In the field of financial technology, enterprises face the challenge of transforming from traditional R&D models to SaaS, while also needing to find new business models and sales strategies in the fierce market competition. This article discusses in detail how to achieve the whole process from product verification to commercial promotion through R&D management reform, sales transformation, and the application of AI technology through the actual case of a fintech company, providing valuable practical experience for the transformation of fintech companies.
In 2020, I went to a fintech company from a securities company to provide software research and development services for financial institutions. That is to say, the legend goes from Party A to Party B, and when Party A is in Party, I always feel that the securities company is not an enterprise with software business as the core of income, and R&D management is like a small workshop, as long as it can meet the business requirements of the securities company. After coming to Party B, I found that R&D management does not seem to be like a large software company as I imagined, but as long as the product can be delivered to the final payment. The experience of securities companies and fintech companies in recent years,Let me understandThere is no fixed standard and process that must be implemented, only a process built based on the personnel structure of the enterprise for the operation of the enterpriseThis is true for both R&D organization and marketing.
The first product in financial technology companies is institutional clients, which provide financial clients for professional traders such as securities companies, futures companies, and banks. There are still many competitor companies in the country with institutional clients, in addition to companies that provide R&D services for financial institutions, such as Youpin, Hang Seng, etc.; There are also companies that are responsible for product iteration and let financial institutions pay for it, such as Xuntou and Quantitative Investment. Since the service body of the institutional business of my financial technology company is still financial institutions, the product iteration of the entire product is still based on the payment needs of financial institutions.
Two years later, after several months of debriefing, we set up a product department for digital marketing in the company. After the epidemic, due to the downturn in the market, the revenue of the brokerage business of financial institutions has also declined seriously (of course, not only the brokerage business, but all the businesses of financial institutions have declined seriously).
When I was still in a financial institution ten years ago, when many companies had to distribute nearly half of their business income to third-party channels, ten years later, this business model dominated by third-party channels has not changed much. So we thought if we helped financial institutions build their own revenue channels, would there be an opportunity to build a new business closed loop in the brokerage business?
1. Verify the business model
Before building this business model, in fact, we have had a lot of exchanges with many financial institutions, and you will find a very interesting phenomenon, that is, when you communicate with almost all business leaders (non-company executives), the business leaders’ cooperation needs for traffic channels must be placed before any needs, so if you provide solutions that can provide drainage cooperation services for financial institutions, they are willing to purchase any of your software products.
So the question comes back to the business model itself:What value do you provide to your customers?
To be honest, I don’t really like to work in the ToB industry, but I have great respect for every partner who works in the ToB industry. Because a good ToB business starts in at least three years, the first year is used to verify the business model, the second year is used to expand business influence, and the third year is used to expand the scale of revenue.
When you’re trying to provide some kind of business value to a customer, you need a large enough sample size to evaluate the effectiveness of the business value to decide whether to continue investing in the business。 The first problem I encountered in promoting this business was that after visiting nearly 10 customers, my pre-sales and sales team came to the conclusion that the customer did not need this kind of software product, the customer only needed traffic, and then everyone said we wanted to change direction.
It was very devastating for me as a first time to do ToB business, for a while I brushed a lot of articles on Zhihu about entrepreneurship, there is a sentence that I think is very right,That isIn the early stage of the product, the founder must personally go to the market to verify the value and sales logic of the product。 So last year I wasbecame the companyThe most diligent salesThe reason why I prompted myself to run the market is that when I asked our colleagues who you visited in financial institutions, what positions they were in, what they were responsible for, and the details of communication with customers, I found that there were basically no leaders above the vice president in the visits, and even some were marketing executive positions (without budget decision-making power). Second, the customers visited were mainly small and medium-sized financial institutions and branches. Later, when I talk about building a sales framework, I will share the operation ideas with you in detail.
After 10 years of interaction design, why did I transfer to product manager?
