Transforming a global fintech’s sales operations with enterprise lead qualification

Navigating the shift from SMB sales to enterprise lead qualification

A leading global fintech company — one of the world’s largest payment processing platforms — has partnered with TELUS Digital for more than a decade to power their sales operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. For much of the ongoing partnership, the focus has been on start-up and SMB sales, with TELUS Digital managing the complete sales cycle for inbound leads.

But the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. The massive surge in ecommerce drove rapid expansion for the fintech leader. Growth later stabilized, and the company needed to maintain profitability while capturing larger, higher-value enterprise opportunities. The fintech leader decided to reduce their internal sales development team and outsource a larger portion of inbound volume to TELUS Digital, trusting us to qualify enterprise prospects with deal sizes averaging 15 times larger than typical SMB opportunities.

The shift from transactional SMB sales to enterprise lead qualification revealed that the team’s existing processes, training and tools were optimized for speed and volume, not the consultative rigor required for deals at enterprise-scale. It quickly became clear that TELUS Digital needed to fundamentally rebuild how the team qualified, engaged and converted enterprise prospects.

A complete sales transformation in six months

TELUS Digital responded with a comprehensive overhaul of the sales operation, addressing leadership, quality, technology and team enablement.

Building the right leadership foundation

Recognizing that enterprise sales motions require specific expertise, TELUS Digital hired new leaders with demonstrable success in high-performance sales environments. In came one senior sales manager and two sales team leads, each with more than 15 years of sales experience. This leadership team immediately overhauled sales processes, introduced performance accountability frameworks and established a culture of continuous improvement. Of particular note, the new leaders achieved a 93% leadership effectiveness score in team surveys.

Implementing high quality standards

The team adopted MEDDIC — a structured sales qualification framework designed for complex enterprise deals — as the foundation of its quality approach. The MEDDIC sales methodology ensures that sales representatives thoroughly assess each prospect across six critical dimensions, including: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain points and champion.

To carry out the MEDDIC sales methodology, TELUS Digital deployed quality managers and customer experience analysts to develop comprehensive training programs, regular refreshers and aligned coaching practices. Weekly calibration sessions kept the team aligned with client expectations, driving quality scores above 90% and qualification scores to 93%.

Enabling consultative selling with AI

To help sales representatives deliver more strategic, insight-driven conversations with enterprise prospects, TELUS Digital piloted an AI-powered research copilot. This pre-call research copilot generates comprehensive company analysis reports covering everything from founder backgrounds and financial data to market position and product compatibility.

The tool enables representatives to enter every conversation with a foundational understanding of the prospect’s business, and to position solutions ideally mapped to their unique challenges.

Connecting the team to real customer success

TELUS Digital orchestrated a Customer Success Summit, inviting local businesses that use the fintech client’s product and encouraging them to share their transformation stories directly with the sales team. This customer success initiative created authentic connections between sales representatives and real customer outcomes, deepening product knowledge and generating genuine enthusiasm.

Driving collaboration and speed

Understanding that lead qualification success depends on seamless handoffs to account executives, TELUS Digital created multiple collaboration touchpoints, including weekly office hours for seller-to-seller communication, regular pipeline reviews and bi-weekly outreach on stalled deals. This collaborative approach contributed to an 86% reduction in prospect-to-lost rates quarter-over-quarter.

Real-time lead review processes with immediate reassignment protocols ensured speed-to-lead remained a priority, consistently achieving over 95% service level agreement compliance with a median first-contact time of just 52 minutes.

Results that proved enterprise-grade performance at scale

The transformation delivered exceptional results across every aspect of sales performance.

Revenue impact and target achievement

• $121 million in operating net revenue generated as of Q3 2025
• 114% attainment against both sales volume and revenue targets
• 15% increase in client ROI, leading to expanded investment in additional campaigns including outbound sales, customer success and existing business programs

Conversion and quality improvements

• 47.6% conversion rate growth from Q1 2024 to Q2 2025
• 90%+ quality scores with 93% qualification accuracy
• 86% reduction in prospect-to-lost rates
• Consistent 95%+ SLA achievement with 52-minute median first-contact time

Strategic expansion

• Expanded from inbound-only to five specialized service lines: inbound sales, outbound sales, customer success, accelerate onboarding and existing business
• Grew from 25 full-time equivalent team members to 94

Competitive validation

When the client implemented a champion-challenger model to test TELUS Digital against a competitor, the results were decisive. The competitor achieved only 3% conversion rates compared to TELUS Digital's 19%. Despite the competitor's lower-cost location, the competitor was decommissioned within six months.