Kyle Hager

Background

About Kyle Hager

In my 12 plus years of corporate experience, my favorite part of any job has always been creative problem solving. As I continue my career, I want to keep that at the forefront. My first 5 years were spent dabbling in digital marketing- paid search, consumer programmatic, social- the works. When not executing campaigns, I loved tackling out of date pacing documents to bring better insights in less time. How could we take the knowledge that Mondays are typically higher spend days and integrate that into how much we should expect to spend compared to the remaining budget. As I moved over to Hireology I got a real headfirst dive into the Talent Acquisition space. My role was to help create a product for our ATS customers- could we manage your recruitment dollars for you and get more efficient results than indeed sponsored postings. At the risk of being hyperbolic, these two years played out like a miniature MBA (free, but also without the degree). I learned how to build up a product, work with the sales/marketing team to gain adoption and work with customer success to keep people happy. The product grew from $4.5k when I joined to ~$200k in November of 2019- about two years. The team grew from just me to a team of six people. At this point, I pivoted over to Appcast, a vendor I had been using at Hireology. In the last 4.5 years, I've spent time working with our publishers to understand them better, time as a sales engineer to help customers understand our product, and my current role as a strategist, where I help current customers solve difficult problems. The year of Sales Engineering was invaluable to help build confidence for speaking on calls- I almost never get nervous to speak in meetings anymore. The constant through all of this, and the piece that keeps me motivated at work, is the problem solving aspect. How can we adjust our reporting so that we come into weekly calls already understanding insights we want to call out? How can we arm our sales team with specific information that will help them prioritize deals to work on based on the ability to fill that client's need? One of the biggest things I've learned about sales is that if you can solve a problem for someone, they will almost always listen to what you have to say. I'm a "process oriented" person at heart, but have grown far out of my comfort zone in the last few years and am as well rounded as I've ever been.