Need for speed: How Skai’s in-house ‘hero’ squad fast-tracked sales

How can a company scale to service the demands of a growing sales pipeline - without slowing down innovation in an ever-changing market?

For Gal Zohar, the answer was creating a team of in-house "heroes", able to quickly build for new customers while developers stayed focused on meeting existing needs.

“There were only 50 employees when I joined,” says Zohar, VP Solutions Development at Skai, a SaaS platform for planning, activating and measuring omnichannel advertising campaigns. “Large clients were a priority and we’d give them all of our attention.”

That dedication has paid off—since Zohar joined Skai in 2009, the company experienced substantial growth.

But Skai had to overcome potential challenges to hit those heights.

Seizing the opportunity

To satisfy its large client base, the team had to constantly build new features to solve for emerging opportunities in the fast-moving world of ad-tech.

But doing so meant developers were often not available to build custom features demanded by new sales prospects.

Zohar compared it to a pendulum: Skai could either devote resources to its core roadmap, or it could swing to building bespoke features at short notice.

Lurching between these options wasn’t an option because it would slow things down at a time when Skai needed speed.

Move fast and make sales

Zohar realized the solution was to find a fast lane. If it could create a dedicated solutions team within the existing development team, Skai could forge ahead for new clients, without disrupting overall operations.

That would require adopting an emerging set of new tools, methodologies and standards.

“It made sense for our team to shift from code to a no-code set of tools,” Zohar says. “Our development team were marathon runners—we needed to be sprinters.”

He found the answer in no-code integration.

“I didn’t have a budget,” Zohar remembers. “I only had a concept of what could be done and I just needed to do what I needed to do as quickly, and simply, as possible.

“I tried Zapier, Tray.io and other tools, but they just didn’t cut it. Make’s visual, simple loops were easy to learn and start using.”

From weeks to days

Instead of spending time writing new code for specific client requests, Zohar leveraged Make’s ability to instantly connect and configure thousands of apps that would accomplish even the needs that clients thought were impossible to meet.

Using Make as a foundation, Zohar and Skai spun-up a fast-moving in-house solutions team. It is a unique approach—both the existing development team and the new unit serve the same company mission, but in very distinct ways.

“The whole methodology changed, and it gave us an advantage over our competitors," Zohar remembers.

“We work on 70 projects each year, but the crown jewels are always the quarterly flagship projects that close deals specifically because we were able to create a custom solution in a matter of days, not weeks.

“We tell them, ‘Hey, we’re going to solve this problem and show you a solution next week before you even sign a contract’.”

That’s what happened, for example, when, during a sales process with a global telecoms provider, Skai used Make to automate a major pain point, something the company didn’t think could be done. That agility helped convince the prospect to sign with Skai.

Best of both

Looking back, Zohar is happy that Skai could recapture the fast efficiency of the company he first joined 15 years earlier.

“Developers don’t need someone running into their factory and asking them to bring mass production to a halt just to fill one or two customized orders,” he says.

Instead of working together under one department, platforms like Make allow Skai’s solutions team to accomplish individual client requests independently while still working in tandem with the development team to keep Skai’s clients satisfied.

“Our team has a hero mentality. The impact-per-person, per-capita of our team is quite unique,” he says.

“It feels good to save the day.”