The Revelio Labs Guide to Enterprise Sales: Navigating from Financial Services to Corporate HR

Selling to enterprise buyers is challenging enough. But what happens when you need to completely transform your sales approach while moving into enterprise markets? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Revelio Labs founder Ben Zweig shared insights from their journey transitioning from hedge fund clients to corporate HR departments.

The contrast between these markets couldn’t be starker. In financial services, Ben explains: “When I think about investment management, there are industry conferences where there are data buyers and data sellers, and these commerce organizers facilitate introductions and meetings, and it’s very clear who you’re selling to.”

But corporate sales presented an entirely different challenge: “Breaking into the corporate market… it’s been hard just because it is a fragmented market and you don’t really know who the buyers are necessarily,” Ben reveals. “In a company, the user is not always the buyer, and maybe the decision maker is two levels above.”

This transition forced Revelio Labs to rethink their entire sales approach. Here’s how they navigated the shift:

Understanding Complex Buying Centers

Unlike hedge funds with clear decision-makers, corporate sales required mapping complex stakeholder relationships. The company discovered that HR technology purchases often involved multiple departments and decision-makers, each with different priorities and concerns.

From Product to Solutions

Rather than leading with product capabilities as they did with hedge funds, Revelio Labs adapted to focus on solving specific business problems. As Ben notes: “These end users, they are very often familiar with their sets of problems. Sometimes they’ll just come to us and they’ll say, oh, here are five challenges I have in my role. And we’ll say, okay, we can basically solve one, two, three, and four.”

Market Education

While hedge funds immediately understood the value of alternative data, corporate buyers needed more education. “They don’t necessarily know that they need something like our offering,” Ben explains. “So I think a lot of our job is educating people on what’s possible ways to save money, ways this could help provide value and level up your understanding of your own company and be able to differentiate against competitors.”

Leveraging Initial Success

The company used their success with sophisticated financial clients to build credibility with corporate buyers. They expanded through adjacent markets: “I’d say we started investment management, then our next big splash was in consulting. So we work with all the major consulting firms because they’re also in the business of understanding companies more deeply.”

Building for Enterprise Scale

Throughout this transition, Revelio Labs maintained their product-first approach: “Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code. Everyone’s really hands on.” This focus on building enterprise-grade solutions helped them meet the stringent requirements of large corporate buyers.

The Power of Media Presence

To build credibility in corporate markets, Revelio Labs leveraged media relationships. “We’re in the media almost every day now,” Ben shares. “We have a bunch of reporters we have good relationships with at Bloomberg and Business Insider and Wall Street Journal and New York Times… we provide that for free, really, because it helps us with getting our name out also.”

Looking ahead, the company sees their enterprise sales journey as just beginning. Their vision involves becoming as essential to HR as Bloomberg is to finance: “In ten years, I really would like to see a Revellia Labs terminal on the computer of every person who works in HR, just like a Bloomberg terminal is used by everyone in finance.”

The key lesson from Revelio Labs’ transition? Enterprise sales requires more than just a different sales approach – it demands rethinking every aspect of how you present and deliver value. While hedge funds bought data, corporate HR departments buy solutions to business problems. Understanding and adapting to this fundamental difference has been crucial to their success in enterprise markets.