James Barker

GTM HIVE

I provide Sales and Marketing advisory, interim sales leadership and coaching to enterprise sales executives handling big-ticket sales items.

Owner

Plumery

Plumery is a new generation of Digital Banking platform. Combining the speed-to-market of a product, with a fintech-grade DevOps platform to empower your own Continuous Innovation and rapid feature development.

Advisor

Tech Market Access

Revenue services for enterprise-grade technology and Fintechs, including:
- Sales and marketing advisory
- Interim sales & marketing leadership
- Project Execution

Monument

Creating a sales and marketing strategy, hiring permanent exec and sales team, driving revenue activity

Chief Commercial Officer (Interim)

MeDirect Malta

Board Advisor

Fourthline

Fourthline is the only regulated provider of KYC. It's Identity Platform combines both AI-powered automation, with the option of being supplemented by outsourced analysts for the most comprehensive and powerful KYC solution available in Europe today.

Following their stellar raise, I advised and supported their European expansion plans.

Oper Credits

Oper is working to transform the mortgage market in Europe. Providing digitisation from contact-to-contract for both brokers and distributors.

The Oper platform provides a variety of capabilities, from out-of-the-box customer journeys, to broker and advisor tools.

Appway

I helped the Appway business integrate GTM capability into FNZ post-acquisition. Evolving the sales model and driving revenue for the Appway product set.

VP Sales EMEA (Interim)

Bud is startup providing Open Banking solutuons to banks and FI's
I led the Sales, Marketing and Client Management teams.

Chief Commercial Officer

Mambu

Mambu is now the leading provider of Core banking technology, a mission critical technology required by every financial institute to run. Opportunities are highly complex 6-7 figure investments.

I led a team of Sales leaders and senior sales contributors  across UK&I and Northern Europe (Nordics), overseeing 100% YoY growth and UK&I becoming the largest revenue driving sub-region.

During my tenure I opened the UK office and grew it to +30 staff. Revenue growth of x 8 across my tenure, culminating with Mambu achieving Unicorn valuation.

Commercial Director EMEA

Building Fintech businesses

I love the impact that a great salesperson can have - and I'm not just talking about revenue. When Sales function is well designed it can deliver amazing experiences to potential customers, help them solve problems, and make their businesses run better.

Great sales can be a huge force for good!

I've sold everything from Office Supplies door-to-door, through to >$20m software deals to the largest enterprises in the world, and everything in between.

I've grown teams from nothing to be the top performing regional sales offices - I've made mistakes, but I've had more than my fair-share of successes. 

- 2 Fintech Unicorn-making journeys
- Created and grown top performing sales offices in those businesses
- Closed an industry-record 8-figure deal
- Created team cultures that were both performant and highly personal

I now work with founders, leaders, and enterprise salespeople to share with them everything I've learned on my journey, and save them from, the bumps and knocks I took along the way. I specialise in enterprise sales motions, particularly selling into Banks and other Financial Services business, providing..

- Guidance on scaling sales and revenue
- Non-executive support and advisory 
- Coaching big-ticket salespeople on their largest opportunities

GTM HIVE Provides on-demand expertise to help SaaS Fintechs grow revenue quickly. We provide non-exec advisory, OR hands-on personnel at every seniority. 

Checkout our FREE knowledge hub of bite-size insights to help founders, and sales & marketing executives, grow their businesses.

It was the biggest deal of my life, and it nearly broke me. 
$20M of software. $10M of services. 18 months of relentless pursuit.

I thought that when I closed it, I’d feel on top of the world. But the elation was short-lived, then the crash. 

The deal amounted to 20% of the companies total revenue and the pressure that was eating me was also holding me together. 

Without it I crumbled. The adrenaline of the pursuit was replaced by panic attacks in silly situations. 

I kept it together - just. 

The climb to that deal was brutal:

- The vanishing signature – On the day we were meant to sign, the CTO of a key division was sacked. His successor was friendly with the competition and it took another 6 months to regain control to close it. 

The ultimatum – A senior exec with the Group CTOs ear threatened to kill the deal with the unless we agreed to hand over the source code. Remembering the conversation where I had to outright reject his request still makes my stomach tighten.

The holiday hijack – The post-RFP presentation? They gave us one date with zero flexibility… right in the middle of a family holiday. I flew home, delivered it, and flew straight back - pretending it hadn’t happened.

