{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories","title":"Nobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1878,"description":"Gerald Zankl and his co-founders spent three years selling sales playbooks. The playbooks were good. Almost nobody bought them. So they built a recorder to prove to sales reps that they needed the playbooks, and the customers told them to keep the recorder and throw the playbooks away.\nIn this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Gerald Zankl, founder of Kickscale, the conversation and revenue intelligence platform built for European B2B sales teams. Gerald opens with the two numbers the company exists to attack: sales teams lose roughly 66 percent of their time to non-selling work, and about 90 percent of what gets said in customer conversations is never captured anywhere. Kickscale records the calls, writes the data back into the CRM, and turns the transcripts into coaching, forecasting and product signal.\nThe pivot is the story. The company is about six years old, but the product is three. The first three years were content, video tutorials and playbooks that were, in Gerald's words, hard to sell. The recorder started as a diagnostic to show reps what they were doing wrong. By September and October of 2023 the feedback was unmistakable: nobody asked about the playbooks anymore, everybody asked about the transcripts and the CRM sync. They rebuilt the whole company around the thing they had made as a means to an end.\nGerald is direct about competing with a category leader. Kickscale is a Gong-like solution for Europe, and he names Gong as a great company doing 500 million in ARR rather than pretending otherwise. His wedge is where Gong is heavy: languages, data privacy, and the cultural differences in how European teams sell. The ICP is mid-market, teams with somewhere between ten and a hundred reps, a segment he had personally tried and failed to buy Gong for at a previous company.\nThe rest is the unglamorous mechanics of getting to roughly 230 customers with about twenty people. Customer number one was an existing...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/qSYc3cBdFcsAT9NoNJB-b1WOXf_eKr0fZMdzan3rr64/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8xNDI0/Y2Y5ZGEyNjlhMWQ4/OGRiNDdjNTc5YjQ3/YTQzOS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}