10. Mitchell Powers, VP Commercial at Pleo - Scaling Go-to-Market Teams Across Fintech, from GoCardless to Pleo
33m 35s
In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Mitchell Powers, VP of Commercial at PLEO, discusses his sales career journey and key lessons. He started in commodities trading, where he built relationships and credibility, then moved to tech sales at Pact Coffee, a B2B coffee startup. His major growth came at Go Cardless, where he scaled teams from 5 to 30 and added over $100 million in contract value. Mitchell emphasizes the importance of not over-tweaking processes as teams grow, comparing it to steering a larger ship that responds slower. He advocates for using the "three whys" methodology—why now, why anything, and why your company—to tailor value propositions for different stakeholders. In hiring, he prioritizes personal questions about struggles and character to build strong connections. Challenges included scaling too quickly, hiring mistakes, and difficulties entering the US market due to cultural differences in payment methods. Mitchell later moved to Trustly to focus on open banking and enterprise sales, handling acquisitions and change management, before joining PLEO. His insights highlight the need for strategic patience, personal connection in leadership, and adapting sales approaches for different markets and deal sizes.
[Music] Welcome back to another episode of Inside the Pipeline. Hope you guys enjoyed our episode last week with Sophia Aurora from Jack and Jill. Such a great conversation about AI recruitment. If you haven't already listened to it, definitely go back after you've listened to this one to give it a listen. This week we are very excited to welcome Mitchell Powers to the podcast. Mitchell came to our office about a month ago to record for those of you tuning in who don't already know who Mitchell is or what he's been up to in his career. He started out his sales career working actually in the world of coffee before then turning to FinTech. He rose from head of UK sales up to VP of sales at Go Cardless where he added 100 million plus in contract value over five years. He then moved into an executive director position at Trustley for just under two years before joining PLEO where he is now the VP of commercial. So we spoke to him. This was about four months into his role and we spoke about all of the things you would imagine you would in the AI era. Go to market, how to still be diligent and how to approach deals when you're going up market. Enjoy. [Music] Very, very pleased to be joined this morning by Mitchell Powers VP of commercial at PLEO. You have an incredible career so far working in sales in FinTech. I had a dig on your LinkedIn last night though and saw you with the rowing coach for the Oxford University rowing team. So maybe we could start there. While look, Oxford has many colleges so it's probably important to say that I was rowing coach for a variety of different colleges. Not the university from the blue boat side of things but I used to row quite a lot when I was at university and then decided I probably couldn't do both rowing and also academic studies at the same time and do both really well. So I actually moved into rowing coaching and so that became very much a passion and I continued that when I was at LSE as well later on when I did my graduate degree. So it's something, it's a passion still continues to be a passion of mine. So coaching high performance teams, basically bringing a variety of different people together and it's not like football where you can kind of someone has particular flair or whatever everybody needs to be very much coordinated. So it's a different type of sport but I really enjoy it seeing a boat kind of transform from in terms of speed and execution. It's very transferable to sales as well. And the last few years haven't been so good for Oxford they have the in the boat range. No, no, very much Cambridge. Yeah, maybe we'll leave that there. And then you move from your university career into commodities trading. How did you navigate that switch into sales and what was it that pushed you into sales over that career path? I think you always look around in the office and you think, okay, could I see myself here in 10, 15 years time? So I think I had that sort of epiphany at one point and I think that I was probably seeking a slightly different culture for me. I'm a bit bit more fast paced. Commodity-broken and commodity trading is quite interesting. It's very much a skills, a sales skills emotion. Really got to build relationships, find the right stakeholders in very large multinational organisations, you know, trading organisations. And then you've got to build credibility and you've got to position yourself as a consultant in the sense of you're creating liquidity in a market. So I was working in physical commodities, so coal, biofuels, biomass. So these commodities are moving around. And my role is to pick up a phone, engage all these different stakeholders across multiple different markets, different geographies, and come across as credible in somebody with knowledge that, you know, and that way you're top of mind when they're thinking about, okay, who do I speak to? Let's speak to Mitchell. So those kind of skills are quite transferable into sales, but it's just very different. It's more relationship, it's more of a service-orientated product. It's not like a physical product. It's you're offering service, basically. That's creating liquidity in a market. Yeah. And then the moving to financial technology, when did you decide to go into that space specifically and what was it about Fintech that excited you? Well, I got an opportunity at a company called Pact Coffee, so that was the first. It was very much, they were moving into B2B and they'd been a really successful director to consumer subscription company in Coffee, and it's a physical product I loved. And I really loved what they were