10. Mitchell Powers, VP Commercial at Pleo - Scaling Go-to-Market Teams Across Fintech, from GoCardless to Pleo

Mitchell Powers has spent the last decade building go-to-market teams inside some of fintech's most important companies. He started out coaching rowing at Oxford and trading physical commodities like coal and biofuels, then broke into tech sales by building the B2B function from scratch at Pact Coffee. At GoCardless he was the first head of SMB sales, ran the UK market top to bottom, and helped drive the company's move into enterprise, contributing around £100M in contract value. After leading enterprise and open banking sales at Trustly, he's now VP of Commercial at Pleo, running a 120-person team across account executives, SDRs, account management and partnerships. In this episode Mitchell breaks down how he scales sales teams as they grow, the "Why Now, Why Anything, Why Us" framework he's used to anchor enterprise deals at both GoCardless and Pleo, how he hires for character and resilience over polish, and where AI actually helps in sales versus where over-relying on it gets in the way. A practical look at what it takes to build and lead go-to-market teams in financial technology, and how the enterprise transition stretches every part of a business.