Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/89275849/e4c338f27ec43900092f9b1cd563c0b0.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 00:44:32

The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers is what have you. It's 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 gotta be a born seller or things like that and it's really not, right? Like those people are just talking their their book if you will. And so just like getting good at those behaviors, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna benefit you in a myriad of ways. Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Pete Kazanji. Pete is the author of my single favorite book on sales, called Founding Sales, which I point every B2B founder to. He also runs a huge community of sales people called Modern Sales Pros. He's also the CEO and founder of Atrium, which is a SaaS product that helps you make your sales team more efficient through analytics and data. In our conversation, we focus on three things. One, life founders should be doing sales themselves for a long time before hiring your first sales person and also when it's time to hire that first sales person. We get into how to hire or your first sales person with the look for in the profile and the most common mistakes people make. And finally, we cover a bunch of tactical tips for getting better at sales. Pete didn't come from my sales background and he learned everything by just doing it, learning, researching, and repeating. I know that you'll learn a ton from this conversation with that I bring you Pete Kazanji. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. I'll help you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth. If your business stores any data in the cloud, then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your SOC2 compliance. 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This because flawless data on-boarding acts like a catalyst to get them in their customers where they need to go faster. You'd like to learn more for get started. Check out flat file and flatfile.com slash Lenny. Pete, welcome to the podcast. Hey Lenny, super awesome to see you. Even more awesome on my part. Ever since I launched this podcast, I have always wanted to have you on it. We're finally here. We've been online buddies for a few years now. Ever since I discovered your book, Founding Sales, which we're going to talk about and it's just been a lot of fun knowing you so. Thank you again for being here. The quick story was Lenny had shipped his different genres of marketplaces and how to start the liquidity and growth and whatever. And I was obsessed with it and then somehow I ran into you at Brian Kimmel's South 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. That was like, what you're amazing. And then we got beers and like, you know, and now like, happily ever after. Look at us now. And then you encourage me to make a book out of that post, which I have not yet done maybe one day, eventually. So we're going to be talking a lot about sales and a lot of the stuff that you covering your book before we get into it. Could you just take a minute to share a little bit about your background, some of the wonderful things you've done to kind of give folks a sense of your experience in the sales world? I think probably the most important thing to characterize for folks is that I don't actually have a background in sales like originally, which is where most sales leaders and sellers come from, you know, they graduate from school, our BDR becoming an AEE manager, a BDR manager, and then go on a sales leadership. My background's 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 Bin. It was a recruiting software company in geez Louise 2009. And just like we quickly realize that like, man, the software, like this BDRB software stuff like doesn't sell itself. Like 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 realize like, man, this isn't, this is a rocket surgery. Like anyone can, to get in learn this, like if I can learn this, like other people can learn this, even though there's like not documentation on it. And so the software company was eventually acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014. And then I wrote a book on, on sales for founders and other kind of first time sellers called Founding Sales, mainly it was like the book that I wish I had, right? It's rather than like, you know, having to learn by a narrative from, you know, 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 communities called Modern Sales Pros, 30,000 sales operations, sales leaders, etc. 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, not, not that old sales, modern sales. Oh, I'm curious to hear what that is. But before I ask you that question, I just want to mention the book, your book Founding Sales is like the book I give every founder that is trying to figure out sales. And every time I give it to them or point them to you, even your site that has all for free, there was just like holy shit, this is exactly what I need to do. So we're going to be covering a lot of that stuff in there, a little chat. Brad, can you actually just briefly talk about what is modern sales versus what you call traditional sales? Oh, I just think that like, you know, there's a little bit of like a mindset change. It's kind of, it's a little bit related to some of the reasons why founders and kind of other folks maybe have this perception of sales being like ew sales. And it's because like people are like, they're only experienced with sales, like Glenn Gary Glenn Ross or like movies with, you know, sleazy these 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 micro-economic 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 they run around trying to find people who ought to have the demand, maybe they have the demand right now, maybe they don't realize that they have the demand and then they like elucidate to them, why they ought to have the demand. So like a that process is very important from a technology deployment standpoint and also be it's like very miserable, especially in a modern environment where like, you know, with modern CRMs and also kind of like all the digital activity that we do, email, calendar, phone, zoom, etc. Like all this information is now being recorded such that you can then like measure, manage, and improve behavior. So very similar to how like back