Market
launches
aren’t a one-size-fits-all process
Join us as we get Up-Close with Arun Mani, Chief Revenue Officer at Pleo and former President of Europe at Freshworks. Read about Arun’s expertise in implementing ambitious growth and the biggest lessons he has learned during his time with Pleo.
Tell us about the move to Pleo from Freshworks and what was compelling about this opportunity?
I moved to Pleo for a combination of reasons. First was Pleo’s mission to revolutionise business spending, an area that is both ripe for disruption with a large TAM in the segments targeted by them.
Second was the role itself. The role of a full-stack CRO appealed to me as it enabled me to influence every part of the customer journey from marketing to customer success and apply the best practices that I have learned over the past decade in scaling SaaS companies.
Third was the leadership chemistry. I have been lucky to work with two Founder CEOs who have been very inspirational. It is important to have the right chemistry and fit. What I saw in Jeppe and Nicco, Pleo’s founders, was, and still is, a real passion to create a purpose-led, financially transparent business culture to help cultivate meaningful conversations around money, growth and organisational decisions.
For instance, at Pleo each team is given flexibility in terms of how they structure work and attain their goals. Pleo understands that culture is created not through micro-management of its people but by asking the right questions that challenge and guide its employees to find optimal solutions. That’s an empowering way to work, helping businesses to get the very best out of its people.
Finally, I was also keen to be based in Lisbon. I was given the autonomy to set up our hub in Lisbon and now we have over 150 employees based there.
Were you also interested in the opportunity to work somewhere with a large European Headquarters, compared to your experiences in your previous roles where the Headquarters were based in the US?
I was clear that I didn’t want to work for a global company as its Head of Europe, responsible only for the European markets. I have done that previously and was looking for something that could stretch my capabilities and increase my learnings and impact. I was looking for a European SaaS company that had pan-European or even global ambition. I was lucky to have found that opportunity with Pleo. The Fintech aspect was an added benefit that helped scratch an itch for me to learn something new.
The first thing I tackled was focus and alignment. This is a classic scenario with most growth companies - the lack of sharp definition and internal alignment on our target segment. When I joined, the leadership team was in the process of discussing if and how to target larger enterprises. It was already happening organically but without a company-wide alignment, which was putting pressure on all stages of the customer journey and our product roadmap.
We deliberated together and made the strategic choice to hone-in on the smaller and mid-market businesses across Europe. This was an underserved market, and our research showed that only a small percentage of companies in these segments felt they had good visibility over their spending, presenting a big opportunity for us.
By defining the target segment clearly, focusing on filling the product gaps and optimising all our touchpoints from awareness to advocacy for the segments we were able to bring alignment within the company with a singular focus of providing the “wow” experience for our target customers.
Once you arrived, how did you have to shift or pivot the go to market strategy?
Tell us a bit about that and the core part of the strategic thinking behind Pleo’s move to enter many new markets since your arrival.
Having operated for six years in six major European countries including the UK, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ireland, we’re very familiar with the challenges faced by businesses and underlying customer needs are very similar. Ultimately, spending at work is broken.
We saw a major shift in the world of work due to the pandemic. The turbulent economy accelerated the desire for digital transformation with decision makers wanting to get rid of manual processes and businesses desperately needing better oversight of their finances to run more efficiently and forecast for the future. With that in mind, we decided to take our market expansion playbook and launched in 10 new European markets in just 10 months. This year, we are continuing our expansion but rather than moving into new markets, we have decided to focus on deepening our offering in our core markets. For example, we have recently launched our invoices product in France and Spain due to upcoming e-invoicing laws that will affect all businesses, ensuring our customers are set up for success.
With our goal of 10 in 10 in mind, we experienced about five times annual revenue growth in 2.5 years which we are very proud of. This month we are celebrating the 1 year anniversary of Pleo Netherlands (our fastest growing market so far) and Pleo France (where we’ve seen users increase by almost 400% in May compared to the same month last year).
“With our goal of 10 in 10 in mind, we experienced about five times annual revenue growth in 2.5 years which we are very proud of.”
Once the strategy to expand into new markets was solidified, how did you make this happen and how did you structure the team to ensure the success of this growth?
