Who buys, and the signals that say now
Data and AI budgets do not open because a platform is good. They open when something makes the current way of working untenable. This module is about recognising that moment from outside the building, before the RFP exists.
01 The shape of it
Five triggers worth a campaign
Not personas — situations. A CFO with nothing broken is not a buyer; a CFO three weeks into a carve-out is. Each card names the trigger, what it does to the data estate, and the page that speaks to it.
A core system is moving
An S/4HANA programme, a core banking migration or an ERP consolidation. Every report downstream has to be re-pointed, and the reconciliation work is discovered late and hated universally.
Send: /sap-integrationA carve-out, merger or new subsidiary
Two of everything and one board pack due. Entity resolution and a consolidated view stop being an architecture preference and become a reporting deadline.
Send: /finance-360A regulator or auditor has asked
ISO 20022, a lineage request, a model-risk review. The question is always the same — where did this number come from — and the honest answer is usually a spreadsheet.
Send: /governanceCash got expensive
Rates, covenants or a working-capital push. Attention moves to DSO, stock and the cash cycle, and nobody can agree what the numbers are because three systems hold them.
Send: /academy-cash-calculatorAn AI pilot stalled
The model works and the deployment does not, because the data underneath is ungoverned and no one will sign off an answer they cannot trace. This is the most common trigger of the five.
Send: /academy-agentic-ai02 Questions
Six checks before you spend budget on an account
Run these before the campaign, not after the meeting. Most wasted pipeline spend goes to accounts where nothing has changed and nothing is going to.
- Has anything changed in the last two quarters — a system, a regulator, an owner, a target — that makes the current reporting harder than it was?
- Is there a named person whose job gets worse if this is not fixed, or only a general wish for better data?
- Which of the five triggers is this, honestly? "They are big and have lots of systems" is not a trigger.
- Is the trigger inside a function we have a value tree for, or are we guessing at their economics?
- Do we have a study in the same sector or the same shape of problem to lead with?
- If they replied today, is there a page we would send that answers the next question without a call?
03 Sequence
From signal to first meeting
Five steps, each with an artefact that already exists. Nothing here requires new content to be written first, which is the usual reason campaigns slip a quarter.
04 Reference
Lead with the study that matches the shape
Eight deployments are published on /impact. Sector match is good; problem-shape match is better, and these are the figures as recorded in each engagement.
| Their situation | Study to lead with | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| Many systems, no single version of the truth | ECU Worldwide · logistics | 30+ systems unified, one source of truth across 40,000 port pairs |
| A facilities or asset estate on fragmented systems | EFS · facilities management | 11 systems and 6.5M records into one hub, phase 2 run in-house |
| Manual regulatory and finance reporting | Amex India · banking | 200+ regulatory reports automated, 25 finance processes migrated |
| A core system migration with reporting to protect | CBI Bank · banking | 85% less manual integration effort, 200+ reports redesigned |
| A regulatory deadline with a fixed date | PCBB · banking | ISO 20022 readiness ahead of the deadline, automated screening |
| Margin invisible below the revenue line | ADNH · hospitality | Food wastage from 23% to under 8%, P&L from three weeks to two days |
| Master data spread across sites | Aster DM · healthcare | One item master across 30+ hospitals, 125+ clinics, 250+ pharmacies |
| An AI use case that needs governed inputs | ITQ · travel technology | 99.8% fare-rule accuracy against an 82% industry average |
05 Language
Say this, not that
The difference is almost always specificity. The second column is not wrong, it is just indistinguishable from every other vendor in the inbox.
Most finance teams we meet during an ERP migration lose the first three days of close to reconciliation rather than consolidation.
We help enterprises unlock the power of their data.
Two charts of accounts and one board pack due in January is a reporting problem before it is an integration problem.
Congratulations on the acquisition! Thought this might be relevant.
If OEE and capacity utilisation come from different systems, one of them is being used to argue for capital.
Our platform delivers real-time operational insights.
06 Questions
Frequently asked
Is this account-based marketing or inbound?
Both, from one input. The trigger decides the account list and the persona decides the message; the pages you route to are the same ones that answer the search query, so inbound and outbound reinforce rather than duplicate each other.
What if none of the five triggers applies?
Then the account is not in market and the honest move is to nurture it with the Academy rather than spend sales capacity on it. The triggers are deliberately narrow — a list of everyone is a list of no one.
See what the buyer sees
Every claim in this module traces back to a page the customer can read for themselves.