Payments Growth Playbook
You're thinking about growth in the wrong way.
Most payments companies say the same thing: "We need more qualified leads." It sounds reasonable. It's also the problem.
When you say you want more leads, what you really mean is: you want to talk to engineering leaders, product managers, or CFOs who are actively shopping for a new processor or billing solution right now. Maybe a VP of Engineering who just hit the limits of their current provider. A Head of Product whose checkout conversion is tanking because of authorization failures. A finance leader whose subscription billing platform can't handle their new pricing model.
That group is tiny. Roughly 3% of your addressable market is actively in-evaluation mode at any given time.
That means 97% of your future customers are not comparing you on G2. They're not filing a request to migrate payment processors. They're not filling out your demo form. But here's what's interesting: they do have pain. They're just not prioritizing a switch yet.
The Race to the Bottom You're Already Running
In payments, the competition for that 3% is brutal and commoditizing. Every processor is running the same Google Ads. Bidding on the same keywords. Offering the same "lowest rates" pitch. Sending the same outbound sequences to the same lists of CTOs and finance leaders.
You end up in a pricing war dressed up as a sales conversation. Your differentiated capabilities, including your authorization rate optimization, your smart retry logic, and your developer experience, get reduced to a basis-point negotiation. And your sales cycle stretches from weeks to months while legal, finance, and engineering all need to sign off on a migration that nobody wants to own.
You didn't lose because your product wasn't better. You lost because you showed up too late, looking like every other vendor already on the shortlist.
The 97% Is Where the Real Opportunity Lives
The engineering lead who suspects their current gateway is costing them 2–3% on authorization rates, but hasn't built the case to migrate yet. The SaaS CFO who knows their billing platform can't support usage-based pricing, but is heads-down on the fiscal year close. The marketplace operator whose payout infrastructure is duct-taped together, but the problem hasn't caused a crisis yet.
These people fall into predictable buckets:
- Pain-aware but not solution-aware: they know their checkout is leaking revenue, but haven't connected it to the processor
- Solution-aware but not vendor-aware: they know modern billing platforms exist, but haven't shortlisted providers
- Vendor-aware but not trust-ready: they've seen your name, but you haven't earned the right to a migration conversation yet
If you can reach these buyers before they issue an RFP, before the incumbent processor offers a rate concession to keep the business, before procurement gets involved… you change the conversation entirely. You're not pitching. You're educating. You're helping them quantify a problem they already have. You're positioning your approach as the obvious upgrade before the evaluation even kicks off.
So when they do decide to move, the shortlist has one name on it. Yours.
The other creates it.
The first business captures demand. It shows up when buyers are already searching. It generates demo requests, books calls, and wins deals. It's a fine business. But it's a grinding, margin-compressing kind of fine.
The second creates demand. It finds the right buyers early. Earns their trust before a billing failure forces the conversation. Builds authority before the RFP lands. And converts them when the timing is right, on favorable terms, with shorter implementation cycles and less churn risk.
The Stripe story is instructive here. Patrick and John Collison didn't wait for developers to come looking for a payment API. They built a brand around the idea that payments infrastructure was broken for builders. And that it didn't have to be. Seven lines of code instead of months of bank integration work. They created the category conversation before most of their eventual customers were actively looking. The demand followed the authority. That's the model.
This playbook is about building that second type of machine. Not just capturing demand, but creating it. Shaping it. And turning it into durable revenue in one of the most relationship-dependent and switching-cost-sensitive categories in B2B.
Here's a mistake almost every payments company makes before spending a dollar on marketing. They describe their customer like this:
"We sell to mid-market SaaS companies and e-commerce businesses."
That's not a buyer. That's a target vertical. Verticals don't get paged at 11pm because of a payment processing outage. Verticals don't have to explain to the CEO why authorization rates dropped 4 points last quarter.
A person does.
Payments buying decisions are uniquely political. They touch engineering, finance, product, legal, and sometimes the board. The VP of Engineering cares about API reliability and developer experience. The CFO cares about interchange optimization and SLA guarantees. The Head of Product cares about checkout conversion. The General Counsel cares about PCI compliance and liability. If you're not speaking to each of them in their own language, you're losing the deal in a room you're not even in.
