Inside the five-year sales partnership between AirGarage and Market Pull.
A first-time founder running a sales team he'd never run before. Five years later, dozens of reps coached, and two rounds raised.
“I as a founder have never run a sales team before. What Carol was really instrumental in helping us do was the coaching, the ongoing feedback sessions, listening to calls that our sales team was doing and giving people feedback.”
5 years
Length of the AirGarage + Market Pull engagement, 2021 to 2026.
Series A & B
Both raised while working with Market Pull.
###
SDR’s onboarded, trained, and coached.
???
another stat
AirGarage runs parking lots and garages on software, in an industry that still mostly runs on paper. It takes over the operation from the legacy operators who have controlled parking for decades, automating enforcement, payments, and pricing, and giving the real estate owner a live view of what the asset actually earns. The technology worked and the market was huge. What the company didn't have was anyone who had ever built a sales function, including the founder.
The Company
Jonathon Barkl is the co-founder and CEO of AirGarage, which he started in 2017 with Scott Fitsimones and Chelsea Border after the three met at Arizona State University and began renting out driveway spaces to students near campus. That grew into a full-service parking operator. AirGarage partners with the owners of parking lots and garages and takes over the entire operation, using license-plate recognition, mobile payments, and its own software to run enforcement, collections, and pricing, and to give owners the kind of real-time visibility legacy operators never offered. The category is far bigger than it looks: parking takes up close to a quarter of the land in many urban cores, and almost all of it still runs offline. By 2025 AirGarage was operating hundreds of locations across the country and had raised about $40 million from a16z, Headline, and Founders Fund. When Market Pull came in the sales team was four to six SDRs and AEs. Today it is a Series B company scaling its sales and go-to-market org under a VP of Sales.
The Challenge
Jonathon was a first-time founder who had never run a sales team. There was no defined sales process, no ideal customer profile, no scripts, no playbooks, and the team was young, mostly early-career reps selling something the sales world had no template for: convincing a parking lot owner to hand over the operation of their asset. Beyond the missing infrastructure was the harder problem. A junior team only rises to the bar someone sets for it, and the person who should have set it had never sold and did not have the hours to try, since he was busy building the company and raising the rounds that kept it alive. The reps needed a standard and daily coaching, and until Market Pull came in, no one was there to give it.
“Carol was able to help me as a founder and CEO make sure that our sales team had the resources that they needed.”
The Fix - Market Pull enters the process
Market Pull started with the foundation: what the sales process should be, who the ideal customer profile is, how to target them, how to write the scripts, how to build the playbooks for going after them.
Then the part that ran for five years. Onboarding for every new SDR who joined. Ongoing feedback sessions. Call reviews and in-the-moment call coaching. Line-by-line feedback on emails. Weekly one-on-ones with reps. And coaching for Jonathon himself, on how to lead a sales team and how to give his own people feedback.
Along the way AirGarage raised a Series A, hired its first VP of Sales, and Market Pull stepped back. When that leader didn't work out, they called Carol back. The engagement ran until June 2026, through a Series B and a second VP of Sales.
The Outcome - A bar, set and held.
AirGarage raised its Series A and its Series B while working with Market Pull, and dozens of reps came through onboarding and coaching across five years. The more durable result was what the next VP of Sales inherited: a junior team already operating at a high bar, with rigor and accountability built in before he arrived. The mindset Carol set for that team tracked straight through to results and quota attainment, and it held after she stepped back.
Jonathon learned to coach by watching Carol coach. The reps learned the bar by being held to it. The product was always why owners signed. The sales team is why they kept signing.
If you are a founder who has hired reps but has no idea how to coach them into a team, that is exactly what we build. Book a call below and let's set the bar your sales team will rise to.