As I teased in our last PS From PSP section, there are now two new client success stories over on the website—Yapta and GLDN. This announcement will summarize our experience with Yapta, while Part Two (coming soon!) will look at GLDN.
Yapta, based in Pioneer Square, helps companies save money on travel costs—flights, hotels, rental cars. Michael Smith, Yapta’s Chief Revenue Officer, told us the company’s startup phase has been a pretty dizzying trip of its own. Like so many young and dynamic tech firms, it flew fast and lean.
“We were going through this crazy growth curve, and the company had never had a formal sales structure,” Smith said. “So we had some real gaps in performance, and we knew that. We couldn’t even produce a forecast.”
In the autumn of 2018, Smith—a relative newcomer at Yapta—began the process of building an inside-sales team in time for a worldwide sales kickoff the following January.
That timetable was… ambitious. But Michael had been through a quick-turn team buildup before. When he was at Changepoint, he worked with Peckman Search Partners to develop a sales team on an aggressive deadline. So he called us up to do it again with his new company.
“I knew Gina had extensive contacts in the Puget Sound from prior searches and from other companies, so her ability to quickly match potential candidates with our roles was really high,” he said.
Michael, you flatter me! Do go on!
“Gina takes the time to really understand what the company needs and is looking for in terms of human capital, and puts that into a sales pitch that’s super compelling,” he said. “In effectively a zero-percent-unemployment market, that’s what you need a recruiter to do.”
And that’s exactly what our firm did in Yapta’s case. As if they hadn’t set a sufficiently high bar for themselves already, they realized that they needed not only inside-sales professionals, but highly seasoned channel-sales pros as well.
Then, as staff interviews began, it became clear that the team would need us to coach them on how to conduct this part of the process. Now it was December—mere weeks away from the January 15 sales kickoff.
But no worries—we had it in the bag, turning up prospects that we knew would meet Yapta’s needs. “The quality of candidates we got was really, really high,” Michael said.
By the January 15 kickoff, all of the sales positions were filled except one. For Peckman Search Partners, it was an example of how we can go in, assess an organizational structure, and build out a sales capability in a way that ideally matches the client’s needs—even when the clock is ticking LOUD. Pretty cool, huh? To read more, check out our website!
