Every other month, a client or someone I meet at an event tells me they want to start targeting enterprise. Bigger deals, better logos, more room to grow.
But when I look at their marketing, it’s often the same paid search campaigns, the same blog posts, and the same persona they’ve always targeted.
So what actually needs to change?
That’s what I wanted to explore with Pam Velentzas, VP of Marketing at Spreedly, on the FinTech Marketing Lab podcast. Spreedly is a payments orchestration platform, and Pam has experience building both SMB and enterprise marketing approaches.
What stood out was how much needs to shift beyond the messaging. Your enterprise marketing strategy needs to account for more decision-makers, different ways of building trust, and a much longer buying process. Here’s how Pam approaches it.
Speak to the buying committee
At Spreedly, the SMB audience is often a developer or engineering team managing the payment stack. Naturally, the content gets technical.
With enterprise, a technical person may still champion the platform. But the final decision involves other people, including senior executives and the economic buyer.
That changes the questions your marketing needs to answer. A developer might want to understand an integration. A CFO wants to understand its impact on the business. Procurement needs reassurance about the vendor.
Pam described a shift toward messaging about revenue and business outcomes. The technical content still has a role, because those champions need it to evaluate the platform.
The question I’d ask is: does your content help everyone involved make a decision? If most of it speaks to one technical persona, there may be a gap between winning their interest and getting the purchase approved.
Put more budget into building relationships
I asked Pam where the budget goes when you start targeting enterprise.
For Spreedly, SMB marketing leans heavily on paid search and digital media. Enterprise investment focuses more on in-person events, PR, analyst relationships, and curated experiences.
That includes lunch-and-learns, partner-hosted gatherings, and scheduled one-to-one meetings. The team might focus on around 50 named accounts over several quarters, inviting relevant contacts to specific events.
Something I found useful was Pam’s distinction between events. Money20/20 is valuable for meeting strategic partners, but Spreedly sees fewer merchant prospects there. More targeted payments events can provide better opportunities to meet potential customers.
So the biggest event isn’t automatically where your budget should go. Start with who you need to meet and whether the format gives you time to have a useful conversation.
Paid search and content can still support research. But your plan also needs to build the relationships that help a large merchant feel comfortable choosing you.
Make your customer’s business outcome the story
Pam’s most interesting observation was that PR has been an undervalued way to influence enterprise opportunities.
Her approach is to make the merchant’s achievement the focus of the announcement, with Spreedly explaining how it helped.
She shared an example of a merchant that wanted to expand into Latin America and adopt Pix. Spreedly’s partner integration helped make that possible. After seeing the announcement, other merchants approached the team about their own geographic expansion plans.
That’s a much more specific reason to pay attention than a general announcement about a platform’s capabilities. A prospective customer can see a business problem they recognize and a company that has addressed it.
Of course, getting permission to name enterprise customers can be difficult. Pam said new customers typically want at least six months of deployment experience before discussing results publicly.
I’d start with your existing customers. Which achievement would make another target account think, “We’re trying to do that too”?
Create content for buyers who have already done their research
This part of the conversation connects closely with how I think about bottom-of-the-funnel content: helping people who are actively evaluating a solution.
Pam is seeing prospects arrive after researching through large language models, ready for a more detailed conversation. Spreedly is adapting with question-led content, comparison pages, and calculators.
It’s also changing how the team nurtures leads. If someone already understands their problem and wants to see the product, a sequence of introductory blog posts may be unnecessary.
Your content needs to meet them where they are. Explain what the product does, which integrations it supports, how implementation works, and how it addresses their business needs.
Talking about your product is part of helping someone make a decision. It also gives AI tools clearer information to draw on when buyers ask about your platform.
A useful place to start is the questions sales gets from prospects who are close to buying. Do you have clear, specific answers on your website?
Measure influence across a longer sales cycle
Enterprise deals can involve events, partner recommendations, sales outreach, and several people researching independently. First-touch attribution only tells you part of that story.
Spreedly uses first-touch attribution alongside enterprise influence tracking in HubSpot. The team reviews activity in the six months before a deal closes and weights different touchpoints to understand what may have helped move it forward.
It’s imperfect, as Pam acknowledged. But it gives the team more information about which activities contribute to opportunities.
That matters when you’re committing resources over a long period. Pam’s closing advice was to prepare for enterprise sales cycles that can stretch to 18 months.
Before you set the target, make sure sales, marketing, and the wider business agree on the investment needed to support it.
Key takeaways
- Create content for the full buying committee, including technical champions and economic buyers.
- Invest in relevant events and relationships with your target accounts.
- Make customer achievements central to your PR stories.
- Help informed prospects evaluate your product and reach sales when they’re ready.
- Track marketing influence and plan for a longer sales cycle.
Show notes
Pam Velentzas is the VP of Marketing at Spreedly, a payments orchestration platform that connects merchants to a network of payment gateways and services through one integration.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why targeting enterprise requires a different marketing playbook
- How to speak to technical champions, CFOs, and the wider buying committee
- Where marketing budget goes when you move upmarket
- Which events help build relationships with enterprise buyers
- Why making your customer the focus of PR can attract similar accounts
- How Spreedly tracks marketing influence across long sales cycles
- What contact-level advertising adds to account-based marketing
- How AI-assisted research is changing content and lead nurturing
- What Spreedly is testing with Reddit advertising and community participation
Episode timestamps
- 00:04:01: How marketing changes when moving upmarket
- 00:09:09: Where enterprise marketing budget goes
- 00:17:16: Tracking marketing influence
- 00:19:19: Customer-centered PR
- 00:33:58: Adapting content to buyer questions
- 00:41:07: Pam’s advice for fintech teams targeting enterprise
Show links
- Spreedly on LinkedIn
- Pamela Velentzas on LinkedIn
- Araminta Robertson on LinkedIn
- Mint Studios on LinkedIn
- Mint Studios Website
- Mint Studios Newsletter
About Araminta Robertson
Araminta is the Founder and Managing Director at Mint Studios, a content marketing agency that helps financial services and fintech companies acquire customers and position themselves as experts with content marketing.
