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

“And then I want of those seven, maybe I want 4.5 of them to get to get to the third meeting. And then ultimately I want like two or three to win. And that's the way to kind of think about that. Like those are the leading indicators. And so like as those conversions get better, like, man, I'm not getting any second dates. Oh, okay, cool. You need a haircut, right? Or you need a shower, right? And the same applies to your sales motion as well. Like your message is not landing. right you're targeting the wrong people why like what's going on here you need to you know you need to think about it”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you can measure how you're getting to those stages, which is kind of like somebody lands on whatever page that Lenny was in charge of at Airbnb and like, did they click on the right thing and do they get to the next thing and it gets to the next thing to get the next thing? And so in sales, it's kind of the same thing. And so the more sophisticated version of this is looking at stage conversions, what have you, the less sophisticated version of it, which early on I think is an appropriate way of doing it is like, hey, man, are we getting second dates? So like just metaphorize it to hinge or coffee meat spagel or like whatever the more recent one is like, all right, we get in the second dates. Are we getting the third dates? Because if we're, if we're not getting the second dates, like probably something's amiss there. And so what we want to do is we want to say, great, of all of our 10 first meetings, how many gets a second meetings? Like it would be great.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Totally. So, like, what are the leading indicators of success? Because if you're only looking at like lagging indicators, so again, it's probably like a funnel on a new feature, right? So the opportunity is like an at bat, right? Or a potential transaction. And so usually what you do is you model out the stages in your opportunity. And so generally like there will be kind of different stages depending on the sales motion. So like use Atrium as an example, we sell on customer data. It takes like five minutes to turn on an atrium account. So, you know, it's really, really helpful for folks. They just sign in. They OAuth was Salesforce. Great. So a really important part, like staged in our Salesforce motion is, we call it data light, right? Has data been lit up? And so that's a stage, right? We have a discovery stage. We have a data light stage. We have like what we call a preview stage. Like, are we previewing it with the staff? Then we get to commercial discussion.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know Lenny. It doesn't really sound like XYZ, you're like, oh, you know, a lot of people say that, but here, if you look over here, you can see this. Oh, yeah, that's a really good point. Wonderful. So as the next step, let's go ahead and talk to your boss, right? And so like now your sales motion has been updated and the collateral has been updated and now we're like we're being more effective sellers and you're just going to do that dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of times before you're like you have a repeatable sales motion.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be iterating, iterating, iterating, and like again for your, I think your audience might appreciate this the way to kind of think of a sales motion. So sales motion is like a fancy pants way of describing just like all the things that you do in order to take a prospect and like, you know, bring them through the sales process and then eventually close them. And one helpful way to think about it is kind of like software, right? And like what you want to be doing is like constantly updating it. Like, oh, that was a really interesting question that the prospect asked right there. I didn't have a good answer for it. And moreover, I didn't have a slide for it. You know what I should do? I should make a slide that handles that objection, right? So I can show it to them visually. And also it'll help give me a guardrails and a talk track. And that'll be nice. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to like, and then I'm going to update the source code, right? And like now my sales motion has been updated, right? And then the next loop through, ideally, the next time that person says like, oh, I.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and importantly, what you don't want to do is, and I think probably a lot of the product managers like to listen to Lenny's podcast here might appreciate this, is like, you want to bring on cohorts of users and to kind of like see what's going on, then learn and then bring on new cohorts of users, right? So going and like doing 100 app bats and then being like, okay, due to work or not versus like, hey, let's have 10 for like prospect and try to get 10 first meetings, have all those like have all those interactions, see how your conversations land, see how the discovery questions are evoking the right response or not the right response, see how your slides land, see how your demo lands, all that sort of stuff, if it's working well and you're getting to the next stage. Yeah, this is great. I would love to introduce you to my boss. Ah, that's a good sign. It's like, yeah, I'm just not getting it. All right, cool. Back to the drawing board, right? Versus doing like 100, like 100 all at once and been like, all right, now did it work right? We want to like break it up. And then the constantly just.