Specialist
Former Senior Account Director at Coupa Software Inc
Agenda
- Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP) and its business spend management solutions
- Industry overview and competitive landscape, highlighting larger platform companies and smaller best-of-breed providers
- Growth strategy and trajectory, and impact of the coronavirus
- Outlook for H2 2020 and into 2021
Questions
1.
How would you describe Coupa Software and what it does?
2.
Coupa talks about how it has connected over 1,000 organisations with more than five million suppliers globally. The company also talks about the flexibility and real-time nature of the platform. How would you describe the differentiation of the platform beyond the cloud aspect?
3.
Coupa provides something called Community Intelligence, basically providing details around transactions happening across the community, and trying to identify and communicate best practices. There also is something called Coupa Advantage, where it leverages the collective buying power of customers. How important do you think that community element is to not only the initial sales and value proposition, but also as companies are using the platform?
4.
When Coupa is offering procurement, invoicing, expense management and payment solutions, would you say all of those are entirely or almost entirely cloud and fully integrated? Are there certain parts that are not as cloud-focused? Does Coupa achieve seminal integration across these categories?
5.
Can you talk about Coupa’s supporting modules? It has made strategic sourcing and spend analysis, contract management, supplier management and contingent workforce management available as add-ons. How important would you say those are? Are they nice to haves, or do many clients make extensive use of those?
6.
What percentage of Coupa’s revenue do you think comes from the core offering of procurement, invoicing, expense management and payments vs the supporting modules?
7.
Would you say that procurement is still the largest contributor to Coupa’s revenue? I think it recently account for a quarter of revenue. Or is it one of the other core modules such as invoicing or expense management?
8.
How would Coupa generally describe the ROI benefits to new customers? Is there a specific percentage or dollar amount attached to the customer benefit over the first year, or something like that? Presumably ROI can be measured compared to using other solutions, and starting to use best practices for this type of activity.
9.
Coupa has cited a TAM of USD 56bn, excluding Coupa Pay. What do you think about that number? Where do you think the biggest opportunity is, and what are your thoughts on overall industry growth, especially as it seems there’s a lot of consolidation at the top with the larger vendors? Workday acquired Scout RFP last year. What are your thoughts on overall category growth?
10.
Do you think the industry will continue to consolidate around Coupa, and SAP, Oracle and Workday, or do you think there will still be a place for smaller specialist providers?
11.
Do you have any thoughts about the Workday-Scout RFP combination? That was a some USD 540m deal that was complete in December 2019. Do you think that’s had any impact in the marketplace, enabling Workday to gain share or even retain more business?
12.
Esker is a Europe-based company with what I understand is a decent presence in the US. Is that a name that has come up in the context of what you’re doing currently or when you were at Coupa?
13.
What are your thoughts on the potential for accounting-based players such as Intuit with QuickBooks and Xero moving into this space?
14.
It seems Coupa is focused on the Fortune 1000, so it competes with SAP, Oracle and Workday. Coupa seemingly wins through its cloud platform or by having so many different functionalities within the suite. When Coupa loses, why is that? Is it typically because a customer is renewing with someone else?
15.
What is Coupa’s growth strategy? What are the most significant drivers of top-line growth?
16.
Is there a dedicated internal team at Coupa for selling to existing customers? Are there customer success incentives to increase revenues per customer? Some think Coupa could do more when it comes to targeting, selling and servicing existing customers.
17.
What are your thoughts on Coupa Pay? It seems to be a significant opportunity. It was extensively discussed during the company’s Q1 conference call. It indicated that it supports around 100 customers using Coupa Pay, and about half of them were described as new customers. It talked about the prevalence of paper cheques, the implementation of digital cheque programmes and the elimination of the need for people to go back to offices and deal with paper. Coupa’s CFO Todd Ford indicated that Coupa Pay-involved deals were 20% larger than those without. Do you have any sense of the importance of Coupa Pay?
18.
What are your thoughts on the impact of the coronavirus and lockdowns on Coupa? The company talked about April being stronger than March. What do you think the longer-term implications of th coronavirus will be for Coupa?
19.
You mentioned Coupa being more of an indirect spend management-type solution. Do you think the company plans to or should make a bigger push into direct spend management industries, such as manufacturing?
20.
What is your outlook for Coupa Software over the next couple of years? What are its biggest opportunities and risks?
