YouSaid · the spoken record

Pete Kazanjy

lines on the record: 71
first: 2022-12-15
most recent: 2022-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But the reason why my wife put it into a squarespace site was because we wanted people to be able to search it and come back to it and use it as a reference and so on and so forth. And then in terms of like folks, how folks can be helpful to me, if you work for an organization that has between 10 and 300 salespeople and you're looking to make them more like manage them better via metric, make them more efficient, right? That's a big watchword these days is efficient sales organizations through better management. Atrium is fantastic for that. If you just Google like atriumhq.com is the is the domain, but you can also just Google Atrium sales and we'll be the top result as well.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pretty easy to find online. I'm the only pete Kazanji in the United States, as far as I can tell, and Google will auto-correct my name if you Google it wrong. So that's pretty helpful. Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, find me on Twitter. You can also find founding sales at founding sales.com as letting notes the whole book is a”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 8080s that are being managed using Atrium. And so I think there's a good lesson there, which is it's not going to be the first, it's not necessarily going to be the first time through the pipe and it's maybe not the second time, but you just have to keep like pushing that boulder up the hill. And then eventually when you do, good things happen.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a gentleman on our sales organization named Sean, who's an early seller here. He's now a sales manager. He's absolutely fantastic. And I think one of the things that early stage founders and also sellers have to remember is like you're not going to, you're generally speaking, not going to close the deal on the first time through the pipe. Like as we discussed earlier, if you have a 30% win rate, that's pretty great. If you're a 20% win rate, that's pretty solid, but that still means that like are not going to close. But the next time around they might, right? So like win rate on the second time through the pipeline. And so Sean, you know, closed one of our biggest customers is a company called Grin. They're absolutely fantastic. They make influencer management software for brands. Very cool stuff. And I think Sean probably ran like three or four ops with them before they were able to get a toe hold in the account a couple years ago. They were much smaller. And so now, you know, I think they have like 100 SDRs.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, or it's just something that I mean, for all my portfolio companies as well, people just use it. It's Google Sheet, right? Sorry, not a Google Sheet, a Google Doc, right? It's just like, and you just clone it, give it to them. All right, you have edit rights. Let me know when it's done. And you'd be shocked. Like, you know, people are like, I forgot to do it. Okay, great. You told me everything I need.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to change this up on you. It's less about interview questions. One of the things I'm a really big fan of is job simulation, especially in sales. And so 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 like a dozen or so biographical questions that we allow people to answer. And you'd be shocked, like the way how well it screens people. Like, you know, 50% of people won't do it. And this is not, these are not complicated questions, right? It's like, Lenny, tell me about something that you've built that you're proud of, right? Like, it's a dozen of those questions. And so like, one, you can filter out people who are not serious. You can filter out people who have low levels of give a shit. You also can see whether or not people can communicate in a compelling fashion, right? With the beginning and a middle and an end. You can also see their attention to detail, whether or not like it's like written with typos or they like forget to answer some of them or what have you. So it's not an interview.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got a five year old, so we're all Disney all the time. So I think probably the one that's been on repeat recently has been Encanto. So yeah, there you go. Love that one.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy, I don't listen to too many. I listen to Lenny's and I listen to the all in podcast. Just, you know, so I can get my fill of like doom and gloom.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's very applicable to sales as well. Like if you focus on those leading indicators and make sure that you're doing it in a high quantity of high quality way, then the score will take care of itself. So those are two great books I like to recommend to folks.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Books that I recommend the most would be The Goal by Eli Goldratt. There are two books that inspire Atrium. One is The Goal, which essentially is a novelization of the Toyota Lean Manufacturing System. So it's like a process engineering book written as a novel. It's like really fantastic and sales organizations are just revenue factories. So it's a really like if you want to think about like systems thinking and kind of like processes, but in a way that's like not a textbook, it's absolutely fantastic. And then the other one is a book by Bill Walsh called The Score takes care of itself. Bill Walsh is a really famous football coach for Stanford Cardinal and the San Francisco 49ers. And he just kind of like broke down how you can't worry about the score and the football game. You can only worry about the things that are in front of you. You can control. And that if you do a high quantity of high quality actions, like whatever your position is as a quarterback or a linebacker running back or whatever, then the score will take care of itself.