Taking payments from side feature to $7M ARR
- Client
- PandaDoc, the document workflow and eSignature platform for sales teams
- My role
- Head of Marketing – Payments
- Dates
- Jul 2023 – Jul 2025
- Scope
- GTM for the payments vertical, post-acquisition integration, launches
The starting point
PandaDoc bought Denario in August 2023 to close the last gap in quote-to-cash: getting paid. It's an elegant idea on a slide. In reality, almost nobody used payments. The team sat inside an incubation unit with little say in the wider org, and a 700-person company was busy doing everything else.
The job was to make payments something sales teams actually switched on, not just a checkbox on a pricing page.
What I did
Ran a merger integration, not just a migration.
I brought the Denario playbook into PandaDoc's product marketing org. That meant aligning with product, sales and CS on who payments is for, which moments in the document flow it belongs to, and how to talk about it without sounding like a bank.
Co-designed the solution with product.
I took part in preliminary calls with clients to understand how they wanted to get paid, then worked with the product team to shape the Payments app around what we heard.
Built payments GTM around product moments.
I owned the go-to-market for the big releases, including deposit-based Installments and the new Payments app, with positioning, launch plans and enablement for customer-facing teams. To launch the Payments app successfully, I worked across teams throughout the PandaDoc org, from product and sales to customer success.
Worked cross-functionally to drive adoption.
With product and sales, I ran global initiatives to get existing customers to activate payments inside the documents they were already sending. Adoption was the metric, not page views.
Moved payments out of the incubator.
Payments went from an experiment to part of PandaDoc's core value story. When PandaDoc launched Rooms in 2024, payments was part of the shared deal workspace from day one.
Results
- Payments adoption grew from 0 to 5% of users
- The payments feature reached $7M ARR
- I led payments marketing as PandaDoc crossed $100M ARR in August 2024, with 56,000+ customers and 700+ people worldwide
Acquired products die in one of two ways: they get ignored, or they get "integrated" into oblivion. The way out is to tie the new thing to a moment customers already have. Nobody wants "payments". Everybody wants the contract signed and the money in.