in the day you do product analytics by like looking your fingers again in the wind and then like then mix panels showed up. Then an amplitude showed up. Then, you know, so on and so forth and the same is kind of the case in in sales as well. So like modern sales is a more thoughtful operational, rigorous, analytical kind of bent. Like it's been around for a while. It's kind of like one of those things like the future is here. It's just like wasn't widely widely distributed. But now it's like being much more, you know, much more distributed and much more like embraced. Kind of like, you know, the pre-money ball moment in, you know, 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. Awesome. I definitely want to talk about ways to get better at sales and like things you've learned about just having improved sales. But to set a little bit foundation for that conversation, I want to talk about founder let's sales. You touched on this topic. Your book is basically named after this concept of founder let's sales. Can you talk about what that is, why it's so important and maybe why founders often get this wrong? The way that kind of think about founding sales, the book founding sales, it's kind of like the, um, I like to think of it is like the sequel to Eric Reese's like the lean startup or like Steve Flanks, um, four steps to the epiphany or like startup owners manual or whatever. Where, if you think about the stages of, um, you know, that like, and this is all B to B, right? If you think about the stages that a product goes through, it's one, you gotta like know what problem you're solving, right, and validate that and it's gotta be real. I thought I had this problem. I got to be validate 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, um, you know, building the minimum feature set and we're going 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 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, and 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 like 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 a, it's a loop, right? We're like the minimum, 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 interface with a lot of customers with a lot of, you know, and that's, 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 is that like you can't outsource that behavior, right? The founders got to do that stuff. And a lot of people kind of asking that question is like, whoa, I, I second sales are like, I'm afraid to talk to people or, you know, like interfacing with non-friendly parties is like makes me uncomfortable. And the way to kind of think about it is like it's, um, I figured 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 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 like interactions with like non-friendly parties and like, you know, having commercial conversations and asking for money and 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 user 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, kind of data-doggy amplitude, but like for your sales reps. I'm probably the, 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, you know, put aside the fact that like, I already know how to do minimum viable selling, if I try to get somebody else to 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 Blankoist talks about like startups can't get through, can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales. It's often times 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, you know, sales leader or what have or some sort of seller and outsource as and you really just can't do that. Not for the first like couple dozen customers. It's just not tenable. You're like, you lose that feedback loop, you lose the learnings of like whether or not your message fits the market, all that sort of stuff like you're playing a game of telephone with that with a sell it 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 like while loop, right, like a selling while loop, then package it and hand it to someone else. So that's kind of like my diet trip on like why founders have to do this. I was going to try to summarize the reasons that you should be doing this and it sounds like there's so many. One is figure out what you should actually be building. That's the reason founders should be selling to learn how to position and pitch and sell. Yeah. Three is figure out what you could teach your sales person when you hire them. Is that kind of the summary of why you should be selling as a founder for a while? Yeah, first, I mean, like one, it's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstract and 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 human. Because that's the way that B2B start out of scale is like it's not like what's app or like you know Twitter or like Airbnb or whatever where you have like this kind of like scalability by a marketing. The way that B2B organizations scale primarily is by adding more sales people who then have customer-facing meetings with prospects and then you cap out with like the number of the number of hours that are in the week, like there's only four of your 50 hours in the week. Especially 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 sales people. Right? And so that's why packaging that up is really important because then you're going to shove it into the brains of you know two more sales people 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 once they're successful, you're going to go to 16. You talk about this while loop concept, which I love, what are signs that it's time to hire your first sales person? It's kind of like right begs the question when do you want to do this? Yeah, I'm not a software engineer, but like I like to use technical metaphors with technical audiences when I 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 air out, right? And so so then what were the definition of like not air or ring out look like? And so generally speaking, it's like kind of is contingent on your on your sales motion, but it's going to be like you know that you can reliably at like a pretty okay win rate. So like maybe 15% or 20% or 25% turn first meetings into eventual customers, right? And like do that in a reliable fashion. It's not like, you know, I engage 10 arms length parties and I got two customers close. Like hey, that's great because that's a good start. Do that five like five X that 10 X that, right? So you know, take 50 