What we talked about
John Karsant shares the unexpected path that took him from college tennis and coaching to sales, remote work, and ultimately founding LevelUp Leads in 2021. John explains how a bold life move:quitting coaching and moving to Argentina to learn Spanish:pushed him to find one of the rare remote roles available in 2015, where he became the first SDR at a small startup and learned sales by wearing multiple hats.
Show notes
John Karsant quit tennis coaching, moved to Argentina with no plan, and ended up stumbling into a remote sales job in 2015, back when remote work was genuinely rare. That accidental first SDR role at a solar lead generation startup became the foundation for Level Up Leads, a company he built during COVID lockdowns with a six-month runway and the confidence he could always find another job if it failed.
What we covered
- Building an internal SDR team is more like building a car from scratch than leasing one, companies often underestimate the management overhead, tool costs, process design, and the reality that the average SDR stays with a company for one year or less before churning out.
- Cold calling outperforms email and LinkedIn as a standalone channel because it produces real-time feedback: you learn immediately whether you reached the right person, whether the message is resonating, and why people aren’t interested, instead of waiting for sparse email responses that are easy to ignore.
- The most common outbound mistake is expecting ROI in two or three months when industry data shows that even an internally hired SDR typically takes six to nine months, sometimes a full year, before generating meaningful pipeline returns.
- Multi-channel works better than single-channel: layering email and LinkedIn on top of cold calling builds awareness across touch points, so a prospect might ignore a call but then research the company, see an email, and book a meeting through that second channel.
- Campaigns should run two to three weeks before any adjustments are considered, pivoting too early based on insufficient data is as damaging as running a dead campaign too long, since attribution across channels makes it hard to know which touch point drove any given result.
- Keeping personalization human in the age of AI means removing the long dash that ChatGPT favors, building real relationships through podcasts and in-person events, and accepting that most recipients assume cold outreach is AI-generated, which raises the bar for anything that actually lands.
About John Karsant
John Karsant is the founder and CEO of Level Up Leads, an SDR appointment-setting agency based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He launched the company in 2021 after eight years in lead generation, building on his experience as the first SDR at a solar lead generation startup and later working alongside the CEO of a B2B outreach agency.
Episode 98 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-Vered podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by John Karstent, his founder and CEO of Level Up Leads, an SDR appointment setting agency based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent more than eight years in lead generation before launching Level Up Leads in 2021.
build a self-development engine that helps small and mid-sized teams who don’t have the bandwidth for consistent prospecting, running ad-bound across email, LinkedIn, and cold calling to create more pipeline and meetings. Before founding Level Up, John worked across sales and business development roles, and his path is anything but typical. He’s also an ex-college tennis player and a coach and a traveler and a father. So, John, welcome to the show.
John Karsant (00:52) Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Federico Ramallo (00:54) Awesome, awesome. I’m honored to have you here today. So let’s get started on how did you go from tennis coaching to sales work?
John Karsant (01:04) So, great question. So I played college tennis and after I graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to get into. In fact, I didn’t even know what wanted to major in until I was forced to choose a major by my university. So tennis was kind of all I had known. And so logically, I kind of just continued that path and stayed in tennis. But…
Several years down the road, I realized this isn’t what I want to do forever. I don’t want to be teaching tennis or in the tennis world per se, anything that involved being on court, I should say. And so at some point I had to pull the plug and realize, OK, I need to switch gears. I need to change professions. So I quit and I moved to Argentina to go learn Spanish and experience what it was like to live in another country.
And I was there for roughly eight or nine months. I had started to develop relationships. had a girlfriend and I had the decision that I either needed to go back to the United States or I needed to get a remote job. And so that is how I broke into sales. I went and got a remote job. And at this time, this was 2015.
Remote jobs weren’t that easy to find at the time. And I guess I struck gold. just lucked out. Not that the job was, it was amazing. It was really good experience. Wasn’t good pay, but I lucked out. met somebody in the Bay area online. Um, turned out we had, uh, his, his parents knew my parents through, they were in the same line of work. And so they took a chance on me and I was the first SDR at their, um, their small start.
which was in solar lead generation. So there I was there for roughly two years and that’s where I really started getting the hang of it and what is it like to be a sales rep? What is it like to wear multiple hats? And I think to this day that job was probably some of the best experience I had which ultimately led to starting level up but that there was like a bit of a gap in between.
