How SpendLab generated $1M pipeline per BDR and lifted productivity 400% with Amplemarket

SpendLab is an Accounts Payable technology company headquartered in Amsterdam. Founded in 2002, the company combines AI-driven recovery audits with SpendProof, its real-time error detection platform, to help enterprise finance teams recover incorrect payments, reclaim VAT, and enforce contract compliance.

Paul Conway joined SpendLab seven months ago to lead business development, and within five or six months was promoted to Head of Sales and Business Development. He now owns the full commercial number: pipeline generation, meetings booked, and everything in between for both the sales and BDR functions.

The challenge he inherited was structural. SpendLab's commercial team blended people who had been with the company for up to 25 years with new hires brought in over the previous 12–18 months. This resulted in an outbound motion where everyone was running their own playbook, without proper alignment.

Why SpendLab chose Amplemarket

Why was a fragmented, spontaneous outbound motion capping growth?

When Paul joined SpendLab, the commercial team was technically operating but not aligned. Reps with decades of tenure sat next to recent hires, and each was running their own version of outbound.

"Everyone was doing things in a pretty unique fashion and spontaneous way. Some people would do 50 calls a day, some people would do three calls a day. So what we really wanted to do is unify everything into one visible place."

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This approach broke down into four compounding problems:

1. Inconsistent messaging and process meant there was no standard to coach against

Reps were "creating their own messaging, going after different ICPs." There was no single source of truth for what good outbound looked like at SpendLab, which made it impossible for Paul to coach against a standard that didn't exist.

2. A domain health blind spot was quietly killing deliverability

SpendLab's previous outreach tool gave the team no visibility into domain health, and they didn't know that was a problem until it was diagnosed. Open rates sat at 1-1.5%, and the team had no idea why. As Paul put it, the messaging "wasn't overly relevant or personalized," but the bigger issue was that emails were not landing in inboxes at all.

3. A heavy admin tax from a siloed stack

SpendLab's previous outreach tool gave the team no visibility into domain health, and they didn't know that was a problem until it was diagnosed. Open rates sat at 1–1.5%, and the team had no idea why. As Paul put it, the messaging "wasn't overly relevant or personalized," but the bigger issue was that emails were not landing in inboxes at all.

A siloed stack taxed every rep eight hours a week in admin. SpendLab was running Cognism for data, Salesloft for engagement, and Salesforce as the CRM. Moving a prospect through the workflow meant moving data between three systems, and data was lost at every handoff. Paul put a number on it:

"I would say you're probably talking eight hours per person per week, just on the admin side to find the right prospects, to enrich the data, to pull them into your outreach tool.”

4. Pipeline depended on heroes, not a repeatable system

Without a repeatable outbound motion, the team risked relying on the occasional large deal to drag them across the line each quarter. Paul described how exhausting that model can be: "you don't want those heroes to drag you over the line every quarter, every month, where you have this spontaneous 500K deal that everything is resting on, because that just creates this inconsistent model and a last-minute dash to the finish line every quarter."

How a unified AI sales platform aligned a multi-generational team

SpendLab consolidated onto Amplemarket and launched the platform in January 2026. The implementation proved fast and efficient: the trial produced a booked meeting from a signal in the first 10 days, and the broader team was live within one to two weeks.

The lift came from five specific capabilities:

1. Standardized AI sequences won over even the most old-school reps

Before Amplemarket, reps spent 20–30% of their time crafting compelling messaging that, because of poor domain health, prospects often never saw. As Paul described how they "were spending 20/30% of our time creating compelling messaging, uploading it onto Salesloft, and sending it out to our prospects without any hope of them actually seeing it." Whereas:

"Now we have sequences that are really relevant to our prospects, our open rates have actually gone up without spending that 20/30% of our time creating this messaging."

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We can say the shift was as much cultural as operational. Even reps with several years of muscle memory in the old way bought in once they saw the messaging the platform produced. Paul noted that "even people who were a little bit more old school in their approach and maybe doing things for, you know, five, six, seven years the same way, they actually straight away saw value in the messaging when they read it."

2. Intent signals became the capability the team refuses to work without

The single capability Paul singles out as indispensable is signal-driven prospecting. Reps now log in to find prospects already queued up based on job changes, company events, and technology footprints.

"The fact that you can jump in, in the morning, and you have 15 new prospects ready waiting for you, and then the AI generation in terms of the sequences that it sends out. It just automates all of that tediousness for the team."

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The team's first meeting from an intent signal was booked in the first 10 days of the trial, and four months later, that deal is now in the late-stage pipeline on a deal cycle that typically runs nine to twelve months.

The signal that surprised the team most was event attendance. Paul shared how "we attended an event midway through last year, and we had tremendous trouble actually seeing the attendees' list. But with Amplemarket, you can actually put in the event and see what prospects have actually shown up. So I think these are really unique parts of the tool that we hadn't seen before, and we really couldn't live without right now."

3. Fixing domain health lifted open rates roughly 8x in three months

The single biggest blind spot SpendLab carried into Amplemarket was domain health. Paul described pre-Amplemarket emails as having little chance of ever reaching prospects: "our domain health was so poor, they probably would have never gotten through to the people." Native deliverability and warm-up turned open rates around in three months.

