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Aspire is an award-winning fintech company that provides an all-in-one finance operating system for more than 10,000 new-age businesses in Southeast Asia. It helps them to pay, manage, and earn smarter - doing more than a bank, bookkeeper, or rewards program could ever do alone. Through technological innovation, Aspire supercharges finance teams with a global business account and unified solutions to manage expenses, payables and receivables. Headquartered in Singapore, with offices in Indonesia and Vietnam, Aspire is backed by some of the world's best VCs, including Y-Combinator, the #1 startup incubator in the world. Aspire is ranked among the top ten fastest-growing companies in 2023, compiled by The Straits Times and Statista.
Bethia Wee (Sales Development Lead) shared that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Southeast Asia are a key segment for Aspire. With the mission to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs and business owners with the financial tools they need, Aspire has a very holistic growth strategy. Beyond advertisements, sales leads come from multiple channels such as partnership with ecosystem players like corporate secretarial firms, accounting firms, credit brokers, and startup accelerators. Aspire has also built a community of entrepreneurs and finance professionals. To accelerate business growth, the Sales Development Team was set up, playing a key role in Aspire’s go-to-market strategy and carrying out sales outreach. With Bethia heading the team, the representatives are tasked with sourcing and onboarding SMEs from a wide range of industries, including e-Commerce, Home Entertainment, Furniture, and Logistics. Founders, business owners, CFOs, and Heads of Finance are typically their main target audience. In terms of sales prospecting, the team has been using a number of global Sales Intelligence software such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and ZoomInfo. While these tools are excellent in terms of product features, the coverage for local SMEs, the team’s primary focus, isn't always the best. “To further improve productivity for better prospecting, it is clear that we need a Sales Intelligence software that could offer greater breadth and depth for the local market,” said Bethia. That’s where The Grid comes in.
From a sales operations perspective, while Aspire's solution is generally industry-agnostic, the team adopted a strategic approach by targeting certain industries with a greater success rate. They hope to reach out to new prospects that share similar profiles as their successful customers, but discovering and researching these prospects can be time-consuming. Each sales representative on the team is tasked with outbound responsibilities, making efficiency and productivity critical. At that point, Aspire was already a subscriber of the entry-level plan (self-checkout), so they decided to explore the more powerful corporate plan subscription to get the most out of the tool. With The Grid’s advantage in local data coverage as well as powerful search function, discovering new prospects within different verticals became a seamless process. “Compared to using other tools or combing through the internet, it saves us so much time in terms of generating a target list of prospects that fit our ideal customer profile and getting contact details, so that my team can spend more time on sales outreach,” said Bethia.
With the adoption of The Grid, Aspire greatly benefited from efficiency improvements, translating into a saving of 600 man-hours a year. This will have an even more significant impact on their sales operations efficiency in the longer run given the company’s incredible rate of growth and expansion. To put things into context, Aspire has grown into an organization of more than 400 headcount within the space of 4 years. As the sales team continues to grow, and the sales process becomes more complex, Aspire's experience using The Grid highlights the importance of having the right tools to support sales operations in specific markets. While global tools can be helpful, local depth and regional coverage are essential to gaining a greater market share. As they expand in Southeast Asia, The Grid's upcoming regional coverage creates a good alignment with their business objectives and supports their go-to-market strategy.
“We needed a solution that can help to unlock the local market, especially in the SME space. This is where the global sales intelligence tools typically don’t have a strong coverage in... Considering 97%–99% of the companies in Singapore are SMEs, our target segment, The Grid’s coverage turns out to be an excellent fit.”
“Considering my market focus, The Grid’s data depth immediately stood out... I’ve peace of mind that the companies in The Grid are legitimate as registry data is one of the main data sources.”
“In the past, we relied on personal contacts or previous sponsors, but now we are starting to get new sponsors from various industries including hospitality, fashion, entertainment and consumer electronics that we have never worked with before ... because of The Grid’s ability to find key stakeholders in human resources and marketing departments.”