at bats, take 100 at bats, and now that you know that you reliably for every, you know, for every cohort of 10 first meetings that what's known in sales and as opportunities, for every cohort of 10 that you engage, are you closing, you know, are you closing one point five, are you closing two or you closing two point five if you're in there, but if you're at like yeah, for every 30 I interact with, I close one. Well, it seems like that's probably like pretty inefficient unless, you know, you're selling 500,000 dollar deals or something like that. So it's at the point where you like you have the like it feels like it's statistically significant, it feels like it's repeatable because what you're going to then do is like now it feels like it's a safe bed to try to abstract that out to somebody else because the only way we're going to get to success is like we're not going to have Lenny go and like sell from morning new to night, right? Where we're going to do is we're going to take the information out of Lenny's brain and we're going to put it in the slides and we're putting it in the scripts and we're going to put it into email templates and all that sort of stuff and then we're going to shove that into the brain of two more reps and see if we now we can get it to like run in the cloud, right? In the in the sales cloud here and then to start out like you may it may fail like the same way. All right cool like it runs on my local. Oh, it breaks over here. Okay. Why? Right. And then that's like the segment next stage is now you're figuring out how to get those other folks to sell as successfully as you have and that becomes like the next job. And this is actually this is the presentation I gave at Breyans. A SaaS school was there's if you Google it's just called like founder led selling it's like available online. It's essentially there's like a bunch of stages in the B to B maturity journey and like you have to go through them in order to get to the next one if you jump stages like you're kind of host and so in this case like if you know that you can reliably sell this yourself that's great then the next thing to do is get you know at least a couple people reliably selling as well as you not 10 because you're never going to get to success well 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 for aid etc. I love this he risked that you shared that you want to get to about 15 to 25 percent of contacts closing to a customer yeah so you shaking your thumb I think that's a really useful so it's like a third a bit less than a third and doing like 50 to 100 attempts is roughly where you want to go. Yeah and importantly what you don't want to do is and I think probably a lot of the product managers would like to listen to Lenny's podcast you're going to appreciate this is like you want to bring on like cohorts of users and 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 at that and then be like okay you do to work or not versus like hey let's let's have 10 for like prospect and try to get 10 first meetings how all those like how all those interactions see how your conversations Lancy 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 oh that's a good sign just like yeah I'm just not getting it all right cool back to the drawing board right it's right versus doing like 100 like 100 all at once and then like all right now did it work right we want to like break it up and then the constantly just 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 um 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 that 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 that so I can show it to them visually and also it'll help 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 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 don't know Lenny it doesn't really sound like you know XYZ you're like oh you know a lot of people say that but here if you 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 of times before you're like you have a repeatable sales motion. What's interesting is with this heuristic like two thirds of the time it's not going to work out and so a lot of times we're going to be like yeah I don't get this sleeping alone is there other leading indicators that tell you you're improving knowing that like only a third or maybe a fifth of the time it'll work out is it like talking in the boss off more often what else do you look for yeah yeah exactly totally is right so like what are the leading indicators is success because if you're only looking like lagging in the kidders so again it's probably like a it's like a funnel on a on a new feature right so the opportunity is 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 age room as an example we we sell on on customer data it's like five minutes to turn on our nature in my account so you know it's it's really really helpful for folks they just sign in they OAuth was sales force great so really important part like stage in our sales motion is did we we call it data light right has data been lit up and so that's a stage right we have a discovery stage with data light stage we have like a what we call it preview stage like are we previewing it with the staff then we you know get to a commercial discussion and so you can measure how you're getting to those stages which is kind of like you know somebody lands on like whatever page that that Lenny was in charge of at Airbnb and like did they click on the right thing and they get to the next thing and they get to the next thing and 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 the appropriate way of doing it is like hey man are we getting second dates right so like just you know just metaphorize it to to hinge or you know copy meets bagel or like whatever the 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 like a miss there and so what we want to do is we want to say great of all of our ten first meetings how many gets the second meetings like it would be great like the lagging indicator is you know two wins at a ten or what have you but I'm going to come into these conversations and I want out of my ten first meetings like I want seven of them gets the second meeting right and then I want of those seven maybe I want like you know I want 4.5 of them to get to to get to the third meeting and then ultimately I want like two or three to 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 okay cool you need a haircut