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

the thing that I just like to encourage Founders and and product managers what have you is just don't be afraid of sales there's a lot of people out there who are 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 at those behaviors is 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 SAS 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 salesperson and also when it's time to hire that for salesperson we get into how to hire or your first salesperson what to look for in their 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

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go faster if you'd like to learn more or get started check out flat file at flatfile.com 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've 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 um 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 Brienne Kimmel's SAS school and I was like after I 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 the series and and then you raised your hand you're like that that was me and I was like what you're amazing and then we got

beers and like you know and and now now like happily ever after look at us now and then you encouraged me to make a book out of that post which I and not yet done maybe one day eventually so we're gonna be talking a lot about sales and a lot of the stuff that you cover in 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 and sellers come from uh you know they they graduate from school or bdr become an AE AE manager or a bdr manager and then go on a 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 talumpin it

was a recruiting software company and um geez Louise 2009 and um just like we quickly realized that like man the software like this B2B software stuff like doesn't sell itself like irrespective of like maybe what people say on the internet at least back then and so I had to be our first seller our 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 isn't rocket surgery um like anyone can 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 I wrote a book on 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 like you know having to learn by a narrative from uh 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 Community it's called modern sales Pros it's 30 000 sales operations sales leaders Etc and then started a new software company called Atrium that makes data-driven sales management software and and then here I am so I think a little bit about sales turns out modern sales right 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 even your site that has all for free they're always just like holy this is exactly what I needed so we're going to be covering a lot of that stuff in our little chat Brad can you actually just briefly talk about what is modern sales versus what you called traditional sales oh I just think that like you know there's a little bit of like a mindset change this kind of 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 be like ew sales and it's because like people are like their only experience with sales is like Glenn Gary Glenn Ross or like you know 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 the microeconomic agents in the market that bring Supply to demand rather than waiting for demand to find Supply like they they have Supply in their back pocket and

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 are they ought to have the demand so like a that process is very important from a technology deployment standpoint and also B it's like very measurable especially in a modern environment where like you know um 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 licking your fingers taking the wind and then like then mix panels showed up then amplitude showed up then you know so on and so forth and the same is kind of the case in in sales as well and so like modern sales is a more thoughtful operational rigorous analytical kind of bent it like it's been around for a while it's kind of like one of those things like

the future is here is just like wasn't widely widely distributed but uh 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-moneyball moment in uh you know in in sports and 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 how to improve it sales but to set a

little bit foundation for that conversation I want to talk about founder-led sales you touched on this topic your book is basically named after this concept of founder light sales can you talk about what that is why it's so important and maybe why Founders often get this wrong the way I kind of think about founding sales the book founding sales is it's kind of like the um I like to think of it as like the sequel to Eric Reese's like The Lean Startup or like Steve blanks um four steps to the Epiphany or like startup owner's

manual or whatever where if you think about the stages of um you know that like and this is all B2B 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 got to be real you can't be like oh well I thought I had this problem gotta be validated and that's like customer development that's customer research right and that's more like a product management function and then there's um 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 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 gotta get someone to pay for this and I gotta 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 gonna 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'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 that Founders got to do that stuff and a lot of people kind of ask me the questions like well I 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 and the way to kind of think about it is like it's um I forget who the 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 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 the 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 amplitudi kind of data doggy amplitude but like for your your sales reps I'm probably the the the expert in sales like in 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 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 gonna like pour a little bit of sales on this hire some you

know 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'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 cell 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 when you have a 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 diatribe 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 is learn how to position and pitch and sell three is figure out what you could teach your salesperson when you hire them is that kind of

the summary of why you should be selling as a Founder for a while yeah for sure I mean like one that's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstracted for sure two it's gonna help like you're going to be the person who's gonna 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 like that's the way that B2B startups scale is like it's not like WhatsApp or or

like you know Twitter or like uh Airbnb or whatever where you have like this kind of like scalability by a marketing um the way that B2B organizations scale primarily is by adding more sales people who then have customer facing me meetings with prospects and then you cap out with like the number of media the number of hours that are in the week like there's only 40 or 50 hours in the week especially like as a seller um 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 then once they're successful you're going to go to 16. you talk about this while loot concept which I love what are signs that it's time to hire your first salesperson it's kind of like right begs the question when do I do this

