A skeptical, oversold audience
Ethos sells a unified risk-management platform to banks. Its traditional buyers, heads of risk and compliance, are heavily courted by vendors and wary of anything that sounds like a pitch.
Jett had relied mostly on warm connections to start sales conversations. That was too slow, and he wanted a steady way to start conversations without sounding like a sales development rep.
A founder’s question, not a pitch
Distill ran outreach from Jett’s own LinkedIn account, with email as a fallback. Instead of a product pitch, the message offered to compare notes on how banks are governing generative AI and agents.
Early on, a chief risk officer at a fintech bank asked for Jett’s email so he could send a meeting link. Jett and the Distill team kept tightening the approach: shorter copy, and targeting by what people actually work on, such as AI governance and AI transformation, rather than by job title alone.
Meet the Ethos team
Jett Oristaglio
Founder and CEO
The right executive answered
In October, the EVP and technology officer at a bank replied within half an hour of Jett’s message and booked a time on his calendar. He was building an AI governance program and wanted to talk.
Jett called it the strongest meeting yet. The conversation moved toward a product demo that would include the bank’s chief operating officer.
“Afternoon Jett, what a timely connection!”
“Respond with your email and I will send a Google meets link.”
Knowing who to talk to next
For Ethos, the payoff was more than one promising conversation. Not every early meeting was the right fit, but the strongest one showed that technology leaders driving AI adoption could be Ethos’s champions inside the bank. Ethos refocused its outreach on those leaders and is bringing the same peer-to-peer approach to its conference season.