Al Gerrie explores the six year success story of ZigZag on Tech Salescraft

Our Co-Founder and CEO Al Gerrie joined James Hounslow, CEO of North Starr, for an episode of Tech Salescraft to discuss the processes behind building a tech start-up and the role of an experienced sales team. North Starr is a talent acquisition firm focused on building world-class sales teams for companies from start-ups to enterprises.

James kicked off with a rather startling statistic for any budding entrepreneurs that “only around about 20% of businesses get from Series A to either a successful exit or Series B of funding.” Unfortunately, it does not get much easier after the initial investment, with only 10% of companies securing Series C funding further down the line.

So, on the back of the successful multi-million-pound acquisition of ZigZag Global by Global Blue, Tech Salescraft wanted to find out more about how it all started for our award-winning returns management solution, and how Al laid the foundations in the early years to set the company up for success.

Al explored the importance of founder-led selling, building a robust and high-quality product, building a sales team through a pre-existing and trusted network, and ensuring you measure the success of a sales team through both the cold, hard numbers as well as the less tangible measures like engagement.   

Outlining three of the most important ingredients in ZigZag’s version of Colonel Sanders’ eleven herbs and spices, Al finished the fireside chat by emphasising, “Speed to market is really important, make sure you are building quality at the same time as speed though. There’s a really important balance there that you can’t just rush a product, as much as speed to market is important don’t sacrifice quality. Listen to customers, make sure you are attending those meetings, and that you are actually facing those customers yourself and getting that feedback first hand”

You can listen to the full episode now on YouTube!