Market View
What Sales REALLY needs from Marketing in 2025
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Produced by:
Kosovare Lenjani
Head of Sales, Northern Europe at Spendesk
About Kosovare Lenjani
Kosovare Lenjani, Kosovare Lenjani, Head of Sales, Northern Europe at Spendesk, is a seasoned sales leader with over 6 years of B2B experience, including 5 years in FinTech. Based in the UK, she specialises in Value Selling, Challenger & MEDDICC methodologies, building high-performance teams with a customer-centric focus to transform the FinTech landscape across Northern Europe.
As you transition from a sales-led to a marketing-led approach, what changes have you observed in your revenue generation model?
Spendesk is currently navigating a significant shift in our revenue generation strategy. For the past five years, we've operated with a heavy sales-led model, but in 2024, we've started adapting towards a marketing-led approach. This transition has delivered impressive results. Our marketing-generated pipeline delivers more focused and efficient outcomes. We've achieved notable improvements across several key metrics – shorter sales cycles, higher average deal sizes, and better engagement throughout the sales process.
I’ve found our most lucrative and attractive pipeline consistently comes from inbound leads. The key advantage comes from engaging directly with people who have already identified their problem and actively seek solutions. They're ready to address their challenges and they're evaluating their options in the market.
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I think we've swung too far in the direction of caution. When I browse LinkedIn today, very little catches my attention because there's a lack of truly distinctive voices and perspectives.
How do you think marketing needs to evolve to better support sales in today's B2B landscape?
In the current B2B landscape, particularly within FinTech, we're operating in an incredibly condensed market where buyers are spoiled for choice. Over the past five to six years, marketing in the FinTech space has become increasingly cautious, perhaps too safe, leading to a landscape where everyone sounds and looks the same.
I often reflect on the early 2000s approach of companies like Intercom, who weren't afraid to generate bold and thought-provoking content. Their bold approach sparked engagement because it stood out – no one else discussed those topics. While brand safety matters, I think we've swung too far in the direction of caution. When I browse LinkedIn today, very little catches my attention because there's a lack of truly distinctive voices and perspectives.
The way we educate the market substantially impacts our ability to penetrate those segments effectively. This proves particularly crucial when we sell to specific buyer personas like finance professionals, where multiple factors drive their decisions. Right now, with cost efficiency taking priority across virtually every business, everyone focuses on reducing rather than increasing spending.
How has the increasing complexity of B2B buying groups affected your sales process, and what support do you need from marketing?
The evolution of B2B buying has fundamentally changed how we build and train our sales teams. We've learned that customers want genuine consultants who go beyond product features or pricing, rather than stereotypical salespeople. They seek advisors who hear them, listen to them, and consult with them. This insight has shaped our approach to sales team development and customer engagement.
Our focus now centers on value proposition and customer centricity. If a salesperson can't articulate clear value to a prospect, they shouldn't make the call. Marketing supports this approach by producing thought leadership content that addresses the real challenges we hear about in sales calls. This content helps other finance teams realise they don't face their struggles alone, whether they deal with cost efficiency measures or navigate redundancies. We connect buyers with the right salespeople and produce content based on active listening.
We've found that our target customers, particularly CFOs, take an analytical and data-driven approach when assessing the market. They typically prefer to engage through WhatsApp groups, Slack communities, or LinkedIn rather than attending trade shows or events. This understanding has shaped our approach to content creation and distribution, focusing on producing the right voice and content to speak to them effectively.
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Our marketing-generated pipeline delivers more focused and efficient outcomes – shorter sales cycles, higher average deal sizes, and better engagement throughout the sales process.
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Customers want genuine consultants who go beyond product features or pricing, rather than stereotypical salespeople.
How do you leverage AI and data to improve lead qualification and personalisation at scale?
We're implementing AI solutions to transform our lead qualification process and make our outreach more effective. The technology helps us understand buyer behavior by scanning various data sources to identify high-intent customers. Rather than relying solely on basic engagement metrics, we use AI to analyse broader indicators – such as how potential customers download relevant content across different websites, hire new finance team members, or secure new funding.
This approach helps us filter through large volumes of leads to identify those that truly fit our ideal customer profile (ICP). The AI analyses growth rates, team expansion, and recent solution implementations to determine fit. It then uses information from various sources, including LinkedIn activity and published articles, to customise our outreach messaging.
Previously, we spent an hour building a comprehensive understanding of each prospect - examining their role, team dynamics, growth trajectory, and potential pain points to assess our potential fit. Now, AI scans and analyses information from across the internet, helping us categorise and qualify prospects efficiently while maintaining highly personalised customer interactions.
About Spendesk
Spendesk is the leading spend management platform that transforms company spending. By simplifying procurement, payment cards, expense management, invoice processing, and accounting automation, Spendesk sets the new standard for spending at work. Its single, intelligent solution makes efficient spending easy for employees and gives finance leaders the full visibility and control they need across all company expenses, even in multi-entity structures. Trusted by thousands of companies, Spendesk supports over 200,000 users across brands such as Soundcloud, Gousto, SumUp, and Bloom & Wild. With offices in Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid, Spendesk also puts community at the heart of its mission. CFO Connect, backed by Spendesk, is the fastest-growing global network of finance leaders, with more than 12,000 members.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
