Spreedly overhauls technical discovery, drives 47-day reduction in enterprise sales cycles

“Coast quickly became the cornerstone of how we engaged with prospects and customers.”

- Tyler Hodgins, Senior Director of Customer Success at Spreedly

Spreedly, leading open payments platform, empowers merchants through an open, secure and inclusive payment ecosystem, unlocking choice among PSPs, fraud tools and other innovative payment services.

Tyler Hodgins, Senior Director of Customer Success, is responsible for ensuring that Spreedly’s solutions not only meet the needs of customers but also accelerate adoption and drive measurable business outcomes.

But for Hodgins, one challenge stood out: demonstrating the power of Spreedly’s APIs in a way that resonated with technical buyers.

Buyers wanted to see the Spreedly API working and the experiences possible to be built on top of the APIs.


“Historically, our technical discovery process was slow and inconsistent,” Hodgins shared. “We weren’t able to effectively show how our APIs worked, impacting multiple areas of the business.”

Using Coast, Spreedly has drastically transformed the approach to demonstrating its APIs.

The team has achieved a 47-day reduction in enterprise sales cycles, accelerated lead qualification stage, improved conversion rates, standardized selling framework, enhanced product development processes, and new levers for expanding customer usage of the new Spreedly product features.

“Coast has fundamentally changed how we sell our APIs. Every solutions leader seeking to demonstrate an API needs Coast,” Hodgins highlighted.

“It’s not just a demo tool, it’s a strategy.”

Within the Spreedly solutions consulting team, determining a clear fit with the prospect's needs is a stage in the sales process that is closely monitored and paramount to a successful deal.

Determining this fit is a turning point in the sales process, moving qualified buyers forward in the sales process to eventual close, or knowing when to save resources on an unqualified lead.

The solutions team relies heavily on technical discovery to educate these early prospects on how Spreedly platform works and progress prospects to a qualification decision.

“Historically, our technical discovery was really drawn out and slow, primarily due to the fact that we weren’t able to effectively demonstrate how the APIs worked to prospects,” Hodgins said.

The team utilized a generic, mocked API request with a static screenshot of the same retail-based use case every time.

Hodgins paused here to clarify why this missed the mark with prospects.

“If I’m pitching an online streaming service, I need to be able to show a tailored presentation based on the prospect’s unique challenges. At a minimum, that means visually demonstrating the custom set of APIs and the bespoke interface that could be built on top of these APIs. In order to really stand out, I needed to brand this entire experience to the prospect’s colors, logo and use case. The static retail use case just didn’t solve for these needs.”

Organizing the tools for these mocked, static demonstrations was not a trivial task. Hodgins described just the preparation required for a solutions consultant before a call.

“Before a technical discovery call, the SE needed to configure a Postman collection, update the JSON simulator, build a sequence diagram, take screenshots of a generic GUI, and create a slide presentation. It often added up to four hours of prep time just to be ready for a call.”

Before Coast, Hodgins recalled how the team could be ‘spinning its wheels’ on unqualified prospects during multiple touchpoints in the sales process. Even when the Spreedly sales motion was executed to perfection, there was still polish and customization that the Spreedly team needed when it mattered most.

The team speaks to some of the largest brands in the world, and Hodgins needed to create that “wow” factor when the team showed off the products externally.

“I recognized the need for a more tailored approach to differentiate ourselves and make a stronger impression on prospects during these conversations."

Spreedly additionally faced challenges in driving feature adoption with existing customers. Advanced Vault, a critical subscription lifecycle management feature, was underutilized because customers did not have a clear understanding of how it could integrate into their existing Spreedly integration.

For Hodgins, the solution to these key challenges was rooted in what he calls, “value engineering.”

“Spreedly primarily sells directly to technical buyers: product managers, payments managers, solutions leaders. If we don’t get buy-in from these stakeholders, we lose our ability to make a meaningful impact. I really believed that there was an opportunity to improve value engineering within our organization and I was convinced our team was in a great position to make that happen.”

Once this big idea of reshaping value engineering was communicated within the organization, Hodgins and the company CTO took charge searching for a solution.

“Coast was the only platform that could take the API and put it into an interactive, visual demo experience. Once we found Coast, we acted fast. I spoke to my senior leadership team and made it clear that we needed the product.”

“Coast quickly became the cornerstone of how we engaged with prospects and customers.”

From early discovery sessions to deep technical solutioning, customer upselling, and renewals, Coast empowered Spreedly teams across the organization to radically improve their go-to-market strategy.

