Make Spend & Purchasing As Simple As A Chat

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Welcome to the Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business.

1.2s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Digital podcast. Today we're excited to have another partner of ours as a guest today, and Andrea Kayal is the CRO of Team Pay. Team Pay is an all in one, business spent management platform. It's so needed in this economy and moving forward for companies to manage and automate their expenses. But welcome to the show, Andrew. 1.2s

Thanks so much, Victor.

Yeah, so obviously you have an amazing resume and experience in this space, and love to, if you don't mind, maybe give the audience a little bit of background about yourself and how you got the team

there. Yeah, happy to. I will give you the Abbreviated version because I feel like I've been doing this a very long time, but got my start in marketing right after the University of Michigan, where I played soccer. Had a great. 1.4s An awesome fun experience there and found myself at an agency called Octagon. We did some pretty cool things. Very large events for BMW and Mastercard. I think. Victor, you and I are talking about this before the show, but one of the perks of having that job was I was able to be Pele's assistant for a few years while the Mastercard World Cup was going on in Germany. And so very honored and privileged privilege to have had that experience and really just fell in love with marketing and stayed in it for the next 20 years, except on the B to B side, primarily in SaaS technologies in New York City, ranging from everything from martech to POS. So point of sale for restaurants 1.8s even it at electric. And now business spend management at Team Pay. And 1s my job in these companies, formerly as Chief marketing officer, has always been to figure out how to grow these companies. Certainly, growth has been a key metric for the venture capital community, making sure that their organizations are able to make more in revenue. And that's kind of always been my mission. And so had a wonderful 15 year run as Chief Marketing Officer before making the jump over at Team Pay. The chief revenue officer, where I now oversee all the commercial teams that include sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships and certainly one with your own organization at various source and revenue operations. So been a long ride, but very excited that I landed at Team Pay, where I was a former customer. So knew a ton about the product and loved everything about it. And I was like, this is the next company I want to be at. 1.1s

Wow, that's actually a great story. How you were a customer, obviously loved the product and then said, wow, I could take this ten X. Right. 1.2s That's really cool. So obviously you talked about being a CMO numerous times before growing company from 3 million to 50 million. Can you kind of give the audience a little background on what that was like? Meaning when you're went in, the company was 3 million, still smaller, and then how you grew that to 50 million. And what did you learn throughout that experience?

Yeah, 1.9s the stage really matters. I joined Electric, for example, when they had just raised their Series B, and there were three marketers having exited Electric only a few short months ago with 30 marketers and the SDR team and the BD teams, and having grown the commercial organizations was an incredible ride. I would say the key to success in growing your organization is foresight. So just making sure you're always looking around the next bend to how you make your next tranche of five or $10 million, because you don't just start making that money on day one when you say, we want to make more money today. It takes a lot of planning and just kind of like a really strong operational mindset to execute on those things. 2.7s

That's actually a lot more questions for you there later on. But obviously, coming back to kind of this business spent management, why is spend and purchasing broken, you think? Obviously. 1.3s Why do you

think? Yeah, there's three ways we think about this. 1.3s And I would say under the theme of just modern businesses are spending money differently. And there's three core reasons for that. 1.3s First, spend is a need to have. So the industry in general, like, the problem we're solving is like a painkiller, it's not a vitamin. So 1s controlling every way money leaves the business is really important. But there's three reasons why, I think, now, and this is the founder story, andrew he, he really had the vision to kind of, like, see where the market was going here. But, like, companies are buying more than ever, certainly in the market. Like, they've controlled some of that cost, but there's still, like, massive amounts of cash flowing out of organizations and on average. 2s The number of cloud applications in an enterprise is like 1200. So larger companies are still spending on software technologies to make their business grow. The second is that everything is purchased bottoms up. Now, well, in large part bottoms up. That means like, employees have control. 2s The stat there is at twelve times 1.6s like the software buyers in an enterprise prize has grown by like twelve times. So every person is kind of in charge of the company's capital. And that's a scary thing if you don't have controls on it. And then lastly, just working relationships are decentralized. There's 68 million independent earners or freelancers in the US. So the way in which companies have to pay people is quite a lot. 1.6s Getting control over that is sort of like the central theme of what we mean by business spend management. It's like managing the capital that's flowing out of the company.