yeah I'm not a software engineer but like I like to use technical metaphors with technical audiences when I'm 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 um and so so then what would the definition of like not erroring out look like and and so generally speaking it's like it kind of is to contingent on your on your sales motion

but it's gonna be like you know that you can reliably at like at a pretty okay win rate so like maybe 15 or 20 or 25 percent 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 clothes like hey that's great that's a good start do that five like 5x that 10x 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 in sales land is opportunities forever every cohort of of 10 that you engage are you closing you know are you closing one are you closing 1.5 are you closing two are you closing 2.5 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 deals or something like that so it's 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 gonna then do is like now it feels like it's a safe bet 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 noon to night right what 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'll put 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 here and and then to start out like you may it may fail like the same way you're like all right cool like it runs on my local uh oh it breaks over here okay why right and then that's like the SEC the 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 this is a actually this is the presentation I gave at brienne's um SAS school was there's if you Google it's just called like founder-led uh selling it's like available online it's essentially there's like a bunch of stages in the B2B 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 hosed 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 gonna 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 for Aid Etc cetera I love this heuristic that you shared that you want to get to about 15 to 25 percent of contacts closing to a customer yeah I see shaking your thumb I think that's 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 like to listen to um Lenny's podcast here might appreciate this is like you like you want to bring on like cohorts of users and then 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 bats and then being like okay did

it work or not versus like hey let's 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 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 that's a good sign this is like yeah I'm just not

getting it all right cool back she's drawing board 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 and then like 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 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 that the prospect I 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 that so I can show it to them visually and also it'll help it'll help

give me a guard rails and a talk track and that'll be nice so I'm gonna do that I'm gonna like and then I'm gonna update the I'm gonna update the source code right 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 a Next Step let's go ahead and talk to your boss right 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 time 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 no and so a lot of times they're gonna be like yeah I don't get this

leave me 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 to the boss off more often what else do you look for yeah yeah exactly totally is right 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 it's like a funnel on an 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 the sales motion so like use Atrium as an example we we sell on on customer data it takes like five minutes to turn on an Atrium account so you know it's it's really really helpful for folks they just sign in they owe auth with Salesforce great so a really important part like stage on our sales motion is did we we call it data light right it 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 a um what we call a preview stage like are we previewing it with this app 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 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 the appropriate way of doing it is like hey man are we getting second dates right so like just you know just just metaphorize it to to hinge or you know coffee meets Bagel or like whatever the the more recent one is like all right we're getting the second dates are we getting a

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 10 first meetings how many gets a second meetings like it would be great like the lagging indicator is you know two wins out of ten or what have you but I'm going to come into these conversations and I want out of my 10 first meetings like I want seven of them to get to the second meeting all right and then I

want of those seven maybe I want like you know I want 4.5 of them to get to uh 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 oh okay cool you need a haircut right or you need the shower right and the same applies to your uh 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 you need a better pickup 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 any matches as a Founder do you have to get good at sales you know a lot of Founders are like oh my God we're gonna do plg we're gonna

be self-ser freemium we don't need sales I'm just gonna let people figure it out like is that is it 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 and a sales organization to a self-serve product that Lenny had me write and then uh he edited the heck out of it 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-serve motions out there that have really kind of like 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 you added a really cool name oh the transition layering on sales to products yeah see you have a you're good at naming things right I was inspired by David Sachs as the uh the Cadence which I love for how to operate there you go yeah that's a 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 and 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 have would be um would be Dropbox and you Dropbox has phenomenal early sales leadership so like one of our investors here at Atrium is a gentleman named Mike Marg he's a partner at craft uh Ventures he was an early sales manager and

leader there Kyle Parrish was the head of sales at figma Mercer fuhrer is over at figma as well there's all these just like absolutely fantastic Dropbox folks but the problem was is that like the organization from a product standpoint never kind of like put all their calories as many calories behind product development that would like support the ability to sell to across an entire organization and so the way that I kind of like try to succinctly describe that is 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 missed that but then they brought in a bunch of like Salesforce um Salesforce folks and other folks actually Mike Mark was also an early sales manager 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 was like really great but um you know getting to a 50 000