building. A series, a great founder, really exciting startup, and they actually gave me an opportunity to run their B2B function and build it from scratch. So that was my first transition into tech sales. I loved it, got to build a really great team, and then they just became a natural point where I was going into all the different Fintechs to sell into those businesses. And I really liked what I was seeing. There was a real energy at that point, so not just go cardless, but we're in Monzo Revolut when they were just beginning. Yeah. So I could really feel that the pace in Fintech in London, I was like, I really want to be there. And then I got this opportunity to go cardless to start really in tech sales. And so shifted across and I was their first head of sales for SMB. Not their first, but certainly their first building out the direct sales motion. And if you were to look back at Mitchell at that time, what was your character like? How did you approach sales? Maybe even at Pack Coffee when you sort of first went into it. And how different is that to how you are now and how you approach it? Very opinionated. I suspect most people would say. I always love tech and technology and using the new and latest technology. So I probably used to drive my revenue operations team mad. Always one of the latest piece of technology. But I would say if I was to reflect back then and I was thinking about how I was operating, I was always trying to tweak things and tweak things too much, I would say. And I think you have to allow things to bed down. You have to be a lot more considered, especially as things get bigger and you start to scale up. What were some of the specific things that you were tweaking? Was it the way things were being pitched? Was it tools that people were using? Maybe we could just dive into that bit more. Yeah, I think it was all of those things. But it was also qualification criteria, handing over of leads in specific ways, territory allocation, what was the right segmentation? That it was all of those things basically combined. And these are quite fundamental changes, especially at scale. So when you start tweaking territories, you start tweaking segments. They have ripple effects and there's consequences to those changes. And you also need to look at the data for a prolonged period of time before you can assess whether it's working. And I had a tendency to want to tweak and improve and iterate. And sometimes they have ripple effects. Yeah, I'm sure. And then to move into go-cardless, you got this opportunity to head up. Was it UK and Ireland? We were very present in the UK at the time. So yes, it was UK when I first joined. Yeah. That sort of transitioned into running all of our global markets for SMB. So we ran it. We ran it as what we called the growth engines, growth engine model. So SMB was kind of carved out across all of our markets in France, in Germany, in the US, in Australia, in New Zealand. And I basically effectively ran that layer across all of our markets. And it became very much was the sort of revenue driver for the business, where we had really strong ICP fit. We were doing slightly smaller deals. But as we tweaked segmentation, we started to do larger and larger deals as we went as we started to push the envelope in terms of revenue of organisations we would target. And then some of the deals that my team were doing were as big as the sort of enterprise teams. It was just the nature of who we were targeting, which was these fast, paced scale-ups. So that was very much. And when I joined, it was sort of three to five people, I think. And by the time I left that specific role, it was about 30 people in total. And then I moved to running the UK, top to bottom. So SME with market and tries to write the way up the stack. And what are some of the things is you're growing a team from five people to 30? I imagine it's easier when you have a team of five, because you can keep everything so under control. And you can have so much visibility over every single process that's going on. I'm really implementing. How different is that if you're looking after a team of 30? I know you're looking after a team of about 120 now at Ply勇, and I'm sure we'll get there. But what are the big differences for people who are listening, who might be managing a team of five, who are looking to scale that to 30? Well, I was thought this analogy is useful. So it's a little bit like you've got a very small rowing boat, or a very small sailing boat, and you move the tiller a little bit, and it's very responsive when you're running and you're a front-line manager. As things scale up and you become sort of second-line third-line, the ship gets bigger. And as you move that tiller, it doesn't respond as quickly. So it's the people on the deck that can kind of put the things in motion to move the boat a little bit quicker. So you've got to have a really strong alignment with your management team. The sort of the force multipliers getting the right people in the right leaders, that you really gel with, you really work together, and you have a kind of common shared vision. Yeah. And then you can sort of implement the changes as quickly as you were doing before. But yeah, I would say that's the biggest thing. Things don't move as quickly, and you need to be prepared for that. It is a mindset shift, especially when you're used to sort of running a team of maybe six to seven, and then certainly that's maybe 10X the size. And obviously management is very important in surrounding yourself with the right people. When you're making hires, what are some of the things that you're looking at in people? I know that sales obviously takes a number of different skills. High agency, someone might literally just be very good at sales and do it throughout their career. What are some of the things you look at when you're when you're hiring someone in their character? I tend to ask questions around much more personal questions.