The Payments Buying Spectrum
Not all payments purchases look the same. Your go-to-market needs to match where your buyer actually sits.
SMB & Early-Stage ($1M–$20M GMV)
Often a founder or CTO making the call. They chose Stripe or Square out of the box and haven't thought hard about payments since. They're not optimizing. They're just trying to keep transactions flowing. Reach them when a specific pain surfaces: chargeback rates climbing, international expansion creating currency complexity, or a billing model their current tool can't support. Speed and simplicity close these deals.
Growth & Mid-Market ($20M–$500M GMV)
This is where the buying committee assembles. Engineering owns the integration decision. Finance owns the commercial negotiation. Product owns checkout UX. The incumbent processor has a relationship. Sales cycles run 3–9 months. Proof-of-concept periods. Migration anxiety. Trust and demonstrated ROI are the primary purchase drivers.
Platforms & Embedded Finance ($500M+ GMV or ISV/SaaS platforms)
They're embedding payments into their own product or building money movement into a software platform. Their criteria are different: revenue share economics, developer documentation quality, multi-merchant architecture, and regulatory coverage. Reach them through technical content and partnerships, and speak to the revenue opportunity their end customers represent, not just the technology.
Build a Real ICP, Not a Filter
Most payments companies have an ICP that looks like this:
- Industry: E-commerce, SaaS, marketplace, healthcare payments
- Volume: $10M–$500M annual GMV
- Title: VP Engineering, Head of Product, CFO, CTO
That's a Salesforce filter. It's not a buyer profile. A real ICP goes much deeper:
- What's their current processor and what specific friction are they feeling with it?
- What's their authorization rate, and do they even know what it costs them?
- What business model change, whether usage pricing, international expansion, or marketplace payouts, is straining their current infrastructure?
- Who owns the migration decision, and what does career risk look like for that person if it goes wrong?
- What would a successful outcome look like in the first 90 days after switching?
- What has made them hesitate to move before now?
When you can answer these questions, you stop leading with pricing and start talking about the revenue they're leaving on the table. That's when marketing starts to work.
The "That's Me" Moment in Payments
The test for whether you truly know your buyer: take your best marketing asset. Your homepage headline. Your best-performing ad. Your top email subject line. Read it out loud. Would the right person stop mid-scroll and think, "this is exactly what I'm dealing with"?
In payments, this is harder than it looks because the category has been commoditized by pricing conversations. You can't just lead with rates. Every processor does that. You need to be specific about the failure mode. About the authorization decline that looked like lost revenue. About the billing migration that stalled a pricing model pivot. About the chargeback dispute process that was costing three hours of finance team time per week.
"Flexible payment processing for growing businesses"
← This is a category description. Nobody feels this.
"You're losing 3–4% of revenue to authorization declines your processor isn't telling you about"
← This is a problem. The right VP of Engineering or CFO feels this in their gut.
Where Payments Buyers Actually Are
Here's what most payments vendors get wrong about channels. They show up at Money20/20 and Fintech Nexus, post on LinkedIn about acquiring and issuing, and wonder why their pipeline is thin outside of conference season.
Your Head of Product is also a human being. They're scrolling Instagram after dinner. They're listening to SaaS podcasts on the commute. They're in Slack communities for their industry. The VP of Engineering you want to reach is watching YouTube tutorials on a Saturday morning.
The channels don't determine the audience. Your message does. And we'll get to your message next.
You know who your buyer is. You know where they live. Now let's go build trust with them before a contract renewal forces the issue.
The social feed is where authority is built at scale. For payments companies specifically, it's where you stop looking like a commodity and start looking like the category expert. Before your buyer ever starts evaluating alternatives.
Organic First. Always.
Before you spend a dollar on ads, you need to know what lands organically. Think of organic social as your research lab. Every post is a test. Every reaction is a data point.
In payments, organic content does something beyond engagement. It signals to your buyer that you're a practitioner, not just a vendor. When a VP of Engineering starts following your LinkedIn because you consistently share useful breakdowns of authorization optimization, network tokenization, or real-world chargeback win rates, they're not following a brand. They're following a trusted voice.
That relationship is worth more than any ad campaign.
When you post something and it gets shared across product and finance teams, saved by developers, or sparks a genuine debate about interchange optimization versus processor fees, that's a signal. Amplify it. When something falls flat, don't repeat it.
