Marketing teams spend months fine-tuning campaigns, building nurture sequences, and aligning messaging with sales. Dashboards look healthy: CTR is up, demo requests are growing, lead scores are trending in the right direction. But when finance closes the month, the revenue line doesn’t match the marketing story. Somewhere between a prospect clicking Get started and money actually landing in the account, deals quietly disappear.
In many B2B companies, that somewhere is the payment and onboarding layer. On one market, self-serve subscriptions convert well, but as soon as you launch a campaign in a new country, CRM and billing show a sharp drop-off at the moment of payment: the preferred method isn’t available, cards are declined, or the customer is forced to wait for an invoice by email. Or marketing finally secures a budget to go after a new segment, but the launch stretches into months because the payments team is still integrating a new PSP and negotiating terms with compliance. On the marketing side, it looks like a successful launch; on the revenue side, it looks like another shortfall.
Table of ContentsWhere B2B Marketers Quietly Lose Deals: The Black Box Between Yes and PaidComplex B2B checkout flowsMulti-step onboardingWhy Your Payment Gateway Belongs in the MarTech ConversationConversion and UX, not just Yes/NoA real experimentation surfaceWhere marketing events turn into money eventsOperational alignment, not manual glueWhat a Marketing-Friendly Payment Gateway Actually Looks LikeFlexible routing that follows your segmentsAnalytics that speak the same language as marketingSupport for the business models you actually sellConfiguration without full release cyclesRisk and compliance as part of the journeyHow Marketing Teams Can Work With Payment and IT to Fix the Gap1. Map the full funnel, including payment outcomes2. Audit what your current gateway can actually do3. Design experiments that start from business questions4. Build a marketing-friendly payment roadmapA simple example in practiceTurning Your Gateway From Cost of Doing Business Into a Growth Lever
In practice, the payment gateway already shapes core marketing KPIs like CAC, payback, and LTV. Formally, though, it sits somewhere between IT and finance and rarely shows up in conversations about the MarTech stack. The most expensive part of the funnel — the moment after the customer has said yes — remains a black box for marketers.
Where B2B Marketers Quietly Lose Deals: The Black Box Between Yes and Paid
After a prospect clicks on a CTA in B2B, they don’t jump straight from interested to revenue. Between those two points there is a whole layer of flows that usually lives outside marketing’s field of view.
Complex B2B checkout flows
Deferred or invoice-based payments, subscriptions with trials, add-ons, and upgrades, and usage-based or tiered billing all introduce friction and extra approvals. Each variation adds another point where a deal can stall or fall through before the first successful payment.
Multi-step onboarding
On top of that, many B2B journeys include:
KYC/AML checks and document collection.
Contract negotiation and signing.
Setting limits, risk profiles, and commercial terms.
Technical verification or activation of services
Every one of these steps is a chance to lose a deal before the first successful payment. Yet in most organizations, marketing only sees the top of the funnel: the click on the ad, the form submission, the booked demo. Everything that happens after the CTA is treated as handed over to product, IT, payments, or risk.
That’s where familiar pains come from:
No visibility into failed payments. Marketers can’t see how many deals die on a decline, how many customers retry, and how many simply give up.
Inability to adapt payment methods to campaigns. It’s impossible to quickly enable local methods for a new market or to temporarily prioritize a specific provider for a particular promotion.
No control over experiments at the payment layer. Traffic can’t be split across gateways or routes for A/B tests. Any change becomes a backend project, not a fast hypothesis.
Fragmented integration with CRM and analytics. Payment events live in a separate system. It’s hard to tie them back to campaigns, channels, and leads in CRM, GA4, or BI, so the funnel view simply stops before the money moment.
On paper, this stretch of the journey belongs to IT, finance, and risk. In reality, it directly changes CAC (because some portion of paid traffic never monetizes), pushes out payback (because deals close later or never close), and cuts LTV (because customers churn after early payment friction). As long as the payment layer remains “someone else’s territory”, B2B marketers will keep losing deals exactly where they’ve already won the most expensive thing: the customer’s intent to pay.