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think probably like the biggest thing is the thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers, what have you, is just don't be afraid of sales. There's a lot of people out there who would love to tell you a story that it's magical or like, oh, you got to be a born seller or things like that. And it's really not, right? Like those people are just talking their book, if you will. And so just like getting good at those behaviors is going to benefit you in a myriad of ways, even if you don't want to necessarily be an early stage founder, even as like a product manager within an enterprise organization or even a consumer organization selling behaviors and like good communication and persuasion and like what always like thinking about like what's in it for them etc like those are really good skills for internal selling for external selling for you want to interface with customers etc it's like you know all these skills are very important and impactful for for a myriad of personas”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point of view on that is like you, especially at like early stage, from a founder standpoint, like being shoulder to shoulder with your co-founders certainly. But even with like, you know, a founder who has a couple of sellers that they're working with being side by side with them in order to like help them learn faster, teach them more, have accountability, and then have like, you know, like training loops is really what you need to do. Because the alternative is a whole generation of SDRs who are like, it's kind of like learning loss, if you will. There's a bunch of like 24 year olds who have never like, you know, like never learned the skills that are needed at the same way, at the same clip that they would have sitting amongst 10 others with an SDR manager sitting in the middle of them or an AE manager sitting in the middle of them.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in early stage startups, that's the only thing that matters is how it's a race against time to make sure that you get to success. You can raise your next round of financing or get to profitability or what have you. And so having distance, right? Having asynchronous distance is really problematic for that, especially for junior folks, like SDRs, junior AEs, all of that. It really is. And can be distributed. Okay, that's potentially a different situation, but very early on having someone sitting, like being able to sit side by side with your sellers is really pretty, it's hard to beat.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning, right? So, like, what needs to happen? The new sellers, they need to learn the sales motion, and then they need to be audited, right? Like instrumented. And so the faster the loops are on that, the better off you're going to be. And so if the loops are once a day of like, you know, listening to their calls or maybe even like a longer interval, then just like the correction loops are just going to be way too slow versus if you're sitting next to somebody, if you're sitting amongst like three or four people and like listening to all their calls concurrently, and then they get off of a call. It's like, hey, that was really good. You know, correction here, correction here, correction here, correction here, here, run it back to me. Now the loops, right, this speed with which you're able to like update their software and make sure that the sales motion is running appropriately on them is quite high.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's primarily bad for junior salespeople. Like, senior salespeople have been selling out in the what's known as the field for a long time. But when you think about the behavior that we're talking about, which is”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet, because the money is not in the bank. However, things are looking good. So if you get to month four and then lots of things are getting to proposal, but nothing's closing in month four, nothing closing in month five, you should still like we still can't say all the oligoxin free. You should still be very concerned, right? But if you, if like the leading indicator is at the right level for the right period or right interval in ramp, then you can feel confident but not declare victory yet.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost kind of like you're kind of continuously monitoring, right? So like in the first month, maybe you spend that time like onboarding the rep, teaching them, you know, going through mock discovery conversations, mock demos, et cetera, having them ride along with you. In the second month, we would expect them to have like, you know, 10 first meetings or maybe 21st meetings, and we would expect 50% of those to get to second meetings. We would measure those things. In the third month, we would expect some subset of the first meetings and second meetings that happened in the second month to get to a proposal, right? To get to a commercial conversation. And then maybe we would expect some of the deals in that month to close, to close when, or maybe the next month. And so it's essentially like you're looking at the leading indicators in the appropriate timeframe such that like if someone is in month three and they're getting a bunch of their deals to proposal, you can't declare victory.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flow is a person putting meetings on their calendar. Are they progressing them? Are they being active in the meantime? Those are all really good leading indicators. And so, I mean, if somebody's not getting first meetings on the calendar, like, you know within a month, it's like, okay, cool, this isn't working out, right? Now, if they're not getting to second or third meetings where they are getting those first meetings, well, now you know you've got a different problem, right? Which like they're getting those first dates, but they're not getting in a second date and they're not getting a second date the same way that you were okay, maybe that's a coaching issue, or maybe it's just like a behavioral problem that you're not going to be able to surmount. But the point is, is it's like having instrumentation on the most leading indicator possible gives you eyes onto whether or not things are working or not. And you can make judgments because the worst possible situation is like nine months in, you're like, man, it's not working. It's like, man, I bet if you looked at the leading indicators, you probably knew you would have known like two months in.