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a actually, this is the presentation I gave at Brianne's SaaS school, if you Google it, it's just called like founder-led selling. It's like available online. Essentially, there's like a bunch of stages in the B2B maturity journey. And you have to go through them in order to get to the next one. If you jump stages, you're kind of hosed. And so in this case, if you know that you can reliably sell this yourself, that's great. Then the next thing to do is get at least a couple people reliably selling as well as you. Not 10 because you're never going to get too successful if you're trying to onboard 10 concurrently. And then if you get those two successful, now you've earned the right to go to four, eight, et cetera.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not a software engineer, but I like to use technical metaphors with technical audiences because I think it's like helpful. And so it's kind of like when it runs on your local, right, now it's time to like see if it reproduces over here, right? So if it reliably runs on your local and it doesn't like error out”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shove it into the brains of two more salespeople. And then once they're successful, you're going to go to four. And then once they're successful, you're going to go to eight. And then once they're successful, you're going to go to 16.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, one, it's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstracted for sure. Two, it's going to help like you're going to be the person who's going to figure out how to talk about it in an effective way. And then three, it's going to make it such that you can package that up such that other humans. Because like that's the way that B2B startups scale is like it's not like WhatsApp or like, you know, Twitter or like Airbnb or whatever where you have like this kind of like scalability via marketing. The way that B2B organizations scale primarily is by adding more salespeople who then have customer facing meetings with prospects. And then you cap out with like the number of hours that are in the week. Like there's only four or five hours in the week, especially like as a seller because you interface with other people during business hours. And so the way that you scale up is by just adding more salespeople. And so that's why packaging that up is really important because then you're going to”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That with a seller, like a third party seller versus you, and like you just want to keep that in one brain to start, then package it and then when you have a repeatable while loop, right, like a selling while loop, then package it and hand it to someone else. So that's kind of like my diatribe on like why founders have to do this.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2D, but like for your sales reps. I'm probably the expert in sales like analytics in the world, right? And so like back in 2016 and 2017 when we were doing this, if I had like put aside the fact that like I already know how to do minimum viable selling, if I had tried to get somebody else expert at that in order for them to go out and do that in the market, like that would have been not good, right? And then this is why Steve Blank always talks about like startups can't get through, can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales. It's oftentimes because they skip that step. And so the founder is like, hey, man, I'm going to like pour a little bit of sales on this, hire some sales leader or whatever some sort of seller and outsources. And you really just can't do that. Not for the first like couple dozen customers. It's just not tenable. You lose that feedback loop. You lose the learnings of whether or not your message fits the market, all that sort of stuff. Like you're playing a game of telephone with.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the way to kind of think about it is, I forget who the person was who said startups versus incumbents is a race between like, can innovation get to distribution before distribution can get to innovation? And so this is kind of a related concept where as a founder, it's going to be way easier for you to get good or like minimally viable good at selling by having interactions with like non-friendly parties and having commercial conversations and asking for money in exchange for their in exchange for the value delivery. It's going to be easier for you to do that than it is for some third party to become as expert at the subject matter that you're tackling that you are. Because as a founder early on, like use atrium as an example, we make data-driven sales management software, which it exists to help sales managers and teams use metrics and data to improve the performance of their reps. I mean, the way to kind of think about it is kind of like amplitude-y kind of data doggy, amplitude.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like bits and atoms and what have you, in order to solve a problem that people have. But then the next step is like, okay, cool. Now I got to get someone to pay for this. And I got to do that in a reliable fashion. And I got to do it in a scalable fashion. And so there's kind of like a little bit of a loop there, right? It's not like, all right, the product's done. Throw it over the wall. Have fun, kids. It's more like it's a loop, right? We're like the minimum viable version of your product is probably going to suck, right? And then in order to get to the minimum valuable step, like you got to be interfaced with a lot of customers, with a lot of, you know, and that, and that's like, that's a sales behavior, right? Like get in front of people and be like, hey, I think you probably have this problem if you look like these other folks right here. And the point is that you can't outsource that behavior, right? The founders got to do that stuff. And a lot of people kind of ask me that question is like, well, I suck at sales or like, I'm afraid to talk to people or, you know, like interfacing with non-friendly parties is like makes me uncomfortable.