when I come into interview processes. I tend to come in later on towards the end, often now. And a lot of my focus will be on, where have they struggled? What's the biggest struggles that they've had in their life? And can they articulate that for me? So I can really understand what did they learn from that process? How, like, how meaningfully has that impacted their character? And that just sort of forces the conversation more into the personal sphere, which I'm much more interested in. And, you know, I might sort of also take them back to much earlier on in their life, where there's been key moments that have kind of changed the direction or really formed their character. And I prefer to sort of anchor there, because you can unpack a lot, and you can get very personal and very connected with somebody. And I think when you are a leader in a business, you need to have that personal connection. You need to build that very early on. Yeah. And that's what I try and do in the interview processes to unpack that a little bit. Yeah, I bet. And such an important skill to be able to do that, because scaling teams fast, you know, those problems just multiply, as you, you know, if you make the wrong call, I think I read that you had brought in to go cardless about 100 million in contract value. What was some of the biggest deals that you worked on, and what was it that helped get those over the line? I mean, I would say the transition we made at Go Cardless was going up market into the enterprise sphere, and trying to get some sort of repeatability there. And that's a very different thing to SME and Mid-Market Sales. It's more complicated in the sense of not just the number of stakeholders, but also the infrastructure you're building into in some of these large organisations can be quite complex. Yeah. So we work with a lot of utility companies. The big five, for example, in the UK, we work with a lot of those organisations, but when they were scaling as well. So over energy is a good example of a business that we signed sort of seven figure contracts with the course of time at Go Cardless, they continue to be a customer today. And that was a very sort of complex, you know, we were often building or selling in product features that hadn't been built yet. And so when you, when the nice thing about sort of operating the enterprise space is you're, you're almost sort of forced to build stuff that hasn't been built before and it's like, as a consequence of that, you really stretch all the muscles within a business to be able to service them. Yeah. Not just sales, execution, but product naturally, but also compliance and risk and legal. Like you're really sort of stretching to understand what it is. We've got to do to service a business of that magnitude. And so yeah, we built functionality that we hadn't built before to service that customer and get them kind of excited to continue working with us over the long term. So I'd probably say those sort of stand out deals that I perform in my memory. And how I know that people like outreach at the moment is very saturated space. Marketing in general is a saturated space. How did you initially get your foot in the door with those deals, with a personal connections, referrals? I think I read that there's a big, is it partnerships? Is it a big thing at Go Cardless? It is. How did you initially get the introductions and are there any skills or pieces of advice you'd be able to offer to people listening? It was a slightly different time back then as well in terms of the technology stack. So the fundamentals that we hear about today around sort of value-led anchoring on outcomes, positioning, sort of much higher level business object, like sort of strategic objectives for that business was where we were anchoring the conversation always. Yeah. We just perhaps didn't have the technology to do that at scale at the time. But I would say that's what we did to get into those types of organizations and also repositioning for every stakeholder that you engage with that you position. We use the three-wise as a methodology. So why now, why anything, why Go Cardless it was? OK. And those three-wise are a constant changing feast. They're not like a qualification criteria that how you articulate value. Yeah. But that's something that changes and continues to change the more engagement you have within the count. And also it changes depending on the stakeholder that you're engaging. So we would think about the three-wise in terms of how we'd frame those. Why is this even relevant to this individual? And why should we be even having a discussion first and foremost? Secondly, why is this relevant now? And why would Go Cardless be an option for them? Why are we the chosen provider? And I think if you've got that really locked in your mind, then when you're jumping on that call or you're reaching out via email or you're at the event, for example, you've got that really well-articulated filling the count. And we've continued to do that, Clio, as well. It sounds like a very diligent way of looking at things. And also I guess then also making sure that you're not focusing on the wrong accounts and wasting your time when the timing might not be right, the account fit might not be right as well. Was it all positive at Go