right or any of the shower right and the same applies to your 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 think about it you need a better pick up line 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 as a founder do you have to get good at sales you know a lot of founders like oh my god we're going to do PLG we're going to be self-serf premium we don't need sales I'm just going to let people figure it out like is that is a requirement of a B2B business to get good at sales as a founder 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 sales organization to a self-serf product that Lenny had me right and then he edited the heck out of and it's it's it's really a fantastic asset but what I would say there is that there are a lot of PLG or self-serf motions out there that have really kind of like they they stagnated themselves because they didn't add the the sales piece to it and I would encourage people to read that article I forget what it's called you got it a really cool name oh the transition layering on sales to product like yeah see you have a you're good at naming things right if it's inspired by David Saxes the cadence which I like I had operate there you go yeah that's like that is a great that is a great article so it's not that you have to be great you just have to recognize that it's important so like a good example of this would be probably like the most famous example of an organization that like maybe didn't get sales religion as quickly as they should of would be um would be drop-box and you drop-box has phenomenal early sales leadership so like one of our investors here at atrium is a gentleman named Mike Mark he's a partner at craft ventures he was in early sales manager and leader there Kyle Perish was the head of sales at Figma Mersefure is over at Figma as well there's all these just like absolutely fantastic drop-box but the problem was is that like the organization wrote products standpoint never kind of like put all their calories it's my 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 like never mistake your lead gen for your business and I think the good news is is that like a lot like a lot of people took a lot of lumps there and folks have learned that like maybe slack almost like miss that but then they brought in a bunch of like sales force, sales force folks and other folks actually Mike Mark was also a really sales manager at at slack as well and like really got religion around that because it turns out that you know people paying you know 19 bucks a month or 29 bucks a month or what have you is like really great but um you know getting to a $50,000 or $100,000 or $250,000 dollar contract like that's like we're big ARR numbers start racking up and organizations like want to talk to a human or to navigate that right so PLG's great for landing right and like permeating an organization there's a bunch of great like craft invent invest in this like crazy so like scratch pad is a great example of like very bottoms up I mean a trims pretty bottoms up as well it's like a it's like I don't what is the Robin what is the uh the Silicon Valley joke middle out or whatever because we land with like sales managers and SDR managers but it's still like what you're doing is you're like you're solving the problem that the user has but the problem is is like the the user doesn't necessarily have like 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 like that's gonna require sales that's okay and just to punctuate that basically 100% of B2B companies end up building a sales team right I would say that's the case I mean it's it's like it's more of a question of like when versus if so like even like the really famous ones like at Lassian right and you know at Lassian they had a they had a sales organization they just didn't call out sales organization and they went like pretty pretty far without a lot but instead what they did was they just like price the product like breathtakingly low and um and I think developers who can often times do this were because like developers are like pretty technical they can adopt products they don't need like handholding in order to adopt like a product that is like complicated enough to be valuable like data dogs get example or new relic or apte but even those guys like you know very early on had um had meaningful sales organizations and like one of the reasons why data dog 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 think okay cool well the developers can just like swipe their credit cards like yeah they can but then you're gonna be eventually capped there I mean like it's snowflakes snowflake has like I don't know 500 sales people like you're gonna need a sales org let's shift a bit to talking about just how to get better at sales at the skill of sales and I think it's interesting because you don't have a sales background and so you've had to learn how to do this and you did a lot of research and building your business you've had to get really good at sales so maybe a first question what's like the number one tip that you have for getting better at sales? The first chapter of founding sales talks about what I 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 as a product manager as a sales like as a engineer whatever like how many people do you interact with data today? 6, 10 maybe not too many 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's just is like such a mindset shift like you're not going to be able to remember everybody you're gonna have to write it all down you're gonna have to use the CRM for that you're kind of like in the starting blocks like you know on the track like you're in the starting blocks and like you have 90 seconds or like a couple minutes to like form rapport to 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 whereas like engineering and product managers a lot of like super deep work it's kind of like holograms like maker versus manager's schedule sales people have manager's schedules interestingly enough where what you're doing is you're constantly context switching right like an ideal sales person's calendar or a founder who's doing sales is like two, three, four, maybe five customer facing meetings a day with different humans and then more over your like 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 totally different set of skills and so it's it feels super weird to start out but what ends up happening