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Nobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)
· 31:18 · Season 1, Episode 35

Nobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)

0:00 / 31:18

// TRANSMISSION

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

Key Takeaways

  • Kickscale spent three years selling sales playbooks with minimal success before pivoting to a call recording and CRM integration product after customers explicitly requested the recorder instead.
  • The company addresses two core problems: sales teams lose 66% of their time to non-selling work, and 90% of what is said in customer conversations is never captured.
  • Kickscale targets European mid-market B2B sales teams (10-100 reps) by competing on language support, data privacy, and cultural differences where Gong is weak.
  • Gerald Zankl emphasizes that sales capability is the limiting factor in software companies—the best product fails without a system to sell it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Kickscale do?

Kickscale records sales calls, writes data back into the CRM, and turns transcripts into coaching, forecasting, and product signals for B2B sales teams.

How did Kickscale pivot?

After three years selling playbooks with poor results, the company built a call recorder as a diagnostic tool. By September-October 2023, customers stopped asking about playbooks and only wanted transcripts and CRM sync, so the company rebuilt around the recorder.

Who is Kickscale's target customer?

Mid-market European B2B sales teams with 10-100 sales representatives, particularly where Gong's language support, data privacy, and cultural fit are insufficient.

How many customers does Kickscale have?

Approximately 230 customers with a team of about 20 people.

How was Kickscale funded?

The company bootstrapped as long as possible with one engineer and two go-to-market people, then raised a 2.4 million euro pre-seed round once traction was demonstrated.