Helping Sales Leaders Avoid Mistakes While Growing Sales Teams

Mark Doody, VP of Sales, Bambee

I’ve worked with KG since 2013 and he’s always been a mentor to me. Since joining Helium10, we officially hired him as an advisor and his help has been impactful. We meet weekly to discuss both strategic and tactical items as I am building out our new sales team. He’s put together spreadsheets to help me fully understand our fully loaded costs of sales and headcount plans. He’s helped me strategize our first RevOps hire (job description and comp). While I’m an experienced leader, KG continually helps me see the big picture and remain strategic and not just focus on the tactical items. I’ve been very happy with the advice KG has given me and I would recommend him to anybody if they need help building or scaling their Inside Sales teams.

Paige Craig, Managing Partner, Outlander Labs

I’ve known KG since 2010 and hired him as my VP of Sales in 2012. I’ve always said that KG is the best sales leader in SoCal and when I wanted to build out my Investor Relations team at Outlander in 2021, KG was the first person I called. He helped us strategize the kind of hires we’d want and then actually recruited people from within his own network for us and screened them objectively. He also worked with us to develop a repeatable sales process as a checklist so the new hires knew what “good” looked like. I’ve recommended KG before and I would recommend him again if a startup is looking to scale their inside sales team.

Adam Lewis, CEO, Apploi

KG has been an advisor to Apploi since March 2021 and he’s been the best sales advisor with whom we have ever engaged. I’ve gone to him for guidance on many topics including how we position our product and sales leadership hires. He even helped us hire a new sales leader from within his network for us. We’ve had KG in our weekly leadership meetings, coaching our sales and marketing leaders and even conducting training on a one on one basis with our new hires (AEs and SDRs) on the sales process and checklist he custom created for us. If you’re a CEO of an early stage tech company and want guidance and advice on how to build your inside sales teams, look no further than KG.

Alexander Gutin, Founder & President, Web Scribble

When we were making our first head of sales hire at our company, we wanted to improve our probabilities of hiring success. It’s an expensive hire and we wanted to reduce our mistakes. We hired KG to help us build out our Head of Sales hiring benchmarks, coach us on what to look for as well as interviewing our finalist candidates. In the interim, we’ve also relied heavily on KG to help guide us on additional strategies we should be considering given his experience building sales teams at companies of our size and given his experience in the job board/HR tech space/two-sided networks space. His experience and fresh perspectives have been very helpful to us.

Ryan Iyengar, CRO/President, Helium 10

I’ve worked with KG since I started at ZipRecruiter in October 2013, and was so impressed with how KG built the massive Inside Sales team from scratch, while working with myself and other leaders at the company. Over the years, I’ve gone to KG to pick his brain about Inside Sales teams at the other tech companies I’ve been at, and when I became CRO of Helium10, I hired KG as an advisor. What I found most valuable was being able to get objective feedback on strategy as well as tactics. I’ve chatted with other sales leaders who would focus on one or the other but since KG has walked the walk, he is able to be both strategic and tactical. I only wish I could have hired him full time!

Danilo Stern-Sapad, CEO, Blixo

I worked with KG at BetterWorks back in 2011 and saw firsthand how he built and managed top performing inside sales teams. Since then, we’ve both been part of the senior leadership of Unicorn companies in Los Angeles and he’s always the first person who comes to mind when I have questions about sales strategies and tactics for my startups. At my most recent startup, Blixo, I hired KG as an advisor to guide me on hiring SDRs, SDR metrics, sales model evaluation, marketing programs, and I even got KG on a prospect sales call with me to provide me with direct sales coaching, which led to me closing my biggest client. If you’re building an inside sales team, I highly recommend talking to KG first.

Alexey Gutin, CEO, Web Scribble

When we were making our first head of sales hire at our company, we wanted to improve our probabilities of hiring success. It’s an expensive hire and we wanted to reduce our mistakes. We hired KG to help us build out our Head of Sales hiring benchmarks, coach us on what to look for as well as interviewing our finalist candidates. In the interim, we’ve also relied heavily on KG to help guide us on additional strategies we should be considering given his experience building sales teams at companies of our size and given his experience in the job board/HR tech space/two-sided networks space. His experience and fresh perspectives have been very helpful to us.