Cardless? Were there any tough times? It sounds like it was you were there in a period of incredible growth. I think they went from 970 million valuation to over 2 billion in about two years. Were there any tough times that you had to get through? Yes, certainly was. I mean, you always have the sort of scaling pains. So you scale very quickly, you tend to make mistakes where you're moving fast, so you think you need more and more people. And that is not always the right pathway forward. So I think we scaled very quickly. We hired a lot of people in particular areas of the business. And that has ripple consequences as well, especially if you get that wrong. And you're not able to keep that pace as well. So then there's a little bit of contraction that's required as well. And then you've got to go again so that can be quite. And also when you're trying to scale quickly with people, you're more likely to make decisions around who you bring in a little bit quicker. You might not do due diligence. And of course, these have consequences. I can think of a few instances around how quickly we scaled from a people perspective. That was challenging. And also, we were really strong in the UK market. So we had a really strong value proposition in the UK market. And we found it very difficult to transition into the US market. And a lot of European companies find that challenge too. And what was that? Just a new market, a different way of looking at finance within business. What were the main challenges? What were the reasons that you were finding those challenges? I think it's mainly-- it's obviously payments. So it's how they-- in the US, they're much more wedded to credit card. Yeah. And card payments is more traditional. They're not so used to direct debit payments. So I would probably say for me personally, for what I saw with the team, it was that transition. It just wasn't a payment preference in the US that we struggled with. Yeah, OK. And then the move to trustee-- what was it that caused that move? And yeah, what sort of excited you about trustee? Why did you decide to make that shift? I think it was just the-- it just felt like the right time for a new project and something new, a bit of a change. I had a great fantastic time to go cardless. And what I liked about trustee was it was very much focused on open banking and enterprise. And I found that particularly interesting, much smaller set of accounts. But in terms of volumes and revenue, a very different beast. And they were coming at it from an open banking lens first. So they built open banking capability. And then they were layering in additional technology through acquisition. So it was a very different type of project. And I came into sort of help with a lot of the change management. We required a few businesses putting those together. And it was just about rebuilding the commercial organization again. Plus, the team there was great. And I thought, this makes a lot of sense. How different is it bringing a new business in, once you've done an acquisition? How different is that? Imagine that business has its own brand, its own team, its own values. How difficult is it to assimilate that into trustee versus just building a sales team on its own? Yeah, it is difficult. Because often you're acquiring businesses that are a little bit smaller. In some cases, then the acquireer. So the pace of innovation is different what they're used to. So we acquired a very sort of small startup that had been used to operating like a startup, done incredibly well in the public sector space. We acquired that for the revenue and a little bit for the technology stack as well. So it was a cultural shift for them. I think a bit of a challenge. You know, you used to innovation, smaller teams, and suddenly you're part of a much bigger organisation and you need to be much more thorough and considered with the types of decisions you make. And then also the technology stack as well is also quite difficult because you're building an architecture that's been built over many, many years to sort of stitch those together. It can be quite complex and complicated, especially in payments. Yeah. And then from trustee to now, where you're at in Plyo, I think you said you're about three months into the job, is it? Just over three months. First of all, would you be able to just describe what exactly is Plyo as a company, as a product, and where does your role sit now? Well, Plyo's on the kind of cutting edge of expense management, spend management more broadly. So we are known as the European leader on expense management technology. So if you think about how you, any organisation you're a part of when you travel, when you take clients out, you're very likely to put expenses in, whether that's using a company credit card or you take your receipts and then you hand them over to the accounts team at the end of the month. That's where sort of Plyo steps in, sort of manages that process, makes it very seamless, using Apple Pay, capturing the receipts very seamlessly. That's the sort of technology that Plyo's built over the last sort of 10 years, and is the front runner in Europe for that product. But we're starting to sort of expand the technology stack outwards as well to capture more of the invoicing expenditure as well coming in. So what we can do for businesses is, for example,