"We went from 1-1.5% open rate on our previous tooling. And now we're up from 8 to 10%. Some people, they go for a more sniper approach, which works well. So they're hitting 15 plus percent open rates, which is great to see."

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4. Native data and CRM sync gave each rep eight hours a week back

Data loss between Cognism, Salesloft, and Salesforce had been costing 20-30% of contact records on every transfer. With Amplemarket, the data layer and the engagement layer live in the same platform, and the Salesforce sync is native. As Paul put it: "you would lose 20, 30% of the data. Whereas now it's all in one place, embedded. So that's just such a time saver for us."

That time saving compounds across the team. At the eight hours per rep per week Paul described, a four-person BDR team reclaims more than 30 hours every week, well over 1,000 hours a year, redirected from moving data between systems to talking with prospects.

Paul shared how forecasting has changed, too. What used to require dedicated meetings to reconstruct deal context is now visible at the opportunity level in real time, with analytics on every account, contact, and deal.

Paul described the shift: "when I'm doing forecasting and reporting and I go into any deal, any opportunity, I can see exactly what's happened without any ambiguity. Whereas that was something last year we struggled with so much, we'd have to have dedicated forecast meetings to really get through the tediousness of every conversation that's happened on the opportunity."

5. From a BDR's desk: Searcher and Duo cut prospecting to minutes

What the numbers look like for Paul, Elizabeth Mellotte feels in how her working day is shaped.

As a BDR at SpendLab, prospecting and sequencing used to consume the biggest blocks of her week. With Amplemarket, those two activities collapsed into a fraction of the time, and the hours freed up went straight back into phone conversations with prospects.

She singles out two features as daily-use:

1. The Searcher reshaped how prospect lists get built.

Accurate data and layered filters produce workable lists within minutes, which eliminated the morning admin block that used to sit between Elizabeth and her first call of the day.

2. Duo Copilot surfaces relevant context in seconds.

Account and prospect context appear in the flow of work, which makes meaningful personalization possible without breaking momentum. For the senior finance buyers SpendLab sells into, where generic openers fall flat, that in-flow context has been a quiet but consistent advantage.

As Elizabeth put it, “the compound effect is simple: less time on admin, more time in conversation.”

Stack consolidation: Cognism + Salesloft vs. Amplemarket

When SpendLab consolidated, they replaced a multi-vendor stack with a single platform. Where their old setup required separate tools for data, engagement, social, and deliverability (each with its own integration to Salesforce), Amplemarket delivers all of it in one.

What does $1M per BDR per month look like in practice?

SpendLab launched Amplemarket in January 2026, immediately after a major restructuring. The combination produced a step-change in commercial output.

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The pipeline figure deserves emphasis, considering that SpendLab has no marketing team or division. This means that every dollar of that pipeline is pure outbound, generated by the commercial team using Amplemarket.

"In Q4 2025, we reduced headcount by 70%, but our productivity per BDR is up 400% in Q1 of 2026. This aligned with the embedding of the tool in January, so all of that pipeline has been generated through Amplemarket. Per person, it's a million a month of pure outbound pipeline that we're generating."

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At a million in pipeline per BDR per month across a four-person team, that is roughly $4M in new outbound pipeline every month, built without any marketing support. The Q1 pipeline is now converting into Q2 bookings, and Paul expects the quarter to be the team's strongest in two years.

As he described it: "Q2 holistically is really exciting because all of this pipeline that's been generated, we're actually going to see some bookings and some closures in Q2. We're on track to actually have probably our best quarter in two years, which is something that we just couldn't have done without having the right tool in place."

The other result, harder to measure but visible everywhere, is that reps are spending their time on the work that closes deals.

"When I look at the analytics from last year, we really struggled to get BDRs on the phone consistently, they were probably making 15 calls per day on average. Whereas now, 50 is absolutely doable every day by every person. So we're getting way more productivity on that scale across the team."

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Why Amplemarket became the operating system for SpendLab's sales team

SpendLab went from a fragmented, hero-dependent outbound motion across a multi-tenure team to a unified engine generating $1M of pipeline per BDR per month, with 400% more productivity on a leaner headcount. The platform handled the work that used to drain the team (admin, messaging, deliverability, data hygiene) so reps could spend their time on calls and conversations.

The change held because it worked for everyone, including the reps Paul expected would resist it most. As he put it: "we have a team of people who are in their late sixties who utilize it and have used it effectively and efficiently. So it's really for everyone. Even for us, we're probably at 70% of its functionality, which is giving us 200% of the results that we had. So even as we progress and learn everything that it's capable of, it's just going to enhance the results."

Behind the platform numbers is a partnership that the SpendLab team feels every day. Paul highlighted how "any question, any small thing it's answered pretty much instantaneously by the team," and singled out the people on Amplemarket's side who made the rollout feel like a shared project rather than a vendor handoff:

"Megan (AE) could not have been better. She was so understanding, so patient, so aware of what we were going through. And then we had Waleed from our CSM side, we couldn't all feel more supported. He's been absolutely phenomenal. So it's been an amazing journey for the team."

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That combination of platform and partnership is what makes Amplemarket the unified AI sales platform modern commercial teams build their pipeline engine on.

Learn more about SpendLab and follow the company, as well as Paul Conway and Elizabeth Mellotte on LinkedIn.