or 100 000 or 250 000 dollar contract that's like where big ARR numbers start racking up and organizations like want to talk to a human in order to navigate that right so plg is great for landing right and like permeating an organization there's a bunch of great like craft investment it's like crazy so like scratch Pad is a great example of like very Bottoms Up I mean Atrium is pretty bottoms up as as well it's like a it's like I don't know what is the robin uh 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 like the user doesn't necessarily have like large budgetary Authority so you can get them stoked up but then you gotta talk to the person who's got the purse strings and so like that's going to require sales that's okay and just to punctuate that basically 100 percent 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 atlassian right and you know atlassian they had a um they had they had a sales organization they just didn't call it sales organization and they went like pretty pretty far without a lot but instead what they did was they just like priced the product like breathtakingly low and um and I think developer tools can oftentimes do this where because like developers are like pretty technical they can adopt product they don't need like hand

holding in order to adopt like a product that is like complicated enough to be valuable like datadog's good example or New Relic or appd but even those guys like you know very early on had um had meaningful sales organizations and like one of the reasons why datadog really I mean there's a lot of reasons why datadog 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 going to be eventually capped there I mean look at snowflake snowflake has like I don't know 500 sales people like you're gonna need a sales order let's shift a bit to talking about just how to get better at sales at the scale 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 sale like as an engineer whatever like how many people do you interact with day to day not six or ten 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 in like on the track like you're in the starting box and like you have 90 seconds or like a couple minutes to like form Rapport and 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 manager there's a lot of like super deep work it's kind of like Paul Graham's like maker versus manager schedule sales people have manager schedules interestingly enough where what you're doing is you're constantly context switching right like an ideal salesperson's calendar or a Founder who's doing sales is like two three four maybe 5 customer facing meetings a day with different humans and then moreover your hat 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 it's a 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 um and you just kind of become used to it you become 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 um so so like one just recognizing is going to be a pretty big mindset change and then the second thing you can do is then once you know that there's going to be a mindset change you can focus in on making those behaviors be better so as an example one of the things I challenge my staff to do is I call it turbo Rapport it means a better name but like think about um people that you interact with in the world who maybe

are like like a little Shields up right like they're probably used to interacting with people who are like not going to be super nice to them like maybe it's bartenders or 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 going to be a really good skill for you to have when you're interacting with with uh with a prospect and then what that's going to allow you to do is then ask them

candid questions about their current situation that either a they may know about or B you ask provocative questions that make them think about the world in a way that like maybe that you want them to and realize that they have pain they didn't want or they they didn't know that they had so it's kind of like um my my friend Brett person 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 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 more you do them like the better like you'll just get good at them this episode is brought to you by merge every product manager knows the pain of slowing product velocity when developers struggle to build and maintain Integrations with other

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engineers countless hours and expedite your sales cycle by making integration offerings your competitive Advantage with merge visit merge.dev Lenny 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 yeah can you talk a bit about that I think this is kind of like the remember the mod the like the modern sales versus like

old school sales thing like the old school sales thing is like all right I'm gonna sell something to a mark right or like the best example of this like man that guy's a great sales guy he can sell ice to an Eskimo it's like man if you're selling ice to an Eskimo you're an right like what is wrong with you they don't need ice I mean unless they're like you know they're they're visiting uh Southern California and so like 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 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's minimum ICP is probably like sdr's plus AES in an organization should probably be like at 10 all the way up to like 300 right so if someone shows up and they're like man I gotta get really good at sales I need to buy your software p and I'm like okay cool like how many how many sales people do you have like oh I like

one I'm like man I'm not gonna sell you Atrium like you're just gonna be unhappy it's gonna be dumb like it's gonna be a waste of our customer success resources you're gonna churn all those sort of things right but if instead what you what you're doing is you're saying hey I'm gonna go out in the market and I'm going to find the people that match that have a high proclivity that our technology solves and then I'm going to talk with them about how they're solving that problem right now and ideally through 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 have this High magnitude problem that it is costing them lots of money that it is a pain in their ass and that and then I reveal to them that there is a better way of approaching it and 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 um that makes every like that makes everything better if someone's listening to this and they're like I want to get better at 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 those complicated versions I think the non-complicated version would just be just like walking down the street make eye contact with everybody and then every person that you like every person you stop next to at like Starbucks or like or like you know the crosswalk or whatever just like strike strike of a conversation with them like figure out a mechanism by which you can start a conversation with them like 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 church it's probably the more sophisticated version is like you know just be very very tight on your ICP just 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 um 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 a more thoughtful thing that's great can you actually explain ICP briefly because a lot of people may not know that term yeah thank you um so ICP stands for ideal customer profile and that actually it's important to kind of think about there's two things in a B2B sales motion there's like the account the characteristics of the account which is like the company that's gonna buy and then there's the characteristics of the human