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why it's so, so, so important to look at leading indicators. And this is something that we just think about all the time here at Atrium from a instrumentation and data-driven sales management is if someone's not having customer facing meetings, if they're like low activity, you're never going to win anything, right? Like if you have a 50% win rate on two opportunities in a month, that's probably still not going to be super helpful unless you have a very, very, very high deal size, right? And so looking at those leading indicators, like are they having first meetings? Are they having second meetings? What is their email volume look like? Are they getting, are they progressing things through? Are they getting things to proposal? And then eventually our things closing. And so that's why bird dogging, I do a bunch of like masterclasses for Atrium on data-driven sales management. And one of them is on ramping. It's called like, you know, ramping for success. I forget the name of the masterclass. But like looking at those leading indicators, like opportunity in.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If those things are not present, then probably no one's going to be successful, or at least they're going to have to rederive all that stuff that you already did. But if you have all those precursors and it's not sticking for someone, that's probably a good leading indicator that they're not going to work out.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But God bless, but like she's not ICP for Atriam, right? So you can't, this is like kind of the danger of doing revenue trades in your accelerator or like whatever. It's not real, right? So, if you have done that and you've sold like 20 or 30 deals, you know it can be done. We have an existence proof of this. So if someone else can't do it the way that you do it, and this is why hiring like two folks to start is effective, right? Like you don't want to hire just one, maybe three, but like four, it's like, oh, that's a lot to manage, at least to start. And so if you have done that and the person's like their win rates are poor, right? Or their activity levels are poor, things like that, those are usually indicators that it's like not going to, that it's not going to work out, that they're not getting those second dates. They're not getting those third dates. But importantly, they have to have the materials in question, right? Like, did you create the slide deck that you take people through and did you give this to them? Did you take all the discovery questions that were in your brain and write them down into a Google Doc or a Notion page or what have you? Do you have a demo script for them?”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presuming that you have, and this is another reason why it's really important to do it yourself to start, but presuming that you've done that, like that you've been able to close business on a reliable basis, again, with like arm's length prospects, like it can't be Lenny's mother-in-law buying my software. Huge fan for real, actually.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's great. This is one of the things that we really love at Atrium, we have really great customers because, I mean, like we're creating new category of software. And so it's kind of one of those things where more advanced, more modern sales managers and leaders really get it. It's kind of how it always.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marissa, she's probably going to look at your organization, be like, cool, prove to me that your product fits the market because like I don't want to necessarily take a bet on you. And then you would say, well, in addition to having a 25% win rate with me, I have these two sellers right here and they both have 20% win rates. And you can see that they're both closing $50,000 of bookings a month. All I need you to do is scale it up, in which case that early stage head of sales is like, all right, let's do it, right?”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you a couple examples. So, like, I don't know, you're doing some sort of design tool, right? Like I would go look at the Figma sales organization and I would look at some of the earlier sellers who were there maybe two years ago or three years ago or what have you, right? Maybe you could consider getting a sales manager there who's like not super far from selling, right? Like a great example of this is there's this woman Marissa Fuhrer who works at Figma. She's absolutely fantastic. She works on the enterprise team there. And she was at Dropbox previously as a seller for a long time. She would be a great profile for someone who's not too far from having sold and is like willing to, you know, roll up her sleeves. But ideally what you're doing is you're like, that would probably be the person who you'd want to hire after you've hired those couple of sellers and gotten them to success. Because the other thing, too, with like.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And whatever aren't going to be all buttoned up and with a bow around them. And so looking for those early stage, kind of like grimier, grittier sellers is a more effective way of going about that. So like those are the folks that you want to look for once you've gotten to that statistical significance of your own selling capacity.