Federico Ramallo (03:05) Right, right, amazing. By the way, I’m Argentinian, moved to Mexico, 17, 18 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love Argentina, but the economy back then was terrible, yeah.
John Karsant (03:11) really?
didn’t know that.
Yeah.
So I lived there for about 10 years. So wasn’t until just recently I moved out.
Federico Ramallo (03:28) Amazing, amazing. Yeah, the economy there sucked, but the people are great. The culture, the food, know, everything. Yeah. I’m biased, yeah. Amazing. Yeah. And my first engineering work coding was because I was looking for a remote job as well.
John Karsant (03:41) I really like it too.
Federico Ramallo (03:55) Commuting in Buenos Aires was difficult, so…
And what made you choose like lead generation as your career?
John Karsant (04:02) I didn’t choose it as like that was at the time. It was the only, like, was like, had no sales experience and I got that job. And so I was more like, what job could I get that was remote? That would allow me to keep working in Argentina and you know how important it is to make us dollars there. So that was really the main criteria and how could I get some experience? I wasn’t so concerned about the pay. and over time, you know, it was really good practice and over time.
Regardless of what you’re selling it’s still you can apply a lot of sales Experience to other other jobs a lot a lot of the same work, but a little bit different depending on the industry And I just kind of I fell back into it over time which I can explain but yeah I was it wasn’t necessarily by choice, but it’s where I did get my first experience
Federico Ramallo (04:48) Right, so you found that opportunity, so the job found you, right? Because you were looking for that opportunity, right? Amazing. So tell us a little bit more about why did you start Level Up Lids in 2021?
John Karsant (04:54) Yes. Yes.
Sure, over time I had some other, after this level, this job with Solar Lead Generation, I had some other jobs at startups doing sales as well. And in 2000, was either 2018 or 2019, I started working at a different lead generation company, a lead generation agency, a B2B lead generation agency doing email and LinkedIn outreach. Got two years under my belt there working right next to the CEO.
And it was during COVID where I kind of came to the realization I was like.
Now is the perfect time to start a business because I was one, were kind of in lockdown. We weren’t doing a whole lot. So I was working all day and I just figured like, why not try now? I’d be, I’d be really focused with not a lot of distractions. And I was gave myself a six month window. I Hey, if this doesn’t work out, I’ll give it roughly six months. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll go get another job. had the confidence I could get a job pretty easily. And so anyways, I stopped what I was doing.
started Level Up Leads, which was a bit of a spin-off of what I was previously doing. And that’s ultimately how it got started. was mid-COVID and just kind of had the confidence of going off on my own.
Federico Ramallo (06:20) amazing so what problems do your clients have before they hire level up leads they hire you
John Karsant (06:29) So companies use this in a few different ways. I’ll go through a few, but the most common use case is they don’t want to build out an internal sales team or an internal SDR team. There’s a lot of reasons for that. Mainly it’s expensive, time consuming, and it’s risky. know, probably a lot of the same use…
use cases for you and your company. It’s just a different field, right? It’s the same concept.
So companies are, don’t want to do it internally because of, you know, in general it’s just more expensive and you have to have more management with eyes on it. It’s just a longer process and more expensive. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I’m just giving you the facts that it just is more expensive to build out short term. And a lot of companies may not have the experience or the budget to do all that. The other things may be is they are launching a new product.
and they want to test that out in a new market. So rather than hiring a whole new sales team to do that, they would hire us to go out and test the market first. The other could be that they’re testing a new market. So maybe they’re a European company or maybe they’re in South America and they want native English speakers and they want to start pitching their product in a new country. So that’s another reason why someone might hire us.
Federico Ramallo (07:44) Right, right.
John Karsant (07:44) I would
also add a lot of companies work with us on a hybrid model. So they do have internal people, but they use us for certain things. Maybe it’s helping drive more people to their conference or to their booth, right? Or to an event they’re holding. So there’s a lot of different scenarios or ways they might utilize our service.
Federico Ramallo (08:03) Right, to cover peak demand for ⁓ conferences.
John Karsant (08:05) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (08:07) trade shows, things like that, right? Yeah. I used to think, you you were talking about building an internal SDR team or…
external SDR team as the buyer lease, you know, like, you know, a car, you buy or lease a car, right, which is purely a financial decision, right. But I think that analogy doesn’t work. It’s more of a buy or build a car from scratch, right, that you need to know engineering, you need to know, you know, so many things, the level of specialization that you need to have in order to
build a successful SDR team, it’s similar to building a car from scratch. You could spend millions of dollars building a car, or you can buy a car for $30,000 or whatever.
