How Spendesk Doubled AE Meetings by Centralizing Prospecting Workflow With lemlist

Spendesk is a spend management platform with Account Executive teams in France, the UK, Germany and Spain. When it moved to a full-cycle sales model, its AEs suddenly had to prospect as well as close. That only works if AEs actually want to use their prospecting tool, so Spendesk let them choose it. They picked lemlist, and outbound meetings per AE went from 2.3 to more than 4.

In this story, Sébastien (Head of RevOps) and Geoffroy (Head of Sales France) explain how they chose lemlist, what changed for their AEs, and how they cut tools and costs along the way.

Watch the full interview

A new sales model needed a new prospecting tool

To speed up pipeline, Spendesk moved from a BDR + AE structure to a full-cycle AE model, where AEs handle both prospecting and closing.

That changed the AE job overnight. Prospecting was now part of their daily work, so they needed a tool that made them want to prospect, helped them reach people across channels, and made booking meetings fast.

Their existing tool, Salesforce Sales Engagement, couldn’t do that:

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  Rigid UX

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  Hard-to-build sequences

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  Limited LinkedIn capabilities

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  Fragmented activity tracking

Sébastien, who runs RevOps, saw the problem from the setup side:

From a UX standpoint, it was very rigid. Hard to build your own cadences.

— Sébastien, Head of RevOps

And Geoffroy, who leads sales in France, felt it in his team’s daily work:

We were limited in how we could use LinkedIn, and some tracking parts didn’t work well.

— Geoffroy, Head of Sales France

With AEs now responsible for their own pipeline, Spendesk couldn’t afford a tool they didn’t like using. It was time to look for a better one.

AEs tested, voted, and chose lemlist over Outreach, Salesloft and Humanlinker

Spendesk could have let Ops pick the new tool. Instead, it let the people who would use it every day decide.

AEs joined the vendor calls, tested all four tools, and voted. The result came fast.

The vote was very quick… and almost unanimous. In favour of lemlist.

— Geoffroy

This bottom-up choice had a big side effect: AEs adopted lemlist right away, because it was their decision.

Now they can’t complain. They chose lemlist! If Ops had chosen, it would be easy to blame us.

— Sébastien

The AEs who voted for lemlist became its first champions, and the rollout mostly ran itself. The next question was whether a tool AEs liked would also help them book more meetings.

lemlist helped nearly double outbound meetings per AE

Before lemlist, each AE booked 2.3 outbound meetings on average. After switching, that number went up to more than 4.

Three changes made the difference, and they all come down to one thing: AEs now spend their day in a single workspace, with less friction between them and their prospects.

1. AEs work from one place

Every morning, AEs open four tools: Gmail, their calendar, Salesforce and lemlist. But most of their day happens in lemlist, where they talk to prospects.

You open your laptop and you have four things. And you spend most of your time in lemlist, talking to prospects.

— Geoffroy

Less switching between tools means more time for actual conversations. And those conversations start with better sequences.

2. Every prospect gets a next step

AEs run multichannel sequences that mix emails, LinkedIn steps and calls. Conditions decide the next step based on what each prospect does. If someone doesn’t open an email, they might get a LinkedIn message or a call instead.

Whatever happens, there’s always a next step. It’s almost impossible for an account not to hear about Spendesk.

— Geoffroy

3. Cleaner data, in one place

Because all outreach now runs through lemlist, all activity is tracked there too. AEs switch between fewer tools, activity logs stay consistent, and RevOps can follow AE performance more easily.

The more we unify things into one place, the more reliable our data becomes.

— Sébastien

Fewer tools, lower costs, and better data

More meetings was the main goal. But once lemlist was in place, Spendesk found it could also remove tools from its stack and save money.

Waterfall enrichment found 30 to 40% more contacts

The first tool to go was the data provider. Spendesk tested lemlist’s waterfall enrichment against its previous provider on the same 400 leads. Waterfall enrichment checks several data providers one after another until it finds a match, and lemlist found contact details for 30 to 40% more people. It was also cheaper, so Spendesk dropped the old provider.

We killed two birds with one stone. Cheaper and more effective.

— Sébastien

Calling is next

The phone tool could be next. When its current contract ends, Spendesk plans to move calling into lemlist with in-app calling, so AEs can call, email and message from the same place.

Deliverability became a valuable KPI

Sending more emails also meant paying closer attention to where they landed. Before lemlist, nobody tracked domain health, so emails could go to spam without anyone noticing.

Now Spendesk uses lemlist’s deliverability monitoring to:

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  track deliverability per mailbox

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  use alternative domains

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  avoid domain burn

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  run outbound at 96% deliverability

We’re at 96% deliverability now. Before, no one even looked at that.

— Sébastien

So lemlist didn’t only make the stack simpler. It also made Spendesk’s outbound healthier and easier to scale.

Smooth rollout and hands-on support

None of this happened overnight, but it happened quickly. It started with a small POC (a short trial) run by RevOps. It worked from the start, and the AE vote turned that early success into a team-wide rollout. lemlist CSM team helped the team get up to speed with training sessions in France and the UK, and was available for fast, practical support whenever they needed it.

Fast and effective support. Nothing ever negative to say.

-Sébastien

What comes next for Spendesk?

With the basics in place, Spendesk wants to bring even more of its outbound into lemlist. Next on the list are intent signals, WhatsApp steps, and more automation across channels.

The goal is simple:

We want a true outbound cockpit where AEs manage everything inside lemlist.

— Sébastien

Curious to see what your team can achieve?

Try lemlist to bring your outbound into one place, personalize at scale, and give your AEs a workflow they enjoy using.

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