This isn't just about what content "performs." You're learning which pain points resonate, which ROI angles hit, which real-world failure modes travel. And once you know that, you pour fuel on what's working with paid amplification.
But that comes later. Start here.
Meta Is Where the Real Volume Lives
LinkedIn is the default for payments B2B marketers. And it has its place, particularly for enterprise deals and engineering or finance leadership targeting. But Meta consistently outperforms LinkedIn on cost per lead and pipeline quality for most payments buyers.
Facebook and Instagram reach over 3.5 billion daily active users. Your Head of Product is on there. Your SaaS CFO. The marketplace operator. The e-commerce founder whose payment stack is getting more complicated by the month and has never heard of you.
On LinkedIn, your buyer has their guard up. They're in work mode, filtering everything for relevance. On Meta, they're human. More open. More susceptible to a story that makes them stop and think.
Meta outperforms LinkedIn on cost per lead, volume, and pipeline quality. Not because LinkedIn is bad, but because the audience depth is far greater and the creative formats let you tell a real story that earns attention rather than demanding it.
Content That Creates the "That's Me" Moment
Your content needs to be uncomfortably specific to work. Here's what that looks like in payments:
Selling a billing platform to SaaS companies moving to usage-based pricing? Your content is about the moment a finance team tries to model usage-based revenue in their existing billing tool and realizes it simply can't. The spreadsheet workarounds. The manual invoice corrections. The customer who got billed wrong and churned over it.
Selling a gateway to mid-market e-commerce? Talk about the Q4 promotion that drove record checkout volume. And the auth rate that quietly dropped two points under load because the processor couldn't optimize dynamically. The revenue that evaporated invisibly. The post-mortem where nobody could explain it clearly.
Selling embedded finance infrastructure to vertical SaaS? Talk about the moment a software company realized they were leaving 30–40% of their potential revenue on the table by letting a third-party processor own the payment relationship with their own customers.
Make them feel understood before you ever make them a pitch.
Go Deep on One or Two Platforms
Pick your primary platform based on where your specific buyer segment spends time and what format plays to your team's strengths:
- Meta (Facebook + Instagram): best for volume, SMB and mid-market, storytelling content, ROI-focused narratives
- LinkedIn: best for enterprise, VP/C-suite, technical practitioner and developer audiences
- YouTube: best for technical deep dives, developer tutorials, and educational content for platform builders
- Podcasts (as guest or host): best for senior product, engineering, and finance leaders who consume audio
Don't try to be everywhere on day one. One platform done well beats five platforms done poorly every time. Each piece of content is market intelligence. Every reaction, every save, every DM that says "we're literally dealing with this right now" tells you more about your buyer than any analyst report.
You've identified your buyer. You've tested what lands organically. Now it's time to pour gas on the fire.
By the time you get to paid, you're not guessing. You know which message makes your buyer lean in. You've seen it in the comments, the saves, the DMs. Now you're taking what already works and putting it in front of more of the right people, faster.
What Demand Creation Does in Payments
Demand creation is not designed to generate immediate demo requests. That's demand capture, and we'll get to that. These efforts are reaching the 97%: the buyers who aren't ready yet but will be. Your job is to be the most credible, most trusted name in their mind when the timing shifts.
In payments, that timing usually shifts because of a business event: a new pricing model the current billing platform can't support, an international expansion that exposes currency and compliance gaps, a board conversation about monetizing payments as a revenue line, or a failed audit where processor contracts came under scrutiny. You can't control when that happens. But you can control whether they already know you when it does.
The SaaS CFO who's frustrated with their billing platform but hasn't built the migration business case yet. The Head of Product who suspects their authorization rates are underperforming but hasn't quantified it. These are the people you're reaching. You're not asking them to buy. You're showing up in their feed with something specific and useful. And staying there.
This is how you get off the treadmill of fighting over the 3% who are already in market. You build a warm audience of people who know you, trust you, and think of you first when they're finally ready to act.
