To celebrate Bandalier’s sixth birthday, we want to share the history behind our kaizen culture and our annual Kaizen Award.

Jeremy Ruch founded Bandalier in the summer of 2017 to solve a multifaceted problem that he experienced firsthand. As a sales leader for a startup based in New York City, he was tasked with building their first sales team – and it needed to be done fast. Jeremy was ready to hire a new team, but couldn’t get people in the door fast enough.

He began searching for outsourced sales development solutions. His startup needed a small, onshore team that could strategically contact a highly curated list of targets. But his search came up short. Off-shore solutions and traditional call center programs were designed for large corporations with extensive lists of prospects.

From this experience, Jeremy saw a few problems to solve:

  • Startups weren’t well-served by existing outsourced sales development vendors.
  • Startups’ talent pools were limited to individuals living near their offices in major cities. 
  • There was high-quality talent available across the U.S. that was hungry for the opportunity to join the tech industry.

With these facts in hand, Jeremy began building Bandalier. He tested the idea of our outsourced inside sales programs himself, acting as a fractional sales representative for Bandalier’s first client. With his idea proven out, Jeremy established Bandalier’s headquarters in Binghamton’s Southern Tier Incubator, connecting with the talent pool created by the city’s two SUNY schools. 

Since 2017, we’ve worked with hundreds of talented team members from all across the U.S. The concept of kaizen, or continuous improvement, has guided Bandalier’s development from the very beginning. Kaizen is a common concept for many startups – and for good reason. When your team is growing fast, there are countless opportunities to test new ideas. Some may be highly effective; others may not. Regardless, each test presents a unique opportunity to learn. 

By identifying which changes are most impactful, our teams are constantly delivering better results for our clients. For outsourced SDRs and BDRs, every day presents a wide variety of opportunities to refine their outreach process. Every phone call is a learning opportunity; each email presents the opportunity to test which personalizations are most impactful. It’s important to test both large and small kaizen experiments. Some of our team members have seen the most improvement in their productivity from making minor changes.

We award our Annual Kaizen Award to the team member who has best demonstrated the concept in the past year. For some team members, like Courtney, that might mean delivering incredible results on a challenging program. For others, like Brenden, it can mean building strong relationships with new clients and driving success for their team. This year’s winner, Chloe Arcand, earned the award thanks to her focus on delivering actionable feedback and proactive support for her team members.

We’re excited to keep improving with our team. Contact us to learn more about how Bandalier’s outsourced inside sales teams identify opportunities to improve.