38. Sri Kaza on building a SaaS company while consulting

Sri Kaza, a former McKinsey partner who specializes in sales and service, left the firm to put his sales expertise to work as the SVP of Commercial Operations at Viking Cruises, and subsequently led sales for a company offering a SaaS-based solution to obtaining tax credits.

Sri is now running his own independent consulting practice while also developing two separate SaaS startups. One of them is a tool to help companies hire the employees most likely to perform well and stick around, based on academic research and testing that looks at 70 personality traits.

The other one helps companies optimize their incoming leads by routing that lead to the right sales person.

Sri’s consulting is focusing on these areas, allowing him to better understand unmet needs.  So while he serves clients he is also doing market research for his startups.

In our discussion we explore in some detail the concept of how to optimize incoming leads, and Sri shares some initial steps that you can help your clients with. Sri also mentions that he is happy to partner with other independent consultants, so if you are serving a client with a large number of incoming leads and more than, say, 10-20 sales reps, reach out to Sri to see if he might be able to help. Or if your client hires a large number of front line service personnel every year, Sri may be able to help your client reduce training and replacement costs with his recruiting solution.