The Ad Formula That Works
The highest-performing demand creation ads in payments follow a structure that mirrors how your buyer thinks:
- Open with a recognizable scenario: a company like theirs, a problem they've experienced or are starting to feel
- Reveal the insight: what they were missing, what the real cost of inaction looks like in dollars
- Deliver a result: specific, credible, grounded in real outcomes
- Bridge to you: low friction, value-first CTA
The Stripe origin story is a useful template here. It doesn't open with API specs. It opens with a problem every developer and founder experienced but hadn't fully defined: that accepting payments online required weeks of bank integrations, legacy APIs, and pain that had nothing to do with building a product. The insight reframes the problem. The result is concrete. The bridge is natural. Apply that structure to your category: if you sell billing infrastructure, start with the subscription pricing pivot that almost broke the company. If you sell embedded payments, start with the moment a SaaS founder realized their processor was quietly owning their customer relationship.
The Funnel
It starts with your best-performing organic content. The posts that got the most engagement, the most shares, the most "this is exactly what we're dealing with" responses. These become your ads. Same format, same feel, same voice. You're just buying distribution.
Next you need a simple landing page. A single-purpose page built around one lead magnet.
The Lead Magnet
In payments, your lead magnet should be genuinely useful, something your buyer would pay for if you charged. Options that work well:
- Authorization rate benchmark report by vertical (e-commerce, SaaS, marketplace)
- Billing migration readiness checklist for SaaS companies moving to usage-based pricing
- Payments total cost of ownership calculator: processing fees, fraud losses, chargeback ops, integration debt
- Embedded finance revenue opportunity model: what payment monetization could add to an ISV's ARR
- Interview series featuring CFOs and Heads of Product who've navigated major processor migrations
It should be good enough that you could sell it. But you're going to give it away. On the landing page you need three things: a headline that speaks directly to the revenue pain, a short explanation of what they'll get, and social proof that tells the visitor they're in the right place and that you deliver.
The Qualifying Question
Your form pre-qualifies leads before they go to sales. Ask for the signals that matter: current processor or billing tool, annual GMV or ARR, business model, biggest current pain point. Keep it brief. Every extra field costs you conversions.
Then, at the bottom, add one optional checkbox for buyers who are actually ready: "Would you like a 30-minute payments cost analysis for your current stack?" That checkbox is a buying signal. It tells you who to call first. Everyone else enters your nurture sequence. You keep building trust, and when the timing shifts, whether a contract renewal, a pricing model change, or a failed audit, you'll be the first call they make.
The Thank You Page
The person who just filled out your form is at peak engagement. Put something valuable here: a short video from a solutions engineer walking through a real-world migration, a customer story about authorization rate improvement, or a low-friction next step for those ready to go further. Most won't take it. But the ones who do are your highest-intent leads in the entire funnel.
What This Funnel Actually Builds
Step back and look at what you've created. You're identifying buyers before they're in market. Earning their trust before a painful billing failure or a rate hike from the incumbent forces their hand. Building a database of finance and engineering leaders who have raised their hand for your category. Surfacing the high-intent ones automatically. And delivering genuine value to everyone else while you wait for their timing to shift.
In payments, where switching costs are real and migration anxiety is high, this machine does something your competitors can't replicate quickly: it builds a relationship before the RFP exists. And it makes you feel like a known quantity, not a cold outbound pitch, when the evaluation finally begins.
Build these funnels right and they'll pay off for years.
Everything we've talked about so far is about reaching buyers before they're ready. Now let's talk about what happens when they are.
When a payments decision-maker is finally ready to evaluate vendors, they search. And they search in ways that are specific to their situation. They're not Googling "payment processor." They're Googling "best billing platform for usage-based SaaS pricing" or "how to reduce authorization declines for subscription businesses" or "embedded payments for vertical SaaS: Stripe vs. custom."
These are high-intent, specific queries. Being found here organically, not just through ads, changes the entire dynamic of the sales conversation. They come to you already understanding the problem in your framing.
Modern SEO
Getting your website to rank organically is one of the highest-ROI investments a payments company can make. It's also one of the most neglected, because most payments companies are so focused on conference presence and outbound sales that content strategy gets deprioritized.
SEO is a trust signal above all else. When your buyer searches for a solution and your company appears at the top of the organic results, not as a paid ad, something happens psychologically. They assume you understand the problem deeply. They assume you've built for it. They assume you might be the answer.
There's a lot you can do to rank. But if you want 80% of the benefits with 20% of the work, you need two things working together.
