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Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)15 December 2022

Founder-led sales

8Frameworks
13Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Leadership5 steps

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

Hire two gritty early-stage sellers from an analogous company, not a professionally rich VP.

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Sales5 steps

The Consultant With a Predilection

Be a consultant who favours one solution: yours. Disqualify hard, let discovery persuade.

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Leadership5 steps

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

Judge a new seller each month on the indicator due that month, not on bookings.

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Sales5 steps

The Sales Motion as Source Code

Treat the pitch like a codebase: run cohorts of 10, patch the bug the prospect found, redeploy.

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Sales5 steps

The Second-Date Funnel

Win rate is a lagging indicator. Manage the meeting-to-meeting conversions like dates.

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Sales6 steps

The Selling While Loop

Sell it yourself until it reliably runs on your local, then package it and ship it to other brains.

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Leadership5 steps

The Written Screen Job Simulation

Send a shared doc of a dozen easy questions. Half the candidates disqualify themselves.

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Communication5 steps

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

Sales is a set of drills, not a birthright — practise your scales on baristas and bartenders.

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Hot Take· 3

Hot Take24:00

You Don't Have To Be Great At Sales, Just Non-Zero

Addressing PLG and self-serve founders who think they need no sales, Pete says you don't have to be great but you have to be non-zero and recognize sales matters. Many self-serve motions stagnate by never layering on sales. He uses Dropbox as the cautionary example and warns founders never to mistake their lead gen for their business.

  • PLG is great for landing and permeating an org but caps out without sales
  • Big ARR ($50K-$250K contracts) needs a human to navigate the purchase
  • Dropbox had great sales leaders but underinvested in product to support org-wide selling
  • Essentially 100% of B2B companies end up building a sales team, it's when not if

“you don't have to get good at it. You just have to get non-zero at it.”

Pete Kazanjy · 24:00

“never mistake your lead gen for your business.”

Pete Kazanjy · 25:30
#plg#sales#b2b
Hot Take33:30

Good Selling Is Consulting, Not Selling Ice To Eskimos

Pete rejects the old-school ideal of the closer who can "sell ice to an Eskimo," calling that person an asshole because the buyer doesn't need it. Instead a seller should act as a consultant with a predilection for their own solution: qualify hard, walk away from bad-fit buyers, and use discovery questions to reveal a real, costly problem the prospect can then solve with your product.

  • Frame yourself as a consultant with a bias toward your solution, not a closer
  • Turning away a bad-fit buyer (e.g. one seller vs Atrium's 10-300 ICP) avoids churn
  • Discovery questions reveal a high-magnitude, expensive problem to the prospect
  • When you win as their better path, everybody wins and it scales across the economy

“Man, if you're selling ice to an Eskimo, you're an asshole.”

Pete Kazanjy · 34:00

“you're a consultant that has a particular predilection for a given solution.”

Pete Kazanjy · 34:00
#sales#discovery#consultative-selling
Hot Take51:30

Work From Home Is Bad For Junior Sellers

Pete argues remote work is especially damaging for junior salespeople because learning the sales motion depends on tight feedback loops. Sitting side by side lets a manager listen to calls live and give immediate corrections, whereas async distance stretches correction loops to a day or more. He warns of a generation of 24-year-old SDRs who never learned the skills at the clip they would have sitting amongst peers with a manager in the middle.

  • Junior reps learn fastest via rapid, side-by-side correction loops
  • Async distance makes call auditing and coaching loops too slow
  • Early-stage startups are racing time, so faster learning loops are critical
  • Remote created "learning loss" for a cohort of junior SDRs and AEs

“it's it's primarily bad for junior sales people.”

Pete Kazanjy · 51:30

“There's a bunch of like 24 year olds who have never like you know, like never learned the skills that are needed”

Pete Kazanjy · 54:00
#remote-work#sales-management#coaching

Explainer· 2

Explainer07:30

What "Modern Sales" Actually Is

Pete reframes salespeople as the microeconomic agents who bring supply to demand rather than waiting for demand to find supply. Modern sales is more operational, rigorous and analytical than the sleazy stereotype, because CRMs and digital activity now let you measure, manage and improve selling behavior. He likens the shift to the pre- and post-moneyball moment in baseball.

