How Corpay Grew SDR Opportunity 3X with Outreach

Corpay is a leader in corporate payments. As Garrett Cote, VP of Sales Development at Corpay, describes it: “We are a Fortune 1000 company in the S&P 500, and we are MasterCard's number one issuer for Commercial MasterCard in North America. We help businesses within their accounts payable automation platform — streamlining accounts payable through card programs, expense management, and full AP solutions.” The business spans three separate entities: lodging, fuel, and payables.

That breadth is also what makes the go-to-market motion complex. Dylan Golden, Vice President of Inside Sales for the Vehicle Payments Division at Corpay, oversees one of several inside sales teams: “A majority of our teams are using Outreach at Corpay — specifically the inside sales organization, which encompasses SDR, our Inside Payables Division, our Inside Lodging Division, and our Inside Vehicle Payments Division, which I run.” Supporting all of it behind the scenes is Kirzell Bailey-Alexis, Revenue Operations Optimization Manager at Corpay, a five-year veteran of the company who helped drive the platform decision.

“We wanted to have a platform that we could trust that could help us predict the business and predict performance measures. With Outreach, we've been able to chip away at getting closer to a more secure environment for that exact purpose.”
‍— Dylan Golden, VP of Inside Sales, Vehicle Payments Division, Corpay

The Challenge: A manual, unreliable, leader-dependent motion

Before Outreach, reporting at Corpay was a patchwork held together by individual effort. “Prior to outreach, we used a lot of manual processes, and it varied based off of seller preferences,” says Bailey-Alexis. “Some sellers used Excel, some logged their activities in their email, some used notes — and it was not very reliable for our leaders. We would like to make some data-driven decisions, and we just could not do that without having that proper data.”

For Golden, the cost of all that manual work landed squarely on the front line. “Life before the absence of Outreach was very manual,” he says. “When you have manual reconciliation on reporting and performance metrics, there is a lot of reliability on bandwidth for leaders. Depending on the timing of the day, the month, the week, that's a lot of risk.” Basic performance signals simply weren't captured: “Before Outreach, we really didn't track meetings held and meetings booked. A lot of our salespeople used their own methodology — a Salesforce task or an Outlook calendar.”

Corpay's previous dialer compounded the problem. “Prior to having Outreach, we used a platform that didn't really give us any type of data analytics, didn't push back over to Salesforce,” says Cote. “From a first- and second-level leader perspective, we weren't able to really get the data that we needed in order to drive the revenue that we were looking for.”

“Prior to Outreach, we used a lot of manual processes, and it varied based off of seller preferences. Some used Excel, some logged activities in their email, some used notes — it was not very reliable for our leaders.”
‍— Kirzell Bailey-Alexis, Revenue Operations Optimization Manager, Corpay

The Solution: One platform that fits a complex business

What sold Corpay was Outreach's ability to handle its complexity without compromise. “Outreach was very impressive to us because of the bilateral sync,” says Bailey-Alexis. “Being able to have information updated in Salesforce almost immediately, and vice versa… we are a very fast-paced company and many people use the same record.” Just as important was the platform's flexibility: “The ability to handle custom objects. We are a very complex company — we have many custom objects, and the fact that we're able to get that into Outreach and still work without many band-aids was very impressive. That's a solution we jumped on very quickly.”

With Outreach Sales Engagement, reps gained the structure they'd been missing. “There are a few capabilities that stand out — like sequencing clients and prospects and keeping a good cadence and follow-up organization,” says Golden. “As a new sales rep coming into the business, we have an array of different processes and products, and it really keeps us in our lane… we're just a lot more organized.” The team also leans on Deal Insights: “A workflow that really improved for us was scoring the opportunities based on activity and feedback from the prospect — being able to nail down very fast, is there any risk in this deal? And if so, how do we address it quickly to keep it in our pipeline or get it out, so we can move towards creating revenue.”