Pillar Content
A pillar piece is a comprehensive, authoritative article built around a specific question your buyer is actively searching. In payments, these topics are abundant:
- "How to reduce payment authorization declines for subscription businesses"
- "Usage-based billing: how to choose the right platform for your SaaS pricing model"
- "Embedded payments for vertical SaaS: build vs. buy vs. partner"
- "How to run a payment processor RFP without a 12-month migration nightmare"
Google's job is to surface the most useful answer. Your job is to write that answer. For your specific buyer, in their language, better than anyone else has. Build a library of these. Each one is a door into your funnel, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Backlinks
In payments, third-party credibility is everything. Backlinks from respected sources, including fintech publications, developer communities, industry analyst firms, and major business media, signal to Google that your content is authoritative and your perspective is worth amplifying.
You earn them by creating things worth linking to: original authorization rate research, proprietary transaction data studies, developer frameworks, or benchmark reports that journalists and analysts will cite. You also earn them through contributed articles to payments and fintech publications, guest appearances on product and fintech podcasts, and press coverage of your research.
Pillar content gets you found. Backlinks tell Google you deserve to be there.
SEO Is an Investment
Neither happens overnight. That's why this is the long game. But companies that invest in it consistently find themselves in a position their competitors can't easily replicate. You can't buy your way to the top of organic search. You have to earn it. And in a category as competitive as payments, earned authority compounds in ways that paid spend simply doesn't.
The AI Search Layer: The Newest Frontier
There's a new place your buyers are increasingly looking. They're asking AI.
"What's the best billing platform for a SaaS company moving to usage-based pricing?" "Which payment processors have the best authorization rates for subscription businesses?" "Who are the leading embedded payments infrastructure providers for vertical SaaS?"
These queries are happening in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini every day. And the answers don't come from paid ads. They come from what's been written about you across the internet: your website, your developer docs, your blog content, third-party reviews, analyst coverage, press mentions, and anywhere else your name appears with useful context.
If you have a strong content footprint and a consistent, credible presence across the web, AI search surfaces you. If you don't, it surfaces your better-documented competitor.
This is AI Engine Optimization (AEO). A payments company that consistently publishes original transaction data and benchmark research, earns mentions in fintech and developer publications, maintains strong G2 and Capterra reviews, and has well-documented customer migration outcomes will be surfaced by AI assistants ahead of competitors who have none of those things, regardless of ad spend. This advantage compounds and becomes genuinely difficult to replicate quickly.
Paid Search: Buying the Shortcut
While SEO and AEO build over time, paid search drives pipeline today. In payments, paid search buyers are already deep in evaluation mode, which means they're comparing you against known alternatives. Your paid search strategy needs to cover your brand name, your category terms ("billing platform," "payment gateway," "embedded payments"), and competitor keywords where relevant and defensible.
Just remember: paid search reaches only the 3% who are already in market. It's essential. It's not sufficient on its own.
Search and Social Working Together
Here's something worth understanding about how demand capture and demand creation interact in payments.
Your social content and demand creation ads are warming up an audience. Building familiarity with your thinking, your benchmarks, your approach. So when that buyer eventually searches, they're not encountering you for the first time. They already know you.
A Head of Product who has read your authorization rate benchmark content, downloaded your billing migration checklist, received your nurture emails, and now finds you at the top of Google for their search query doesn't experience those as separate touchpoints. They experience it as confirmation. You're everywhere. You must be the real deal.
In a category where switching costs and migration risk dominate the conversation, that confirmation matters more than almost anything else. Demand creation fills the top. Demand capture converts the bottom. And the buyers who move through both are the easiest sales conversations you'll ever have.
Getting value from this playbook?
We can offer a lot more help with a Marketing ROI Checkup, a 1:1 strategy session with an Influicity strategist to review what's working and where your biggest growth opportunities are. It's free, but spots are limited.
Schedule Your Marketing ROI CheckupEvery platform you post on is rented land. LinkedIn can change its algorithm tomorrow. Meta can throttle your organic reach. A platform that's core to your strategy today can shift the rules overnight.
These things happen. Regularly.
Owned assets are different. You own them. Your email list. Your podcast library. Your developer documentation hub. Your website. No platform can take these away from you. They compound over time, they travel without you, and they keep working long after you created them.
