A regulatory assessment that became a revenue line
This is one of my favourite stories from my career. Banks had one worried question, and answering it properly turned into a business of its own.
The situation
I was leading product and go-to-market strategy at an enterprise AI company with a strong fraud-prevention product, but it wasn't getting traction with banks. Then the regulator introduced new counter-fraud rules, and suddenly every bank had the same worry: are we ready?
What we did
Instead of leading with our product, we turned the banks' worry into a new offering: a regulatory readiness assessment. It showed each bank how its current controls measured up against the new rules, and where the gaps were.
- We scoped and priced it as an offering in its own right, so the first conversation was about the bank's risk, not our features.
- Every assessment taught us something about what banks really needed, and we fed that straight back into how the fraud product was positioned, packaged and priced.
- We trained the sales team to open with the assessment rather than a demo.
Within the first three quarters, six enterprise clients signed on, and the fraud product became an active revenue line.
In regulated markets, buyers trust the people who help them understand their own problem. Build the offer around that problem, and your product becomes the natural next step.