Overview
You manage a portfolio of 8-12 major financial institution accounts that already use Nova Credit. Your job is keeping them happy, growing their usage of existing products, and cross-selling them into new Nova products. You're dealing with long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder buying committees, and quarterly business reviews where you prove ROI with data.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Strategic Account Management - expansion and retention focused |
| Sales Motion | Land-and-expand with enterprise financial services clients |
| Deal Complexity | Enterprise/Strategic - multi-product, multi-stakeholder |
| Sales Cycle | 4-9 months for expansion deals |
| Deal Size | $150K-$500K ACV per expansion |
| Quota (est.) | $1.2-1.8M annual expansion/upsell quota |
Company Context
Stage: Series D ($156M raised, recent $35M round in Oct 2025)
Size: 109 employees
Growth: Recent major wins (BMO partnership announced Sept 2024), expanding from international credit into cash flow underwriting
Market Position: Leading cross-border credit infrastructure provider, now competing more directly with Plaid/Finicity as they push into cash flow data
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 70% Expansion into new products with existing clients (they have Credit Passport, you sell Cash Atlas)
- 20% Usage-based growth (more API calls, higher volume)
- 10% Contract renewals and upsells at renewal time
SDR/AE Structure: You own the account post-sale, new logo AEs hand off after implementation
SE Support: You pull in Sales Engineering/Solutions Consulting for technical expansion deals, but you run the relationship
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors:
- Plaid, Finicity, MX for cash flow/bank data
- Traditional bureaus (Experian, TransUnion) for credit data
- Point solutions for specific use cases Nova is expanding into
How They Differentiate: Unified platform for multiple alternative data sources vs stitching together 3-4 different vendors
Common Objections:
- "We're already integrated with [other vendor], switching cost is too high"
- "Our risk team isn't ready to use this new data source in decisioning yet"
- "Budget was allocated to other priorities this year"
- "We need to see 12+ months of performance data before expanding"
Win Themes: Simplify vendor management, better coverage of underserved segments (newcomers, thin-file), proven ROI from existing product
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Account Planning/Expansion (35%) | Client Meetings/QBRs (30%) | Renewals/Negotiation (20%) | Internal Coordination (15%)
Key Activities
- Quarterly Business Reviews: You prepare 20-30 slide decks showing usage metrics, approval rate lift, ROI calculations. You present to VPs of Lending, Risk teams, and data science leads. You field tough questions about data quality or edge cases where Nova's data didn't perform as expected.
- Expansion Campaign Planning: You map out who at your bank client doesn't use Nova yet (maybe auto lending uses it but mortgage doesn't). You build business cases, get warm intros through your champion, and run a 6-9 month sales cycle within the same organization.
- Executive Relationship Management: You're taking client execs to dinner, attending industry conferences with them, scheduling skip-level meetings to maintain senior relationships. Banks have org changes constantly - your champion leaves, you need to rebuild trust with their replacement.
- Renewal Negotiations: 60-90 days before contract renewal, you're pulling usage data, proving value, and negotiating pricing with procurement. If usage dropped or performance wasn't what they expected, you're in damage control defending the renewal.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Glacial Decision-Making: Banks take forever. You'll have a "yes, let's expand" verbal commitment for months while it sits in legal, procurement, compliance, and risk review. Deals you thought would close this quarter slip by 6+ months regularly.
- Churn Risk is Real: If a client's business changes (they stop lending to immigrants, they shift strategy away from thin-file consumers), your product becomes less relevant. You can't always save it. One churn hurts your number badly.
- Success Depends on Client Execution: If the client implements Nova poorly or doesn't actually use the data in decisioning, your expansion case falls apart. You don't control their internal prioritization.
- Multi-Stakeholder Complexity: You need buy-in from Risk, Compliance, Product, Engineering, and the business line. One blocker can kill a deal. You spend a lot of time navigating internal politics at client organizations.
What Success Looks Like
- 110-120% net revenue retention across your book of business
- 90%+ gross retention (minimal churn)
- 2-3 major expansion deals closed per year per account
- Clients renew early and expand contract size at renewal time
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- VPs of Lending, Consumer Lending, or Credit Products (economic buyers)
- Chief Risk Officers and Credit Risk teams (technical evaluators)
- Heads of Data Science (technical champions)
- Procurement and Legal (final approvers)
What They Care About:
- Proven ROI from existing Nova products before expanding
- Regulatory and compliance comfort with new data sources
- Integration complexity and engineering resource requirements
- Contract terms, pricing, and volume commitments
- Risk management - they don't want a vendor relationship that creates headline risk
Requirements
- 5+ years in B2B account management or sales, ideally in fintech or selling to financial services
- Experience managing complex enterprise accounts with $500K+ ACV
- Understanding of banking, lending, credit risk, or financial services operations
- Track record of driving expansion revenue and hitting net retention targets
- Strong executive presence - comfortable with C-suite and SVP-level stakeholders
- Ability to read data and discuss analytics/performance metrics credibly