Andrew Morgan, Head of Sales, Scripted

I’ve led several sales teams in the past but I’ve never had a coach and advisor like KG. Since he’s seen so many situations himself over his career, he’s given me extremely practical advice on how to lead my inside sales team (consisting of SDRs, AEs and AMs). Specifically, he’s helped me with improving our hiring process, training program development, managing up, expectation setting, compensation plans, dealing with “morale issues,” performance management / terminations, best practices in sales technology selection, and much more. He’s been very helpful to me in accelerating my sales leadership career and I would certainly recommend KG.

Brian Carrillo, Head of Sales, Apploi

KG and I worked together for years and when Apploi (a startup KG was advising) was looking for somebody to run their sales team, I was happy to learn more and eventually came on board to lead their sales teams. Having KG there as a coach for the past year to help me get up to speed and build and manage my Enterprise and Inside Sales teams was incredibly valuable as he helped me avoid potential missteps and helped me confirm that my strategies and tactics were correct. If you’re leading a sales team at a startup, KG can help you build and grow your sales team. I recommend him.

Jake Krum, Co-Founder, Trim Landscaping

KG has helped us think strategically about our business and give us tactical advice through his experience with other fast growing companies. One area in particular is our sales hiring process. We feel much more confident about our hires because we structured our interview process to focus on and dig deep into the key attributes we are hiring for like resourcefulness, initiative and coach-ability. We now feel like we're good at making successful sales hires.

Nicole Clark, Co-founder & CEO, Trellis

It feels like Kevin is part of the team. We can start talking about high level items (which is where most advisors stop) and then really gameplan, right on that call, and get tactical quickly to solve immediate problems. He’s helped us with real, working headcount models. He’s helped us come up with ways to measure the team. He’s helped us with performance management systems for our salespeople. He’s one of the best advisors we’ve ever worked with at Trellis.

Founder & CEO, UpKeep

At a time when we were between sales leaders, KG helped us tactically with sales rep coaching, pipeline reviews, forecasting as well as strategic, higher level projects around performance management. He was a tremendous help during this critical time and I would highly recommend using him.

Jeremy Bellinghausen, CEO, Scripted

I’ve known Kevin since 2006 when we worked together at Business.com and helped grow and sell the company for $350million. As an inside sales expert, I’ve called on him over the years for go-to-market guidance and advice and in 2021 decided to hire him formally as an advisor to our sales team and myself. Best money I’ve spent on a sales advisor because Kevin has the unique ability to talk strategically and at a high level but then given his experience with early stage and growing startups, rolls up his sleeves with practical guidance and work product to really help us in the moment. If you’re looking for an advisor to help you with your GTM strategies, call on KG.

Ben Souva, Co-Founder, Trim Landscaping

KG has helped us think strategically about our business and give us tactical advice through his experience with other fast growing companies. One area in particular is our sales hiring process. We feel much more confident about our hires because we structured our interview process to focus on and dig deep into the key attributes we are hiring for like resourcefulness, initiative and coach-ability. We now feel like we're good at making successful sales hires.

Nima Hakimi, CEO & Co-Founder, Convoso

I’ve known KG for nearly 10 years now and hired him recently to help us with a leadership transition as we’re growing our sales team and his advice has been immensely helpful. He’s helped us in many areas including strategic areas like creating a hiring process for a Head of Sales, hiring best practices, and tactical areas like running Forecast Calls, 1 on 1s, sales meetings and more. It’s clear why they call KG an expert.

Alexandra Sacani, VP of RevOps, Scripted

Man KG gets hands-on and gets stuff done! Our CEO introduced us and wanted KG to help us with more of the sales ops issues and challenges we were facing. He wrote up a whole document delineating how the sales dashboards (for both AEs and SDRs) should work and then got on calls with me in working sessions to help us bring them to life in our CRM so we could finally get out of Google sheets. That’s more than some high level advisor for sure. Given his experience with early stage, fast growing start ups, we even got really gritty and worked up some Zapier and Calendly work-arounds that helped us with our lead distribution process. Thanks for your help KG!

David Gable, Head of Sales, Kixie

Thank you for being such an incredible mentor to me as I try to get a firm grasp of how to be a great revenue leader.

You actually gave me a renewed impression of advisors/coaches/consultants (or at least of how good consultants can be), after experiencing many who acted much like bad outside counsel tends to act. Lots of billable hours, very little actionable/helpful advice.

You’ve made an indelible impact on Kixie and my career.

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