After the real job transfer, I found that many jobs were still beyond my imagination. The work of a product manager is indeed more complicated. Theoretically, the work of a product manager includes all aspects of the product, from market research, user research, data analysis…
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So whether it is building a new product or promoting an old product (many fintech companies have a lot of old products, just a dozen customers, there is a cost to continue to invest, not to maintain and hurt customer relationships, every time I take stock of these products and teams, it is very embarrassing), I think the most important thing for founders to do is to clarify the core value of the product, and visit customers with rich samples (large, medium and small to cover) to verify whether the value is established. If the business model is really not established, sales cannot give you the right direction, they are just amplifiers of the business model and sales process you have built.If there is no sales crown, the founder should be the sales crown。
2. Reconstruct the R&D process
In my first two years at a fintech company, I was exposed to a lot of projects. Whether it is securities, futures, banks, or any product, the average implementation cycle of each project is at least three months, which means that the capital turnover rate of any R&D team is up to 4 times a year. On the other hand, I have hardly seen a product that is not delayed at all, and after reaching the deadline, I must work with the customer to cut some requirements and deliver them online, and then use the remaining requirements as acceptance conditions, when to finish and when to deliver. The average delivery time for most projects is 5 months, and some projects are even more than a year.
Friends who have done financial technology or financial institutions to connect with Party B know that most financial technology companies have a lot of personnel mobility. For example, in some year-long projects, all the people who discovered the project were replaced, and some product departments found that they didn’t know anyone after a year. The most direct problems caused by personnel turnover are various problems such as project schedule delays and misalignment of needs before and after, and these problems accumulated in the front will only break out in the acceptance stage after one year, and you often do not have enough time to fix these problems at that time. So you may come to a conclusion, that isFintech companies need a lot of good project managers。
Let’s not talk about whether there are so many good project managers, and if there are any commission packages for these project managers. Even with a project manager, you will find that a project manager can manage up to three projects, andIt is necessary to equip the project manager with a good architect and technical leaderOtherwise, after a round of personnel turnover, it will be found that the code is a mountain that is difficult to maintain. The people behind it have to see how to maintain this kind of code, and the day it can’t be maintained is the day he slips away.
You can never imagine how low the price of competitors can be, so you can only “squeeze” yourself and front-line employees to work overtime. So for a while, the overtime hours of our department have been in the top three in the company.
Half a year after the establishment of the department, I made a bold attempt to use existing productsThe SaaS multi-tenancy model is reconstructed to achieve unified operation and maintenance, and adopts agile development methods for two iterations a month, and only one set of code is maintained。 When I was doing R&D model selection, I saw an article written by a technical blog sayingChina’s best CTO can only manage up to 8 sets of code, 8 sets is 8 code versionsFriends who are fintech companies know that it is common for a product to pull out a dozen versions. So friends, don’t blame the R&D brothers, the ceiling of China’s software research and development is here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is no process that should be implemented according to any standard, only a process that serves the operation of the enterprise. At the beginning of the establishment of the department, I wanted to use SaaS, but the time was not ripe, there were customized projects to be continuously maintained, and the existing team did not have core personnel who could build SaaS. This timing was not until one of my major customers had a serious production problem, and the original R&D team realized that they could not maintain this project. So there was a big change in the R&D team, and the R&D personnel were basically replaced.
The biggest pressure during that time was actually the pressure of customer delivery and personnel recruitment, and I spent more than a month looking at tens of thousands of lines of code with the back-office team and found more than a dozen concurrency problems. Then he led the test team to create test data for performance testing. Then every day is to brush the resume interview, why is there no HR, because HR thinks I am too picky, and I think HR is too slow to give resumes. It took about 3 days to brush all the R&D resumes in Wuhan that I wanted to change jobs for, read more than 2,000 resumes, and interviewed about 5 people every day, so during that time I once became the top ten most diligent bosses in Wuhan.
It took about two months from the decision to replace the R&D team to the completion of the replacement. Then it took another three months to help the new technical leader adapt to the new team and sort out the entire SaaS R&D organization and product technical framework. Almost half a year later, the first version will be launched half a year after the end of 2023, which is the aforementioned start to let pre-sales and sales be promoted.
There will be many pain points for traditional R&D teams to build SaaS, one is whether the technical leader has technical reserves, secondly, whether the customer can accept the SaaS model, and finally how to control the demand for SaaS products. SoDeveloping SaaS products is the first step, and it is also necessary to build a supporting sales system and product service model。
SaaS technology does not adopt any new technical framework, and the core lies in the sorting out of three systems: user system, authority system, and multi-tenant system. The permission system includes application permissions of tenants (mainly for product sales), data permissions of SaaS operation and maintenance operators, and usage permissions of third-party cloud services (such as cos storage, traffic, live broadcast, SMS, etc.). The rest of the departments belong to business system research and development, such as market center, simulated trading, indicator engine, live broadcast platform, data analysis, appropriateness management and other business systems.