Conversation Intelligence has been transformative for coaching. Using Kaia™, Corpay trains and ramps reps faster. “Utilizing Kaia™ has helped us train reps faster, ramp them quicker, get them up to speed,” says Cote. “A lot of reps listen to what an individual is saying and it goes in one ear and out the other. But when you actually listen to yourself, you can pick up on a couple of things your manager has said to you multiple times but you didn't see. Hearing is believing is what we say.” Coaching cards and templates let a single leader scale feedback: “I can't be behind somebody day in and day out… having coaching cards and different templates allows us to be more effective.”

For RevOps, Kaia™ turned conversations into company-wide intelligence. “We allow our marketing and product team to use insights from Kaia™ to evolve our products, to evolve our sequences,” says Bailey-Alexis. “We put information in front of our sellers so that they are prepared to handle any objections that are coming their way.” The bidirectional sync underpins it all: “By having the bidirectional sync — Salesforce push to Outreach and Outreach push back to Salesforce — we're making tremendous strides in our data integrity,” says Cote.

“The ability to handle custom objects. We are a very complex company… the fact that we're able to get that into Outreach and still work without band-aids was very impressive.”
‍— Kirzell Bailey-Alexis, Revenue Operations Optimization Manager, Corpay

The Results: 2-3x opportunity creation and reporting for every role

The headline result is pipeline growth. “We have increased deal creation — our opportunity count — significantly, by roughly 2 to 3× over the last two years,” says Cote. “Our goal is to generate pipeline for the account executives we're supporting, and to see from a rep perspective what's working and what's not.” Corpay now measures its funnel end to end: “Seeing the stats around meetings booked, meetings held, and what that percentage is gives us an idea of our talk tracks, our messaging, who we're targeting, and how effective that message is being received,” says Golden.

Reporting has become the platform's most indispensable capability. “Our new leaders are data-driven leaders, and being able to answer questions and have those answers at our fingertips would be missed if Outreach disappeared,” says Bailey-Alexis. Because Corpay serves so many lines of business, that flexibility matters: “It gives us reporting for all scenarios. What's important for our SDR leader is completely different from our field leader, but I'm able to pull all of those reports out of Outreach… It allows us to do proper forecasting, and pipeline reviews have improved.”

The data has even reshaped Corpay's strategy. “It was quite surprising how many people were interested in multiple of our products,” says Bailey-Alexis. “Going through the call summaries and further analysis… it allowed us to come up with new teams that will be able to do cross-selling or upselling — not just on one product, but multiple. Without those call summaries, we would not have that insight into additional needs from our customers.” Cote points to a quieter but meaningful win too: faster onboarding. “The biggest unexpected workflow Outreach has changed for the SDR team has been the ability to watch reps succeed in a quicker ramp time.”

“We have increased deal creation — our opportunity count — significantly, by roughly 2 to 3× over the last two years.”
‍— Garrett Cote, VP of Sales Development, Corpay

The verdict from all three leaders is the same. “I would definitely recommend Outreach,” says Golden. “It gives a collective set of autonomy to run a business from a leadership perspective, and it gives the rep a way better bird's-eye view of their pipeline.” Bailey-Alexis adds a personal note: “I used to do sales — I wish I had a tool like Outreach when I did, because it took away the guesswork. And the white-glove service we get from the Outreach team, if I don't have those reports at my fingertips, is one email away.”

Looking Ahead: Unifying the business and adding AI

Corpay's next chapter is about bringing everything under one roof. “One of the things we're trying to make sure of is bringing all lines of our business into one go-to-market platform,” says Cote.  

Through it all, Corpay credits a partner that took the time to understand a genuinely complicated business. “The Outreach team has been super receptive to our feedback,” says Golden. “We're a large organization with very complex processes, different lines of business, different metrics and custom objects via Salesforce. They've been super helpful — patient with us and learning our business well enough to help us get to where we want to be.”

“Outreach gives a collective set of autonomy to run a business from a leadership perspective — and it gives the rep a way better bird's-eye view of their pipeline and more autonomy to manage and prioritize it.”
‍— Dylan Golden, VP of Inside Sales, Vehicle Payments Division, Corpay