Why Your Payment Gateway Belongs in the MarTech Conversation
If you look at what modern marketing teams actually do, they already manage most of the journey from first touch to revenue recognition. Campaigns bring the right accounts in, nurture programs keep them warm, sales engagement tools move them through evaluation. The only place that often falls outside of this conversation is the payment gateway – even though that’s where the outcome of all this work is decided.
Conversion and UX, not just Yes/No
A gateway is not just a yes/no switch for card transactions. It actively shapes conversion and user experience. The choice of payment methods, currencies, and languages determines whether a customer from a new market feels like you’re ready for them or not. The way you design payment and contract flows for a $49/month SaaS subscriber versus a six-figure enterprise agreement determines how many of those prospects actually make it through the last mile.
A real experimentation surface
The payment layer is also a powerful experimentation surface. If it’s flexible, you can route traffic from different campaigns through different PSPs, fee structures, or 3DS flows and see where conversion is higher instead of guessing. You can quickly add a local method for a niche segment and treat it as an A/B test, not a six-month project that freezes your roadmap.
Where marketing events turn into money events
From a measurement perspective, the gateway is where marketing events turn into money events. If payment approvals, declines, retries, and chargebacks stream into the same analytics and attribution tools as your campaign data, you can finally answer questions like Which creative actually leads to stable, paying customers? and Which channels bring users who fail at the first payment attempt? Without that connection, you’re optimizing for form fills and demos, not for revenue.
Operational alignment, not manual glue
And then there is the operational side. When payment, finance, and marketing all look at different versions of the truth, it’s hard to make decisions about CAC, payback, or LTV with confidence. A gateway that exposes its configuration and data as part of a broader MarTech stack reduces the manual glue between teams: fewer spreadsheets passed around, fewer ad-hoc exports, more shared dashboards from click to cash.
Once you see the gateway through this lens, it’s natural to discuss its architecture and vendor choices in the same meetings where you talk about CDP, CRM, marketing automation, and attribution. It’s one more system that either supports your growth strategy — or quietly caps it.
What a Marketing-Friendly Payment Gateway Actually Looks Like
If you treat the payment layer as part of your MarTech stack, you start looking for slightly different traits than in a purely technical can it process payments? checklist.
Flexible routing that follows your segments
Routing needs to be flexible enough to follow your segmentation. A marketing-friendly gateway lets you route transactions based on geography, customer profile, expected MRR, or even campaign source. When you open a new region in LATAM, for example, you might send a portion of traffic through a local PSP and the rest through a global provider, then compare approval rates and cost in your usual reporting tools instead of relying on anecdotes.
Analytics that speak the same language as marketing
Analytics can’t be an afterthought. The gateway should emit structured events for successful payments, declines, retries, chargebacks, and refunds, with enough context to join them to users and campaigns. Whether you feed those events into GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or a BI stack, the point is the same: payment outcomes should appear alongside marketing and product events, not in a separate silo that only finance understands.
Support for the business models you actually sell
It also has to support the business models your go-to-market actually uses. One-off payments, classic subscriptions, usage-based billing, marketplaces, and split payments all introduce different failure modes and friction points. If the gateway can’t keep up with how you price and package your product, marketing ends up constrained by billing rather than the other way round.
Configuration without full release cycles
Configuration is another tell. When every change to limits, methods, or routes requires a full backend release, marketing loses the ability to react to what they see in the data. In a gateway that behaves more like MarTech, a meaningful subset of changes can be made through a UI or configuration layer under proper governance — close enough that experiments and optimizations are measured in weeks, not in quarters.
Risk and compliance as part of the journey
Finally, compliance and risk controls have to be designed as platform capabilities, not ad-hoc obstacles. KYC/AML checks, document collection, and limit management will always be there, but they don’t have to break the journeys marketing and product design. A gateway that supports different onboarding paths for different risk profiles, for example, lets you protect high-risk flows without forcing low-risk customers through the same heavy experience.
