Pete Kazanjy
Pete Kazanjy is the author of Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook and the founder of Modern Sales Pros, an invite-only peer learning community focused on sales operations and sales leadership. He’s also the co-founder of Atrium, a B2B SaaS company that provides data-driven sales solutions. Pete got his start in product at VMware and then dove deep into the art and science of sales. He explains the difference between old-school sales and modern sales, which focuses on human connection and solving problems for customers.
Growth Skills
In B2B, product-market fit is evidenced by a repeatable conversion rate from first meetings to closed deals across cohorts.
"Take 50 at-bats, take 100 at-bats, and now that you know that you reliably, for every cohort of ten first meetings, what's known in sales land as opportunities, for every cohort of 10 that you engage,..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
A written biographical screen is a high-leverage way to filter for candidate effort, communication skills, and attention to detail.
"I'm a big fan of doing screens, so we actually have a written screen that we do with folks, where it's the Google Doc that has a dozen or so biographical questions that we allow people to answer. You'..."
Marketing Skills
Effective sales requires a crisp definition of both the target company (ICP) and the specific stakeholders (Personas).
"ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. Actually, it's important to think about there's two things in a B2B sales motion, there's the characteristics of the account, which is the company that's going t..."
Product Management Skills
Sales is a consultative process of using discovery questions to help a prospect realize the magnitude of their own problem.
"The way that I like to frame it to people is that you're a consultant that has a particular predilection for a given solution... ideally, through a series of questions, I'm going to reveal that to the..."
Sales & GTM Skills
Founders cannot outsource early sales because they need the direct feedback loop to validate the product and message.
"The point is is that you can't outsource that behavior, the founder's got to do that stuff. A lot of people ask me that question, "Well, I suck at sales," or, "I'm afraid to talk to people," or, "Inte..."
Founder-led sales serves three purposes: product refinement, discovering the pitch, and creating the 'source code' for future hires.
"One, it's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstracted, for sure, two, you're going to be the person who's going to figure out how to talk about it..."
The right time to hire the first salesperson is when the founder achieves a repeatable 15-25% win rate over 50-100 at-bats.
"Generally speaking, it is to contingent on your sales motion, but it's going to be that you can reliably, at a pretty okay win rate, so maybe 15% or 20% or 25%, turn first meetings into eventual custo..."
Avoid hiring a VP of Sales as the first hire; instead, hire two 'pioneer' Account Executives who are willing to do the gritty work.
"Generally, what you want to do is you probably don't want to start with a VP of sales to start... what you want to do is you want to hire a couple early-stage pioneer sellers to take that sales motion..."