is it's just a skill and so you just start doing you start doing you start doing it and you just kind of become used to it you become a callous 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 gonna be a pretty big mindset change and then the second thing you can do is then once you know that there's gonna 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 means 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 gonna be super nice to them like maybe it's bartenders or a flight attendant or like barista or 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 gonna be a really good skill for you to have when you're interacting with with with with a prospect and then what that's gonna allow you to do is then ask them candid questions about their current situation that either a they may you know about or b you ask provocative questions that make them think about the world in a way that like maybe that you want them to realize that they have pain they didn't want or they did know that they had so it's kind of like um my my friend Brett Burst and had this great tweet one 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 da da da da da da da da da da da da da what is the version of that for for selling and that's like you know rapid rapport building asking good questions asking follow up questions being willing to ask uncomfortable questions right 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 the the more you do and like the better 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to get started and integrate up to five customers for free one of the things in your book that most shifted my mindset on sales was this kind of shift from you're trying to convince someone to buy this thing to you're trying to help them and maybe this will make their life easier you talk a bit about that. I think this is kind of like the remember the modern sales versus like old school sales thing like 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 yeah 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 something California and so like as a seller that what you should be doing the way that I like to frame it to be pose that you're a consultant that has a particular predilection for a given solution your solution right but we're not trying to like use atrium as an example right like atrium is minimum of ICP is probably like SDR's plus eight ease in an organization should probably be like a 10 all the way up to like 300 right so if someone shows up and they're like man I gotta get really good at sales I need to buy your software and I'm like okay cool like how many how many sales people do you have like oh I'm 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 gonna turn all those sort of things right but if instead what you what you're doing is you're saying hey I'm going to go out in the market I'm going to find the people that match that 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 you know a series of questions I'm going to reveal that to them that they're doing it probably not great right and then once I've revealed to them the fact through kind of this you know directed questioning what's known as discovery that they're not solving the problem like they they have this high magnitude problem that it is causing 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 and magically magically enough I happen to be a representative of that of that solution well now like that's an ideal transaction and everybody everybody wins and so like that's 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 that makes everything better if someone's listening to this and they're like I want to get better sales what's like one thing I could do differently tomorrow this week to improve my ability to sell my product what what would that be there's like the non complicated version of this complicated version of the non complicated version would be just like walking down the street make eye contact with everybody and then every person then you like every person you stop next to at like Starbucks or like or like you know the crosswalk or whatever just like strike strike mode conversation with them like figure out a mechanism by which you can start a conversation with them like look like compliment their 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 the first probably the more sophisticated version is like you know just be very very tight on your ICP just give 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 of making sure that you're not wasting time on people who don't have your problem and that you're 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 one more thoughtful thing that's great you can actually explain ICP briefly because a lot of people may not know that term 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 or 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 to ICP would probably be organizations that make software products that probably have at least a couple of product managers because if there's like a single product manager it might be like too much like they might be at the point where they they don't need a full like a full blown enterprise analytics suite and that's probably it right and then on the then on the human side who are the people who participate in that conversation well the product manager is going to be the ones who are going to be the users but engineering is probably involved in order to make sure that amplitude can talk to the cloud data warehouse and so on and so forth and then more over the person who owns the budget might be the VP of product not the product manager or it might be the VP of engineering of the CTO right so there's 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 off let's go get in front of them versus I don't know if that's a very good opportunity like maybe that's that's passed on and then the personas are great that's an awesome off 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 therapy and be and that's Susie over here and then you know once we give validation from her then then we're like I know that the VP over here is Frank and like sort of like knowing where the personas are so that's what ICP and personas are awesome there's an template that you've created that helps you kind of lay out your ICP and so we'll try to link to it in the show notes and have to find it again nice sounds good so we've talked about founder-led sales and how