2x new business: how Teamspective boosts sales with agents

Challenge

Five years of typing data in and digging it back out

Teamspective's growth is sales-driven, not product-led. The sales team works consultative deals that involve as much process design as software.

The tooling did not match that reality. For five years, Jose Kantola, Co-founder and CRO, ran the team on HubSpot: a marketing-focused platform linked with Lemlist, ZoomInfo, and a handful of other sales tools.

The work flowed one way. Reps built prospect lists by hand, typed in data manually, and dug through records and activities whenever they needed to understand an account. Five years of that produced a lot of data, but didn't help the team sell any better.

By late 2025, the team knew they wanted out but hadn't started searching. Then Jose met the Zero team at Slush. The switch was decided within a couple of weeks. The only real worry was the migration itself, and losing five years of activity history with it.

That worry didn't materialize. Despite five years of historical data, the transition was swift and the team moved on to Zero within days.

Solution

A sales playbook that is configuration, not a document

Most sales playbooks live in a slide deck nobody opens. Teamspective's playbook is configured directly into Zero, and it works shifts.

Here's how a deal runs now. Every email is tracked, calls are logged, and meeting transcripts flow straight into Zero. When a rep decides a conversation is a real opportunity, Zero agents read through the emails, messages, and transcripts, and populate every field on the deal. Every new email or meeting refreshes that data. Nobody updates a record by hand anymore; the record keeps up with the deal on its own.

Then the coaching kicks in. Before each upcoming meeting, another agent reviews everything known about the deal and flags the gaps:

• You don't know who holds the budget: ask in the next meeting and update
• No decision deadline yet: ask in the next meeting and update
• Nothing on competitive alternatives: ask in the next meeting and update

Every rep gets precise, deal-specific coaching, automatically: the kind of preparation that used to depend on a manager having a spare hour.

For Jose, it also works top-down. He can ask Zero to review every open deal and tell him whether the team is systematically missing something in discovery calls, and adjust the playbook accordingly. The playbook improves from live deal data, not annual offsites.

The second workflow is pipeline building. Teamspective could reach out to tens of thousands of companies, but the team is too small to reach out to all of them. So they built ICP scoring into Zero that goes beyond industry, size, and geography: agents scan annual reports and pick up signals like a chief people officer posting on LinkedIn about a relevant topic, then adjust the score. The sales team's outreach lists come out prioritized and pre-built.

New leads and signals from marketing land in Zero through webhooks, and the whole go-to-market team (sales, customer success with its own expansion and renewal pipelines, and marketing) works from the same system. When something is easier to do in another tool, MCP connectors feed the results straight back into Zero.

Results

2x new business, with a leaner team

Jose's estimate: with the agents, automation, and built-in sales playbook, Zero replaces every third sales hire. To him, the point isn't the hire itself. It's everything that comes with one. Every person the team doesn't need to add is onboarding nobody runs, training nobody repeats, knowledge nobody has to spread, and coaching a manager doesn't have to find time for. The team stays smaller and more talent-dense. For every rep it means a bigger book, more opportunities each. And a day where the CRM work happens without them, so there's actually room to work it.

The salespeople who do join land in a system that already knows how Teamspective sells: deals stay fresh on their own, and the playbook coaches from the first meeting. Jose is careful not to credit Zero alone, but since the switch, the team is closing twice as much new business as before.

• Every third sales hire replaced by agents and automation (Jose's estimate)
• 2x new business closed since switching