Each hurdle felt like the last, only for another to appear. 

I learned that the summit isn’t always where you find joy.
When you finally set the weight down it’s often more like relief. 

It took me nearly 3 months to mentally recover from, what on paper, was the greatest achievement of my sales career. 

Mega deals require extreme ownership, but the weight can be crushing. 

I got the result, but I wish I’d had a good coach myself back then. Having someone to joust with would have made the weight a little lighter. 

Don’t forget to check in on your sellers - they’ll need your support.

The Fintech Sales Guy - making revenue strategy and leadership simple

The summer holidays are a logistical nightmare for working parents.

This entire August, my wife (who also works) and I take an extra day off each week (not the same days) so our kids don’t spend the entire summer in camp.

It’s not easy.
There’s always client work I want to push forward…
Marketing I want to finish…
Projects I want to get ahead on…

But I keep coming back to this:
Me being a financial provider can’t be my only legacy to my kids. 

Yes, I want to grow my business. Yes, I want to deliver for clients. But I also want my kids to remember that I was there in the summer - not just in the evenings, not just at weekends, but in those little midweek moments that also matter.

It’s a constant balancing act and some weeks I get it wrong. But if you’re a parent navigating this too just know you’re not alone.

Each week I reflect on the most important thing I achieved. This week was easy. I helped my young son, who’s autistic and only learned to ride a bike a couple weeks ago, ride 1 whole mile on his bike. 

Nothing at work came close. 

Working parents. You got this!

Probably the biggest piece of advice I’d give a young salesperson would be not to spend all your bonuses, and build up a FU fund.

A good FU fund is 12 months’ worth of runway for your daily expenses.

Sales is a tough gig. When it’s going well, it feels like it’ll last forever.

The reality is you’ll hit bad situations. Roles that don’t work out. Toxic bosses. Deals that collapse. It’s just part of the journey.

If you’re worrying about how to make rent next month, the weight of those moments is crushing.

Living month-to-month is a prison you build for yourself.

With an FU fund, you can walk away if your work ever becomes incompatible with your morals and values. 

It gives you freedom to pick your next role strategically. 
It gives you leverage to negotiate hard with customers becuase a lost deal isn’t the end of the world. 

It’ll give you more peace of mind than the nice car, luxury watch, or the lavish holiday.  

It’s the one thing I wish I’d done much earlier in my career.

Sales people are so fortunate to have a career that gives them the opportunity to earn bonuses - many jobs don’t. Use that privilege to buy your freedom and not shiny stuff you just don’t need.

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I saw a post this week that really got under my skin

A 25-year-old, a couple of jobs in, now a “founder” for a total of 6 months, declaring that anyone not working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week is a slacker.

This kind of hero posturing about brutal work hours drives me mad.
If you want to work 80 hr weeks every week, fine - especially when you’re in your 20s. But turning it into a badge of honour or worse, a moral standard, is simplistic and damaging.

When it comes at the total expense of physical and mental health, or being an active parent present in your children’s lives, I take the bait. 

In my career, I have had to work some long hours.
I have taken 3-hour legal calls from the balcony of my holiday.
I have come back from a holiday early for a meeting.
I have spent weekends on planes.

As a senior exec or ambitions salesperson it’s been necessary, exciting and something I’d happily do again. But these long weeks were exceptions, not something I’d do every week.

I have tried to keep work life broadly within 40-50 hours a week, with the occasional spike into 60-70 when the situation demanded it.

Let’s not reduce the populous to being either a clock-watching 9-to-5-er or an Elon Musk-style 80-hour machine. For most it’s something in between - and it changes. 

Sometimes you sprint. Sometimes you recover.

Where do you stand? Is hustle culture right, or do we need to develop a more flexible approach to working intensity?

Exciting news!
The team at FTT Fintech have invited me to host a live edition of my podcast at their Fintech Festival on 11th November.

I’ll be joined by two senior banking execs to explore what’s broken in how vendors sell, how banks buy technology, and how we can make it better for both in my session, “Selling to Banks: Time to Rethink the Game.”

I’m really excited to lead this conversation. As an industry, we always talk about technology innovation. But we rarely address the messy reality of how it’s actually bought in banks - let's change that!

Huge thanks to the FTT team and Victor Cruz for asking me to tackle this often thorny issue.

Outdoor exercise is the ultimate cheat code for happiness. 
I only wish I had learned it earlier in life.

