00:14:43 · Michael Sindicich
We had just launched this new payment thing And we said, okay, now is probably the right time to go into expense management, into creating purchase cards, like being more of a spend management platform as teams were really distributed. And so to answer your question in the beginning, like went from sales leader there to eventually the CEO of the payments and expense business. And that was cool. That was like my first time from leading salespeople and, you know, having a number to actually leading like product design, engineering, operations, legal, HR, you know, all of the things that you would do. And we really treated it as a startup within the startup, as its own business. Like there was a time where we weren't going to the company all hands. We had our own all hands and things like that. And I think it was so important for us because if we were to build this Fintech, you know, new products and treat it as, hey, here's a new business that is, you know, we're leading with, you know, a random, like, just a project on a PM's team with a few engineers, it never would have become like the big business that it is today. Definitely created a lot of headaches, right? We had multiple sales teams, different products, competing resources, like lots of duplication across the company. But think it was very big and smart investment decisions to actually build something that can scale to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and really a good product that then we can sell. And after that journey, about a year and a half ago, both businesses were scaling really nicely. And what Ariel asked me to do is to be the president of the company, which is an ambiguous title, but essentially it means is leading everything go to market. And so what I did was combined all the sales teams, combined the rev ops teams. We have a marketing CMO as well, and that's kind of combining the messaging around travel expense and payments and meetings and events and VIP and a lot of the different businesses that we've built internally. And and then corp dev and M and A and and partnerships and field operations. So that's kind of what I oversee now. And it's, you know, one big, really aggressive, you know, kind of scaling go to market motion.
00:16:54 · Miguel Armaza
[00:16:54] S0: When revenue goes to zero in March 2020, was there a point where you doubted that you would actually make it as a company?
00:17:03 · Michael Sindicich
[00:17:03] S1: Honestly, there was... Yes, for sure. But it was also so busy that it was hard to think about that because we just... We're the kind of team that takes action really fast. So the pandemic hit. And I think like the next day, you know, we sent everyone home and that was the whole like, see you in two weeks kind of thing. Fernando. Sent everyone home. Like the next day, we had a board meeting and we were basically like, okay, we can do a couple things. We can kind of shutter the company and just wait this thing out and put it on pause and furlough people and things like that was one option. Which, by the way, a lot of the other competition was doing in the travel management space. Just because they're so people heavy, they had a lot of support agents and things like that, and no one was traveling. So that was option one. The other option was essentially, what if we actually used the time when we know that our people heavy, cost heavy competition would actually do that to turn it into an advantage to go on the offense. And, you know, we kind of looked around the room and we're like, Yeah, we're all startup people. We take risks. We go for it. And what we actually did is we raised money fast. We then, and it was a convert and things like that, so there were different nuances, but we raised money. We actually doubled down on enterprise sales because we thought, okay, if we can go and convince, you know, an enterprise company, hey, nobody's traveling right now. You believe that travel will come back. The best time to change your travel solution and modernize it is actually when no one's traveling. And I remember sales were really hard. Imagine selling travel to a travel manager during a pandemic when they're, like, not even sure about their own job and no one's traveling. But we pushed down that path. And then what we also did was we took it as an opportunity to really invest in the payments and expense business. So we sent a lot of our best engineers, we hired a lot of people, and we essentially built this product very fast and then started selling it into all of our install base and then also net new companies. And I think that decision was more company defining than anything else.
00:19:15 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
Once the pandemic started ending and travel came back, we just saw the volumes just growing like crazy because the install base of the companies we had sold that never traveled with us started traveling. We built products like R Factor dashboards, COVID dashboards, employee tracking and monitoring, all these types of things for admins to basically leverage our technology to help us or help them navigate through the pandemic. And I think people love that. We doubled down on support. So I don't know if you remember, flights were getting canceled. Employees were stuck Europe or in The US and they couldn't get home. So just really 20 fourseven hands on support to help our customers. And yeah, think it allowed us to basically scale fast. During that time, we also made some acquisitions. So I think we've acquired, we probably acquired about three or four different travel agencies and companies during that time as well, which then helps us to scale globally, internationally, have licenses, better agreements, all these types of things with the suppliers. Yeah, we absolutely went for it. I think it paid off big time. [00:20:22] S0: Michael, what does it take to build a world class sales organization? Especially, obviously, here we're talking about B2B.
00:20:33 · Michael Sindicich
[00:20:33] S1: Yeah. It's a good credit. It takes the right CRO. And we have a guy named Grant McGrail who is just phenomenal. He's an absolute killer. But I think if I were to start it all over again or think about how to build world class, first thing starts with the people. And I think there's different schools of thoughts and playbooks around basically processes for sales. And so we use something called the MEDDPICC process. But basically, we have different stages throughout the sales cycle. We have different qualification criteria. We have different ways to move from a sale from, you know, one stage to the next stage with gates that are actually measured. The important thing also is consistency. So everybody around the globe is actually speaking the same language so that if I know, you know, this company, I'm preparing for a big meeting with the CPO of a company, and I know they're in CI stage champion identification, I know where we exactly are in that deal and everyone who's helping support that deal knows exactly where it is in the various stages. So it's kind of like this methodology. And there's, you know, you could write a thousand page book on, you know, this methodology and process and everything, but it's consistent and it works really good. And it's actually crazy watching the sales switch from an art sale to actually a science sale. And I I I never really believed it. I thought good salespeople were good salespeople because they're likable. But actually, salespeople don't need to necessarily be likable. They need to know the playbook and know what all the roadblocks are, and they're kind of orchestrating the entire deal behind the scenes. And it does feel like a science now. So I would say the people, the methodology, consistency is really important as you're building a sales organization. The next thing I would say is the tooling. So are you leveraging the best tooling, the best technology to be able to help through that sales process? Whether that's do I have the right email addresses and phone numbers for people? Do I have the right technology to do call recording and to make sure, you know, we're we're following the demo process accurately to train the reps, to help them get enabled on all the different systems, to track the deals. Right? Do you have a Salesforce or HubSpot, like, or or one of these systems?
00:22:51 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
There's a lot of automation being built right now. So even in the outreaches and these types, but there's a lot of new companies as well that will basically see, okay, somebody liked this random thing on LinkedIn that talked about operational efficiency and this is how it ties back to what you're building at your company, and then therefore here's a handcrafted kind of email that you can use to prospect into them. So there's that process as well. And then I would say the other pieces around the people, essentially, like the type of people that you're hiring. Our Salesforce, more than 50% of the closed won opportunities are actually self sourced by the account executives. And so we put a lot of emphasis and hire a lot of SDRs. And these people are cold calling, cold emailing, being very strategic on how to break into accounts. But at the same time, one thing we measure very aggressively is how much is the account executive itself prospecting and doing what we call PG or pipeline generation. And we hire the type of people that are just very hungry and owning their books of business and partnering with the SDRs and the marketing team, but really knowing that they're the CEOs of their book of business and they are the ones that are responsible for delivering the outcomes. So that's a very high level kind of thing, and there's a billion more things. But yeah, our CRO, Grant, is just incredible and knows exactly what to do. [00:24:15] S0: So you started as an SDR? [00:24:17] S1: Yeah. AE, but both, know, early days.