When PressOne Africa launched in Lagos in 2021, it entered the market with something Nigerian businesses had never quite seen before.
It was not just a business phone number; it was an entire phone system. One number that an entire team of up to 15 people could use simultaneously to make and receive calls. Every call is tracked, recorded, and available for replay. Customer support agents, sales reps, and account managers all operate under one line, with full visibility for whoever is running the team.
For any Nigerian business trying to professionalise its customer communication and stop losing clients to missed calls, unmonitored conversations, and zero accountability on the phone, PressOne was the answer. With an extra service to provide local businesses with international phone numbers, Pressone was phenomenal.
Techstars saw it, and as one of the world's most competitive startup accelerators with over a billion in combined value, getting into their program itself was a signal that Pressone was solving a market problem. The product was real, and it worked, but while the interest was high, the conversion to sales was slow.
PressOne was generating interest in the business world; Nigerian businesses were discovering the product, making enquiries about it, and showing up at the top of lead funnels, but somewhere between that first show of interest and a close deal, things were falling apart.
This wasn’t a product you could sell with a generic pitch. PressOne required a salesperson who understood the business problem deeply enough to walk a prospect through why their current setup with a personal number, a shared WhatsApp line, and calls that disappeared with no record was quietly costing them customers and credibility.
That’s a specific kind of sell. They weren’t looking to fix a broken team. They needed someone who could have a consultative conversation, trained sales reps who could hold it, because leads were arriving and leaving unconverted.
Scalein came in and took ownership of the entire sales rep function under its outsourcing service.
That started with recruitment, sourcing, and placing the sales agents PressOne needed. These weren’t just warm bodies with phones. Scalein recruited people who could hold a commercial conversation, understand a product with real technical nuance, and sell to Nigerian business owners who had never thought about their phone system as something worth investing in.
Once the team was in place, training began. It was not a generic sales training but a product-specific, pitch-specific, objection-specific sales training. Agents were trained to open with the problem the prospect was already experiencing, connect it to what PressOne solved, and close with confidence. They learned the product well enough to demonstrate it, not just describe it.
Scalein then managed the team’s performance by tracking activity, monitoring results, and ensuring accountability was built into how the function ran day to day.
Within six months, PressOne had seen a big increase in converting leads to closed-won deals. What made that possible wasn’t just the volume of calls; it was the quality of the sales conversation. Agents who understood the product, knew the customer, and had a process to follow will always outperform agents who are simply winging it. PressOne didn’t have a growth problem. They had a sales infrastructure problem. Scalein solved it, and the revenue followed.