Leigh Gross is Chief Revenue Officer at Synctera, the banking-as-a-service platform that pairs fintechs with sponsor banks to launch embedded banking and card products (customers include Bolt, Zenoti, and BTG Pactual). He runs an unusually complex enterprise motion — roughly ten people on Synctera's side, ten on the customer's, and a sponsor bank in the middle, across cycles that can stretch past a year. Before Synctera he spent twelve years in fintech sales across heavily regulated markets: student-loan refinancing at CommonBond, SMB lending, and credit and financial data at Array, where he ran five or six distinct sales verticals. Earlier in his career he was a commercial attorney — a background that shapes his emphasis on controlling the process, documenting scope as a single source of truth, and selling to the compliance blocker, not just the champion.
“We're taking a fintech that wants to offer some sort of banking or card product, we're giving them the technology to do that, and we're matching them with a sponsor bank in our network. Every program has to have a bank.”
“You really have to make forecasting a part of your sales process. If you just treat it haphazardly and ask the customer, 'Would you mind sharing some projections?' — it doesn't get you the response you want.”
“It's a little bit of give and get. We want to walk through your projections, and what we're going to give you back is a deal model you can use internally to sell this to your executives. We work off the same document.”
“In a regulated space, the bank will lose their minds if you do that. You can't make tweaks you feel like making, even if from a technical perspective it's not a big deal.”
“The time to launch for these programs oftentimes could be years. We've been able to reduce that significantly — our average launch time is about three months. And that becomes a huge selling point.”
“You run the risk of losing a lot in these handoffs. AI has really helped us in our meeting tools — creating summaries and being able to hand these things off quickly. That's been the biggest thing we're seeing.”
“What I really like is the ability to look at the last 10 deals in this vertical — here are the objections we got, how did we try to overcome them, was that the right thing to do, did it work?”
“The most important thing that I would start with is RevOps. Right after you give a salesperson, you better have a RevOps person — unless your market is just 20 companies and you don't need to do anything.”