Three months ago, I was convinced we needed to be talking to CFOs and Heads of Collections. After all, they control the budgets and make the big decisions, right?
Wrong.
Our Q2 data told a completely different story. While senior collections leaders gave us an 18.9% LinkedIn acceptance rate, Country Managers hit 43.2%. But the real revelation wasn’t just in the numbers—it was in the conversations that followed.
The Country Manager Discovery
When Alex (a Country Manager) from an alternative finance company accepted my LinkedIn invite, something clicked. These aren’t just middle management—they’re the people actually living with the operational pain points every single day. They see the Excel sheets, manage the staff turnover, and field the “I don’t feel well” messages from collections agents.
More importantly, they have the authority to fix it.
The companies hiring Country Managers are substantial enough to have real collection challenges, but still nimble enough to make operational decisions quickly. They’re not getting lost in committee approvals or fighting through layers of regional bureaucracy.
The Operational vs. Strategic Divide
Here’s what really surprised me: when we shifted our messaging from strategic positioning to operational efficiency, everything changed. Instead of talking about “transforming collections with AI,” we started asking about daily collection capacity and Excel-based tracking systems.
The response was immediate. These Country Managers weren’t looking for digital transformation—they were drowning in staff management overhead and manual processes.
Three Customers, One Pattern
Our last three customers all followed the same pattern: operational leaders dealing with immediate pain points who could see the cost savings clearly. No lengthy ROI justifications needed—they were already calculating how much more they could get done and save vs. hiring their next collections person.
What This Means
The lesson here isn’t just about who to target—it’s about understanding how businesses actually work versus how we think they work. The people feeling the pain aren’t always the people we assume are making the decisions.
Country Managers at mid-sized finance and leasing companies have become our sweet spot because they have the perfect combination: real operational authority, daily exposure to collection challenges, and companies large enough to have meaningful accounts receivable volumes.
Sometimes the best insights come from simply asking: who actually lives with this problem every day? The answer might surprise you.
What patterns have you noticed in your own customer conversations that challenged your assumptions?
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