A benchmark report you published 18 months ago can still drive inbound leads every week. An email subscriber stays on your list for years, as long as you keep delivering value. Even a YouTube tutorial can have a remarkable shelf life in a technical category where buyers are actively searching for answers.
Your Website: The Trust Verification Hub
Most buyers won't go directly to your website first. They'll encounter you through content, an ad, a podcast, a developer forum, a peer referral. But when they're serious, when they're close to putting you on a shortlist, they go to your website to verify you're legitimate and capable of handling their scale.
Think of it less as a traffic destination and more as a trust verification hub. It's the place a serious engineering or finance leader does their due diligence. They want to see your customer logos, your uptime track record, your documented authorization rates, and whether your thinking about payments lines up with what they've been reading in your content.
A high-performing payments website does three things without compromise: it speaks directly to the specific buyer and the specific pain you solve; it builds immediate credibility through processing volume badges, enterprise customer logos, and third-party validation; and it makes the next step frictionless and obvious.
The "that's me" moment you've engineered in your content and ads needs to continue the moment someone lands on your site. If the message shifts, if the homepage feels generic after your specific content, the trust breaks. And a buyer who was 90% of the way there will quietly close the tab and move down the shortlist.
Newsletters
A newsletter is a direct line to your buyer with no algorithm standing in the way. In payments, where buyers are sophisticated and deeply skeptical of vendor marketing, a newsletter that's genuinely practitioner-level, with real transaction data, candid analysis of network changes, and actionable optimization frameworks, is a rare and valuable thing.
The best payments newsletters feel like they come from a trusted advisor inside the industry. They cover what a Visa network update means for your authorization rates. They break down why a major e-commerce company's checkout conversion improved after a processor switch. They give you the language to use when presenting a payments optimization business case to your CFO.
A list of 4,000 engaged CFOs, Heads of Product, and engineering leaders who open your newsletter every Tuesday is worth more than 100,000 LinkedIn followers who see your posts when the algorithm permits. You own the list. You control the timing. Every send is a touchpoint that keeps you top of mind when the contract renewal lands or the pricing model pivots.
Podcasts
Audio is the most intimate mass medium available. A payments-focused podcast puts your thinking in a VP of Product's ear for 40 minutes during their morning run. That's a relationship-building format that nothing else in your marketing stack can replicate.
You don't need massive download numbers. You need the right listeners. A podcast with 800 consistent listeners who are all product and engineering leaders at high-growth SaaS companies can be extraordinarily effective at building the kind of trusted authority that shortens sales cycles.
Consider hosting formats that work in payments: post-migration retrospectives with customers who moved stacks, CFO roundtables on payments cost optimization, developer-focused technical deep dives, and embedded finance business model breakdowns. Content that makes your buyer genuinely better at their job.
Podcasts have a compounding library effect. Someone who discovers your show today and works through 25 back episodes has spent 15 to 20 hours with your thinking before they ever fill out a demo form. Those are the easiest calls in the pipeline.
YouTube and Long-Form Video
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. And in payments, where buyers are actively searching for technical answers, like how to structure a processor RFP, how to read a chargeback dispute report, or how to architect embedded payments for a multi-merchant platform, long-form video content surfaces in search results for years.
The topics that perform well on YouTube in this category are specific and practical: "How we cut our payment processing costs by 18% without switching processors," "Building a billing system that supports usage-based pricing from day one," "How to evaluate embedded payments providers: what actually matters."
Video also collapses the credibility gap faster than any other format. Seeing a real solutions engineer walk through a migration, or a customer CFO explain how the ROI math worked, builds trust in a way that a case study PDF simply can't match.
Pick One and Go Deep
The temptation is to do all of this simultaneously: newsletter, podcast, YouTube, blog overhaul, website redesign, all in the same quarter. That's how you do all of it badly.
Pick the format that fits your team's strengths and your buyer's habits. Start there. One format done with genuine consistency and quality will outperform four formats done halfheartedly every time.
The best time to start was two years ago. The second best time is right now. Because the payments company that started building these assets while you were competing for the same 3% at conference season is already compounding.