John Karsant (08:50) That’s a good analogy, yes.
Federico Ramallo (08:53) Yeah. And as you said, it’s not about that it’s something wrong on the company or something wrong on the product. It’s about the specialization and all the things that could go wrong within an SDR team that with your experience, you’ve been there, you’ve done that.
John Karsant (09:11) Yeah, I think a lot of companies don’t realize what goes into getting a program like that off the ground. You know, a of companies think, I’ll just hire the STR and then they’ll figure it out. But really they need, they need management, they need tools, they need processes. They may be, they’d be out sick. They may quit. Like there’s a lot of problems that could happen with getting this spun up internally.
And so I think that’s a lot of things people don’t realize until they actually are going through it or having the issues with getting an SDR team built in-house. The average SDR typically only stays with a company for up to a year max. So there’s a lot of churn within the role, regardless of whether it’s your hire in-house or your outsourcing.
Federico Ramallo (09:57) Right, right. It’s managing the churn, but also, maybe you implied, but it’s a, you can do all the processes right, but if that person, that SDR, doesn’t have the right mindset and the right tools and training for that call, then they’re going to flop.
John Karsant (10:18) Yeah, or maybe what if they get another job and then they say, all right, I got another job. Here’s my two week notice. And you’re stuck with the management, the tools, everything. And you got to go rehire, retrain and onboard and ramp that, that person again. It’s, it sets you back a lot.
Federico Ramallo (10:35) Right, right, yes, yes. I understand that, yeah. And that’s a very difficult challenge to solve, yeah. So I can see how your team can provide that value, yeah. So what does appointment setting mean or look like on a new SDR team?
John Karsant (10:58) So appointment setting can be done in various ways. The way we go about it is we’re doing for the most part, cold outbound, typically through cold calling. Now we do offer other channels, so that’s not necessarily what companies have to do, but it is what we are recommending because that’s what is driving the best results right now.
So we do cold calling, but we also offer multi-channel where you can do email and LinkedIn on top. So you’re hitting them from different channels. We create different strategies by channel or by a campaign for the clients. And the end result is that we’re booking meetings in the calendar for our clients so they have more selling opportunities.
Federico Ramallo (11:41) Right. So based on your experience, you’re saying that cold calling is much more efficient than multi-channel approach.
John Karsant (11:50) Well, out of the channels, if you’re going to pick one, yes, cold calling would be the best. But what we suggest is that you run multi-channel. So you do cold calling, but you also do email and LinkedIn as well. So you’re able to contact people from different channels.
Federico Ramallo (12:05) when do you use LinkedIn or emails or call calls? What criteria do you recommend that is more efficient?
John Karsant (12:13) Well, first you need to understand where your ideal customer, where your ideal buyers are hanging out, what are the channels that they’re likely to, you’re able to connect with them on. So.
For example, if you’re contacting someone on a manufacturing plant or someone maybe at a university, you have to understand where they are and where they aren’t. So in some cases, reaching out to LinkedIn might not make sense because they’re not on LinkedIn or they don’t use it very much.
Where in others that might actually be one of the best channels because they’re on LinkedIn a lot. Specifically sales and marketing roles tend to be on LinkedIn a lot. So you first have to identify where that is.
Code calling tends to be the best. the reason why is if you can have an actual conversation with somebody, you’re not always going to set a meeting, but if you can have a conversation, you’re likely to better understand why not that person is interested. Maybe it’s the wrong person within the organization. You can get answers faster. Whereas an email, for example, it’s pretty easy to ignore that.
So you may not get as far along in terms of feedback and traction from the campaign using email. Now there are benefits to that though, to using emails, like it’s much cheaper to do and it’s easier to scale. So there are benefits if you’re able to get some traction with email, you can scale that up faster and you don’t need to hire more people to do that.
Federico Ramallo (13:40) so have you seen any benefit of, of, know, sending emails and then cold calling versus pure cold calling.
John Karsant (13:50) Yeah, the ones with the emails on top are gonna help be more, are gonna convert better, right? It’s adding in another touch point. Probably not gonna make a huge difference, but you may get somebody, you start to build that awareness. You may get somebody that listens to your call, then goes, researches you online, and then they respond to your email and book a call, right?