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I kind of think about founding sales, the book Founding Sales is it's kind of like the I like to think of it as like the sequel to Eric Reese's like the lean startup or like Steve Blanks Four Steps of the Epiphany or like startup owners manual or whatever where if you think about the stages of like, and this is all B2B right if you think about the stages that a product goes through It's one, you got to like know what problem you're solving right and validate that and it's got to be real can't be like, oh, I thought I had this problem got to be validated and that's like customer development that's customer research right and that's more of like a product management function and then there's you know building the minimum feature set in order to prove that like maybe technology can fit to this this problem and like solve it like and that's how like we create create value as technologists is like piecing together you know technology and code”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a more thoughtful, operational, rigorous, analytical kind of bent. It's been around for a while. It's kind of like one of those things like the futurist here is just like wasn't widely widely distributed. But now it's like being much more distributed and much more embraced. Kind of like, you know, the pre-money ball moment in sports and baseball to kind of the post-money ball moment, we're now kind of like just flipping over there. So that's kind of the delta.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I just think that, like, you know, there's a little bit of a mindset change. It's a little bit related to some of the reasons why founders and kind of other folks maybe have like this perception of sales being like, ew, sales. And it's because people are only experienced with sales is like Glengary, Glen Ross, or like, you know, movies with, you know, sleazy card salesmen and stuff like that. Whereas the way to kind of think about like what sellers are is they're kind of like the microeconomic agents in the market that bring supply to demand rather than waiting for demand to find supply. Like they have supply in their back pocket and they run around trying to find”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other people can learn this, even though there's not documentation on it. And so the software company was eventually acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014. And then I wrote a book on sales for founders and other kind of first-time sellers. It's called Founding Sales. Mainly it was like the book that I wish I had, right? So rather than having to learn via narrative from the rest of the first round capital portfolio and what have you. And then subsequent to that, I started what became the nation's largest sales operations leadership community. It's called Modern Sales Pros. It's 30,000 sales operations, sales leaders, et cetera. And then started a new software company called Atrium that makes data-driven sales management software. And then here I am. So I think a little bit about sales turns out. Modern sales, right? Not that old sales, modern sales.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably the most important thing to characterize for folks is that I don't actually have a background in sales originally, which is where most sales leaders and sellers come from a, you know, they graduate from school or BDR, become an AE manager or BDR manager, and then go on to sales leadership. My background is actually in product marketing and product management. I started my tech career at VMware back in the day, tons of like amazing, like fun VMware diaspora. And then I started a software company called Talent. It was a recruiting software company in Jeez Louise 2009. And just like we quickly realized that like, man, this software, like this B2B software stuff, doesn't sell itself. You're respective of what maybe what people say on the internet, at least back then. And so I had to be our first seller, our, you know, our first sales manager, our first sales leader. And that's kind of like where I learned how to do sales. And also just kind of like realized like, man, this isn't, this isn't rocket surgery. Like anyone can, again, learn this. Like if I can learn this, like,”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quick story was Lenny had shipped his different genres of marketplaces and how to like start the liquidity and growth and whatever. And I was obsessed with it. And then somehow I ran into you at Brianne Kimmel's SaaS school. And I was like, after I gave a presentation on founder-led selling and there was like a scrum of people around me and I was talking about like amazing writers and amazing content online and I referenced the series and then you raised your hand. You're like that was me. And I was like, what? You're amazing. And then we got beers and like, you know, and now happily ever after.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers and 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.”
2022-12-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source