Nothing you say about yourself is as powerful as what your customers say about you. In payments, this is amplified by the sheer weight of migration risk. Buyers have been burned before. By processors that oversold auth rate improvements. By billing platforms that couldn't handle an edge case at scale. By providers that were great at onboarding and slow to resolve issues. Your marketing claims land in that skeptical context. Your customers' real outcomes cut through it.
The Trust Hierarchy in Payments
Payments buyers move through a specific trust hierarchy when evaluating providers:
Migration stories, outcome data, referrals from peer companies. This is the highest-trust content you can produce.
Analyst coverage, developer community reputation, industry recognition. More credible than your own claims, but still somewhat abstract.
Ads, website copy, sales decks, conference presentations. Necessary, but lowest trust, especially in a category where overpromising is endemic.
Your entire demand creation machine is building toward that top tier. Everything else is table stakes.
Build It Into the Journey
The biggest mistake payments companies make with social proof is treating it as a one-time project. They invest in a round of case studies at company launch or around a major product update, publish them, and move on.
Social proof needs to be a systematic part of how you operate. Collect it automatically, at moments of highest customer satisfaction. Typically 60–90 days after a successful migration, immediately after hitting a meaningful milestone together, like an authorization rate improvement, a first clean audit cycle, or a new billing model successfully launched, or at contract renewal when customer sentiment is highest.
The Formats That Work
Written Testimonials
Specific, outcome-focused, and attributable. Not "Great platform, highly recommend." Something that speaks directly to the problem and the measurable result: "We moved from our previous processor in Q3 and our authorization rate on subscription renewals went from 87% to 93.4% within 60 days. That translated directly to a meaningful reduction in involuntary churn." That's a testimonial that converts because it makes the next buyer do the math on their own portfolio.
Video Testimonials
The gold standard. A 90-second video of a real Head of Product or CFO, in their own words, describing the migration and what changed. Keep it authentic and unpolished. It should look like a Zoom call, not a produced commercial. That authenticity signals realness. Use these everywhere: ads, landing pages, sales decks, email sequences. A genuine customer voice in a video ad will outperform any polished brand creative in this category.
Case Studies
The full migration story: the pain they had with their previous solution, the evaluation process, the implementation, the outcome, with real numbers. Written to mirror the exact situation your best-fit prospects are in. A case study of a SaaS company that successfully moved from flat-rate to usage-based billing with minimal disruption, or an e-commerce company that cut their processing costs by 15% while improving authorization rates, is worth more to your pipeline than almost any ad campaign. Layer in the testimonial and video from that same customer for maximum impact.
Third-Party Reviews
Platforms like G2, Capterra, and Gartner Peer Insights carry weight precisely because you don't control them. A buyer who finds 120 verified reviews from real engineering and finance professionals experiences that very differently than 120 testimonials on your own website. Both matter. But third-party reviews have an independence that makes them uniquely credible in a skeptical category.
Build a systematic process for requesting reviews at peak satisfaction moments. They compound. And in AI search, they become one of the primary signals that surfaces you over competitors when buyers are asking for recommendations.
Social Proof Feeds Every Part of the Machine
Here's what makes social proof truly powerful in this system. It doesn't just live on your website. It feeds back into every other part of your growth machine.
Your best video testimonial becomes your highest-performing demand creation ad. Your most compelling migration case study becomes your lead magnet. Your G2 reviews improve your SEO and your AI search visibility. Your customer quotes appear on your landing pages and lift conversion rates. The stories your customers tell get woven into your newsletter, your podcast, and your organic social content.
Collect it systematically, deploy it everywhere, and watch every other part of your growth machine compound. The companies that do this well don't just have satisfied customers. They have a flywheel that gets more powerful every time someone new decides to migrate.
Every section of this playbook has been about bringing new buyers into your world. Now let's talk about the revenue that's already inside your business. And the relationships you're likely letting decay.
In payments, customer retention is both more valuable and more complex than in most B2B categories. More valuable because payment volume compounds as your customers grow, switching costs are real and significant, and multi-year relationships create deep data advantages that improve your product over time. More complex because a single high-profile outage, a pricing surprise, or a competitor offering to reprice their contract can reopen an evaluation you thought was closed.
It costs 5–10x more to acquire a new customer than to grow an existing one. And yet most payments companies spend the vast majority of their marketing budget chasing new logos while the expansion opportunity inside their existing book of business goes largely untouched.
