Warren Zenna interviews Philippe Lacor, CRO of Airbase, about what it takes to succeed in the Chief Revenue Officer role. They discuss managing spend in growing companies and the specific challenges Airbase faces as it scales its customer base.
Foreign Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, Founder and CEO of the CRO Collective and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint the CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. It's Philippe, correct?
Philippe, yeah.
Where you, where are you from? What's your, your French?
I'm originally Dutch, from the Netherlands, but very French name.
Yeah, yeah, very nice. Well, welcome and really it's great to have you here. You're the Chief Revenue Officer of Airbase. How big is Airbase? How big of a company is it?
Yeah, we have about 400 people in the company. We are a Series B, 16 countries around the world. But yeah, okay.
And if you don't mind, just give me a little brief overview of what your customers are, who you serve, what you do for them, so to speak.
Yeah, so we are a modern procure to pay platform that works for people in the office of the cfo. And we allow companies to consolidate all their spend from a company in one platform. And so we work a lot with accountants, controllers and since a year also with procurement people. And they all tend to roll up into the office of the cfo.
So is it like expensify similar to that?
Well, it is very broad. So we focus first of all on mid market companies. So companies between 75 employees all the way up to like 10,000. We don't do SMB and we don't do Fortune 5000. And the platform is broad in the sense that you can consolidate all your spend, which is on one hand accounts payable automation. So that's payments of vendors through invoices. Through ach, we have guided procurement, what we call, which is a purchasing request module. So if employees want to do a request for spend, they can go in there and they can guide it through the process. Then we have expense management and you mentioned one of the other players in the space and then we have corporate cards. And basically those are all the ways that companies spend money. And the issue that companies ran into, like, because there's different ways of spending money, it's hard to have control and visibility. And that problem gets bigger when companies get bigger because they get more employees, they go into more countries, they get more vendors, they have more currencies, they're more tax implications. So finance becomes exponentially harder when you grow and we help these teams manage their complexity so they can focus on being strategic.
Understood? Great. Yeah, great. And how long have you been the Chief Revenue Officer at the company? How long have you been with the company?
I've been a bit more than two years and I joined as the Chief Revenue officer.
So you came aboard as a CRO. Interesting. Let's talk about this. I'm really fascinated by this. So when they hired you as a CRO, the first question I have for you is how did they and I guess you define that role at your company.
Yeah, I'm basically responsible for all the go to market teams and so I think the role of a CRO is typical to align the different go to market teams. So it goes from marketing to sales, solutions, consulting.