So it's kind of interesting, right? Even if I look at my credit card, everybody looks at their own credit card bills every month. And then you see all these things for $5, $10, $15, $25 that you bought maybe two years ago. You have no idea what it is, but you're like, yeah, it's $25, whatever, right? And then they all add up. That's your personal account. Imagine a business account times, right? That number is not $25, 25,000, $2,500, and it just adds up. And you're like, but the same mentality. But to add on to kind of what you just said, Andrea, 1.1s when you look at it even personally, you just say, all right, that's fine. You don't kind of try to fix it, right? And maybe because it is hard to fix and it just takes a lot of effort. So you say, I'm going to go do something more productive. And to me, when you translate that into businesses, why aren't these companies 1.2s taking that more seriously? I feel like there's a little of human nature in there and I'd love to get your thoughts on if they understand the problem. Of course, if you say, hey, do you want to save money? Do you want to manage your spent? They all say yes, but yet they're not doing it or they don't care about it as much as they should. Why is

that? Well, two things I would say. It's not for want or care. It is for time and energy and implementing a solution. And that is actually where Team Pay is playing between really small solutions like bill.com, which is like free and gets the job done to pay a bill. And then the coupas and the topologies of the world, which are like, for much larger companies or SAP or Oracle or when you're moving really far up the enterprise, putting in a solution like that takes, like, I don't know, in some cases maybe even a year. I think it's just an overwhelming thought for the office of the CFO and we are disrupting that specifically it shouldn't take you a year. It should take you in our plan this year, we have our go live dates under 60 days. So we're trying to make this. 1.7s More of a digestible thing for companies who know they need to do it, but maybe don't think they have enough resources or capital to buy something. So not only are we we're attacking it from a cost perspective, 2.3s we think we're appropriately priced for the value, but we're certainly not the cost of we're not in a million dollar solution right now. Maybe one day we'll get there as we continue to move up market. But it's cost efficient. Time to value is quick and yeah, we make sure that like, you implement the most important thing first, which is controls. 1.1s

Yeah. So a quick interesting story is we were working with a client who bought Concur 1.1s and two years ago, and they haven't implemented yet, actually.

But this is a blocker when you said like, why not? I think that this is how companies feel about spend management solutions. It's time for disruption there. So we're trying to do

that. Yeah. Time for value. And so maybe again, one of the key I think differentiators or thing you guys do very well is this like integration with Slack and other kind of tools. Is that partly because to try to improve the user adoption, saying, I'm going to work where you work? Is that kind of the differentiator and approach you guys 1.8s

I think we talked about this a little bit just before, but we talk about 1.8s the adoption piece or 4.9s what's the sort of the friction between the spend going out and control and it's making it easy for employees to work. And so we have Slack teams. No matter where your employees are or where they're working, we meet them there. Android, iOS. Whatever. And then on the other side of the coin is how all the spend is leaving the business and we're right in the middle. So like between your employees and money leaving the business, you can think of team pay right there. 1.9s

Yeah, no, that's awesome. I love the integrations with Slack teams. The next topic is

sorry Victor, that's on the UX for employees. And then on the admin side, we have all the integrations as you probably know, like Workday, Netsuite, QuickBooks, Zero, Microsoft or 60 Stage. In fact, we're trying to make it so that our our solution is not only working where the employees are, but it's mapping to how the current processes of the procurement and AP teams.

Yeah, no, I think it's well thought out because I've seen a lot of solutions only cover one of those areas, but they kind of forgot the user and they expect the user to just pick it up and run with it and sometimes that's one of the roadblocks. Right. The next topic is what impacts do you think Shadow Spend have on the company? And looking at that from one of the executives as a business, right, you have a budget, you have a department and what does Shadow spend have on the business that they may not even be aware of or they should take more seriously?