founders should be starting sales we've talked about just how to get better at sales as a founder as anyone I want to talk now about hiring sales people and sure and great mug by the way coffee is for closers I love it right people buy that on liners that just went off this is like a modern sales pros perfect modern sales pros max we have like a bunch of yetties that we give away for atrium as well but like yeah we're we're big under like sales jokes here because you have to like we we stole this from new relic right like being very user centric and your in your swag right so like my sales nerd jacket on here 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 you're had so funny key send me on like no problem you should buy our software love it so hiring sales people we've talked a bit about a lot of these things like maybe when it's time to hire sales person when you're closing like a fourth of fifth of your opportunities when it's while loop is kicking in so in terms of the who to find for this first sales role and you mentioned that VP of sales are often let go it's like a very high rate of not working out is that true yeah yeah I mean the way to again this is kind of mapped out in the 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 they don't there's a couple of reasons why they're like even if you figured it out yourself that's we're quiet right you you gotta you have to get to that minimum efficiency of 10 20 you know 30 customers yourself first right but then the reason why I advocate for folks that like hire a couple of sellers right couple of eighties 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 etc and so now you're gonna teach these other these other folks so what you want to do is you want to hire a couple like really stage kind of pioneer sellers to take that sales version the downside of hiring like seeking to hire a VP of sales or like ahead of sales or what how you who actually is ahead of sales like has coming out of an organization where maybe here she is a manager of managers or like managers like you know 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 Lumpkin 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 figure whatever you should come to my like crappy little startups 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 like a new recruiting technology so you know my buddy Troy runs this recruiting software coming to called guide right they make this like really cool guided hey hiring process for candidates whatever but they sell to recruiting organizations so the kind of early there early stage sellers that he would be interested it 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 in a EE who joined greenhouse like last year or like two years ago so like greenhouse has a phenomenal sales organization their sales leadership is is absolutely fantastic the gentleman who's the CR over there it's 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 and whatever I'm going to be like all buttoned up and with a bow around them and so looking for those early stage kind of like grimeer gridier sellers is a is a more effective way of going about that so like those are the folks that you want to look for once you got into that statistical significance of your own selling capacity to make that just even clear the suggestion is if you're like say a series a founder you what's like a profile of a person you look for you said it's like a deputy at a successful sales org I'll give you a couple example so like I don't know say you're doing some sort of like design tool right like I would go look at the 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 this is this woman versus if you're who works at Figma she's absolutely fantastic she works on the enterprise team there like she and she was at Dropbox previously as a seller for a long time like she would be a great profile for someone who's not too far from having sold and is like willing to like you know roll up her sleeves but ideally what you're doing is you're like that would probably be the person who you want to hire after you've hired those couple of sellers and gotten them to success because the other thing too is like Marissa she's probably gonna look at your organization be like cool prove to me that your product fits the market because like I don't want to really 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 a bookings a month all I need you to do is scale it up in which case that that early stage head of sales is like all right let's do it right she's about to get a bunch of like dinner quests she's great this is like one of the things that we really love at atrium is like we have um 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 we're like more advanced more modern sales managers and leaders like really get it it's kind of how it always is in category creation but when you find the people who like really get it and like really get it they turn out to be like awesome and like that's one of the things that just makes startups fantastic with a sign that maybe it's not working out when you hire your either first sales person either maybe like first five what are signs because you said it's often does not work out what are like early signals like hmm I should rethink this presuming that you have done 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 way so again with like arms length prospects like you can't be you know it can't be Lenny's mother and law buying my buying my software plan for real right yeah but like I mean god bless but like she's not ICP for for a tram right so like you can't this is like kind of the danger of like you know doing revenue trades in your accelerator like whatever like it's it's not real right so if you have done that and you've sold like 20 or 30 you know deals you know it can be done we haven't existed 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 is effective right like you don't want to hire just one you may be three but like four it's like oh that's a lot to manage um at least to start and and so if if you've have done that and the person's like their win rates are poor right or that their activity levels are poor things like that those usually indicators that it's like not gonna that it's not gonna 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 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 they were in your brain and write them down into you know a Google