Paid Media Retargeting
Connect your customer and prospect lists to Meta and Google. Create custom audiences and serve ads directly to people who already know you. Build lookalike audiences from your highest-GMV, lowest-churn customers so the platforms can find similar profiles elsewhere.
In payments, retargeting is particularly powerful for re-engaging prospects who attended a webinar or downloaded a resource but never booked a call; staying visible to prospects deep in a long evaluation cycle where the incumbent is fighting to retain them; and cross-selling existing customers on adjacent capabilities. For example, a customer using your payment gateway who hasn't yet implemented your fraud management tools or explored your embedded finance offering.
This changes the economics of paid media. Your cost per lead drops. Your close rate goes up. You're spending money on people who are already familiar with you and halfway convinced.
There are two types of email that belong in your CRM strategy.
The first is nurture. A steady cadence of useful, relevant content that keeps you front of mind for prospects who aren't ready yet. In payments, the best nurture emails look like practitioner intelligence: a brief on what a card network rule change means for subscription billing, a breakdown of why a major retailer's checkout conversion shifted after a processor change, a framework for calculating the true cost of authorization declines across your portfolio.
Your nurture emails should barely mention your product. If they read like a marketing brochure, they go unread. The goal is to be the most useful voice in your buyer's inbox. When they're ready to move, they'll think of you first.
The second is reactivation. Direct, personal emails to prospects who went quiet. For enterprise-level accounts, meaning a company with $100M+ in annual GMV, make these genuinely one-to-one. From a named account executive, not a sequence. Reference something specific from your last interaction. Tie it to something relevant that's happened in their world. Show that you've been paying attention.
SMS
Open rates on SMS hover around 95%, compared to 20–30% for email. Used sparingly and strategically, nothing cuts through faster.
In payments, SMS works best for high-value, high-timing moments: following up the day after a network outage or a publicized authorization rate issue at a major processor (timing and relevance combined), nudging a warm prospect when a proposal has been sitting with their team for two weeks, or reaching a senior engineering contact who isn't responding to email during a critical evaluation window. Keep it short, keep it human, and keep it rare enough that it feels signal rather than noise.
Expansion and Referrals
Your existing customers are your fastest path to more revenue. Expansion opportunities are everywhere in payments: a gateway customer who hasn't yet implemented your revenue optimization or dunning management tools; a billing platform customer whose business model is evolving in ways their current configuration doesn't fully support; a satisfied customer whose company just acquired a new division or launched in a new geography that needs coverage.
Expansion revenue from a healthy customer costs almost nothing to close relative to new logo acquisition. It's in your CRM right now, waiting for someone to have the conversation.
And referrals. In a category where peer recommendations carry enormous weight, because nobody wants to be the person who championed the wrong migration, a warm introduction from a CFO or Head of Product at a peer company is worth more than any ad campaign. Ask for referrals systematically. At peak satisfaction moments, from your most enthusiastic customers, with a clear ask: "Who else in your network is running into this same constraint with their current stack?" Most satisfied customers are glad to make the introduction. They just need to be asked directly.
Keep It Clean. Work It Actively.
Your CRM is a revenue engine. But only if it's clean and actively worked. Deduplicate contact records regularly. Update accounts after every meaningful interaction: a pricing change at a competitor, a funding round by a prospect, a product launch by a customer that changes their volume profile. Build sequences that trigger automatically at the right moments: contract anniversaries, volume milestones, product expansions. Assign ownership so no high-value relationship falls through the cracks.
The payments companies with the best retention and expansion numbers aren't the ones with the best product alone. They're the ones who treat their CRM as a living asset and work it with the same rigor they apply to new logo acquisition.
The companies winning in payments right now are not the ones with the lowest basis points or the biggest conference booth. They're the ones who built trust before the contract renewal. Who educated buyers before the RFP dropped. Who became the obvious name before the evaluation started.
You now have the blueprint. Eight interconnected systems that compound on each other. Build them right, and you're not competing for the same 3% as every other processor at every conference. You're the trusted authority for the 97% who haven't started looking yet. And the obvious choice when they finally do.
That's a different league.
If we can help you get there, get in touch here.
- Jon Davids
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