Monday, March 10, 2014YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- When you step off the elevator on the third floor of the Youngstown Business Incubator, you find a nondescript door not far from the office of U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-13 Ohio. Inside is nothing but an old couch, three desks and a banner hanging on the wall that says SalesKatz in big green letters.
While it doesn’t look like much, CEO Ken Zebracki has big plans for this space.
“My sales forecast is very aggressive,” says Zebracki, “I think we can be a $50 million to $70 million company. I’m realistically thinking in 12 to 18 months we can be at 50 employees – all high-tech jobs.”
Why? Zebracki and his partner, Dick Longoria, say the product they’re getting ready to launch will address the No. 1 challenge every business faces – sales.
“Salespeople everyday are looking for that next needle in the haystack,” explains Zebracki. “SalesKatz is a tool that will help find that next sale.”
Zebracki has been working on the product from his office in Cleveland. For the past nine months, Longoria has been commuting there each week from his home in Omaha, Neb. Now they’re in the process of relocating entirely to Youngstown.
“I met, by chance, a great guy by the name of Jim Cossler,” Zebracki relates. Cossler, CEO of the YBI, told him SalesKatz would be a great fit. But Zebracki was skeptical.
“I didn’t believe him because I’ve worked with different places like this in the past and I just found them to be a lot of lip service,” Zebracki says. “After coming here a few times, there was a vibe in the air, an energy. It’s like a melting pot for techno-geeks. And it’s really cool because everybody works together.”
“In Omaha there are a number of incubators but they follow more of the traditional role,” Longoria says. “Youngstown is more innovative and more in tune with getting jobs in Ohio and making sure the companies succeed. So I think the way they approach it is more unique in the incubator arena, if you will.”
Now the pair is waiting for a wall to come down so their incubator space can be expanded to make room for the six employees coming in from Cleveland. The goal is to roll out the SalesKatz Rev 2 version in about 90 days. They say it will be cheaper than most traditional CRM (customer relationship management) systems and revolutionize sales.
Zebracki recounts his own frustration when he was in sales. “I’d probably make 100 calls a day to find one person that had a potential need for my product. It’s a waste of time. I would spend hours on the phone.”
SalesKatz allows the salesman to enter profile information about the attributes of the product, potential markets and likely buyers.
Zebracki says the program then scours more than 60,000 sources throughout the Web to help align a buyer in need with the product or service the salesman is trying to sell.
“We’re combining CRM and business intelligence to create a whole new product category that is an effective tool for a salesperson,” says Zebracki. “Because if you think about it, there are really no tools for a salesperson to use.”
Zebracki and Longoria explain that statement by saying traditional CRM systems are designed for management. SalesKatz is a tool for people in sales.
“We give a salesperson high-probability leads that they can call knowing the company has a reason to talk to them, Longaria says. “It makes the sales game so much more efficient and profitable.”
Longoria explains how it works. Once the profile information is entered, the salesman is greeted with a dashboard, as it’s called, on the computer each morning. It provides everything needed to get the job done.
Salesmen have quick access to their mail and their calendars. And SalesKatz, based on the product and service profiles and other information including news gleaned from the Internet, will then inform the salesman whom he should call that day.
“I can then say, ‘I understand your company is going through an initiative at your plant. Our product and services can help you meet that requirement. Do we have a reason to talk, yes or no?’
“We don’t want to bombard a user with an overload of information,” Longoria elaborates.
“We want to make sure it’s relevant, so we’re going to see information about the owner of this potential company. We’re going to see information about his biography, where he went to school, his hobbies – anything that’s available on the Web we’re going to go scrape and find and present it to you,” he says. “Because if we went to the same university, that’s going to be important to me in the sales process, as are charities or hobbies. Those are all ways for me to make a personal connection to elevate the level of the sale.”
An integral part of what makes SalesKatz unique is that it uses IQware Solutions, Longoria says. The software company is based in nearby Richfield. IQware allows SalesKatz to be flexible and change programming on the fly.
And according to chief marketing officer Mark Ricker, it’s the only platform that’s never been hacked.
“IQware allows SalesKatz to literally do anything they want for their customer on a custom basis or otherwise,” he says.
And Ricker says right now SalesKatz has the exclusive license with IQware in the CRM realm.
“It’s just a fantastic technology that fills a huge, huge need in business,” says the YBI’s Cossler of SalesKatz. “The fact they’re in Youngstown when they’re from Cleveland and other areas, I think, is a testament to what Youngstown is doing.”
And Zebracki has reason to be optimistic as well. Already, he says, he has prospects lined up with many Fortune 500 and midsized companies that have expressed interest in the program for their sales teams.
As for those projected 50 high tech jobs that would be created in the next year or so? Zebracki says they will all remain in Youngstown.
“That’s our commitment to Youngstown, simply because of the YBI,” he says. “The YBI’s been great to us and they’ve been a valuable partner.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story first appeared in March edition of The Business Journal as part of our year-long focus on Trending: TechBelt.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our free daily email headlines and to our twice-monthly print edition.