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.
In 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.
The 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.
Gerald 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.
The rest is the unglamorous mechanics of getting to roughly 230 customers with about twenty people. Customer number one was an existing relationship, a social media management company, sold on a prototype so manual that users had to record in Teams, download the file, and upload it by hand. Bootstrapped as long as possible with one engineer and two people on go-to-market, then a 2.4 million pre-seed once traction was real. Three account executives now, with Gerald still selling. He is candid that the first sales hires are the real breaking point, because a founder sells the vision and a rep cannot.
His backstory runs from his parents' petrol station in Austria, where his mother worked the register, through a technical high school where he built content management systems and personal finance tools that nobody ever used. That was the lesson that set the career: the best product in the world does not matter if you cannot sell it. He went from there to being the first sales and marketing hire at a startup that grew from seven people to 250.
His advice to an operator six months into building B2B SaaS is the line he repeats to himself: the limiting factor in a software company is always sales. Ignore the rest and build yourself a system that sells. Motivation gets you started, but the system is what keeps you going.
Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com
Connect with Gerald Zankl: https://at.linkedin.com/in/geraldzankl/de
Kickscale: https://kickscale.com
Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep35&utm_content=shownotes