I lean on it constantly..

When I cannot focus or think clearly, I lace up my running shoes and smash out a 5k. Suddenly the problems that felt insurmountable become manageable.

When I feel defeated or worthless, I drag myself outside rain or shine. It does not always make me feel perfect, but it always makes me feel worthy. 

Today I cycled 35k through quiet country lanes in the late summer sunshine. It’s impossible not to feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the simple sheer pleasure of being alive.

I know I sound like one of those exercise bores. And it is true, I am.

Between 30 and 40 I did no exercise at all. Coincidentally, it was also the least healthy, most anxious, most stressed decade of my life.

With a young family and busy work schedule it’s not easy - I know. 
But make time for you, and instead of crashing with a GandT at the end of the day, get your HR up to 160 instead. 

Trust me. 

Happy Sunday. (Sorry about the stupid expression and blinding orange top)😂

Years ago in one of my first job interviews for a sales manager I was asked "How do you enforce high standards in your team?"

I fumbled around, trying to think on my toes but the truth is I had no idea.

I was very early in my leadership career and interviewing with a CEO. He was lovely, but I’d blown it. 

It’s a question that has stayed with me and shaped my leadership since then. Because most businesses don't talk openly about their standards, let alone give thought to how they enforce them. 

Here’s what I have realised since. 

It's a massive mistake to assume that you can hire good people and they will automatically share the same definition of what 'good' as you. 

The standards of the business need to be committed into writing, because it's the only way to ensure it's clear.

A good demo, how you respond to an RFP, how you run discovery. They all need to have defined standards. 

You can only enforce a standard once they have been clearly communicated. After that it's down to each leader to figure out what rituals are needed to train and reinforce them.

What percentage of your previous employers have defined standards for excellence?

Stop calling Revolut a fintech. It isn’t.

When I say fintech, I mean financial services technology (the hint is in the name).
Vendors. Providers of technology to financial services firms.

Somewhere along the line, the term got hijacked.
Now it gets slapped on any financial services business with a shiny app.

But let’s be clear: Revolut isn’t a fintech. Monzo isn’t a fintech. Wise isn’t a fintech.
They’re financial services providers. (actually Wise is now, but only because they sell their platform to other FI's now - argh, so confusing)

When I ask people what fintech means, I often hear:
“Oh, it’s Financial Services companies that use technology.”

Really?
Can you name a single Financial Services business in 2025 that doesn’t use technology??
Didn't think so!

Farmers use technology. Builders use technology. Cafés use technology.
In Japan, the damn toilets use technology!

By that definition, every single bank and insurer on the planet is a fintech.
And if everyone’s a fintech, then no one is.

The suffix matters.
Fintech describes a 'technology' business model, not the fact that you’ve installed some code inside your business.

It’s time we stopped blurring the lines and started using the term properly.

Curious where you stand on this: do you agree fintech should be reserved for technology vendors, or has the new usage already taken over?

(Awkwardly waits for half my Fintech followers to abandon me in disgust)

#Fintech #SalesLeadership #TheFintechSalesGuy

I passionately believe that selling into banks and financial services is different.

The regulation, the culture around risk, the layers of stakeholders, and the rigid governance.
The stakes are higher, the processes slower, and the buying behaviour far more conservative.

Traditional sales training is a helpful foundation, but it just doesn't cover everything enterprise sellers in FS tech need to know - and thats a problem. 
If you don't anticipate the nuances of how banks REALLY buy, you'll end up being blindsided by things that can derail or completely kill your deal.

On Friday 17th October I'm going to be putting on a workshop in London for only 8 enterprise sellers that sell to banks and FS. This is only for sellers dealing with 6, 7 and 8-figure ARR deals.

We're going to pull apart:
- How banks really buy technology and how to position yourself
- Understanding and managing all the stakeholders involved
- Tactics for gaining an advantage
- Winning RFP's and much more.

We're starting at 9am and finishing around 2:30pm. The cost of the day is £500 + VAT.

If you're interested in joining this small group of specialist sellers, please connect and drop me a message.

If you’re a Fintech seller, one of the things I don’t like about traditional MEDDIC training is the overemphasis put on the ‘Economic Decision Maker’ importance. 

If enterprise sales is like Chess (and it is), the EDM is their King, and like that piece it’s deliberately well concealed behind others. 

You can waste a lot of energy trying to get access and lose sight of the other important pieces on the board. 

