Driving Revenue with Strategic Partners and Operational Excellence with Michele Shepard of Emburse

Michele Shepard, Chief Revenue Officer at Emburse, brings over 25 years of experience driving record-setting growth and scale, and shares her journey from strategic advisor and founder to current CRO. 

This episode covers Michele's approach to 'failing fast,' predicting future revenue streams, the importance of employee experience in revenue lifecycle management, and harnessing AI in business processes. 

About the Guest:

With over 25 years of experience, Michele Shepard, Chief Revenue Officer at Emburse, has led companies to record-setting revenue growth and scale with a passion for developing forward-thinking customer and employee engagement strategies across sales, marketing, and customer success. Michele previously served as the Chief Commercial Officer at Paya (now Nuvei Corporation), a prominent integrated payment solutions provider. Before Paya, she was the Chief Revenue Officer at Insurity and Vertafore, where she played a pivotal role in implementing go-to-market plans that accelerated market expansion, achieved operational improvement, and drove profitable growth. In addition to her corporate leadership roles, Michele has held several board and strategic advisory positions in the payments, fintech, and non-profit education and healthcare sectors, where she contributed to strategic planning and achieved notable results.

Guest Highlights:

“Building relationships matter—understanding not only the goals but the pain points of a particular company and going deeper into the persona, our ideal customer profile, and what's important to them.”

“ Failing fast means that when we've got it wrong, we're not going to continue down the path just to continue down the path… Maybe even stop some of the things that we are doing so that we can prioritize the things that are actually going to make us successful.”

 “Where we've been super successful is focused on key verticals, whether it's legal, healthcare, professional services, or manufacturing—but we are finding if we go more broadly in our marketing and in our segmentation, we get less results.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(02:00) -  Innovative Strategies and Partnership
*(06:20) -  Fail Fast: Lessons in Innovation
*(11:05) -  Predictive Pathways and Revenue Strategies
*(16:05) -   Employee Experience and Revenue Lifecycle Management
*(24:50) -  AI and Technology in Revenue Management

Links & Resources:

• Phil’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/phildillard
• Michele’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/michele-shepard-a02382

Our Sponsors:  
About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent and innovation led company with 738,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Accenture Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients succeed and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com. 

About Conga

Conga crushes complexity in an increasingly complex world. With our Revenue Lifecycle Management solution, we transform each company’s unique complexities for order configuration, execution, fulfillment, and contract renewal processes with a unified data model that adapts to ever-changing business requirements and aligns the understanding and efforts of every team. Our approach is grounded in the Conga Way, a framework of entrepreneurial spirit and achieving together to champion our 11,000+ customers. We’re committed to our customers and to removing complexity in an increasingly complex world. Our solutions quickly adapt to changing business models so you can normalize your revenue management processes. 

Conga has global operations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at conga.com or follow Conga on Twitter: @congahq.