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

Results at glance:

Spendesk
0 %

Increased average order value (AOV) in just 3 months.

0 %

Increased monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

0 %

Improved forecasting accuracy

Spendesk – a FinTech scale up with offices in Paris, Berlin, London and San Francisco – provides all-in-one spend management solutions to over 3,000 customers globally.

By combining a SaaS platform with corporate cards, Spendesk opens a world of possibilities to help modern finance teams achieve better visibility, control and efficiency of their staff expenditure.

Spendesk was launched in 2016 and has raised over €198m of funding over 6 rounds. With both revenue and headcount doubling over the last 12 months (approx. 90 sales & CS staff globally today), Spendesk has ambitious plans to continue scaling over coming years to seize the huge market leadership opportunity that exists within spend management.

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.

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:

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.

“If you’ve got specific problems in your sales funnel they can come in and transform that, but at the same time they’ve also got the experience to build out the curriculum and enablement program strategy for sustainable growth.

That’s why we brought them in – because they can do both of those things”

“There’s a very clear alignment between the practicality of what they do, and the speed at which we need to execute.

There’s been a very positive impact on the sales organisation because they can now actually see themselves becoming better sales professionals – and we can see deal sizes increasing rapidly”

“From Q2 to Q3, my MRR went up by 78%. I have felt so much more confident in delivering pricing”

Find your sales team’s flow state

Book a call with one of our experts for a complimentary analysis of your sales team structure, along with suggestions for improving your processes and performance.