For payment providers and acquiring institutions, it’s often easier to adopt a white-label payment gateway software for PSPs and acquirers that already exposes routing rules, analytics hooks, and risk controls as configurable building blocks instead of hard-coding each new flow from scratch. That’s the point where the gateway stops being a hidden utility and starts behaving like the rest of your growth stack.
How Marketing Teams Can Work With Payment and IT to Fix the Gap
Closing the gap between yes and paid starts with putting everyone in front of the same picture.
1. Map the full funnel, including payment outcomes
The first step is to map the full funnel including payment outcomes. That means sitting down with product and IT and drawing the journey all the way to successful payment / decline / abandon, not stopping at form submitted or contract signed. Once that map exists, you can agree on a small set of shared metrics: payment conversion rate, retry success rate, and estimated revenue loss from failed or abandoned payments. These numbers become the bridge between marketing dashboards and finance reports.
2. Audit what your current gateway can actually do
From there, you can audit what your current gateway can actually do. Which payment methods are available in which countries? How hard is it to switch PSPs on or off, or to introduce a new local method for a specific campaign? Do payment events flow into your CRM and analytics tools in a way that lets you segment by channel, campaign, or segment, or are they stuck in a separate portal that only the payments team uses? The goal isn’t to produce a perfect RFP – it’s to understand how much room you have to move.
3. Design experiments that start from business questions
On top of that understanding, marketing can propose experiments that start from business questions, not from plumbing. You might want to compare conversion when high-value customers are routed to the most reliable PSP, test different 3DS flows for a particular region, or introduce a new local method for a segment that currently underperforms at checkout. Framed this way, experiments become joint initiatives: marketing defines the hypothesis and target segment, payments and IT implement the routing and tracking, and everyone looks at the same results.
4. Build a marketing-friendly payment roadmap
The last piece is to prioritize a marketing-friendly roadmap for the payment stack. Once you know how much revenue is lost to declines, missing methods, or friction in specific flows, it’s easier to argue for changes that improve both growth and risk metrics. Instead of a long wish list, focus on one or two moves that can be delivered quickly – for example, enabling local methods in a key market or streaming payment outcomes into your existing analytics setup. Small wins here build trust and create space for more ambitious changes.
A simple example in practice
A simple anonymized example: a B2B SaaS provider serving clients in Western Europe noticed that one particular market had strong lead volume but weak paid conversion. Mapping the funnel showed that many customers dropped off at 3DS and card declines. By adding a popular local payment method and adjusting the 3DS flow for low-risk customers, they lifted payment conversion in that market by double digits without changing anything in their top-of-funnel activity. The campaigns were already working; the payment layer finally caught up.
Turning Your Gateway From Cost of Doing Business Into a Growth Lever
Viewed narrowly, a payment gateway is just part of the cost of accepting money: fees, compliance, uptime. But as soon as you look at the full journey from first click to recognized revenue, it becomes clear that marketing is accountable for the whole chain, not just for generating leads or demo bookings. Ignoring the payment layer means ignoring one of the biggest sources of silent leakage in that chain.
The shift is conceptual as much as it is technical. A payment gateway can and should be treated as part of the MarTech stack: a system that shapes conversion, enables experiments, and feeds real revenue data back into your models. That also means marketers deserve a voice in how it is chosen, configured, and evolved – alongside product, payments, and risk. When the gateway is opaque, you optimize campaigns in isolation. When it is connected, you can optimize the entire journey.
White-label and modular platforms make this shift much easier. Instead of hard-coded flows and long release cycles, they offer routing, analytics, and risk controls as configurable components that can be aligned with how you segment, price, and grow. For B2B teams that already feel the friction between strong campaigns and underperforming payment flows, the next strategic step isn’t to add yet another tool to the MarTech stack. It’s to treat the payment gateway itself as a marketing asset — and to choose infrastructure that lets you test, learn, and grow, instead of waiting for the next backend release to see what really works.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: From Clicks to Cash: Why Your Payment Gateway Belongs in the B2B MarTech Stack