Buying Like a Professional – Part 2: The Forces Off the Scorecard
Part 2 of a four-part series. The forces that decide most technology purchases never appear on the scorecard: familiarity, reputation, personality, and culture – the fit between a bank and the vendor it buys from.
By: Paul Schaus
June 17, 2026
In Part 1, I argued that three different motivations sit at the buying table before any process begins — a buyer governed by fear, a vendor optimizing a multi-year contract, and a professional managing a quota — and I closed by naming the four forces that do the real deciding and never appear on the scorecard: familiarity, reputation, personality, and culture. This is where we take each one apart.
Ask any banker why they renewed and you will hear a version of "we know them, switching is a nightmare." Familiarity is the most powerful force in the process, usually beating price and features. The data is blunt: across B2B procurement, incumbents win competitive RFPs 80% to 90% of the time, while net-new challengers win in the single digits. In core banking, switching friction is so high that even unhappy customers stay put. Some of this is rational — real conversion risk and retraining belong in the decision. The rest is the comfort of the known, which feels like risk reduction but is often just risk you have stopped noticing. Renewing because "we know them" confuses two things: knowing the people, and knowing the product is still the right product. The vendor is happy to let you keep them confused.
Familiarity with the person cuts the same way. The rep who picked up the phone when your last conversion went sideways and worked on the issue carries real social capital — an input, not a substitute for verifying the product, roadmap, and support still hold up. People leave; the trusted account executive may now sit at a competitor, which is the most reliable way a challenger ever displaces an incumbent.
Familiarity does not single out one kind of institution; it pulls on all of them. Its most common and costliest victim is the established bank that stays on a first-generation core its vendor is now racing to modernize, staying because the known is comfortable, not because it is still right, and then paying for years to climb back out. That modernization scramble is the story I have tracked across our work on core modernization, digital deposits, compliance architecture, and AI governance — and it is why monolithic legacy systems still consume the majority of banks' IT budgets. The same gravity acts on the regional renewing a digital platform, the community bank weighing a payments hub, and the multibillion-dollar institution that has run the same core for fifteen years. Whether you are opening your doors or renewing for the fourth time, a modern look on an old engine is not a modern bank, and "we have always used them" is not a technology strategy.
Reputation matters, and more than scorecards admit. Trust is the dominant variable in supplier selection: about three-quarters of B2B buyers rank it the most important factor, and 71% would buy from a salesperson they trust over one offering the lowest price. This is the backbone of the oldest line in sales, people buy from people. True. But the research is precise: people buy from people they trust to deliver, which is not the same as people they like. Reputation should stand in for probability of delivery, validated independently; usually it just stands in for "I have a good feeling about these folks," which is not a control. And it is only as durable as the last invoice — value perception (42%) and total cost of ownership (41%) top the reasons banks decline to renew. In a small industry, a botched conversion is known at twenty institutions within a year. That works in your favor, if you go and ask.
Buyers expect the big, charismatic closer. The best ones often are not. Adam Grant's study in Psychological Science found no clean advantage for extroverts; the curve is an inverted U, with ambiverts who flex between asserting and listening generating about 24% more revenue per hour. The lesson for the buyer: the rep who is mostly listening is not passive, they are gathering. Every detail you volunteer — timeline, budget, who else you are considering, which way the committee leans — is filed and forwarded to a forecast meeting that dissects your deal by name. The professional's real skill is the question, and the patience to let you fill the silence. The quiet one is often the most dangerous in the room.
The pattern I keep returning to: cultural alignment between the two institutions — the bank buying and the vendor selling, not the rapport between two people — predicts whether the relationship works. The mechanism is the one documented in mergers, where a large share of failures trace to cultural mismatch rather than economics. A vendor whose culture is "move fast, ship, apologize later," bolted onto a bank whose culture is "examine twice, change once," will grind in every implementation meeting for the life of the contract. Culture feels like familiarity, so buyers reach for the vendor that reminds them of themselves and call it chemistry. But real fit is assessable: how they handle bad news during the evaluation, whether their implementation people talk like your operations people or down to them, how decisions get made on their side. The most useful question to a reference is not "are you happy" but "tell me about a time it went wrong, and what they did." That answer reveals the culture. The demo never will.
Familiarity, reputation, personality, and culture decide most purchases, and they do it off the scorecard. The corrective is not to distrust the human side but to handle it with the rigor you give the financial model: separate the cost of switching from the comfort of the known, make reputation earn its place through independent validation, notice who is listening, and test culture deliberately instead of mistaking chemistry for fit.
That covers the human half. Part 3 turns to the machinery everyone treats as objective — the RFP, the scorecard, and the demo — and where each one quietly tilts.
CCG Catalyst advises community and regional banks, credit unions, fintech companies, and de novo founders on technology strategy, vendor selection, and contract negotiation. If your institution is preparing for a core, digital, payments, or fraud decision — or building one from scratch — reach out to our team at www.ccgcatalyst.com. For related reading, see our commentary on building a de novo in 2026 and the full library at CCG Insights.
See our latest announcement: CCG Catalyst's Paul Schaus Named a 2026 Top Consultant by Consulting Magazine
By: Paul Schaus | Founder & Managing Partner, CCG Catalyst Consulting
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article represent the perspective of CCG Catalyst Consulting based on our direct experience advising financial institutions. This commentary is intended to stimulate industry discussion and does not constitute legal, accounting, or regulatory advice.