For example, provide them with working capital advances as well. So if they put their spend through our platform, then we can provide them with credit facility a little bit like a call from credit card, but in a slightly different way. And so we give our customs a little bit more runway as well. So it's a sort of holistic spend management platform. And we operate in multiple different markets across Europe. And we're an Nordic HQ company. That's where we originate from. YEPA is our founder and continues to be leading the business, which is great when you are part of a founder-led business. That's fantastic place to be. And I run the commercial function. So I look after multiple different teams. But I would sort of say they are the front book revenue, so account executives, SDRs, then also the back book, account management. And I also look after the solutions engineering team and partnerships as well. Awesome. And you mentioned Nordic founder YEPA. I listened to a podcast that he'd done. I think with one of the leaders at MasterCard that came out a couple of weeks ago. Sounds like such an interesting character. How much value are you getting from him and how much of his values are spread across the company? And do you think that's a big reason why you've been able to succeed so far, or play on its career so far? How much do you think is down to that character? I think it's very much down to YEPA. I think when you have a founder that's still passionate about the business that he runs, what really has impressed me since day one is just how many people stay at Plio. There's a lot of people that have got a lot of tenure. And in multiple different parts of the business, I think a lot of that stems from the consistency of values and culture that's been driven. And it's often driven by the founder, right? It finds its way down. He's still very engaged. So he will still pick up the phone, for example, and speak to customers and do some prospecting just to sort of be engaged. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is really important. I saw the same at GoCardless with Heroki. He's sort of found that the company remained very much leading the organization for a very long time and still continues to this day, I believe, in some capacity since the acquisition. But when you work for founders, you can still feel that. And that sort of culture is very much stamped in. So you feel at the moment you walk in the door. And you're now looking after a team of, I think you said about 120 people. What is the culture that you're trying to bring to that team? So I imagine that three months in, just over three months, you must have to instill your values on the team. What are you saying to them on a daily basis and how are you getting them inspired to be the best they can be? I think my vision for the commercial organization at Cleo's is very much to go up market. And by that, what I mean by up market, isn't it's not an end state. So it's about basically an evolution of the business to be able to sort of sit and operate in that enterprise base eventually. That's the target. But to get there, a lot of things need to shift. And when I think about commercial excellence and execution and where I can most affect with the team, we're putting a lot more emphasis on how we turn up, how we show up, how we deliver maximum value as quickly as possible in those customer conversations. Yeah. And also how we navigate ourselves strategically through and account, how we build champions, how we find access to the economic buyers within an account. These are all sort of fundamentals. But because we've been an SME business for a very long time, I don't think we've quite learnt those skills. So my approach has been come in. I've got a great management team. Let's turn them from sort of focusing on activity metrics to actually focusing on the quality of the engagement, how can we coach develop the skills that are needed when you turn up, when you're in front of executives. And I think those, if we can get those things right, we'll see a real fundamental shift, both in conversion, but also our ability to execute and that kind of upmarket space. Yeah, I mean, because presumably those, if you're doing things right, when you get into the enterprise and you build champions and you're doing the quality conversations, it becomes a lot easier. But then the opposite is also true. If you're not, it becomes a lonely place and quite difficult to expand through a business. Talking about tech and how you get people to be the best they can be, I mean, we all know that AI has created some incredible tools for sales people out there, which ones are you encouraging your team to use and how are they using them at the moment to get the best results? I think this is a delicate dance. I might have slightly different opinions on this. I'm all for AI technology, but I think we need to, we need to be also quite careful how we use it because everything needs to be scalable. Well, often you can utilize technology and you end up finding everyone's using it in a slightly different way. So you lose the core messaging. There's a number of things that can potentially happen with that. So you need to be careful how you utilize the technology. But