and the personas that you're going to be interacting with and and so um let's use like amplitude as an example amplitudes ICP would probably be organizations that make software products that probably have at least a couple of product managers because there's like a single product manager it might be like too much like they might be at the point where they don't need a full like a full-blown Enterprise analytics suite and that's probably it right and then on the then on The Human Side who are the people who participate in that conversation well the product managers

are 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 moreover the person who owns the budget might be the VP of product not the product manager or it might be the VP of engineering or the CTO right so there's three different folks that we talked about there's like different humans and so I ideal customer profile is understanding what those kind of like parameters look like for looking

at an organization in order to say man that's an awesome op let's go get in front of them versus I don't know if that's a very good opportunity like maybe that's that's passing and then the personas are great that's an awesome op right there all right I know that I'm gonna have my first conversation with Lenny but with an intention that I'm eventually going to get to the VP of product at Airbnb and that's Susie over here and then you know once we get validation from her then um then we're pro like I know that

the vpe over here is Frank and like so like knowing who the personas are so that's what ICP and personas are awesome there's a 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 I have to find it again nice sounds good so we've talked about founder let sales and how founder should be starting sales we've talked about just how to get better ad 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 can people buy that online or is that just a one-off uh this is like a modern sales Pros um perfect modern sales Pros mugs I think we have like a bunch of Yetis 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 it's like we we stole this from New Relic right like being very user-centric and you're in your swag right so like I got my my sales nurse 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 your Hat's so funny can you 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 a salesperson when you're closing like a fourth a fifth of your opportunities when this

while loop is kicking in so in terms of the who to find for this first sales role and you mentioned that DPF 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 um 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 you probably don't want to start with like a VP of sales to start like a sales leader and there's

a couple of reasons why they're like even if you figured it out yourself that's required right you you gotta you have to get to that minimum sufficiency 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 a couple of AES to start is because again you 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 going to teach these

other these other folks so what you want to do is you want to hire a couple like early stage kind of pioneer sellers to take that sales version the the downside of hiring like seeking to hire a VP of sales or like a head of sales or what have you who actually is ahead of sales like is coming out of an organization where maybe he or she is a manager of managers or like manages 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 lemkin had a pretty funny tweet about this the other day where he was like you know hiring the VP of sales who's like been there and done that before like why exactly does she want to do it again all right like oh you scaled up uh you know data dog or like figma or whatever you should come to my like crappy little startup it's like yeah I'm professionally rich and and so instead the the great folks to look at are like the deputies right or like those early stage sellers so

the example I always use here um my last software company was in recruiting so if you have like a new recruiting technology so you know my buddy Troy um runs this recruiting software company 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 the 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 an AE who joined Greenhouse like last year or like two years ago so like Greenhouse greenhouses has a phenomenal sales organization their sales leadership is is absolutely fantastic the gentleman who's the CR over there is a good friend of mine Sean Murray but like early stage selling takes like early stage sellers or people have been there because you're not going to have all the collateral like slides and scripts and whatever aren't going to be like all buttoned up and with a bow around them and so looking for those early stage kind of like

grimier grittier 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've gotten to that statistical significance of your own selling capacity to make that just even clearer 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 examples so like I don't know say say you're doing some sort of like um 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 there's this woman Marissa fuhrer 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'd 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 going to look at your organization be like cool prove to me that your product fits the market because like I don't want to necessarily take a bet on you and then you would say well in

addition to having a 25 win rate with me I have these two sellers right here and they both have 20 win rates and you can see that they're both closing fifty thousand dollars of of uh of 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 LinkedIn requests which is 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 a new category of software and so it's kind of one of those things where like more advanced more modern sales managers and leaders like really get it it's kind of how it always is in 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 or maybe like first five what are signs because you said it's often does not work out what are like early signals like I should rethink this presuming that you have and this is another reason why it's really important to do it yourself to start but presuming that you've done that like that you've been able to close business on a reliable basis again with like arms length prospects like it can't be you know it can't be Lenny's mother-in-law buying my um buying my software yeah but like I mean God Bless but like she's not