So there, there’s value to having other touch points, even if you’re not always connecting or booking a call from that particular channel.
Federico Ramallo (14:21) Right.
What mistakes do most people make with setting up an album process? What have you seen that people fail the most
John Karsant (14:33) So there’s a few things. One is if they haven’t done it themselves or they haven’t done it internally, then they really have no metrics to work off of. A lot of companies or clients who work with, they’ll say, we want to have this many meetings per week or per month. But if they’ve never done outbound before, then where are they getting these numbers from?
So oftentimes it’s made up. They feel like it should be that, right? But they have no proof to work off of or to show that that’s realistic. So my recommendation is you need to actually have done it before, before you can actually set particular realistic goals and KPIs. If you haven’t, that’s okay. But you need to then realize that you’re testing.
market right you’re trying to test the channels you’re trying to learn who are the right titles to reach out to within the companies what is the messaging that is resonating the most and that’s fine that’s the that is the best way to go about it but what oftentimes the biggest mistake I see is companies try to look for an ROI within the few months that they really should be testing
They really should be testing the market, but they’re actually looking at it like, I’m spending X amount of dollars. I need to be making a return on investment in two, three months. Otherwise this doesn’t make sense, but really that’s just not how it works. know, take this, this stuff takes a little bit longer in most cases. if you look online, ROI with it, when you hire a sales rep typically takes around,
depends on the industry, depends a little bit, but six to nine months or sometimes up to a year on average to start seeing ROI from an SDR.
Federico Ramallo (16:12) Right, Yes, it’s part of the learning process and testing different hypotheses before you can actually see the results, right.
John Karsant (16:27) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (16:28) And there’s also a, well, what I called, it’s called pilot induced feedback, right? When you’re driving an airplane, right? You make a correction and then the airplane, you know, takes that correction and then you over correct and you keep over correcting, right? Because there’s a delay between the input and the output, right? And I think with the SDR process, something similar, with the outbound process, something similar happens, right? Because you’re doing the process, but…
You make the adjustment before seeing the results then you you don’t know The outcome came from the first second or third intent attempt, right?
John Karsant (17:06) Yeah, it is a bit of delicate process in the sense like you don’t want to, if you’re not getting results, you don’t want to do it forever. But at the same time, you want to let certain campaigns play out. You don’t want to be one or two weeks in and scrapping the whole thing and starting over. So you have to kind of find that sweet spot of when it makes sense to continue a campaign and when it makes sense to pivot. I tend to think…
in the two to three week mark is when you just start thinking about whether or not it makes sense to make adjustments.
Federico Ramallo (17:37) And how do you keep personalization real in the age of AI?
John Karsant (17:43) That’s tough. mean, at this point, it’s almost like most people are assuming everything’s AI written. So you need to stand out. I think it depends on where exactly, know, are you writing LinkedIn posts? Is it specifically from your outreach campaigns? Email’s probably where you need to make the biggest effort. If it’s a phone call, I mean, you’re having a conversation.
That should be pretty easy. know, that can’t be, shouldn’t be AI. In fact, AI cold calling in the United States is illegal. So you should be able to get around that pretty easy. But when it comes to like LinkedIn posting or email outreach, that’s where you have to try to be creative and standing out. and that’s not easy, right? So how can you make it sound human, human like, or more natural? I know those sounds really
easy and lame but like don’t use the dashes that’s what chat GPT tends to use a lot in their writing is the dash that long dash remove those it’s very simple. And in general I think the best way to stand out is to make human connections.
like we were talking about before we started recording, go on podcasts, go meet people in person, go to local events, go to conferences. And so I think the more relationships you can build, that will help you stand out in the world of AI.
Federico Ramallo (18:58) I think that’s the issue
social networks are supposed to help us connect with people, but they actually make us, more isolated. And the same thing happens with AI, you know, on this topic that every time I get a cold email, I first I assume it’s AI generated, right? And then, you know, the content has to be really good or really, personalized for me to actually…
you know, pay more attention, right?
John Karsant (19:26) Yeah, agreed.
Federico Ramallo (19:27) So what was the hardest challenge that you had when you become a founder?
John Karsant (19:34) I think being very isolated, you don’t really have anybody to turn to when you’re first starting out, even if you don’t have a co-founder and shaping the company and knowing what to do when you’re just, on your own, especially during COVID, which was even harder, right? So that is the challenge. Now let you know.
some things fell my way and things started working out and then I had some past relationships I was able to work off of and I continued to build relationships on LinkedIn which helped with getting more sales but that is that was the biggest challenge for me is like every step of the way is not having necessarily someone to turn to who has done it before.