we're using, for example, Claude Co-Work in Cleveland. Correct. And that is a fantastic tool. It's unbelievable what you can do with Claude. But you also run the risk. So one of the things that I'm focusing on at the moment in Clio is how do we have, as I mentioned earlier, how do we have a maximum possible, how can we create the most value at the beginning of the engagement? Because what I'm trying to do with my team is force the access to the EB as early as possible within the sales process. So in order to do that, in order to get in front of an EB, you need to have first built a champion. In order to build a champion, you need to show up. You need to provide a lot of value to them to buy into you. So you're very much a consultant there and their eyes educating them. So you need to be able to provide a lot of value and the AI technology can help you do that. So you can build really compelling ROI, really compelling business cases. But the key though is that you don't lose the fact that those business cases need to also be co-created with the champion. If you don't do that, then it doesn't have the same impact. So those fundamentals of stakeholder engagement and building those relationships still need to exist. You layer on the AI technology to help you have maximum. So you're presenting almost like a kind of McKinsey style presentation or ROI, business case, et cetera. But at the same time, it needs to be co-created to have maximum impact. So it's getting the right balance, I think, between the technology and still the sales fundamentals, if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, we're a huge believer of the power of the human in sales and ultimately, the nuances of creating a champion or getting someone to believe in something you're doing. I think that can come from a human conversation, eye contact at a certain time, a handshake. These tiny things that you don't really think about too much. And as automating parts of work becomes easier, those fundamentals become even more important. I think the founder of Synthesia, Victor, Rappabelli, put an article out on Forbes today saying, exactly that. You know, it's very interesting. And so you've been there for just over three months. What are your long-term visions for PLEO? Growing the team, growing the business, you're obviously, I know you're moving up markets and massive priority for you. What are the other big priorities and motivations being at PLEO? I mean, working within Fintech and scaling Fintech is that there are many constituent parts of that. So it's-- there are licensing requirements. There are many things to think about in order to execute GTM and we can't just move into one market. It's not that simple. So we need to be able to build a lot of depth in the markets that we exist in today. Yeah. And I think we can do a lot better in some key markets that are very, very successful in the Nordics. We are present in key markets like Germany and the UK, but we could be very much the front runners in those markets. So I would like to see a lot of depth in the markets that we operate today. That's-- I feel really-- Could you-- You have-- is it 40,000 companies? We have 40,000 companies today, yes. And what does your ideal customer look like at the moment within the SME space? What sort of business is it? It can vary, but I would say it is a smaller SME organization but that's doing potentially a lot of travel. You might-- you will find this in the construction industry in product in-- in-- in-- in-- in-- media, for example. Yeah. There are a lot of smaller organizations who are in awful lot of travel. So that's where they think about Plio. They pick Plio. Also, they might be multi-nst geographically split across Europe and they need some sort of consistent expense management platform that can be reconciled in the back end. And there's a lot of reasons why they would choose-- or think about choosing Plio. So I'd say that's sort of our ideal customer profile. But it's very much shifting because if you look at the market dynamics, particularly in expense management and fighting finance in general, you've got the AI natives coming in. Yeah. And I think the AI native organizations appeal to the AI native organizations. So they work-- that's the focus. That's no longer our ICP. So when I think about where Plio was before, we were targeting those high growth businesses. I think now we're moving more into the more traditional organizations, the slightly larger organizations, slightly more complex that do like you to engage physically and turn up to the office and have a handshake and meet each other's eye. These things are important for those types of organizations. So I'm seeing our ICP shift. That's so interesting as well, because I imagine that-- I mean, you see a lot of companies who have existed for 15, 20 years have been crushing it. And suddenly, AI is obviously at the forefront of everyone's minds and mouths. And then every company's turning into an AI company to try and appeal to the AI company. So it's very interesting to hear you guys just go, OK, let's just go hands off. Like, someone else is going to take these high growth AI companies. Let's focus our attention elsewhere. And it sounds like quite a smart move as well. and people are still there.
