The Consultant With a Predilection
Be a consultant who favours one solution: yours. Disqualify hard, let discovery persuade.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Kazanjy's reframe of what a seller actually is: not someone who convinces a mark to buy, but a consultant with a particular predilection for one given solution. The job is to go find the people whose profile suggests a high proclivity for the problem you solve, ask directed questions until they themselves see that they are handling it badly and expensively, and only then reveal that you happen to represent a better way. The corollary — the part most founders skip — is that you must refuse to sell to anyone outside your ICP, even when they are asking to buy.
Origin
Pete Kazanjy's articulation of 'modern sales' vs the Glengarry Glen Ross 'sell ice to an Eskimo' stereotype. The directed-questioning step is the sales practice known as discovery; the account-plus-persona structure is his ICP template.
Core principles
- 01Selling is bringing supply to demand — finding people who ought to have the demand and elucidating why.
- 02If you're selling ice to an Eskimo, you're the problem. Fit precedes persuasion.
- 03The prospect must reveal the pain to themselves through your questions; you supply the questions, they supply the conviction.
- 04An out-of-ICP customer is a future churn, a support burden, and a wasted customer success budget.
- 05Crispness about who has your problem and why is the single highest-leverage sophisticated improvement to your selling.
How to run it
- 1
Define the account side of your ICP
Specify the characteristics of the company that should buy: what they build, their scale, the threshold below which the product is overkill. Amplitude's account ICP is roughly: organisations that make software products and have at least a couple of product managers. Atrium's is roughly 10 to 300 combined SDRs and AEs.
Pro tip Define the lower bound explicitly — it is the bound that will actually save you from bad revenue.
- 2
Map the personas inside the account
Identify the three distinct humans: the user, the technical validator, and the budget holder. For Amplitude the user is the PM, engineering validates the data-warehouse integration, and the VP of Product, VP of Engineering or CTO holds the purse strings.
Pro tip Name the actual people before the first call: you may start with the PM, but you already know which VP you must reach.
Watch out PLG lands you with users who have no budgetary authority. Getting the user stoked is necessary but never sufficient.
- 3
Prospect only the white-hot centre
Go find accounts with a high proclivity for the problem your technology solves. Being crisp about who has the problem and why is what stops you wasting loops on people who don't.
Pro tip Score every opportunity as 'awesome op, let's go get in front of them' vs 'let's pass on it' before you spend a meeting on it.
- 4
Run discovery: make them see the pain
Ask directed questions about how they solve the problem today. Through the sequence, reveal to them that they are doing it badly, that the problem is high-magnitude, that it is costing them real money, and that it is a genuine pain.
Pro tip Be willing to ask uncomfortable questions and provocative questions that make them see their world differently — that's where the pain they didn't know they had surfaces.
Watch out Telling them they have a problem is not discovery. If you assert it rather than eliciting it, they won't own it.
- 5
Reveal the better way — or disqualify
If they fit, reveal that a better approach exists and that you happen to represent it. If they don't fit, refuse the deal explicitly, even if they are eager to buy.
Pro tip Naming why they'd be unhappy builds more trust than the sale would have generated revenue.
Watch out Selling below your ICP floor produces a churned customer, wasted customer success resources, and a bad reference.
In the wild
A prospect approaches Kazanjy wanting to buy Atrium. He asks how many salespeople they have. The answer is one — far below Atrium's ICP floor of roughly 10. He declines the sale outright: you're just going to be unhappy, it's going to be dumb, it would waste customer success resources, and you're going to churn.
→ The bad-fit deal is refused before it becomes churn, a support cost, and a negative reference.
Kazanjy decomposes Amplitude's ICP live: the account must make software products and have more than one product manager; the personas are the PM (user), engineering (integration validator) and the VP of Product or CTO (budget). A single-PM organisation likely doesn't need a full enterprise analytics suite.
→ A concrete, three-persona map that tells a seller exactly whose meeting to get and in what order.
Common mistakes
Selling ice to an Eskimo
Optimising for closing anyone who will pay. Out-of-ICP customers churn, consume disproportionate support, and pollute your product feedback loop with requirements from people you should never have served.
Pitching instead of running discovery
Founders default to presenting the product. Without directed questioning, the prospect never articulates the magnitude or cost of their own pain, so nothing you show them lands with urgency.
Stopping at the enthusiastic user
In bottoms-up and PLG motions the user gets excited but has no purse strings. If you don't map and reach the budget holder, the deal caps at credit-card size and stalls.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and PMs who find sales distasteful and need a frame that makes it honest, plus anyone whose funnel is polluted with bad-fit deals.
Not ideal for
Transactional, low-ACV, genuinely self-serve motions where a human consultative conversation costs more than the deal is worth.
From the transcript
“as a seller that what you should be doing the way that I like to frame it to people is that you're a consultant that…”
“I'm not going to sell you Atrium. Like you're just going to be unhappy. It's going to be dumb.”
“through kind of this you know, directed questioning what's known as discovery that they're not solving the problem like that they have this high magnitude…”
“Just be very very very crisp around who has your problem and why.”
“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…”
From the episode
Founder-led sales
Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)