The advantage of using agile development and a set of code management is that the average development time of any of the above new modules is not more than one month, that is, two agile iterations, and the product development process does not need to consider any version branches, which is also 6 times that of peers after product promotion, and other companies basically require a team of more than a dozen people to waterfall development for 1 month, testing for 1 month, and deployment for 1 month, while our average response cycle is 2 weeks. And after SaaS, our R&D team has been controlled to less than 6 people for a long time, and the labor cost is half of that of our peers. Friends in the software industry must be aware of the huge imagination of this model: there is a cost advantage in price, an efficiency advantage in service, and competition with other traditional enterprises is simply a dimensionality reduction blow.
3. Commercial promotion
In fact, there are some elements of gambling in the full SaaS transformation, but entrepreneurship requires not only hard work but also a little luck. Until 2023, when I started doing SaaS, there was never a SaaS business system in the standard sense under the CSRC management system, and financial supervision was relatively strict during that time, and there was more emphasis on protecting user privacy and security in terms of technology. If the SaaS model fails, the company will not have new opportunities.
So after the product was almost built at the end of 2023, the major challenges I faced were:1. Whether the commercial value of the product is feasible 2. Whether the SaaS model of the product can be accepted by financial institutions 3. How to quickly promote the product in the market
Sometimes I think the most important thing in entrepreneurship is not whether you can endure hardships or not, not whether you have energy.It’s about whether you have a strong heart that can explore a vague path in uncertainty。 And don’t let team members, your investors/leaders feel that you don’t have confidence, otherwise everyone in the team will look for a job, and the company will not continue to invest resources; Family relationships cannot be affected because of this, otherwise half of the meaning will be lost regardless of whether the business succeeds or fails.
As mentioned earlier, in the midst of an uncertain future and the pressure of department dissolution, I had the first wave of shock: the pre-sales and sales teams told me that the first challenge had failed, and they had not yet reached the second challenge. You may see that my personality does not attribute failure to any external factors, and if you want to blame it, you blame yourself for your lack of ability. After the last time I transitioned from product manager to code review development, I transitioned to pre-sales and sales, visiting customers and selling products myself. I people are really not suitable for sales, and I have to spend a lot of time before visiting customers every time I force myself to switch to E person mode.
After the meeting, we exchanged with several financial institutions, several of which were branches, and agreed to help financial institutions obtain customer resources in the form of business consulting, but customers must use our SaaS software to complete the business closed loop, so we got the first batch of signed customers, and the contract amount was particularly small. The customer is not for the software product, but for the fact that we can help them drain traffic and complete the first contract. In this way, we took the first step in the SaaS model of the product and formed the first customer case.It is also the first financial technology company in the securities and futures industry to launch a business system SaaS。
After completing the first batch of customer signings, the caliber became when we promoted it in the second month, and it was already used by financial institutions, and the cases of cooperative institutions were sent to other customers for review. After completing the accumulation of seed users, there was no mention of any drainage business in the promotion after February, but only promoted the business value of the product itself to complete the sales action. In February, we held a business training camp, inviting all financial institutions that can be contacted to experience the operation process of business + system, which is actually equivalent to training their employees on new business, and in this way, we reached more than a dozen customers and incubated 2 potential customers.
Looking back now, I feel that business is sometimes so unpretentious,No matter what means you use, you must find a way to take the first step, and then the second and third stepsEven if there is no road ahead, it will slowly become a road if there are more people walking, but you have to let enough people walk first.
Friends who have done sales may know that sales are most afraid of selling “futures” and selling new products, especially new products that have not been tested by the market, and the sales cycle of such products may be very long, and there is a high probability that they will not bring income.Our sales at the timeIt is not a full-time sales of products, but industry sales, and there is no right to assess salesIn other words, the sales of products related to the industry can be sold, compared to sales, they are more willing to sell products with large sales amounts, high sales commissions, and mature products. Therefore, at the sales level, in addition to the sales commission policy and our own subsidies and WeChat rewards, how to make sales understand the value of your product in his sales work is also very important.
So in March, I made an appointment with sales in major cities and visited more than 30 customers with them. Understand who the sales are looking for when visiting customers and how to introduce product needs. The product team and the person in charge must understand, I mentioned earlier that sales are only the amplifier of business, after the first week of visit, my conclusion is that sales basically don’t know who to find and how to sell, and even some sales don’t even know what value the product can bring to customers.