  • Sellers proactively find people who ought to have demand and elucidate the pain to them
  • The negative perception comes from Glengarry Glen Ross / sleazy car salesman imagery
  • Modern CRMs plus recorded email, calendar, phone and Zoom activity make selling measurable
  • Analogous to product analytics moving from finger-in-the-wind to Mixpanel and Amplitude

“they're kind of like the the microeconomic agents in the market that bring supply to demand.”

Pete Kazanjy · 07:30

“modern sales is a more thoughtful, operational, rigorous, analytical kind of bent.”

Pete Kazanjy · 08:30
#sales#modern-sales#mindset
Explainer29:30

Sales Is A Manager Schedule, Not A Maker Schedule

Pete explains why sales feels alien to engineers and PMs: instead of deep work with the same handful of people, you meet multiple new humans daily, context-switch constantly, and must write everything into a CRM. Borrowing Paul Graham's framing, salespeople live on a manager schedule. He coaches a skill he calls "turbo rapport" — building fast trust the way you'd befriend a bartender or barista.

  • Sales means meeting multiple new humans every day and forming rapport in minutes
  • You keep continuity across many parallel conversations, unlike deep-work roles
  • "Turbo rapport": practice rapidly befriending shields-up people like baristas
  • Fast rapport lets you ask candid, provocative questions that surface hidden pain

“Sales people have manager schedules, interestingly enough.”

Pete Kazanjy · 29:30

“one of the things I challenge my staff to do is I call it turbo rapport.”

Pete Kazanjy · 30:30
#sales#mindset#rapport

Story· 1

Story58:30

Keep Pushing The Boulder: The Grin Deal

Pete closes with a story about Shawn, an early seller at Atrium, who ran three or four opportunities with Grin before landing the account a couple of years ago. Grin was much smaller then and now manages roughly 100 SDRs and 80 AEs on Atrium. The lesson: even at a strong 20-30% win rate, most deals don't close first time through the pipe, but they can on a later pass.

  • A 30% win rate still means four of five don't close first time through
  • Grin took three or four opportunities before Shawn got a toehold
  • Grin grew into ~100 SDRs and ~80 AEs managed with Atrium
  • Win rate on the second time through the pipeline matters

“you just have to keep like pushing that boulder up the hill, and then eventually when you do, good things happen.”

Pete Kazanjy · 59:30
#story#persistence#sales

Tool· 2

Tool57:00

The Written-Screen Hiring Hack

Instead of relying on interview questions, Pete favors job simulation. Atrium uses a written screen — a Google Doc with about a dozen biographical questions candidates answer with edit rights. Roughly half of applicants never complete it, which filters out the non-serious, and the responses reveal communication ability, effort, and attention to detail like typos or skipped questions.

  • A ~dozen simple biographical questions in a clonable Google Doc
  • About 50% of candidates won't even complete it, filtering out the non-serious
  • Reveals whether people can communicate a story with a beginning, middle and end
  • Exposes attention to detail via typos or unanswered questions

“you know, 50% of people won't do it.”

Pete Kazanjy · 57:30

“that's a huge hiring hack from my perspective.”

Pete Kazanjy · 58:00
#hiring#tools#screening
Tool55:30

Two Books That Inspired Atrium

Pete recommends two books that shaped his thinking. The Goal by Eli Goldratt is a novelization of the Toyota lean manufacturing system, useful because sales organizations are just revenue factories. The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh argues you can't control the score, only a high quantity of high-quality actions — which maps directly to focusing on sales leading indicators.

  • The Goal (Eli Goldratt): systems thinking and process engineering as a novel
  • Sales orgs are revenue factories, so lean manufacturing thinking transfers
  • The Score Takes Care of Itself (Bill Walsh): control your actions, not the score
  • High quantity of high-quality actions makes the outcome take care of itself

“sales organizations are just revenue factories.”

Pete Kazanjy · 55:30
#books#recommendations#sales

Takeaway· 5

Takeaway11:00

Why Founders Can't Outsource Early Sales

Pete argues the founder must personally do sales for the first couple dozen customers because it's easier for a founder to become minimally good at selling than for a hired seller to become expert in the founder's subject matter. Outsourcing too early breaks the feedback loop and turns market-message validation into a game of telephone. He cites Steve Blank's point that startups often have to fire their first VP of sales because they skipped this step.