Doc or a notion page or what have you do you have a demo script for them if those things are not present then you know probably no one's gonna be successful or at least they're gonna have to like re-derive 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 like they're not gonna they're not gonna work out how much time do you give these books before you make a decision this is why it's so so important to look at leading indicators and this is something that like we just think about all the time here at atrium from a instrumentation and data driven sales management is like if someone's not having customer facing meetings if they're like low activity you're never gonna win anything right like if you have a 50% win rate on two opportunities in a month that's probably still not gonna 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 right are they having second meetings what does our email volume look like are they getting are they progressing things through are they getting things to proposal and then eventually are things closing and so that's why bird dogging I do a bunch of like master classes for atrium on data driven sales management on one of them is on ramping it's called like you know ramping for success after the name of the master class but like looking at those leading indicators like opportunity in flow is a person putting like 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 like not getting first meetings on the calendar like you know within a month it's like okay cool this is so working out right now they're not getting to second or third meetings where they are getting those first things well now you know you've got a different problem right which like they're getting they're getting those first days but they're not getting the second date and they're not getting the 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's that you're not going to be able to surround but the point is is this 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 fact 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 like this wasn't working and like they gave us kind of a bottom end of the range like in a month you should be able to know a lot of times what would be like the max by which like if things are going okay by like six months you're probably it's probably going to be good or what is that timeframe oh like where you know you're successful yeah like it's like it sounds like maybe from a month to some future month this is a period where you can get a sense if this this person is going to work out but it's like that range yeah it's almost like you're you're kind of continuously monitoring right so like in the first month maybe you spend that time like onboarding the the rep teaching them you know going through mock discovery conversations mock demos instead are having them right 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 the second meetings we'd measure those things in the third month we would expect some subset of the month of of those 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 the in that month to close right to close when or 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 3 and they're getting a bunch of their deals to proposal you can't declare victory yet because like the money is not in the bank however things are looking good so if you get to month 4 and then and lots of things are getting to proposal but nothing's closing a month for nothing causing a month 5 you should still like you still can't say all the alliox and 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 like you can feel confident but not declare victory yet got it something that this reminding me of is we were chatting ahead of this call and you mentioned that worked from home is really bad for salespeople in your experience you talk about that yeah it's it's primarily bad for junior salespeople like senior salespeople have been like selling you know out in the what's known as the field for for a long time but when you think about the behavior that we're talking about which is you learning right so like what what needs to happen that the new sellers they need to learn the sales motion and then they need to be audited right like instrumented and so like the faster the loops are on that the better off you're gonna 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 gonna be way too slow versus if you're sitting next to somebody 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 this speed with which you're able to like update their software and making make sure that the sales motion is running appropriately on them is is quite high and like in early stage startups it's only through that matters it's like how it's a race against time to make sure that you get to success so you can raise your next round of financing or it's a profitability or what have you and so like having distance right having asynchronous distance is really problematic for that especially for for junior folks like SDRs junior AES all of that it really is it really is problematic once that sales motion is baked and can be like distributed okay that's potentially a different a different situation but like very early on having someone sitting like being able to sit side by side with your sellers is really pretty it's it's hard to hard to be so it's the solution is it if you're starting now I'd be to be company your devices don't be remote working novice my point of view on that is it's like you especially like early stage you you certainly like from a founder standpoint like being you know shoulder with your your with your co-founders certainly but even with like you know us 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 a kind of ability and then have like you know like training loops is really what you need to what you need to do because the alternative is like there's there's 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 kind of 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 like 10 others with a with an SDR manager sitting in the middle of them or an A manager sitting in the middle of them any last pieces of wisdom before we get to a very exciting lightning round I think probably like the biggest thing is like the the thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers is what have you just don't be afraid of sales there's a lot of people out there who like who would love to tell you a story that it's you know it's