After visiting the customer in March, I gave it to the sales teamSorted out several sets of SOPs, as well as some business cases, pre-sales materials, and cooperative customer cases, and helped sales sort out the sales process of all the company’s industry products when visiting industry customers. What business to use to worship with customers, what products to build trust, and what products to repair relationships. And organize sales for training and publicity every month, and when I visit customers offline, I will also review the customer with each salespersonVisit process。
However, the efficiency of reaching customers through offline visits with sales is too low, not only the cost of visits is high, but the cost of travel per week is at least 2000~3000 yuan; And sometimes I am not in the company for a month, and I don’t have time to solve the problems of the R&D organization; In addition, the effect of the visit is not ideal, some customers don’t even know the purpose of your past communication after you pass, and the problems you can help customers solve are not clear.
In order to solve this problem, we gave the product a name and started to make a self-media account.The first self-media account was a product brand account, and later the founder’s IP self-media account was created.For most potential customers, there is no more effective way to build trust than the founder himself explaining the positioning and value of the product, as well as giving the relevant commitment to product development. If you introduce an employee persona, customers will wonder how much the employee’s words can achieve.
Doing self-media accounts (especially in-depth articles) is the most cost-effective way among all the methods we have tried, including but not limited to promotion, training camps, salons, conferences, parties, live broadcasts, etc. But for most financial technology companies, there is also a certain difficulty, the content of self-media accounts accounts accounts for 60% of dry goods, and the remaining 30%~40% is product promotional articles, the main reason why target customers pay attention to self-media accounts is not what you can sell to him, but what business ideas and values can you help him provide. So R&D personnel are not suitable, and sales are not suitable because they don’t understand the business.So the most suitable person is either a product founder or a pre-sales solution expert.
Friends who have taken sales positions may feel that most marketing/commercial personnel are inert, and it is rare to be able to insist on visiting two customers every day. Not to mention the data that requires the sales team to reach the self-media: one article/short video per week, an average of 500 users per article – 500 per person per week Product exposure must not be completed by offline sales. In 24 years, we held several large-scale online live broadcasts and offline conferences, and most of the business materials were written by me. Our self-media accountThe private domain account covered more than 2,000 people in financial institutions within a year, and more than 50% of the business management in the industry paid attention to the account。
Sales conversion requires a trust foundation, which requires frequency, reach time and depth of reach. After doing self-media, sometimes when visiting financial institutions, customers sometimes say that the article was originally written by you, and often you can understand the real needs of customers on the first visit, and the efficiency of effective visits can be increased by N times.An in-depth self-media article is actually equivalent to “a smooth visit” + “an in-depth exchange”.
In our optimized process, we will reach out online for the first time through self-media, and then conduct offline visits with financial institutions.Financial institutions that have not read our article basically do not go to Mobai, thus increasing the effective visit rate of sales。 Before the first offline visit, you should first understand the organizational structure, business leader, and business development of the financial institution, which can basically be seen through the company’s official website, official account, and APP, so that the visited financial institution knows that you are willing to understand him and analyze solutions for them according to his needs, rather than just selling them a software. Many sales just want to sign orders, but they will find that the follow-up service effect of customers who aim to sign orders is not very good. Then visit the vice president of the company to learn about the company’s development plan for the business. Then during the second and third visits, you can discuss the direction of product cooperation in combination with the financial institution’s planning.
Based on the above process, all customers in the entire industry can be counted to form a market-wide sales plan. What customers are there in the industry, what stage each customer is in, the business plan of the leader in charge, the current business development, the business docking person, the follow-up visit plan, and the content of each visit communication. The relevant data of the sales process is very clear, whether it is not enough reach or not conversion, how much the signing rate can reach each quarter, and what is the current cost, it is very accurate and clear when doing cash flow calculations.
The founder has one more thing to do,It is to summarize the development plan of each company, and dynamically adjust it every month to reflect it in the iteration of SaaS products, and realize the accumulation of SaaS standardized products in this formAt the same time, it can ensure that the product is always before most companies’ business planning, and form a business consulting plan。 In the traditional software R&D model, sales basically cannot tap customer needs and planning, let alone actively pass on customer needs to the product R&D team, even if most R&D teams will not incorporate sales information into product planning.This is the main reason why the production and research team is disconnected from market demand in the traditional model。
There are also some offline salons, market conferences and other product reach methods will not be repeated, the mode is basically the same as that of self-media, we must bring business consulting value to customers, and then introduce product solutions. Through the above methods, the growth flywheel of product commercialization and promotion can basically be formed.
