From transactional sellers to trusted advisors
Targeted vertical sales campaigns and live coaching so embedded finance sellers could speak to client realities, not just product features.
Starting point
Embedded finance had become a strategic priority across many industries, but the value case looked different in every vertical. Sellers inside this global fintech enterprise knew the product catalog. What they lacked was the nuance executive buyers expect in enterprise conversations. Meetings often opened with features rather than a clear point of view on how money moves, where risk sits, how regulation bites, and what value embedded finance can unlock in that specific industry. Discovery quality varied, and multiple product teams pursued the same industries with limited coordination, so insights stayed trapped in silos.
Approach
The organization stood up a repeatable vertical campaign model designed to change how sellers prepared for, framed, and ran enterprise conversations. The work was led in a prior role by Bhuvan Maingi, now Managing Partner of Strathen Group.
Working with corporate strategy and sales leaders, the team selected priority verticals based on market signals, seasonality, and where executive buyers were most likely to be evaluating change. Rather than trying to teach industries in the abstract, the model focused on one vertical per month with a clear theme and a clear path from insight to action.
Each monthly focus included three assets that sellers could use immediately:
- A vertical narrative executives recognize. A concise “why this vertical, why now” story grounded in how the industry makes money, where margins are under pressure, and what triggers transformation. This translated embedded finance from product language into business language and gave sellers a credible opener for first meetings.
- A curated account list with tight targeting. Each campaign included 100+ named accounts that met defined filters such as size, complexity, digital maturity, likely product fit, and evidence of payments or money-movement friction. This prevented random prospecting and made the month feel like an intentional push.
- Discovery prompts tied to real operating constraints. Instead of broad question banks, the team built discovery paths aligned to vertical realities, including procurement and control requirements, compliance expectations, treasury flows, settlement friction, and customer experience tradeoffs. Sellers could ask sharper questions and connect answers to credible solution patterns.
A live coaching session anchored each month. The session walked sellers through how the vertical works, what executives worry about, and where embedded finance plausibly fits. Colleagues already selling other products into that industry joined to share what they were hearing in the field. Follow-ups reinforced the message through talk tracks, account research prompts, and a lightweight feedback loop so field learnings could sharpen the next campaign.
Vertical campaigns worked because they paired crisp targeting with real insight and live coaching, not just new slides.
Outcome
Over time, the monthly cadence changed the tone and quality of embedded finance conversations. Sellers began opening meetings with vertical context, including operating pressures, risk considerations, and customer experience expectations. Products became the “how,” not the starting point. That shift made discussions feel more relevant to senior stakeholders and created a more natural bridge into multi-product solutions.
Internally, the approach improved coordination across product lines. Sellers worked the same vertical at the same time using shared language, compared notes on what was landing, and translated field signals into sharper talk tracks and discovery patterns without rebuilding the program each quarter. The most meaningful change was behavioral: sellers started to act and sound more like trusted advisors, with a point of view on the client’s business, rather than representatives of a product line.
The real win was a mindset shift: lead with the vertical, then map solutions to reality, and earn executive attention.
Our key takeaway from this case study was that trust is built through industry fluency, not product recitation. Strathen Group applies a cadence-driven campaign model to help revenue teams build sharper vertical points of view and run better discovery.
