Why We Started Kickscale

For the last nine months, Kickscale has been working hard on building a SaaS platform. The platform and our consulting services will enable B2B revenue teams to improve pipeline generation, and conversion rates by empowering and aligning marketing & sales teams.

Customers like Bitmovin, Anyline, Holo Light, Hyperwave, and Kaleido.ai scale their business faster and more efficiently with Kickscale.

To explain what we’re offering, and why, let’s start with a little background.

Since 2015, two of the three Kickscale founders (Markus and I) have been working in the area of sales and outbound marketing at the very successful startup and video streaming company Bitmovin. During this time we had the chance to apply best-in-class processes, e.g. outbound processes to pre-schedule 400+ meetings at trade shows, content marketing processes to increase the number of leads every month by +20%, onboarding playbooks for SDRs and BDRs to decrease ramp time, and many more. Some of these processes were taught by world-renowned incubator Y Combinator. By applying these processes we achieved a fast-growing sales pipeline, hundreds of sales meetings with prospects, and millions in revenue increases.

In late 2018 we were approached by today’s co-founder Herwig about a potential project to help a Swiss-based startup to scale their business. Our experience was limited to helping one or two organizations at the time, but we really liked the challenge: How to grow business fast and empower marketing and sales teams is still a huge challenge. By providing playbooks, standard operating procedures, and our know-how we helped to scale teams faster and get better results. This first official project proved really successful and we were keen to work with other startups to help them grow their business by enabling collaboration between sales and marketing teams, providing best-in-class processes as well as supercharging their outbound processes.

Since then, we have been working together with a mix of startups and traditional businesses to accelerate their outbound sales efforts. With these projects, we developed a repeatable and measurable process that new and existing customers can quickly and easily implement and operationalize. Our next step of development was to educate and help B2B organizations scale their presence and efficiency at trade shows, in-person events, virtual events, outbound campaigns, demand generation campaigns, and other marketing, sales, and go-to-market campaigns.

Along the way, we recognized that a lot of different tools and processes are necessary to properly scale marketing and sales teams. In our research, we found that there were no existing platforms or services that align marketing and sales teams and show them HOW to empower the business development process and pipeline generation efforts. Although there were a few solutions that offered pieces, there was no unified method that enabled sales and marketing teams to collaborate and adopt standard operating procedures at every stage of the demand generation process: from planning campaigns, the collaboration between teams, booking & organizing sales meetings, and then analyzing the results of the processes and campaigns.

In 2020, we officially founded Kickscale as a consulting and SaaS firm. So why did we focus on processes that accelerate pipeline generation and align marketing and sales?

First and foremost, pipeline generation and increasing revenue is the #1 business issue. Growing and establishing a predictable early-stage sales pipeline is the most important piece of the sales process. However, most companies struggle with pipeline generation. Services on the market, e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, etc. give you insights about what happened, but not about how to be successful.

However, business's buying processes have changed drastically and will continue to change. This change was further accelerated by COVID, according to Gartner’s Sales Roadmap for Growth more than 50% of buyers don’t want to talk to a sales representative. In fact, 86% of CSOs and CROs say that changing buyer preferences affect their ability to hit their numbers, while only 6% of surveyed CSOs and CROs say they are confident about their team’s ability to meet or exceed revenue goals.

Thus it is becoming evident that aligning commercial resources - marketing, sales, and product teams - around functional buying activities is becoming more and more important for an organization’s go-to-market strategy.

Second, after analyzing the major challenges of our customers, we realized something surprising: marketing & sales teams are not aligned most of the time. Sure, the overall goal of both teams is to generate revenue and that the marketing team is responsible for generating leads and/or setting up meetings that the sales team will convert into opportunities and closed deals. But when it comes to alignment and empowerment, both teams rarely work together and rarely collaborate to maximize revenue generation. International research from the Aberdeen Group shows that when marketing & sales are not aligned, organizations are experiencing 32% less revenue, 36% less customer retention, and 38% lower win rates. Regardless of the size of your business, this potential loss of income is a significant and long-standing issue throughout every industry. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 60 to 70% of the content is never used by the sales team because it is irrelevant. Furthermore, Hubspot reports 79% of marketing leads never convert. If both teams were on the same page, this would not happen.

Third, there are no software applications allowing marketing & sales teams to collaborate, share know-how and follow existing and create their very own best-in-class processes to accelerate revenue generation. Most of the collaboration and planning efforts are still managed within traditional sheets, email, or Slack. Marketing teams work with their marketing software, sales teams work with their sales software. A lot of the processes between marketing and sales are manual with a loss of information between the different steps and the different teams.

We started Kickscale to increase revenue by aligning marketing & sales teams.

We do that with standard operating procedures and with a lot more.

Wanna hear more about our services or need help with scaling your sales and marketing teams?

Contact us if you want to learn more