Don’t get me wrong, the EDM is the objective of the game, but it’s often hard to go straight to it at the beginning of the game. 

Don’t ignore all the other stakeholders. Great enterprise sales acknowledge the importance of all the pieces on the board and has a clear strategy to engage them. 

Here are some critical stakeholders you can’t afford to miss in a financial services enterprise sale.  

Detractors 
Compliance and risk 
Office of the CTO
Project sponsor
Evaluation lead
Change management. 
User groups and subject matter experts 

Who would you add to this list?

What do you think is the most important skill for an enterprise seller?

For me, it’s reading the terrain in the account. 

If you’re blind to important things happening right in front of your eyes, you’ve already lost. 

So many deals are lost not because the product isn’t good enough, or the price isn’t competitive, but because the salesperson simply doesn’t understand the rules of the game they’re in.

They misunderstood the purpose of an RFP and treat it like a box-ticking exercise. The deal is dead

They don’t understand how the customer prioritises initiatives (very different in banks and FS), so they position in the wrong way. The deal is dead. 

They assume there’s more time than there is, and miss the window to achieve critical objectives. The deal is dead. 

You can only read the terrain when you know what to look out for. Otherwise you’ll constantly be tripping on things until it inevitably kills the opportunity. 

That’s OK if you do 10-20 small deals a year. If you screw up you can smile and dial to replace the pipeline. 

If you’re an enterprise seller doing 1–4 deals a year, you can’t magically pull another strategic deal out of thin air - they simply don’t exist in abundance. 

You have to close every single deal that has potential.

There’s a stakeholder in enterprise sales that everyone always forgets about.

They can’t say yes.
But they can sabotage your deal.

They’re not the budget holder.
Not the end user.
They're not part of any team,

But they’re in the room.
They’re on the calls.
They’re influencing the process.

And they have their own agenda.

It’s the management consultant running the tech selection.
It’s the systems integrator pitching for the implementation.
It’s the advisor with a preferred vendor in their back pocket.

Third parties with their own interests.
Ignore them, and your deal might quietly die.

Not everyone that influences the sale is on the customers org chart!

Here are 3 things salespeople often get wrong when doing 'Discovery'.

1. They think discovery is a one-time thing: Discovery isn't something you do once before you get to go into selling mode.

It's a continuous process of learning that doesn't stop until the contract is signed.

Ask questions. Ask new questions. Ask the same questions to different people. Ask the same questions to the same people later and get different answers.

Keep learning - always.

2. Don't make it an interrogation: If you've finally got a prospect interested in your solution and agreeing to take a demo or learn more, grilling them for 45 mins straight before you share any info is a deeply unfulfilling experience for them. They need to leave that meeting having got something interesting.

Remember this.... Information greed = buyer fatigue. Learn a bit, give a bit, rinse and repeat.

3. Don't sell if there's no pain: Sellers labour under the delusion that if they dig enough they will uncover a pain they can sell to - sometimes there is no pain.

If there's no pain, stop. Discovery can be the basis of qualifying out - and thats OK.

Did I miss any?

Most event booths are the same. The most junior employee at the company standing wearing a suit that looks like it was bought by their mum, hoping that a buyer will come and talk to them.

There are 7 event errors that almost every vendor makes, and it wrecks their chances of getting a good return.

If you want to generate revenue from events, here are a few things I've learned along the way...

Physical events are still one of the best ways to connect with buyers, but bad execution is like flushing wads of £50 notes down the toilet! Here are 

Open article: 7 Event strategy mistakes to avoid by James Barker • 7 min read

"Anything in your pipeline with a close date under 6 months isn't real!"

A seller I know was told this by their manager recently - honestly I despair when I hear things like that.

The only thing banks buy in under 6 months is snacks for their vending machine! Anything tech - especially mission-critical stuff - will take 12, 18 or 24 months.

Having a deluded expectation on how quickly buyers move drives so much toxic behaviour. It creates unnecessary pressure on sellers, which flows down and poisons their interactions with buyers.

Can we please be honest about the decision-making dynamics of enterprise selling to regulated businesses.

What do you think the normal sales cycle is for >7-figure tech sales to banks?

I once told a salesperson that, for big banks, customer service was the least important priority when making tech purchases - they looked at me like I was mad.

So I laid out what I considered the priority drivers from most important to least..