Utilizing a suite of tailored templates for different use cases, the Spreedly solutions team could effortlessly adapt demos to fit the specific needs of any audience, from technical buyers to executive stakeholders.

“We have business and technical buyers. A discovery call with both audiences can be incredibly challenging. Coast simplifies this extraordinarily well. We have a talk track that we can follow to show the technical buyers the APIs working on one side of the Coast demo, positioned next to the visual experiences possible to be built using those APIs. We simply didn’t have a way to solve this before Coast.”

Spreedly’s solutions consultants now build tailored, interactive API demos personalized to each prospect’s use case and branding in just five clicks, dramatically changing the tone of discovery conversations.

“I see that ‘wow’ factor almost immediately when we show prospects our APIs in Coast,” Hodgins affirmed.

By implementing Coast across the complete customer journey within Spreedly, the team could tailor demonstrations to an audience based on the experience with the platform.

A prospect with little to no background on the platform might need a comprehensive overview of the APIs, while an existing customer might only need to know the specific specs for a new feature. Using Coast, the team could outline a prescriptive solution for each customer, regardless of their experience with the Spreedly APIs.

Coast quickly became a staple of Spreedly’s sales process, consistently used in nearly 100% of customer conversations.

For Hodgins, Coast’s impact has been felt far beyond just the product.

“It’s not enough that Coast has an incredibly powerful product. It was important to us that your team was willing to build with us and partner with us. We have had that since day one.”

“Once prospects interacted with a Coast demo, close rates climbed.”

After implementing Coast across the business for six months, Spreedly conducted a lookback analysis of how and where the Coast API demos impacted the organization.

The first measurable improvement?

A 47-day reduction in its enterprise sales cycle using Coast.

“We immediately saw how quickly prospects moved through the funnel, particularly the ‘Determining Fit’ stage of the discovery process. Once we walked prospects through a Coast demo, the speed in which deals were qualified was significantly accelerated,” Hodgins recalled.

Unsurprisingly, the team has actually welcomed any resulting dropoff that now occurs with unqualified prospects after the first technical call. This newly collapsed time-to-qualification decision allows for resources to be focused on the deals that have a clear fit for Spreedly’s product and less time “spinning its wheels” on unqualified buyers.

“Coast enables us to jump straight to the value engineering aspect of our sales process much faster than before, essentially skipping multiple stages of the previous discovery process. Coast combines all of these conversations in a single discovery call. Our technical discovery process has fundamentally changed,” Hodgins remarked.

Hodgins and team also measured a significant change in converting prospective buyers to live customers.

“Coast positively impacted close rates across all customer sizes, including some of our largest and most complex deals. Overall, looking at the impact on the general sales process, my team is more accurately qualifying prospects, moving prospects through the funnel faster, and converting prospects to closed customers at a much higher rate with Coast.”

For existing customers, Coast has transformed how Spreedly approaches upsell and renewal conversations.

A sizable portion of Spreedly’s annual growth has been from productizing our new product offerings with our existing accounts. Conversations with existing customers have gone from sending over documents to utilizing an interactive demonstration of the new APIs working within the customer’s existing integration.

Internally, there has been a shift in how Hodgin’s team operates since implementing Coast.

“Coast has allowed me to define our company storytelling within our team. We have a standardized demo process that makes it easy for our SCs to deliver a consistent, professional experience, which just makes it unbelievably scalable for us as a team of SEs. We are growing extremely efficiently as a team because of Coast.”

Once a demo is presented, the work for Hodgins and team really begins.

Sending over slides in an email after a call just doesn’t work. But being able to send an interactive API demo in a link—empowering champions to sell internally—changes everything.

“Coast helps us stay embedded with our prospects throughout the sales process and within their organization. Using Coast’s demo analytics, we know when the demo is opened and by whom, enabling us to tactically support our stakeholders. We now have the visibility to help our champion internally, both with framing and positioning.”

Coast is so ingrained within the fabric of Spreedly’s organization that API products under development are often required to meet the new quality standards that Coast has influenced.

Before Coast, the product and customer facing teams might be unsure of what was actually ready to be sold externally. This has now evolved into a shared, universal certainty of product readiness under a new scientific method:

“If we can’t demo it with Coast, it’s not ready to be sold.”

As for future utilization of Coast within the Spreedly organization, Hodgins sees an opportunity to expand Coast’s role across several areas.

“We’re already exploring ways to use Coast in our technical implementation processes, creating tailored demos to show prospects exactly how the Spreedly integration will work in their applications,” Hodgins enthusiastically shared.