I mean, I think every business on the planet right now is managing their Opex under a microscope. And so if you do not have a system in place that is proactively controlling when something should renew or be charged because employees I just mentioned this at the beginning, the bottom up spending is so prevalent now 1s that you can quickly eat at the one metric. I think, especially if you're like in the startup or VC backed community 1.1s that everybody is kind of like laser pointed at, which is cash burn, you can quickly start to eat into that number because again, it's Opex. So anybody buying a tool that goes unchecked could unknowingly. 1.7s Really start to kind of hurt the financial situation of the company. So it's a very big problem. And while there are tools to help identify where that spend is, team Pay's point of view is that we want to get in front of the spend even happening just to prevent it all together. So that's kind of our point on that.

Yeah. So you being the CRO now again, Mark, marketing, sales, you got to drive revenue, but yet, just like any other company, spend is tighter, budgets are smaller. So you as a CRO CMO, how do you do more with less? What advice would you give to other CRO CMOS where, okay, no longer spending, how can they do more with less now? Or what's the new approach?

Yeah, great question. I was talking about doing more with less at an event that I was at last night. I use the same sentence. There's two things. My approach in joining Team Pay has been to systematically go through every team and figure out 1.6s where we have the largest, like what levers have the highest impact, lowest effort, and start working through that that exercise in and of itself. If we know that the SDRS are calling on bad leads, well, we need to get those leads out and new ones in to improve their efficiency. So that's how you do more with less. So it's same dollar amount, but we made them more efficient. On the marketing side, I went through and I said, which specific lanes are not driving revenue in this quarter if it is not happening in this quarter? For example, I don't want to name any affiliates directly, but there are larger affiliates out there that we could spend on for brand plays. I'll just name a bunch of publications, and no one specifically, but like The Wall Street Journal or Barons or other large publications where we were doing display ads but couldn't directly tie it back to somebody asking to see the product. So we shifted the funds into higherintent lead sources. We use our email database a lot where we didn't have to pay for that. We already had the database. So just like more email marketing. So we kind of like a hedge fund manager, just pivoted the spend on the portfolio, 1.1s the assets in each of the portfolio that we knew were going to be the most productive on the sales side we had. 2s We had a ton of leads come in in December because we pivoted that spend. But it's like, are we doing more with every deal we have? And so I think that's kind of the approach is just if you can't put more in at the top or you haven't been able to figure out how to reconstruct your demand gen, for example, to produce more highly efficient leads, how do you work to get them through the funnel faster? 1.6s Actually, that's on the new business side, and then I would say on the customer success side, protecting our customer base. We have customers that love us. We just wanted to make sure that we did a better job of checking in with them, making sure they're getting the value out of the product that they needed. So you want to make sure that 1.2s the new business acquisition is important, but that your CSMS are laser focused on obviously retaining the customers you do have. It's a much more efficient use of funds to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one. So that was kind of my approach.

Yeah, these are great tips. And obviously recently Chat GPT and AI has been just in the last two months has been a hot topic. And it's fascinating because really that technology has been around three years for people that really know marketing and those things. Like, the thing's been around three years, but now suddenly the virality everybody is doing AI. There's AI for everything now. So I'd love to get your kind of CMO and CRO perspective of what do you think about technology like AI or Chat GPT and how do you envision, whether it's your business or your sales strategies, implementing those things? How do you see that?

Totally, I do not want to get ahead of my skis and talk about how we'd use Chat GPT in our actual team Pay product, although I know our teams are constantly in discussion about how to best utilize technology of this type. I would say on the marketing and sales side, even the CSI. 2.3s They're optimizing language models. 1.2s That's what we do for a living. It's communicating. And so it's targeting directly at the thing that I think 2s we could perhaps better use a bot for, like SDR emails. Maybe we could have Chat Gbt writing them, as opposed to our SDR is having to reconstruct every single one. Or our ads. Our Google ads. Maybe there's 50 variations that Chat GpG could come up with that we could not. So there's so many applications, it's sort of endless. I have not yet figured out how though, to harness this. Like in anything that I'm doing. It feels like a very overwhelming 3.3s topic. So 1.2s I haven't even dipped my toe into kind of how we would think about using it, but very exciting future for it.