Our expansion plans have been ambitious but measured. Previously Pleo had a small team who were focused on expansion. When we first developed our expansion plans, we re-examined the entire process to ensure that we had solid accountability and the right expertise in place. Despite having a clear playbook in place, market launches aren’t a one-size-fits-all process. For every new country, we do deep research to understand the market, the core customer needs, their spending habits, cultural nuances, accounting and tax rules, bookkeeping practices, and legal requirements. We created a Market Expansion Domain within the business, which works out the localised, bespoke Pleo product offering and our commercial route to market. The domain is made up of a blended team of entrepreneurial individuals including strategy and project managers, engineers, designers, marketers, and sales. In traditional organisations, these teams would usually operate within their respective departments. We brought them together under one leadership with the primary goal of market expansion, aiming to launch quickly and then focus on key success milestones e.g. customer numbers, payments made, conversion, retention and revenue.
The 10 in 10 project was a learning experience for us and we stayed true to our ‘learn fast and iterate’ motto. Firstly, looking at the project as a Domain allowed us to go back and improve the foundation itself, ensuring that we had the correct set up in place. We also made necessary adjustments to parameterise certain aspects, enabling us to launch rapidly. We made similar choices across the board, from the product to the tooling to the websites. We examined how we could productise the process of launching countries, and now we have a playbook in place that we can execute efficiently at any time.
“I was looking for a European SaaS company that had pan-European or even global ambition. I was lucky to have found that opportunity with Pleo.”
If you look back, what are you most proud of in terms of what you've built out and the impact you've made in the past couple of years?
We’ve built a very special team here, each with the mindset of an entrepreneur. That means taking calculated risks and ownership over their areas.
Pleo is on a rocketship growth journey and none of it would be possible without a great team that possesses three key qualities: a strong curiosity for learning, a growth mindset and the ability to stay agile and pivot quickly. We’ve developed the ability to re-form and reset teams as needed and I think that's the secret to the success that we’ve had at Pleo. At the end of the day, the strategies of every business spend tool will be more or less alike. What makes the difference is the speed and quality of execution, and that ultimately depends on the talent you have.
How do you think you're perceived as a leader and what does your team say about you as a leader do you think?
I strive for is to be an authentic leader, and that means being vulnerable, leading by example and demonstrating behaviours that I expect from my team. We’re always learning, even as seasoned leaders.
Whilst I set the vision and strategy for the teams and may have an idea of an answer or approach, there’s no point hiring great people and then telling them exactly what to do. Instead, it’s important to ask the right questions and help the teams arrive at the answers and tackle challenges in their own way. To build trust as a leader, it’s critical that you’re truthful, and that includes accepting when you are wrong or sharing when you don’t have all the answers. The entire leadership team at Pleo strives to be authentic and are very open to new or differing ideas, including changing their point of view when new data emerges. I hope the team sees my journey and appreciates it.
“Whilst I set the vision and strategy for the teams and may have an idea of an answer or approach, there’s no point hiring great people and then telling them exactly what to do.”
Reflecting on the last couple of years and your time with Pleo, what are the lessons you’ve learned?
I have a learning mindset - I need to learn something new almost every single day and that’s what keeps me motivated. The biggest learning has been understanding what it takes to be an authentic leader who is vulnerable, and how that affects the team. It’s the role of a leader to instil a sense of psychological safety and build an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you can fail quickly and re-iterate as you go. We have a tendency in the workplace to focus on performance and tasks as the key drivers, but if you focus your efforts on tapping into the motivations of the team and empowering them, you often find that happy and fulfilled teams perform better.
The other significant learning is that we’ve been accustomed to a ‘growth at all costs’ mindset. The volatile financial landscape has served as a wake-up call to business leaders to start thinking about scalable and sustainable growth. At Pleo, this is something we’re very much focused on and I have been both excited and humbled to learn the art of trade-offs at every step of the way. It is not just how we can do something faster but how we can do something faster, better and cheaper.
Has Pleo’s approach to sustainable growth always been part of the DNA, or has that been a byproduct of what's happened in the economic environment and the dip in valuations and investments in the last 18 months?
It is a by-product of the current business climate. We had a massive opportunity ahead of us in terms of the total addressable market, so the focus was on obtaining more market share in our core market. As a result, rapid expansion – especially before our competitors scale up – did make strategic sense.
We've been through a period of tremendous growth and that’s happened very quickly – a testament to the need for a product like ours. Pleo is now in 16 countries and we're proud of that; however, like a lot of companies in the current economic climate, we had to step back, assess our markets and discover where our biggest opportunities lay. That’s just good business sense. We applied the brakes to deepen in our key markets and ensure that we were delivering a nuanced and localised product set up to help our 25,000+ customers not just survive the financial volatility but also thrive in it with the right tools in place.
