Payaza: from spreadsheets to one shared sales pipeline

Payaza is a payments infrastructure company in Lagos, Nigeria. Its merchant sales team finds businesses, signs them up and takes each one through onboarding and integration until it goes live. Since September 2026 that team has worked from Socianet: one shared pipeline, an owner on every deal, a dashboard for the VP of Sales and reminders that run on their own.

This case study sets out where the team started, what we set up and what changed. It is about how the team works. Payaza's own figures on deals, merchants and payments stay private.

At a glance

The starting point

Each of Payaza's sales agents worked their own prospect list, exported from Apollo into Excel. That is how most fintech sales teams start, and it works for one person. For a team it brings three problems.

• Nobody sees the whole pipeline. The weekly picture comes from each agent's own update, and the report for the Monday and Friday meetings is put together by hand.
• Follow-up runs on memory. A merchant who goes quiet stays quiet unless the agent remembers to call.
• The history sits with the sheet. When an agent moves on, their merchants, notes and next steps can go with them.

Payaza wanted the whole team in one place, a weekly view the VP of Sales could trust, and fewer merchants slipping between first contact and going live.

What we set up

1. One pipeline for merchant deals. Stages follow a merchant from first contact through onboarding and integration to going live, so every deal sits at a stage and every agent uses the same words for it.
2. The spreadsheets, brought in and cleaned. We matched each sheet's columns, removed sample and blank rows, and set each deal's stage and status. When a file failed in the importer, we found the cause and brought the deals in for the agent. One agent's file of 708 rows went in as 632 clean records; 120 deals missing from another agent's list were added the same day.
3. An owner on every deal. Deals imported from several sheets had their agent recorded in the wrong field, so the dashboards showed no owners. We moved every deal to its agent's name without changing anything else, and each agent now opens their own list.
4. Two dashboards. The VP of Sales has a weekly review of the whole pipeline: deals by stage, merchants onboarded and live, and the in-flight deals to chase. Each agent has “My deals”: the same view, showing only their own.
5. What moved this week, not only what exists. Every deal is stamped with the date it changes stage, so the dashboards show this week's onboardings, go-lives and lost deals, not only running totals.
6. The weekly report fills itself. Payaza already had a reporting template: meetings booked and held, new and existing merchants engaged, onboarding, onboarded, go-live, integrating, deals lost, next steps and blockers. All eleven lines now sit on each agent's dashboard, ready for the Monday plan and the Friday review.
7. Reply reminders. If a message on a deal goes unanswered for 15 minutes, its owner is alerted. After an hour, the VP of Sales is told.
8. A full-screen table for the longest lists. For agents who work hundreds of merchants at once, a table of up to 1,000 deals a page, with the columns they choose and the stage changed straight from the row. It is in testing with the team now.

What changed for the team

• Each agent opens one list: their own deals, each with a stage and a next step.
• The VP of Sales sees the whole team's pipeline, and this week's movement, without asking for an update.
• The Monday and Friday report is on screen before the meeting starts.
• A merchant's message does not sit unanswered without someone being told.
• When an agent moves on, their merchants, notes and history stay with Payaza.

This describes what is set up in Payaza's account. We have left out Payaza's own figures on deals, merchants and payments: they are Payaza's to share.

How we work with Payaza

• A weekly working session with the team. Each one has a written guide: what is new, what to try this week and what we need from Payaza.
• Every question becomes a fix or a guide. Two Help Centre guides came straight from the team: connect your email and calendar and change a deal's stage from the list.
• Support in the same system. Each request is logged as a ticket, worked and closed in Socianet, so nothing waits in someone's inbox.
• Every seat included. Socianet charges one flat price for the team, so adding an agent costs nothing extra.

What a sales team can take from it

• Give every deal an owner before you build a report. A dashboard is only as good as the name on each deal. Our guide to sales pipeline stages shows how to set the stages up first.
• Count what moved, not only what exists. A running total hides a quiet week. Stamp the date a deal changes stage and review the movement. See how to run a weekly pipeline review.
• Keep the report your team already uses. Payaza's template stayed the same; it now counts itself. People adopt a system faster when the Monday meeting looks familiar.
• Let reminders do the remembering. A reply that waits loses the merchant to someone faster. The research is in lead response time statistics.

More on how this works for agents signing up merchants and customers: Socianet for financial services and fintech.