be operating. It’s fun, it’s energizing, it’s definitely stimulating, but it’s tough.”

The challenge starts with sales cycles. “In the banking industry, especially with financial services, but particularly with banks and insurance companies, the average sales cycle is something like 24 months from the first meeting to the moment you sign a contract,” Avi notes.

Entrio tackled this challenge through three key strategies:

1. Minimize Implementation Requirements Rather than requiring extensive integration work upfront, Entrio built a data-first approach. “We created a situation where as a data company, we own the data and we created this data lake that encompasses every technology solution in the world,” Avi explains. This meant they only needed minimal information from banks to start delivering value.
2. Segment the Market “The question also differs between big banks and what I call global banks, to regional banks, to community banks,” Avi shares. Each segment required a different approach: “What we’re seeing today is that it’s definitely moving much faster with the community banks and the regional banks, just because of their size.”
3. Adapt to Existing Systems Instead of forcing banks to adopt new interfaces, Entrio offered API integration. “They said that the organization is so accustomed already to a certain UI and UX that they would rather have all of the beautiful things that we can provide…But it doesn’t have to come through our own UI.”

Their go-to-market approach is primarily sales-led, focusing on enterprise architects. “We sit under the CIO division, but primarily our Persona is the head of enterprise architecture,” Avi explains. These architects face increasing complexity – one bank had “20 different local no code solutions internally.”

The strategy has evolved as they’ve grown. “What we’ve been investing a lot of time in the last couple of months is actually how can we take the brand that we build, the new language, the branding, the new category around tech adoption and try to bring it into downstream potential customers.”

For founders targeting banks, the lesson is clear: success requires more than just good technology. You need a sales strategy that accommodates long cycles, minimizes implementation friction, and adapts to different market segments.