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a new recruiting technology. So my buddy Troy runs this recruiting software company called Guide, right? They make this like really cool guided hiring process for candidates, whatever. But they sell to recruiting organizations. So the kind of early stage sellers that he would be interested in would probably be like early people at like lever or greenhouse right who sell to the same persona probably around the same like average selling price. But ideally like not an AE who joined greenhouse like last year or like two years ago. So like greenhouse greenhouses has a phenomenal sales organization. Their sales leadership is absolutely fantastic. The gentleman who's the CR over there is a good friend of mine, Sean Murray. But like early stage selling takes like early stage sellers where people have been there because you're not going to have all the collateral like slides and scripts.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take that sales motion. The downside of hiring, like seeking to hire a VP of sales or like a head of sales or how you who actually is a head of sales is coming out of an organization where maybe he or she is a manager of managers or like manages like 10 like eight reps or something like that is that person hasn't been selling for a hot second right and I think actually Jason Lemkin had a pretty funny tweet about this the other day where he was like you know hiring the VP of sales who's like been there and done that before like why exactly does she want to do it again right like oh you scaled up you know data dog or like Figma or whatever you should come to my like crappy little startup it's like yeah I'm professionally rich and and so instead the the great folks to look at are like the deputies right or like those early stage sellers so the example I always use here my last software company was in recruiting so if you have”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the way to, again, this is kind of mapped out in the founder-led selling presentation and then also in founding sales, the book. I mean, generally what you want to do is you probably don't want to start with like a VP of sales to start, like a sales leader. And there's a couple of reasons why there. Even if you figured it out yourself, that's required, right? You have to get to that minimum sufficiency of 10, 20, 30 customers yourself first, right? But then the reason why I advocate for folks that like hire a couple of sellers, a couple of AEs to start is because, again, you have that like software in your brain. Like unfortunately, there is no GitHub for sales motions. So it's in your brain. It's in your documents, et cetera. And so now you're going to teach these other folks. So what you want to do is you want to hire a couple like early stage kind of pioneer sellers.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got my let's get it hat here. I've got my coffees for closers mug. Like these are all inside sales jokes that maybe your audience won't necessarily get or maybe they will, but our audience very much gets them. They're like, oh man, your hat's so funny. Can you send me one? I'm like, no problem. You should buy our software.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like a modern sales prose. Perfect. Modern sales pros mugs. We have like a bunch of Yetis that we give away for Atrium as well. But yeah, we're big under sales jokes here because you have to, like, we stole this from New Relic, right? Like being very user-centric in your swag, right? So I got my sales jacket on here”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be the VP of product, not the product manager, or it might be the VP of engineering or the CTO, right? So those three different folks that we talked about there, it's like different humans. And so ideal customer profile is understanding what those kind of like parameters look like for looking at an organization or to say, man, that's an awesome op. Let's go get in front of them versus, I don't know if that's a very good opportunity. Like maybe that's passing. And then the personas are great, that's an awesome op right there. All right. I know that I'm going to have my first conversation with Lenny, but with an intention that I'm eventually going to get to the VP of product at Airbnb. And that's Susie over here. And then, you know, once we get validation from her, then we're like, I know that the VPE over here is Frank. And like, so like knowing who the personas are. So that's what ICP and personas are.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thank you. So ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And actually, it's important to kind of think about there's two things in a B2B sales motion. There's like the account, the characteristics of the account, which is like the company that's going to buy. And then there's the characteristics of the human and the personas that you're going to be interacting with. And so let's use like amplitude as an example. Amplitude's ICP would probably be organizations that make software products that probably have at least a couple of product managers because there's like a single product manager. It might be like too much like they might be at the point where they don't need a full like a full blown enterprise analytics suite. And that's probably it, right? And then on then on the human side, who are the people who participate in that conversation? Well, the product manager is going to be.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like the non complicated version of those complicated versions. I think the non complicated version would be just like walking down the street, make eye contact with everybody, and then every person that you, like every person you stop next to at Starbucks or the crosswalk or whatever, just like strike up a conversation with them, like figure out a mechanism by which you can start a conversation with them. complement their shirt or their shoes or remark on something. Don't use the weather because that's lazy, but like figure that out because like, so like that's the first shirt. Probably the more sophisticated version is like, you know, just be very, very tight on your ICP. Just get very, very, very crisp around who has your problem and why. And so being more crisp around that and then having, you know, having that understood is a great way of making sure that you're not wasting time on people who don't have your problem and that you're doing more of those loops with people who are like right in the white hot center. So like one is kind of like a behavioral thing and one is a more thoughtful thing.