Spendesk

Spendesk: The series C FinTech scaling into new regions and markets.

The challenge

Spendesk’s internal sales enablement team had invested significantly into the development of sales playbooks and tools, however the adoption of these assets was low and inconsistent across teams & regions… and they didn’t understand why.

Sales Managers – who were the ones responsible for delivering localised team sales training – were not applying a standardised approach to developing their teams on these central best-practices. They themselves were not adept in certain aspects of value-selling methodology and had little formal experience in training or coaching others.

Consequently, sales reps were not being effectively upskilled, and were not demonstrating the required levels of pipeline growth and conversion to consistently achieve quota or qualify deals and forecast accurately.

In addition to these operational challenges, Spendesk’s strategic focus was evolving in order capitalise on ambitious growth targets following a Series C raise of €100m in July 2021.

With the imminent planned launch of new products, new pricing and entry into new customer tiers and regions, a new value-selling methodology and skillset was imperative in order to penetrate these markets and grow deal sizes.

Outside help was required to provide the internal sales enablement team with the added expertise and bandwidth in order to deliver high-performance, achieve results and accelerate the sales enablement roadmap.

The solution

Our objective was to create a global community of “team leader coaching machines” who could raise the bar of excellence and bring value-selling methods to life through their teams.

We started by assessing the current coaching competencies, practices and cadences of 14 sales and BDR managers over a 2-week period. We quickly discovered that there was very little focus on coaching the “inputs” (i.e skills and behaviours) and excessive focus on driving activities and outputs. In other words, lots of conversations that were focused on the “what” and very little on the “how” We immediately prioritised the delivery of three key projects:

1. Codifying the skills and practices required for value-selling.
2. Training the entire sales organisation on value-selling essentials over an 8-week period.
3. Training and mentoring managers on how to become effective coaches, and guiding them to develop and implement a new coaching framework to support lasting behavioural change in their reps.

Over a 6-month period we worked closely with the CRO, sales leadership, line managers, reps, sales enablement and sales operations teams to encourage both strategic alignment and operational execution on the program. Outside of scheduled training sessions, we also regularly facilitated 1-1 and group coaching sessions, observed deal and pipeline reviews, developed coaching scorecards and responded to ad-hoc requests from managers and reps to help embed new learnings and foster collaboration..

The outcome