Yeah. Most people thought we're 510 years away, and then a month later, boom, 1.9s the new world is here. And now Microsoft is literally completely changing their search engine 1.8s in a month. The pace 1.3s transformation is pretty exciting for all of us in technology. 1.2s But one of the things that 1.4s when we work with companies of different size, they have different needs. You're talking about SMB, mid market enterprise, they have different requirements and different complexities. How does your solution fit for SMB? And then maybe compare that to enterprise? How do you help? Because they have different resources and different things in place and complexities. How you support both that segment.

Yeah, on the SMB side, so customers who are growing, so I would say even our SMB segments are 50 to 200. That segment we call rabbits and then 201 to let's just call it 2000, is the deer segment. And that's based on employee size. 1.3s We are quickly learning what. 1.7s The differences are between the two. And I would say the biggest one is that for a rabbit, a growing company, our solution is a slam dunk conceptually to them because they need an all in one solution to replace perhaps a bunch of little tools that they were like, acquiring to get this job done. So with Teampay, it's an all in one businessman solution. And they're like, I get that. I can replace all these, I can replace these five tools and just move on to team. Pay makes total sense to them. The deer, we're like crossing a chasm there with deer because we actually can solve that same problem for deer. But I think that historically they thought, oh, I need this solution for this, I need this solution for this, I need this solution for this. More of like a point solution purchasing. 1.9s I would say they're used to buying point solutions as opposed to one solution that's just going to get it all done for them. And so that's kind of the education we're having to do upmarket a little bit with these customers. It solves the same problem for both groups. But I think the rabbit understand this concept as, as far as I'm learning, a little bit faster, get to the conclusion a little bit faster than some of the deer. You know, the deer are the ones that have been like, implementing these legacy systems that take two years. 1.1s The rabbits are like, we don't have two years. We we just want to get it in and get it going. And so that's kind of the like I said, the reeducation we're having to do with the the larger segment. Like, listen, this is not a two year thing. It's like, you know, a 60 day thing. We're going to get everything, you know, wired up, and you're going to be able to control every dollar that leaves your business. So does that make sense? Same same problem to solve, just different views on how how it's been solved historically?

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think when you have something cheaper, better, faster, but if that cheaper, better, faster impacts five different tools, you now have maybe five different departments or people that have opinions that maybe thoughts of and maybe two people agree, three people don't, or three people do, and two doesn't. So I totally agree. Obviously, selling to enterprise and any change management is difficult, even though it could be very transformational. No, absolutely 1.2s understand. So, obviously, when companies especially now, when companies are buying software and new tools, they think a lot about ROI, right? Like, true ROI that they can see, feel, touch, and quickly. Right? Because especially now. So when you look at your platform, obviously it's very transformational. 1.1s But where can you kind of explain maybe few quick Rois that companies can get? Because when you do a transformational product, a lot of times ROI could take longer, right? It's a long term benefit, and there's nothing wrong with that. You need that. But for people who are just like, hey, I need some savings now, I need some immediate impact ROI, how do you kind of pitch tattoo to customers for