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably not great, right? And then once I've revealed to them the fact through kind of this directed questioning what's known as discovery that they're not solving the problem, like they have this high magnitude problem that it is costing them lots of money, that it is a pain in their ass. And that, and then I reveal to them that there is a better way of approaching it and magically enough, I happen to be a representative of that solution. Well, now that's an ideal transaction and everybody wins. And so, and then scale that up across an entire economy. And you can kind of see why I was saying that, you know, sales is like kind of the grease that makes the economy work like that. And also importantly brings new technology to the market in a way that makes everything better.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a given solution. Your solution, right? But we're not trying to like use atrium as an example, right? Like atrium's minimum ICP is probably like SDRs plus AEs in an organization should probably be like at 10 all the way up to like 300, right? So if someone shows up and they're like, man, I got to get really good at sales. I need to buy your software Pete. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like how many salespeople do you have? Oh, like one. I'm like, man, I'm not going to sell you atrium. Like you're just going to be unhappy. It's going to be dumb. Like it's going to be a waste of our customer success resources. You're going to churn, all those sort of things, right? But if instead what you're doing is you're saying, hey, I'm going to go out in the market and I'm going to find the people that match that have a high proclivity that our technology solves. And then I'm going to talk with them about how they're solving that problem right now. And ideally through a series of questions, I'm going to reveal to them that they're doing.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk a bit about that? I think this is kind of like the modern sales versus old school sales thing. The old school sales thing is like, all right, I'm going to sell something to a mark, right? Or like the best example is like, man, that guy's a great sales guy. He can sell ice to an Eskimo. It's like, man, if you're selling ice to an Eskimo, you're an asshole, right? Like what is wrong with you? They don't need ice. I mean, unless they're like, you know, they're visiting Southern California. And so as a seller, what you should be doing, the way that I like to frame it to people is that you're a consultant that has a particular predilection.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All those sort of things, and like asking for money and then shutting up and waiting for them to answer, all these are very uncomfortable things, but the more you do them, like the better, like you'll just get good at them.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're interacting with a prospect. And then what that's going to allow you to do is then ask them candid questions about their current situation that either, A, they may know about or B, you ask provocative questions that make them think about the world in a way that you want them to and realize that they have pain they didn't want or that they didn't know that they had. So it's kind of like my friend Brett Berson had this great tweet at one point where he said Think about the things that you do in your day-to-day that are like a pianist, like a piano player playing scales like what is the version of that for selling and that's like you know rapid rapport building asking good questions asking follow up questions being willing to ask uncomfortable questions”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you just start doing, you start doing, you start doing it, and you're just kind of become used to it. You become calloused, right? It's like I'm incorrigible now. Like you put me in an elevator, I can talk to anyone, right? And one of the things that, so like one, just recognizing it's going to be a pretty big mindset change. And then the second thing you can do is then once you know that there's going to be a mindset change, you can focus in on making those behaviors be better. So as an example, one of the things I challenge my staff to do is I call it turbo rapport. It's a better name, but like think about people that you interact with in the world who maybe are like a little shields up, right? Like they're probably used to interacting with people who are like not going to be super nice to them. Like maybe it's bartenders or flight attendant or like barista or fill in the blank, right? Think about how quickly you can become friends with them, right? Like how you can break that down. Because like that's going to be a really good skill for you to have.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like two, three, four, maybe five customer facing meetings a day with different humans. And then moreover, then you're having incremental interactions with those folks later on, like later that week or the next week or what have you. So then you have to keep continuity of these multiple parallel conversations, right? So it's like it's a totally different set of skills. And so it feels super weird.