Now I have a coach who has done it before, so if I’m able to talk through, certain situations I’m facing and how he’s, he, he would approach it or how he’s dealt with it in the past.
Federico Ramallo (20:21) Right, Yeah, I think that having a coach and a support system becomes much more relevant. And the more you grow, the lonelier it becomes unless we seek out for mentors, coach, or other peers that are in the same, similar situation than us.
John Karsant (20:38) Yeah. Do you have anything like that? you pay or use a coach or some type of support system for yourself?
Federico Ramallo (20:46) Well, so my wife is my co-founder, we support each other a lot and she’s amazing. So it’s a little bit less lonely, but still I feel the loneliness that you’re talking about. So yeah, I’ve had and have coaches on different stages and with different challenges that I’ve been facing.
and then a community of founders that also has been a great way where I can see, connect with people that have the same challenges, fears, and that than oneself, right? So I find that, know, refreshing, interesting, and also less lonely because now I have a…
I have people that have been going through the same things.
John Karsant (21:31) Is your wife also in the dynamite circle or just you?
Federico Ramallo (21:34) So just me Yeah, she’s So she’s more on the finance She’s a CFO So we decided to to just one be there because we have a son a ten-year-old son So, you know, we if we travel we travel with a kid with a queer kid. So, you know, we We kind of split that so you you know We decided that I should go and represent the whole family. Yeah
John Karsant (21:59) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (22:00) And then we were going to go to DC Mexico, then together as a family, but then there was some conflict of schedule and she was unable to come. yeah, plus was pulling the kid out of school for four or five days, whatever, right? yeah, but yeah, but she’s very supportive of it all. So we have a great.
great communication to make this type of decisions.
John Karsant (22:25) Cool.
Federico Ramallo (22:26) Yeah. So what is the future that you see for Level Up and the SDR industry in general?
John Karsant (22:39) So good question and one I’m paying attention to closely. Outbound has been getting harder every year since I’ve started, right? There’s more tools than ever.
There’s data is easier and easier to get and it’s cheaper than ever before. And so with that, with more access, it’s getting more more crowded. And so for example, the email has become more challenging over time. It used to be that you could send out a hundred emails and you book a meeting out of every hundred cents. Now it’s, you know, a lot more than that. So,
Yeah, the channels are getting harder. AI is playing a role. You know, it’s easier to create personalization based off some AI research. With that being said though, there still is a need for new business to be generated for companies. If you stop doing that, I think humans will continue to seek human connection.
there’s going to be a need for whether you call it SDRs or full sale cycle reps, you could name the role differently or you can change the responsibilities. I still think people are going to want to sell and buy from other people. So at this point,
there’s, you know, I think there’s roughly, if you do a quick LinkedIn search, there’s over 70,000 SDRs and BDRs and that’s even on LinkedIn, right? There’s probably a bunch more that aren’t even on LinkedIn.
It’s still a role that’s in need. It certainly will be changing over time. I do anticipate that. But right now it’s, as I mentioned before, earlier in this podcast, it’s, tough to build that in-house and it’s expensive and risky. So in our, in our case, it’s still a need from a lot of different companies, from small startups to midsize businesses, all the way up to enterprise companies. There’s people that, that need this type of service.
So I’ll keep my fingers crossed, hope things continue to go well. But yeah, so it’s certainly becoming more challenging over time.
Federico Ramallo (24:41) Yes, yes and yeah I agree that I think that a lot of overuse of AI on the personalization it’s making the automated campaigns less effective and people buy from people, right? building human connection is something that is going to continue.
John Karsant (24:55) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:03) because it’s what humans need, as humans need and want. Amazing. So John, thank you very much for joining us today. We’re running out of time, but before we wrap it up, any final remarks?
John Karsant (25:16) No, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. think sales and sales development is constantly evolving, but also it’s a huge need for companies. And so I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon, whether a recession comes or not, that actually sometimes can benefit our space. So yeah, feel free to check us out at levelupleads.io or you can find me on LinkedIn at John Carcian.
Federico Ramallo (25:45) Amazing and we’re going to leave the links in the description below so people can reach out.
Thank you John.
John Karsant (25:50) Awesome, thank you so much.