4. Product implementation and delivery
There are more details about product commercialization, so it is also more dry. In fact, the commercialization work has been laid down, and the facts and delivery of the product are relatively simple. As mentioned earlier, SaaS products also need a supporting service model, which can not only be delivered based on public cloud, but also through hybrid cloud and private cloud, in other words, it can also realize the needs of financial institutions for “private deployment”. When deploying through private clouds, it is necessary to consider k8s, docker, etc. in the technical architecture to simplify the installation and deployment of the environment.In order to make our customers feel that the delivery work is valuable, our customers sometimes extend the delivery time to 2 days。
Because many companies have already understood the company’s business plan when communicating, and at the same time, they often have configured products and tools that can be used directly in the production environment for customers during the second exchange, which is basically what you see is what you get.Therefore, the so-called product delivery has actually been completed in the pre-sales process of the productOur delivery personnel (after-sales personnel) are also pre-sales consulting experts, and while helping customers give business consulting plans, they also build supporting products and deliver them to financial institutions.
The requirements generated during the pre-sales process are directly included in the SaaS iteration planDue to the rapid iteration of SaaS products, the priority is evaluated according to the common needs of different companies.Most of the requirements are often realized before the customer signs the contract, and some are even realized before the customer plans。Some friends may say, is there no charge for customized needs? In the SaaS model, only the business that does not use standard modules is customized development and charging because of the internal control or business needs of the financial institution.
For this part of the custom-developed module,If the change is mutually exclusive with the core logic, it will reject or even abandon the order. If the customer’s customized budget is high enough, an outsourcing team can be pulled to hand over to the cooperative institution to develop and manage it by itself，And set up separate branches of code. However, do not use SaaS R&D teams for multi-code branch R&D, in this way you can maintain the leading edge of SaaS versions for a long time.
You can find that after the transformation of the SaaS model, the previous implementation cost was partially transferred to the pre-sales cost, but in the productAccounts receivable cycle and accounts receivable quantityA very big breakthrough has been made, and labor costs and management costs no longer tend to get out of control with the increase in the number of customers and projects. Since the accumulated customer service cases are completed by pre-sales personnel, they can also be used as case materials in the pre-sales process of products, thus avoiding the communication cost of asymmetric pre-sales information and product capability information.
5. Fintech companies in the AI era
In fact, you can find that the experience we share is not only for SaaS products, but also for financial technology companies to do productization transformation: reduce R&D and management costs, reduce delivery and implementation cycles, improve product sales speed, etc. As we mentioned earlier, companies that do ToB can never imagine what the price of their competitors will be low, in essence, because of the serious involution in the domestic demand process, companies that focus on outsourcing price differences will earn less and less profit.
In the era of AI, the model is a little different.
Since February this year, I have been systematically researching AI systems, including deployment, training, fine-tuning, large models, agents and various upper-level applications, and the product that has spent the most energy on research is Cursor, which is more cost-sensitive to doing ToB business. Software development with Cursor can basically triple the R&D speed, that is, it may take 6 people to develop in the past, but now the same work content and working time may only use 2~3 people.
Of course, we are not analyzing the impact of AI on fintech companies from the perspective of personnel optimization, but want to express that AI makes each team more efficient in R&D.
Recommendations for fintech companies to use AI for R&D are:First rigid, then optimized, and then solidified。 At present, AI cannot replace demand analysis and customer management, nor can it realize all needs in one sentence. The corresponding system must be developed with AI with the participation of R&D personnel based on the requirements document when the requirements are clear enough. Therefore, a company that uses AI well must also be a company with good process management.
6. Write at the end
For various reasons, I no longer work for this fintech company. The brand value of ToB business requires long-term and continuous accumulation by enterprises, which is a great test of the company’s strategic determination, and the management work behind the traditional customized business is extremely trivial, and it also tests the company’s determination to support transformation. If you are interested in the business of financial technology companies, or want to communicate with R&D organizations and sales organizations, you can follow my official account to communicate.
The AI era has arrived, and many companies have created very good products based on AI, and many have moved towards the global market to obtain good business returns.
