Lessons - How to Build a Sales Team, Kyle James, VP Sales at Zentap

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of Success Story. Today you're going to hear from Kyle James, VP of Sales at ZenTap. Kyle was the first sales hire and founding team member of ZenTap. ZenTap is a SaaS product, AKA White Gloves Service, and their service automatically creates massive amounts of meaningful and impactful content marketing material while simultaneously running effective campaigns for individuals in the real estate industry. So ZenTap with the help of Kyle and the founding team is an insane success story. Kyle scaled the business to $5 million in revenue through no tech and pure cold calling in year one. The company has grown to 50 employees, 30 of them being sales under the leadership of Kyle in two years. Today we're going to speak about some of the lessons that Kyle has learned and deployed building a sales team from the ground up. So how do you hire, do you structure inside sales team, outside sales team, account executives, ISRs, SDRs, BDRs, all these sales terms? What did Kyle do to build out this effective sales team and then what type of KPIs that he set for the sales team so that they were successful without any sort of bias? Yeah, so it's inside, inside sales and basically it depends on what time period. So I'll just stick to right now, so what we're doing now. Now we're bringing on people starting them as an SDR for a month and then they will all, if they meet their KPIs, will transform into an AE. And the AE's are charged as an acquisition based role, right? So they're charged with getting the month to month deal in the door. Once the credit card is on file and they've agreed to pay and the basic data and information is there, they transfer the call over to an account manager. The account manager verifies all the information on the file will inform the client about the annual or semi-annual upsells that we have available at any given time and then continue to kind of keep an eye on their account and then our client success division kind of takes the ball from there and really works with the clients to make sure that they're adopting the software, that everything's according to plan and also it helps to identify clients that are starting to consider other services that we have in that we're offering at the time or just upgrading to an annual service. And I keep sort of doubling down on these like from the ground up questions because it's very cool and like not everybody has the opportunity to speak to somebody who was part of a high growth, start a success story, you know, from the very beginning. So I'm going to keep asking these questions because I think it's very cool. I just say like understand like your thought process is you as you sort of built out this team because you've seen success, that's why really. So when you when you mapped out these KPIs, you know, you have KPIs developed for all these different departments, how have you mapped out the KPIs so that you see success across all your organization and you've had the opportunity to do it from the ground up. So maybe you speak to sort of how you've developed those. Yeah, so I think a lot of it was seen what was feasible and practical, you know, out of the gate, remember when we first started a backhouse, it was very experimental, right? And kind of learning, you know, what the KPIs could even be. So what we saw was we kind of just did an average weighted from like our strongest reps that we've had over time to our weakest reps that I don't want to say weakest, but maybe most untrained or very less evolved sales reps that could still cut, you know, cut it, right? So we've had a lot of money for the company in some way, but may have not been like the strongest people at the time. And then we made it somewhere right in the middle there, right? So with seasonality, like for instance, like this month, we adopted and kind of changed the KPIs just a little bit to adapt to the seasonality of it because a lot of agents are, you know, kind of in that mindset of let's wait until January, of course. And you know, obviously we have strategies to try to overcome that, get them to see the value of marketing when other agents are taking their foot off the gas and we have, but you know, seasonality, seasonality to some extent, right? So we try to keep it flexible and make sure that it's something that's attainable, right? That is something that is realistic for them to hit, but also not something that's, you know, easy and that's not going to be challenging and that they're not going to have to, you know, really show up every day and give their best effort to reach as well too.