From 24 to 6 Months: How Entrio Shortened the Bank Sales Cycle Through Product Innovation

A two-year sales cycle can kill a startup. For enterprise software companies selling to banks, it’s the norm. “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,” Entrio founder Avi Cohen reveals in a recent Category Visionaries episode.

Rather than accept this as inevitable, Entrio found a way to cut that cycle to 6-12 months through strategic product design. Here’s how they did it.

Start with the Implementation Challenge The traditional enterprise software playbook requires significant customer input before delivering value. For banks, this means months of integration work and data sharing. Entrio turned this model on its head.

“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.

Show Value Before Full Integration By owning their own data lake, Entrio could quickly demonstrate value: “Once they given that information to us, then we’re able to build basically an environment that completely replicates the entire technology stack of the bank.”

The result? “It’s an immediate ROI because they can see, in a matter of days, they can see their environment that represent their entire vendor stack.”

Adapt to Customer Constraints When customers pushed back on adopting new interfaces, Entrio pivoted to an API-first approach. “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.”

This flexibility removed another common source of sales cycle delays – the need to train users on new interfaces.

Scale Across Market Segments The approach works differently across market segments. “The question also differs between big banks and what I call global banks, to regional banks, to community banks,” Avi notes. “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.”

For founders selling to banks, the lesson is clear: product design can dramatically impact sales velocity. By minimizing what you need from customers to deliver value, you can accelerate the path to purchase even in the most demanding enterprise environments.

This approach requires rethinking traditional enterprise software assumptions. Instead of asking customers to adapt to your product, design your product to work within their constraints. The reward? Sales cycles that move at startup speed, not bank speed.