magical or like oh you got to be a born seller things like that and it's really not right like those people are just talking their their book if you will and so just like getting good at that those behaviors is kind of you know it's going to benefit you in a myriad of ways even if you don't want to necessarily be an early stage founder even as a product manager within an enterprise organization or even a you know 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 it's that are like those are really good skills for internal selling for external selling for you in interface with customers etc it's like you know all these skills are very important and impactful for for a myriad of personas. Amazing well with that we've reached the very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you we're going to go through it pretty fast are you ready? I am. Question one what are two of the books that you recommend most to other people? The books that I recommend the most there would be the goal by E-Lay Gold Grant. There are two books that inspire to 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 factory so it's a really like if you want to think about like systems thinking and kind of like you know 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 the 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 control and that if you do a high quantity of high quality actions like whatever your position is as a quarterback or a lineback or running back or whatever then the score will take care of itself and and that's very applicable to sales as well like if you focus on those leading indicators and make sure that you're doing in a high quantity of high quality way and the score will take care of itself so those are two two great books I like to recommend the folks favorite other podcasts oh boy I don't listen to too many 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 and knowledge with this one favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed I got a five year old so like we're all Disney all the time so I think probably like the the one that's been on on repeat recently has been in Conto so yeah love that one favorite interview question that you like to ask folks so I'm gonna 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 in sales and so I'm a big fan of doing screens so we actually have a written screen that we do with folks which is a Google Doc that has like a dozen or so a biographical questions that we allow people to answer and you'd be shocked like the way that how well it screams people like you know 50% of sending people won't do and this is not these are not complicated questions right it's like Lenny tell me about something that you built that you're proud of right like it doesn't know those questions and so like one you can filter out people who are not serious you can filter out people who you know have low levels of give a shit you also can see whether or not people can communicate in a compelling fashion right with a beginning in a middle in an end and I'll see their attention to detail whether or not like they 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 question thing but like that's a huge hiring hack from my perspective and this is a form that folks fill out when they're trying to apply to work at atrium is there yeah yeah or it's just something that I mean I I'm from my portfolio companies as well I like that people just use it it's a Google sheet right I started not a Google sheet a Google Doc right just like and you just clone it give it to them all right you have that it right let me know what it's done and you'd be shocked like you know people like yeah if we're going to do it okay great you told me everything I need amazing final question do you have a favorite story of you or a sales person closing an awesome deal something that seemed impossible something that you're proud of there's a gentleman on in our sales organization named Sean who's an early seller here he's now sales manager he's absolutely fantastic and um you know I think one of the things that early stage founders and also sellers have to remember is like you're 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% winner rate that's pretty great if you're 20% winner rate that's pretty solid but that still means like four out of you know four out of five we're 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 close one of our biggest customers is a company called grin they're absolutely fantastic they make um influencer management software for brands very cool stuff and you know I think Sean probably ran like three or four ops with them before they were we're able to get a toe hold in the account a couple years ago they were much smaller and so now you know they I think they have like a hundred SDRs like 80 AES that are being managed using atrium and so I think there's a good lesson there which is you know it's not going to be the first it's not necessarily going to be the first time through the pipe and maybe not the second time but you just have to keep like pushing that boulder up the hill and eventually when you do good things happen what a great lesson to leave us with very empowering Pete this was everything I hoped it would be two final questions where it can folks find you online if they want to learn more learn more about atrium the book and then how can folks be useful to you I'm pretty easy to find online I'm the only Pete Kazanji in the in the United States as far as I can tell and Google will order correct my name if you if you Google it wrong so like that's pretty helpful yeah find me on LinkedIn find me on Twitter you can also find founding sales at founding sales dot com as letting notes the the whole book is available online is like hypertext yeah I mean you can buy a physical copy as well but the reason why my wife put it into a square space 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 you know how folks can be helpful to me if you if you work for an organization that has you know between 10 and 300 sales people and you're looking to make them more like manage them better via metric make them more efficient right that's a big watch word 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 also just you know Google atrium sales and will be the top result as well amazing Pete thank you for being here now it was awesome thanks Lenny thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode