Welcome to another edition of Middle Tech’s Spotlight Series! Logan here. This was a fun one for me because I’m actually an early employee of the company we’re highlighting today. In case you weren’t aware, I got my job at SalesRiver through having the founder on this podcast back in 2020. He reached out to us after the interview to let us know he was hiring - for employee #5 at that time - and the rest is history. I’ve been there ~3.5 years now and the learnings have been plentiful, as we discuss in this episode.

In the Spotlight: Koby Hastings & Chris Michelson

On this week’s episode, we sat down with Koby Hastings and Chris Michelson, the CEO/Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of SalesRiver, respectively. SalesRiver is a software platform that empowers insurance sales teams to operate more efficiently, effectively, transparently, and compliantly, by providing a software platform that sits at the heart of their sales process - lead and call routing.

This is Koby’s third time talking about his company on our podcast (you may remember it as “Leadrilla” from the first two interviews - ep. 72 & ep. 163) and this time he’s joined by SalesRiver’s new CRO, Chris Michelson. Our conversation covers big updates such as how Leadrilla led to SalesRiver, their recent $4m series A funding, and their recent team growth.

Key Takeaways

1. Learnings From Establishing an Outbound Sales Process - Chris was a key hire for SalesRiver due to his extensive industry experience and has been focused on helping the company establish a repeatable outbound sales processes as they work to scale revenue.

2. Transitioning to a SaaS Revenue Model - Leadrilla was started as a platform to give independent insurance agents seamless access to leads and calls. Through a customer wanting to use Leadrilla’s technology in a new way, an opportunity to transition to a SaaS revenue model was revealed and SalesRiver was born.

3. Growing Pains From Building a Team of 23 - From a few employees wearing multiple hats, to a growing team that’s more specialized, growing the SalesRiver team to 23 people has come with a unique set of challenges and learnings.

For more information about SalesRiver, you can visit their website at SalesRiver.com

ICYMI

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