using spreadsheets and still doing things very manually. So not everybody's lent us heavily into AI as we think. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely changing. So our industry's RICP is shifting. And I think it creates different types of opportunities. So again, coming back to your original question about what we're shaping, you know, the type of team we need to build, how we turn up, all of these things need to shift a little bit, then where we've been traditionally in the past. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, this has been such an interesting conversation. I'm sure that you're looking for exciting young, experienced people to come and join your team. Where can they find out more about you and you know, if they're going to put in an application to come and join you, what would your advice be to them? They can find me on LinkedIn. So I'm always open. If you want to reach out, send a message, how you think you can add some value, then I will read all those messages. And so find me on LinkedIn, I would suggest. Of course, we have lots of open roles on our website as well. Awesome. And just before we finish, a question that we like to ask every guest who comes on the podcast is, and it might take you a second or two to answer this, but what is something that you previously believed that you've now changed your mind on? That's a difficult question. And if you don't have anything that's also fine, if you're too, you might just be a person who's very true to what they believe in that's okay. Now usually I change my beliefs and my opinions quite frequently. So I probably say I was all in AI. Yeah. And I still am, but I just think what I was saying earlier around just the pace of which we do these things, you know, and how considered we are when we roll this technology out is something that I'm starting to sort of reconsider a little bit today. And just make sure that when we do launch these tools, they're really well thought through. They're well executed. They're adding value and they're used in the right way so that it's sort of consistent and it can be scaled out like any other technology. Yeah. So I think for me, it's just throwing a little bit of caution into the wind. And I'd probably say that's where I've changed my beliefs. Yeah. Yeah. All good. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. If you're listening, go and check out Cleo, go and check out Mitchell on LinkedIn. If you're interested in joining him, obviously send him a message. Make sure you're tuned up. And yeah, thanks so much for coming. And we'll see you next time. My pleasure. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. Such a good conversation with Mitchell. I loved how diligently he looks at the whole of the sales process. And it feels like that is an approach which is definitely going to stand Cleo in very good stead over the coming months and years as people do turn to AI in as much of their sales organization as possible. In terms of what we've got coming up over the next few weeks, we've got some really great guests lined up from the likes of Vanter, Granola and some other massive companies that you'll be very familiar with. So we're going to get an inside scoop into how they are doing go-to-market at the moment, how they've built huge client bases and some incredible growth. Until then, though, that's it goodbye from me and I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Mitchell Powers, VP of Commercial at PLEO, transitioned from commodities trading to tech sales, starting at Pact Coffee before moving to FinTech at Go Cardless.
At Go Cardless, he scaled teams from 5 to 30, adding over $100 million in contract value, and learned to avoid over-tweaking processes as teams grow.
Key sales strategies include using the "three whys" (why now, why anything, why Go Cardless) to anchor conversations on value and adapt messaging for different stakeholders.
Hiring focuses on personal questions about struggles and character to build early connections.
Challenges included scaling too quickly, making hiring mistakes, and struggling to enter the US market due to cultural payment preferences.
Mitchell moved to Trustly for open banking and enterprise focus, then to PLEO as VP of Commercial, emphasizing change management in acquisitions.
Summary:
In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Mitchell Powers, VP of Commercial at PLEO, discusses his sales career journey and key lessons. He started in commodities trading, where he built relationships and credibility, then moved to tech sales at Pact Coffee, a B2B coffee startup. His major growth came at Go Cardless, where he scaled teams from 5 to 30 and added over $100 million in contract value.
Mitchell emphasizes the importance of not over-tweaking processes as teams grow, comparing it to steering a larger ship that responds slower. He advocates for using the "three whys" methodology—why now, why anything, and why your company—to tailor value propositions for different stakeholders. In hiring, he prioritizes personal questions about struggles and character to build strong connections.
Challenges included scaling too quickly, hiring mistakes, and difficulties entering the US market due to cultural differences in payment methods. Mitchell later moved to Trustly to focus on open banking and enterprise sales, handling acquisitions and change management, before joining PLEO. His insights highlight the need for strategic patience, personal connection in leadership, and adapting sales approaches for different markets and deal sizes.
FAQs
The episode features Mitchell Powers, VP of Commercial at PLEO, discussing his sales career in FinTech, go-to-market strategies, and how to approach deals when moving up market in the AI era.
He began in commodities trading, then moved to tech sales at Pact Coffee, a B2B coffee subscription company, before transitioning to FinTech at Go Cardless.
He learned that as teams grow, changes take longer to implement, so it's crucial to have strong alignment with management and the right leaders to act as force multipliers.
He asks personal questions about struggles and key life moments to understand character and build a personal connection early on.
They used the 'three whys' methodology—why now, why anything, why Go Cardless—anchoring on strategic objectives and repositioning for each stakeholder.
They struggled because US businesses are more wedded to credit cards, whereas direct debit payments are less common there.
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