Over the past few weeks, teams across Cintra have been carrying out a detailed review of market conditions, buyer behaviour, and performance trends to better understand what’s changing across the payroll and HR software market.
The aim was simple: move beyond assumptions and build a clearer picture of what’s really impacting growth, visibility, and demand across both Cintra and Capture Expense.
Alongside this research, we’ve also analysed PSSG lead and pipeline metrics, organic rankings, AI visibility, and Google search demand trends to build a broader picture of market conditions and buyer behaviour.
Rather than focusing on isolated metrics, the goal has been to understand what’s genuinely changing across the wider market—and where we may need to adapt our approach moving forward.
What we reviewed
The research focused on four key areas:
Across both Cintra and Capture Expense, the intention was to build a clearer understanding of what’s affecting buyer behaviour—not just internally, but across the wider market as well.
What search trends are telling us
We also analysed Google search demand trends across payroll, HR, outsourcing, and related categories to understand whether the market itself was contracting.
What we’re seeing so far is that demand itself hasn’t disappeared. In many areas, search demand has remained relatively stable despite wider economic uncertainty and budget pressure across UK organisations.
Good news—but also a reminder that buyer behaviour is changing much faster than many organisations expected.
One of the biggest findings so far is that search behaviour, research habits, and conversion patterns are shifting rapidly, particularly due to AI-driven search experiences and increasing competition across key areas.
For those not in the know, AI Overviews are changing the way people discover suppliers online. Buyers are increasingly finding answers directly within search engines rather than clicking through multiple websites in the traditional way.
That means visibility, trust, and discoverability are becoming even more important.
What we’re learning
The research is already helping us build a much clearer picture of where the market is changing and where competitors are gaining traction.
A lot of organisations don’t realise how quickly AI-driven search is changing the early stages of buyer research. This works well when businesses adapt early—but it can become a challenge if visibility strategies stay too reliant on traditional search behaviour alone.
What happens next
The next phase of work will focus on turning these findings into clear, practical actions to improve performance across both Cintra and Capture Expense.
Most importantly, the research is helping teams build a clearer understanding of where the market is heading—and where we can improve how we show up, communicate, and compete moving forward.