➡️ Compliance – Anything they must do to maintain regulatory status.
➡️ Maintaining/updating legacy tech – Replacing critical end-of-life systems 
➡️ Strategic initiatives – Board-driven priorities the whole organisation aligns behind.
➡️ Cost savings & efficiency – Measurable reductions in spend or operational effort.
➡️ Revenue generation – New ways to make money (surprisingly far down the list).
➡️ Customer service – Difficult to quantify impact on bottom line metrics

It's not that they don't care about customer service - far from it. But large banks are always fighting a ruthless battle to triage all the things they want to do, and what they have capacity to do right now.

Customer experience is often too difficult to measure. Too abstract.

The reality is once a bank has done all the things it absolutely MUST do, there's rarely any bandwidth for the things it wants to do.

It's important for sellers to acknowledge, because if you don't anchor your sale to a high-priority driver you'll often find that your deal gets cut at the last moment in favour of something considered critical.

It's little examples like this that made me realise the importance of sales training thats specific to Financial Services. If you can't read the terrain you'll trip up.

If you’ve sold into large banks, how does your priority list compare? What would you move up… or down?

Big ticket sales to banks take longer than 12 months.

I was having a friendly argument with another sales specialist who claimed any sale can be done under 12 months if you're good.

I disagreed, and still do.

Sales cycles elongate when you introduce complexity.

A large amount of money that goes beyond the discretionary budget a department has and needs to be planned for in the next fiscal year.

Technical implementations that require internal resources to be prepared and mobilised.

A mission-critical platform that affects business continuity or compliance.

All these things stack risk and complexity that will mean a lot of stakeholders need to sign-off.
Getting all those people aligned is not quick or easy.

The mere contracting process for large deals can easily take 3-4 months, or longer.

I'm passionate about this issue, because unrealistic expectations drive very negative behaviours in companies.

Act with purpose, but know when to be patient.

Everyone’s saying sales has changed, but has it?

Here’s what I’m seeing. 

When it comes to interested prospects, the ones already in market and looking for a solution, the sales process itself hasn’t really changed.

Discovery, diagnosis and business case building, multi threading, RFPs, negotiation, etc. t is the same core journey it has always been.
Sure, there are more stakeholders, more procurement hoops, and more compliance steps, but it is still the same game at its core.

Where things have truly changed is in outreach.

Getting in front of a prospect who isn’t actively looking is a completely different world.

Buyers have built up resistance, and in some cases outright bio-desensitisation, to constant messaging.
Their feeds are flooded with AI-generated content that all feels the same.
Inboxes are full of cold emails that sound like they were written by a robot reading a how-to-sell manual.

The challenge now is breaking through without becoming part of the noise.
That requires creativity, authenticity, and timing, not just persistence.

So perhaps the better question isn’t has sales changed?
It’s where in the sales cycle has change hit the hardest?

For me, it’s outreach.
What about you? Where do you feel the biggest shift?

There’s a load of ignorance among salespeople about RFPs.

I still hear the same lines over and over:
“They’ve already chosen their supplier.”
“It’s just a box-ticking exercise.”
“It’s all about negotiation.”

There might be a shred of truth in each of those… but they’re reductive.

If you’re a bank buying mission-critical technology, the stakes are enormous. Get it wrong and you don’t just lose money. You get regulators breathing down your neck, headlines in the press, and angry shareholders demanding answers.

We probably all know a banking exec thats been sacrificed at that alter.

That’s why banks lean on RFPs. They’re an insurance policy. A way of adding more eyes, more process, and more rigour into the decision so they don’t make a bad one.

And if you think responding to one is painful. How long do you think it takes them to gather requirements and run the exercise? Lots more effort than the vendor to respond.

RFPs aren’t going away. 

Treat them as a begrudging admin task… or learn how to turn them into a competitive advantage. It's up to you.

I was talking about 'ghosting' the other day banking exec made a great point..

'Sometimes I don't respond because I don't know how explain the messy bureaucracy I'm wading through that even I don't understand'.

It highlights something really important. Even buyers in banks have to fight and navigate complexity. Sometimes they are too exhausted to try and explain something to an outsider that the business itself doesn't always understand.

I don't think that necessarily excuses the practice, but I do think it explains it very well.

We're all humans, fighting our way through our own shite, trying to get stuff done. And sometimes after endless long days, trying to rationalise our day to outsiders isn't always top of the agenda.

Hard but true.

Taplio

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