You have a varied background in both the engineering/computer science along with your experience in consultancy: how has this wide range of experiences helped you your career?
My engineering background taught me to love technology and look for ways to leverage technology to create value. I also got comfortable with complexity and was always ready to roll up my sleeves and dive deep into any tech conversation, whether it’s a product roadmap discussion, how to build for scale engineering conversation, or technical pre-sales conversation. The most important take-away from that phase of my career was to focus on holistic design with first principles thinking. As a microprocessor design engineer at Intel, I was always striving to design a system while working with the fundamental principles of physics. You can't defy physical laws, so it's essential to always go back to the first principles thinking. I leverage this thinking every single day when designing the GTM growth engine.
My consulting background taught me to identify the most critical problem that needs to be solved first. Scale-up companies have numerous opportunities, hence it is crucial to frame and prioritise them correctly. A problem that is not framed well cannot fully harness the potential of a diverse pool of talent as it would be difficult to onboard more people for collective problem solving. And finally, consulting teaches you how to tell a story in a coherent manner. Impactful and inspiring stories help frame the situation, prioritise the problem to solve and identify solution options by bringing in more people to the same page at each step of the journey. The best leaders are the ones who can effectively navigate complexity by distilling them down to its simplest form and articulating a clear vision.
You’ve said that you have scaled organisations using a non salesy approach but instead scaled how an engineer would - is that what you are referring to?
Correct. When you focus on building a holistic distribution engine with a customer first mindset you begin to think about everything differently. For example, marketing is not solely about leads and pipeline but also about its overall contribution to booked revenue and margin. Sales is not merely about closing a deal, but also about setting up the customer for smooth onboarding and future expansion. Customer success is not only about adoption or churn, but also about finding ways to delight customers, turning customers into promoters. It's about each part acting as a small cog in a much larger machine, with each action affecting the subsequent action and so on, so that everything works together in tandem.
Given your experience across different stages of growth within organisations, is there a particular stage that resonates with you, and where do you think your experience is best suited?
I come from the enterprise world. Phase one of my career as an engineer and phase two as consultant were primarily spent in enterprises with 10,000 people or more. Post McKinsey, I believed my skill set was well suited to help scale companies, as demonstrated at AppNexus when we grew from 20 to 200 million in 3 years. It was essentially about bringing the best practices from a high-functioning enterprise GTM setting to a smaller setup but with an entrepreneurial mindset. It proved to myself that I could distil those GTM best practices to a maturing organisation, without overwhelming it.
Since then, I've worked at two scale-ups. Even though Freshworks was around 30M and raised their Series-F when I joined, I was their first employee in Europe. It was quite entrepreneurial as everything in Europe was built from scratch. I didn't have to worry about funding or a base product, but everything else was akin to being an entrepreneur on the ground. At Pleo, I joined even earlier and I thrive in this environment of creative chaos - my sweet spot is when there is a nascent product-market fit and a company is ready to pour fuel on the fire to accelerate growth.
I have a passion for female empowerment. I founded a nonprofit organisation called NIA over 20 years ago to help and encourage young women in India with higher education. Education, in this case, is a means to provide them with the power of choice in a world where such choices cannot be assumed or taken for granted. NIA has empowered over 2000 young women with well-rounded education, giving them the opportunity to choose where they want to go in their life. It’s a small but growing operation that is incredibly fulfilling for me.
What is something that people might be surprised to know about you?
I would love to choose humour as my superpower. I know it is not as cool or exciting as an invisible cloak or ability to fly but thoughtful humour can help lighten any situation and help convey uncomfortable truths in a candid but caring way. Also, within the FinTech scale-up world, we tend to work under pressure so it’s important to remember that whilst we want to do our best work we’re not saving lives and so humour helps bring in the much needed perspective.
If you could choose a superpower, what would it be? And why?
Do you have any books, podcasts or other content that you find valuable and draw inspiration from?
I read a lot of bestselling biographies, company stories etc. but I would like to call out one book which is probably not on many people’s list: Leadership is Language by David Marquet. This book made a real impact on my leadership style.
I also listen to a lot of business podcasts, such as Freakonomics Radio by Stephen Dubner, Possible by Reid Hoffman, On with Kara Swisher, Stratechery by Ben Thompson and Work Life with Adam Grant.
