Before You Hire Another Rep, Look at Your Best One

Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

Jeb Blount Jr. interviews Kyle Willis, VP of Growth at Belay, about leveraging fractional virtual sales assistants to scale high-performing reps instead of defaulting to new

Key takeaways

• Kyle Willis explains that replicating top performer tenure and relationships through new hires is far harder than amplifying existing capacity with administrative support.
• A professional services case study showed a rep jumping from 130% to over 150% quota after a Belay assistant handled CRM updates, list building, and reactivating old leads.

Main topics

• Virtual sales assistants and fractional staffing
• Scaling top performer capacity beyond quota

Notable quotes

"It's so hard to replicate the activity of those highest performers. It's so hard to replicate the tenure, the knowledge, the relationships that they have."

Conclusion

Sales leaders can achieve immediate revenue acceleration by treating delegation as a

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome back to the Sales Driven Podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt Jr., your host, and today's a special episode because I am standing in the Belay Solutions headquarters. Our conversation today is with the VP of Growth, Kyle Willis. We're going to talk about how Belay helps sales organizations and sales peoples and sales leaders make sure that they are tackling the most important activities every single day so that they can get their time back and they can do the things that matter most for the business and not do the things that take away their energy. Speaker 2 (0:34) Thank you for joining us on the SalesGrid podcast. One of our key partnerships with Outbound. We're going to be in Las Vegas this November, and we're bringing you there because virtual sales assistants have really taken the market by storm and Belay is heading up that market. Can Speaker 1 (0:50) you walk us through what Belay is, how you've been growing this segment Speaker 2 (0:55) for your business? why sales organizations are choosing virtual sales assistants going Speaker 1 (0:59) into 2026 and beyond. Well, first of all, we're really excited to be a part of Outbound. So excited to be there in person for that. And when it comes to... staffing, hiring, especially for high-performing leaders, high-performing sales leaders that we're talking about today, that is something that they don't necessarily really need to have on their plate. So that's where I think Belay can come in and really help being the experts in hiring, going out and finding those people. And what we find is so many people think about in the day-to-day, I need help, I need help, I'm drowning in my CRM, I'm drowning in my prospecting, in my follow-up. But when it comes to actually taking the action, putting together the time and resources to go find that person, it's overwhelming. Where do you start? Where do you get the time? And I think that's where Belay really steps in as that expert in hiring and as an expert in going out and getting you the right help that you specifically need. And that's where we can take that from. I should be doing this to, oh, this is actually possible. And I can partner with someone like Belay to help me find that right person and help me find that right person fast. Speaker 2 (1:58) And we were talking before we started recording the podcast, we were having this really interesting conversation about the costs of not having a virtual assistant for your sales organization and how... There are leaders in B2B sales who are looking at their roster. They have an ultra high performer, somebody who is hitting above 100 % of quota consistently, even 200 % of quota. And then they have other people in their team that are hitting, you know, 18 % or 20 % or 30 % or even 60%. And a virtual sales assistant is rocket fuel on top of that organization. But it's interesting how you've kind of positioned where that rocket fuel goes. So can you walk us through? What belay has seen work for ultra high performers in sales organizations Speaker 1 (2:40) that are hitting above and beyond their quota? Yeah, I think a lot of sales leaders are taking a look at those ultra performers. And let's say it's 100 % quota, maybe it's 120 % quota. And they're saying, okay, I've tapped this person out. So now what is my next step? And I think that the natural next step can be, well, I'm going to go hire more sales reps, right? But it's so hard to replicate the activity of those highest performers. It's so hard to replicate the tenure, the knowledge, the relationships that they have. What if you started asking the question, okay, what if they're not at max capacity? What if maybe their quota potential is 150%, 200%, whatever that number is, I just need to get them the right help to be able to do that. I need the compliment to what they do, to what their superpower is, the client-facing work, the actual salesmanship of what they're doing. And I think that to me is a key ingredient that a sales leader needs to be asking because that sales leader, there are certain tasks that they are pushing down to their top sales reps because they need that information, right? They need that information to inform the own decisions that they're doing. They need that information to report to their executive team. They need to be able to help pull out what are these consistencies that we need to do. So those tasks can't necessarily go away. And we actually need them the most from our top high-performing sales reps because that's what I want to replicate the most. So how do we now start to plug in an administrative level help to start helping that sales rep with that so that they stay in their highest revenue generating activities, but now you have the right administrative level help to also give you as a sales leader what you need to do your job really well. I Speaker 2 (4:07) want to pivot to Belay and talking about your organization and why we have chosen to partner with you. We went through a vetting process. We had lots of conversations, even utilize our network to make sure that we are bringing in the right. people to outbound and Belay just hit all of the notes. And I want you to kind of walk through what makes Belay special. Why are these virtual sales assistants so much more effective for sales organizations? through Belay than through other means. And I want you to highlight a little bit about why Belay is the choice for ultra high-performing organizations. Speaker 1 (4:41) Yeah, so we've had the privilege to work with high-performing leaders for the last 15 years. We've matched over 10,000 different people with the right assistant solution that they need, which is super exciting to us. We feel like we know this world really, really well. I do think there's a natural fit of just both of our organizations saying, hey, we want to help high-performing leaders climb higher. That's where the term Belay comes from. We believe that that ceiling might not be the actual ceiling. We can help you continue to get more and more. And what we really love is it's not always just, yes, certainly we're going to dive into, hey, what are those tasks that you actually need taken off of your plate, right? CRM help, prospecting, list building, proposals, agreements, all things that we know really well. But now let's also get into some of those soft skills, right? Like what is the personality that you're looking for that? fits well with your organization, that fits well with your sales rep. These are things that we've gotten a lot of reps doing. We know what works really well in the market. And we've got this incredible bench of sales assistants that are ready and hungry and excited to come out and help support some of those sales leaders. So I think not only do we really see ourselves just like you are leaders in the sales training world, we see ourselves as leaders and helping high impact, high capacity leaders really continue to add more and more to their plates. Speaker 2 (5:54) When we started our relationship and started forming our outbound project and getting you there and having these conversations, what I've learned about Belay, and we have a virtual assistant for Jeb Blunt Sr. through Belay, this organization operates like what we want our organization to operate like. We can call and text you. We've got access to people. It's easy to communicate. You are... flexible. You're able to speak our language in a way that many other organizations that we have worked with in the past haven't been able to really bridge that gap. I wonder from your perspective, what allows you to do that? What allows your team to really personalize the experience of a virtual sales assistant for a salesperson or even a leader in an organization? What gives you that kind of special sauce that really ties that knot and pulls the bridge together? Speaker 1 (6:44) I'm going to use one word for that, and I would say team. We look at our clients, we look at our sales assistants as a part of the team, and we win when you all win, right? We win when Jeb Blunt Sr. gets some time back, right? To go and concentrate on those, setting the vision for the company for the next three years. We win when that sales rep goes from, man, I thought I was tapped out at 101 % of quota. Now I see the roadmap to 150%, right? Same thing on the other side with our sales assistants. We win when we get to hear the stories about them. They're saying, hey, I stepped in. I helped out this sales team. I was in the middle of everything from their data and analytics,