that 100%? And we have an ROI calculator for our customers so that they can see this. We have it on our website, but we also walk them through this when we're in the discovery phase of their needs. There's two ways. One, there's actually cash back that we give to our customers, because the way Team Pay works is that our revenue is comprised of SaaS and it's comprised of payments revenue. So every transaction that goes through a Team Pay platform, 1.6s there's a concept called interchange in fintech, which we don't need to get too far in the weeds in terms of, like, what interchange is, but there's basically a fee that happens every time there's a transaction, and Team Pay takes a small portion of that. So we make revenue on that, but we give cash back on that as well. So we give between one and a quarter to one and a half percent cash back on every transaction that customer makes on the Team Pay platform. So they actually make cold, hard cash back. So the ROI. 2.5s Sort of immediate for a dollar to dollar basis when you sign up with Team Pay. But there's other more value driven ROI. And I'll give you just an example of what five things are that we think 1.1s they can assign a dollar value to. So days saved on month and close, because we're proactively controlling all the spend. It's all the expense is already reconciled for the end of the month. So month end close is a concept, I'm not sure if you're familiar, Victor, but they have to close the books. And we shorten that timeline significantly because of our control policy. The second is money saved on fraudulent or out of policy spend. So every time 1.1s a manager blocks a spend, you're saving money, because 1s we talked about the what is it, the dark spend or what term were you using for that? Shadow spend. 1.2s Sorry about the shadow spend. So, like blocking shadow spend, there's hard dollars to that. A couple more just like employees, time saved on 1s finance processes. There's all this back and forth that has to happen between the finance team and, for example, a marketing team. Like, do you have the receipt for this? Where is the invoice for that? There's a lot of, like, back and forth that's all gone because it's all proactively controlled. And then 1.1s our saved on processing expense reports, 1.1s we basically eliminate expense reports. It's all proactively done. And so, like, 1.2s I need to buy a lamp. You go into Team Pay, you make the request purchase, you say which budget it's coming out of, and it goes to the manager, and they kind of approve it. And it's all done beforehand, and so you're not worried about expense reports. And then the last thing is processing invoices. And so processing an invoice takes like 15 minutes a pop, so we can kind of cut that in half anyway. So those are kind of the value drivers we assign dollar amounts to and then cashback. So very high ROI on team pay. 1s

Yeah. No, first of all, I got to give you kudos, because obviously, you know your business very well inside and out. You know the value, you know kind of all of these things ROI very quickly. Very well. I think that's the type of, I think, partner, we want to work with, but also for a customer. I think that's the type of company they want to work with. Right. They want to get right into it.

Right into it, yeah. By the way, thank you, Victor. I'm glad you said that. I'm only two months into the job, so hopefully I'm two months?

Wow, 1.8s man. 1.9s That's even more impressive. That's awesome. 1.1s Cool. But yeah, as we kind of wrap up here. So one of the last questions that we were talking about is, what does future of purchasing and spent look like in your eyes as you kind of foresee the future not just now of what you're doing, all the benefits you're talking about now, but what could potentially spend and purchasing look like for businesses in three years? Five years, you think?

I really wish my CEO is here to answer that, because he's he is a true visionary when it comes to this space. While I can't do that question justice, like, he would, I would say that if we stay on the theme of why Team Pay was invented in the first place. 1.4s It's to control the most important thing in every business, which is their capital. And there will be maybe 1015 more ways that companies are paying in the future, not only domestically, but globally, and how 1.4s to control for that. There's also maybe more bottoms up ways employees can make purchases and just continuing to make that experience. The delightful for both the employees and the admins, like I said, the office of the CFO, because those are two types of customers we have 1.1s continuing to make them more successful and higher ROI with every purchase, every dollar. That kind of leaves the business. 1.5s

Yeah, this has been fantastic, honestly. A lot of great insights. And the last questions that we usually ask our guest is, I mean, you've been through a lot as a CMO CRO. You've seen a lot. If you have to give the audience one advice, either a personal advice or a business advice, whatever it is that you're just passionate about, what do you think? That would be 1.3s

maybe two pieces of advice. The first, I would say is the piece I mentioned right at the beginning, which is foresight. I think the thing that truly makes companies successful is planning for the future. Whether that's an operating model that looks a year out or two or three, 1s but mapping that with the bottoms up, how actually do you get there? What lane distribution lanes you need? What partners like Varysource or others do you need to partner with in order to make sure that you continue on your growth path. So I'd say the first is that is the foresight. And then the second is 2.2s I have a very passionate about this one, but I would just encourage hiring managers to make sure that you continue to hire for EQ, not like Pedigree or 2.8s necessarily like a college degree. I think hiring kind, good people, those that are passionate, have lots of curiosity and grit, are the best kinds of employees. So those would be the two pieces of advice I'd have.

Yeah. Love it. Andrea, thank you so much for spending time with us. And again, we're excited to partner with you guys.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Victor, this is great.

That was an amazing episode of the Did You know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guests today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.

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