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and it's always the same people, right? And so it's like super comfortable. Whereas in sales or anything customer facing, what ends up happening is like you're meeting multiple new humans every day if you're doing it right. And that just is like such a mindset shift. Like you're not going to be able to remember everybody. You're going to have to write it all down. You're going to have to use the CRM for that. You're kind of like in the starting blocks. Like, you know, like on the track, like you're in the starting blocks and like you have 90 seconds or like a couple minutes to like form report or make to make somebody feel like they should trust you and they want to be honest with you, right? You have to be very focused on activity orientation, right? Like engineering and product management is a lot of like super deep work. It's kind of like Paul Graham's like maker versus manager schedule. Salespeople have manager schedules, interestingly enough, where what you're doing is you're constantly context switching. Like an ideal salesperson's calendar or a founder who's doing sales.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first chapter of founding sales talks about what I call sales mindset changes because I think the big thing is it's just so weird, right? It's just like such a weird shift in behavior because if you think about it as like a product manager or as a sales, like as an engineer or whatever, like how many people do you interact with day to day? Six maybe.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think, okay, cool. Well, developers can just swipe their credit cards. Like, yeah, they can, but then you're going to be eventually capped there. I mean, look at Snowflake. Snowflake has like, I don't know, 500 salespeople. You're going to need a sales order.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that's the case. I mean, it's more of a question of when versus if. So even the really famous ones like Atlassian, right? And Atlassian, they had a sales organization. They just didn't call it sales organization. And they went pretty far without a lot. But instead, what they did was they just priced the product breathtakingly low. And I think developer tools can oftentimes do this where because developers are pretty technical. They can adopt product. They don't need like hand holding in order to adopt a product that is complicated enough to be valuable. Like Datadogs, good example or new relic or appdee, but even those guys, like, you know, very early on had meaningful sales organizations. And like one of the reasons why Datadog really, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why Data Dog ended up winning that market, but their sales organization is no joke, right? So even like even developer tools, like you might like.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the Silicon Valley joke middle out or whatever? Because we land with sales managers and SDR managers. But it's still like what you're doing is you're solving the problem that the user has, but the problem is the user doesn't necessarily have large budgetary authority. So you can get them stoked up, but then you got to talk to the person who's got the purse strings. And so that's going to require sales. That's okay.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your business And I think the good news is that a lot of people took a lot of lumps there, and folks have learned that, like maybe Slack almost missed that, but then they brought in a bunch of like Salesforce folks and other folks. Actually, Mike Mark was also an early sales manager at Slack as well, and really got religion around that because it turns out that people paying $19 a month or $29 a month or what have you is like really great. But getting to a $50,000 or $100,000 or $250,000 contract, that's like where big ARR numbers start racking up. And organizations like want to talk to a human in order to navigate that, right? So PLG is great for landing, right? And like permeating an organization, there's a bunch of great craft invest in this like crazy. So like Scratchpad is a great example of like very bottoms up. I mean, atrium is pretty bottoms up as well. It's like.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to operate. There you go. Yeah, that is a great article. So it's not that you have to be great. You just have to recognize that it's important. And so like a good example of this would be probably like the most famous example of an organization that maybe didn't get sales religion as quickly as they should have would be Dropbox. And Dropbox has phenomenal early sales leadership. So like one of our investors here at Atrium is a gentleman named Mike Marg. He's a partner at Craft Ventures. He was an early sales manager and leader there. Kyle Parrish was the head of sales at Figma. Mercifur is over at Figma as well. There's all these just like absolutely fantastic Dropbox folks. But the problem was that the organization from a product standpoint never kind of put all their calorie as many calories behind product development that would like support the ability to sell to across an entire organization. And so the way that I kind of like try to succinctly describe that is never mistake your lead gen.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say you don't have to get good at it, you just have to get non zero at it, right? There's this really great article on Lenny's newsletter on adding a sales organization to a self-serve product that Lenny had me write. And then he edited the heck out of it. And it's really a fantastic asset. But what I would say there is that there are a lot of PLG or self-serve motions out there that have really kind of like they stagnated themselves because they didn't add the sales piece to it. And I would encourage people to read that article. I forget what it's called. You added a really cool name.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go, right? Now you're not even getting first dates, man. You're just like, man, like, yeah, go all the way up to like, you need a better hinge profile picture, right? You're just like not getting any matches.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source