  • Founder-led selling keeps product development, message and learnings in one brain
  • It's easier for a founder to get minimally good at selling than for a third party to master the subject
  • Hiring a seller too early loses the feedback loop on whether your message fits the market
  • Only package and hand off the motion once you have a repeatable selling while-loop

“you can't outsource that behavior right? The founders got to do that stuff”

Pete Kazanjy · 11:00

“startups can't get through can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales.”

Pete Kazanjy · 12:30
#founder-led-sales#hiring#feedback-loop
Takeaway15:30

The Win-Rate Heuristic For Hiring Your First Seller

Pete gives a concrete signal for when the founder's selling is repeatable enough to hand off: reliably converting first meetings (opportunities) into customers at roughly 15-25%, proven over 50-100 at-bats rather than a lucky 2-out-of-10. Below that threshold, closing only one in thirty is inefficient unless deals are very large. Once it's statistically significant, it feels safe to abstract the motion to a couple of new reps.

  • Target a ~15-25% win rate turning first meetings into customers
  • Prove it over 50-100 at-bats, not a small sample
  • 1-in-30 is too inefficient unless you sell ~$500K deals
  • Onboard cohorts of prospects, learn, iterate, rather than blasting 100 at once

“so like maybe 15% or 20% or 25% turn first meetings into eventual customers right?”

Pete Kazanjy · 15:30
#sales#hiring#metrics
Takeaway22:30

Track Leading Indicators: "Are We Getting Second Dates?"

Because two-thirds of opportunities won't close, Pete says you can't only watch lagging indicators like wins. Early on the simplest useful measure is dating-style: are first meetings turning into second meetings and third meetings? If you're not getting second dates, something is off with your targeting, message or delivery, and you can diagnose it before nine months of failure.

  • Model your opportunity stages like a product funnel
  • Early on, just ask whether first meetings become second and third meetings
  • Bad conversions point to wrong targeting, weak message, or poor delivery
  • Aim for e.g. 7 of 10 first meetings to reach a second meeting

“Hey, man, are we getting second dates?”

Pete Kazanjy · 22:30
#sales#metrics#pipeline
Takeaway36:00

One Thing To Do Tomorrow To Get Better At Sales

Asked for a single next step, Pete offers a behavioral version and a thoughtful version. Behavioral: walk down the street, make eye contact with everyone, and strike up conversations — compliment a shirt or shoes, but never open with the weather because it's lazy. Thoughtful: get extremely crisp on your ICP so you spend loops on people in the white-hot center of your problem.

  • Practice starting conversations with strangers to build the muscle
  • Open with a specific compliment or observation, not the weather
  • Get very crisp on who has your problem and why (ICP)
  • Tight ICP stops you wasting time on people who don't have your problem

“just like walking down the street make eye contact with everybody.”

Pete Kazanjy · 36:00

“Don't use the weather because that's lazy.”

Pete Kazanjy · 36:30
#sales#practice#icp
Takeaway41:00

Hire Gritty Early-Stage Sellers, Not A VP Of Sales

For your first sales hires, Pete advises against a seasoned VP of sales and in favor of "deputies" — early-stage sellers from companies that sell to your persona at a similar price point. A polished VP hasn't sold hands-on recently and, per a Jason Lemkin joke, is often "professionally rich" with little reason to grind at your startup. Because there's no GitHub for sales motions, the knowledge lives in your brain and docs, so you need grittier reps who'll sell without polished collateral.

  • Reach 10-30 self-closed customers before hiring sellers
  • Hire a couple (not one, not ten) early-stage pioneer AEs to absorb your motion
  • Avoid managers-of-managers who haven't sold hands-on for a while
  • Look for deputies from peer-persona companies (e.g. early Lever/Greenhouse sellers)

“unfortunately, there is no GitHub for sales motions.”

Pete Kazanjy · 41:00

“Yeah, I'm professionally rich.”

Pete Kazanjy · 42:00
#hiring#sales-team#founder-led-sales