The Sr. Principal Strategist plays a crucial role in advising executive finance leaders, influencing decision-making, and accelerating deal progression through strategic engagement and finance-led value narratives.
Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry-leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. We empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.
Why join Coupa?
🔹 Pioneering Technology: At Coupa, we're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging the latest technology to empower our customers with greater efficiency and visibility in their spend.
🔹 Collaborative Culture: We value collaboration and teamwork, and our culture is driven by transparency, openness, and a shared commitment to excellence.
🔹 Global Impact: Join a company where your work has a global, measurable impact on our clients, the business, and each other.
Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.
The Impact of a Sr. Principal Strategist – Invoice to Pay at Coupa:
The Sr. Principal Strategist – Invoice to Pay, Treasury & Working Capital is a senior, customer-facing finance expert who serves as a trusted advisor to executive finance leaders and a strategic force multiplier for Coupa’s go-to-market organization.
This role sits at the intersection of domain authority, executive engagement, and commercial execution. Strategist partners closely with Account Executives, Industry & Value Advisors, and Solution Advisors to shape finance-led value narratives, influence C-suite decision making, and accelerate pipeline generation and deal progression.
Unlike traditional delivery or advisory roles, this position is focused on executive credibility, deal shaping, and knowledge amplification, deep expertise in Invoice to Pay, Treasury, and Working Capital to Coupa’s most strategic opportunities while scaling that expertise across the broader sales and advisory ecosystem.
This role is pivotal in shifting Coupa’s finance-led conversations from product discussions to executive decisions. You will directly influence pipeline creation, deal quality, and executive confidence—while scaling finance expertise across the organization. Success in this role is measured not by activity, but by impact on pipeline, deal velocity, win rates, and strategic credibility with finance leaders.
What You'll Do:
- Executive Advisory & Deal Shaping
- Act as a peer-level advisor to CFOs, Controllers, Treasurers, Heads of Shared Services, and Finance Transformation leaders.
- Participate in executive discovery conversations to uncover financial, operational, and risk-related priorities tied to AP, payments, liquidity, and cash management.
- Shape and influence complex, finance-led buying decisions by connecting Coupa’s capabilities to measurable financial outcomes.
- Pipeline Generation & Acceleration
- Partner with Account Executives to identify high-propensity accounts and finance-led entry points that unlock new pipeline.
- Support territory and account planning by defining where Invoice to Pay, Treasury, and Working Capital narratives can drive differentiation and urgency.
- Actively engage in priority deals to accelerate velocity, improve win rates, and increase deal size through value-based positioning.
- Value Narrative & Business Case Leadership
- Translate operational improvements into CFO-level KPIs, including cash flow, working capital efficiency, risk reduction, and cost-to-serve.
- Support the creation and validation of executive-ready business cases addressing:
- Invoice automation and cost-to-process reduction
- Payment accuracy, controls, and fraud mitigation
- Working capital optimization and liquidity improvement
- Governance, audit readiness, and compliance
- Challenge assumptions and guide customers toward fact-based, defensible investment decisions.
- Knowledge Expansion & Enablement
- Elevate finance domain fluency across Industry & Value Advisors, Solution Advisors, and Sales through:
- Best-practice frameworks and reference architectures
- Benchmarks, value assumptions, and financial models
- Deal playbooks and executive messaging
- Serve as a thought partner to internal teams, helping mature Coupa’s finance-led value motion globally.
- Coupa Solutions Focus Areas
- This role primarily supports strategic value positioning and executive engagement across:
- Coupa Invoice – Invoice intake automation, matching, exception management, controls, and scalability
- Coupa Pay – Centralized payments, virtual cards, payment controls, early pay programs, and supplier financing
- Coupa Treasury – Cash visibility, forecasting, liquidity management, intercompany netting, and financial governance
- Coupa Working Capital – Dynamic discounting, payment-term optimization, and cash acceleration
- Coupa Procure (Finance Outcomes) – PO compliance, upstream data quality, and controls that enable AP and treasury excellence
What You Will Bring to Coupa:
- 12–15+ years of experience in finance transformation, treasury, shared services, management consulting, or senior practitioner roles.
- Deep hands-on or advisory experience across Invoice to Pay, payments, treasury operations, and working capital management.
- Proven success engaging and influencing CFO, Controller, and Treasury leadership in complex enterprise environments.
- Experience supporting or shaping SaaS, value selling, pre-sales, or commercial advisory motions is strongly preferred.
- Exposure to global, multi-entity, or shared services operating models.
- Expert-level understanding of AP, payments, treasury, and working capital mechanics.
- Strong command of finance and AP KPIs (e.g., cost per invoice, touchless rate, exception rate, cycle time, DPO, cash forecasting accuracy).
- Ability to connect operational finance improvements to enterprise financial performance and shareholder value.
- Executive presence with the confidence to challenge perspectives and guide strategic conversations.
- Strong analytical capability to build, explain, and defend value models under executive scrutiny.
- Exceptional storytelling skills grounded in real-world transformation experience.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity with incomplete or imperfect data.
Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.
Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa’s Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.
Top Skills
Coupa Invoice
Coupa Pay
Coupa Treasury
Coupa Working Capital
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