How Orum Redefined the Infrastructure Sales Playbook: From Financial Planning to Fintech Infrastructure

The conventional wisdom for selling technical products is to focus on features and capabilities. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Orum founder Stephany Kirkpatrick revealed why that approach fails when selling complex infrastructure – and how her team developed a radically different sales strategy.

Starting with Customer Experience, Not Technology

Most infrastructure companies lead with technical specifications. But Stephany’s background as a financial planner taught her to start with the end user’s experience. As she explains, “You could give great financial advice, but you were always going to have people who didn’t want to follow that advice because they were afraid that they couldn’t access their money in those just in case moments.”

This insight shaped Orum’s entire go-to-market approach. Instead of leading with API documentation, they focused on showing how faster payments transform customer experiences. “What we’ve learned is that if you build a demo that shows the customer experience from an app perspective or a business user perspective, people go, ‘oh, I get it,'” Stephany notes.

Building a Barbell Strategy

Rather than targeting a single market segment, Orum developed what Stephany calls a “barbell strategy” for customer acquisition: “We have a barbell strategy that says, hey, if we take on enough bigger, larger fi, we can also take on all the small brand new innovative things.”

This approach allows them to serve “some of the largest financial services providers. Think like Fidelity, e Money, the biggest bank in the world is a partner of ours, all the way down to some of the most innovative gaming, crypto, new services platforms that are popping up.”

Evolving Beyond Traditional Sales Metrics

The team quickly realized that traditional SaaS metrics didn’t capture the unique nature of infrastructure sales. As Stephany explains, “Payments is actually a very deep form of innovation. And so as we’ve been able to help figure out how to help our customers optimize what they’re building, the growth trajectory of how we sit alongside our customers and help them actually grow their core business is really a feedback loop into our growth.”

This led to a more consultative approach: “We spend a lot of time making sure that people know not just under the right kind of instant payout feature, but how to truly optimize it. So we’ll do marketing campaigns together, we’ll do webinars so that their customers can understand features.”

Continuous Evolution of Pricing and Positioning

Even after finding initial traction, Orum continues to refine their go-to-market approach. “Even recently, I would say we’ve learned a lot about how we, one, we’re structuring pricing, and two, how were positioning it. They’re two different things,” Stephany notes.

This ongoing evolution reflects the challenge of pricing infrastructure that enables entirely new categories of products. It’s not just about charging for API calls – it’s about capturing value from enabling new business models.

Selling the Vision, Not Just the Product

Perhaps most importantly, Orum’s sales approach focuses on the transformative possibilities their infrastructure enables. As Stephany puts it, “It’s a whole new frontier when you stop having to ask how or how fast to move money.”

This vision-driven approach is particularly powerful when you’re enabling new possibilities. “If what we’re building at Orum had existed a decade ago, you would have never built Venmo, which is probably one of the most ubiquitous financial services products we all consume.”

The lesson for infrastructure founders? Success requires more than just great technology – it demands a sales approach that can communicate transformative possibilities while delivering immediate value. As Stephany says, “We want to be always that first phone call that you make when you’re thinking about building a company and you know you’re going to do payouts or you’re going to do money movement because everything else that you’re building should go faster as a result of working with a partner like Orum.”