Spendesk: A Model of Execution, Motivation and Aggressiveness to Achieve Excellence

With over 200,000 users and 10 billion euros in spending processed through its platform, Spendesk has established itself as one of Europe's most dynamic fintechs. In 2022, the company reached a major milestone by becoming the 26th French unicorn, with a valuation exceeding 1 billion dollars.

2015

Identified Problem: On average, an employee takes 17.2 days to finalize a purchase which generates a loss of 57 euros per transaction in productivity for the company.

• Launch of Spendesk by Rodolphe Ardant, Guilhem Bellion and Jordane Giuly within the startup studio eFounders with an initial investment of 800,000 euros
• Spendesk begins developing its MVP
  The initial idea: Simplify expense management through connected payment cards linked to dedicated software.

→ 2015: Launch of the first version

Highly Aggressive Sales Objectives

From the start, Spendesk focused on a direct sales strategy to generate monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

• They focused recruitment on sales and growth profiles with 5-6 sales people in the initial team
• Sales teams are financially motivated with a 30-40% variable compensation
• They must generate 15 opportunities per month
• Junior and senior profiles must generate respectively 3-5k EUR and 5-6k EUR of MRR per profile
• That's a target of 25k to 30k MRR additional per month
• Who are their targets? companies with more than 20 employees

The Channels

How do they find their prospects?
Manual sourcing on LinkedIn followed by calls, emailing

They used scraping methods and tools like Salesloft and Marvin to massively generate leads

→ January 2016, just 2 months after launch, they record their first payment.