ICP for for Atrium right so like you can't um this is like kind of the danger of like you know doing Revenue trades in your accelerator or like whatever like it's it's not real right so if you have done that and you've sold like 20 or 30 um you know deals you know it can be done we have an existence proof of this so if someone else can't do it the way that you do it and this is why hiring like two folks to start is is effective right like you don't want to hire just

one maybe three but like four it's like oh that's a lot to manage um at least to start and and so if you 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 are 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 that 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 going to be successful or at least they're going to have to like rederive all that stuff that you already did but if you have all those precursors and it's not sticking for someone that's probably a good leading indicator that like they're not

gonna they're not gonna work out how much time do you give these folks before you make a decision this is why it's so 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 going to win anything right like if you have a 50 win rate on two opportunities in a month um that's probably still not going to be super

helpful unless you have a very very very high deal size right and so looking at those leading indicators like are they having first meetings right are they having second meetings what does their email volume look like are they getting um 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 David driven Sales Management and one of them is on ramping it's called like you know ramping for success I forget the name of

the master class but like looking at those leading indicators like opportunity inflow 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 isn't working out right now if they're not getting to second or third meetings but 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 States but they're not getting a second date and they're not getting a second date the same way that you were okay maybe that's a coaching issue um or maybe it's just like a behavioral problem that's that you're not going to be able to surmount but the point is is it's like having instrumentation on the most leading indicator possible gives you eyes onto whether or not things are working or not and you can make judgments because the worst possible situation is like nine months in you're like man it's not working it's

like man I bet if you looked at the leading indicators you probably knew you would have known like two months in like this wasn't working I 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 gonna be good or or what is that time frame 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 person is going to work out what's like that range in your mind 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 Etc having them ride along with you in the second month we would expect them to have like you know 10 first meetings or maybe 21st meetings and we would expect

50 of those to get the second meeting so we would measure those things in the third month we would expect some subset of the month of those first meetings and second meetings that happened in the second month to get to a proposal all 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 like it's essentially like you're looking at the leading indicators in the appropriate time frame such that like

if someone is in month three and they're getting a bunch of their deals to proposal you can't declare Victory yet because like the money is not in the bank however things are looking good so if you get to month four and then and lots of things are getting into proposal but nothing's closing a month for nothing closing in month five you should still like we still can't say olly olly oxen 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 right

interval in ramp then you can like you can feel confident but not declare Victory yet got it something that this reminded me of is we were chatting ahead of this call and you mentioned that work from home is really bad for sales people in your experience can you talk about that yeah it's primarily bad for um junior sales people like senior sales people 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 learning right

so like what what needs to happen the 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 going to be and so if the loops are once a day of like you know listening to their calls or maybe even like a like a a longer interval than just like the correction Loops are just going to be way too slow versus if you're sitting next to somebody if you're sitting amongst like three or

four people and like listening to all their calls concurrently and then they get off of a call it's like hey that was really good you know correction here correction here correction here correction here here run it back to me now the loops right this the speed with which you're able to like update their software and making make sure that that the sales motion is running appropriately on them is is quite high and like in early stage startups that's the only thing that matters is like how it's a Race Against Time to make sure that you

get to success you can raise your next round of financing or get to profitability or what have you and so 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 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

beat so it's the solution is it if you're starting now a B2B company your advice is don't be remote work in an office my point of view on that is like you you especially like early stage you you certain like from a Founder's standpoint like being you know shoulder to shoulder with your with your co-founders certainly but even with like you know a Founder who's has a couple of sellers that they're working with being side by side with them in order to like help them learn faster teach them more have accountability and then have like

you know um 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 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 AE 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 and product managers what have you is just don't be afraid of sales there's a lot of people out there who are 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 at those behaviors is kind of you know it's gonna benefit you in a myriad of ways even if you don't want to necessarily be an early stage founder even as like a product manager within an Enterprise organization or an 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 Etc like those are really good skills for internal selling for external selling for you want to interface with customers Etc

it's like you know all these skills are very important and impactful for for a myriad of personas amazing well with that we've reached the very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you we're gonna go through it pretty fast are you ready I am question one what are what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people the books that I recommend the most there would be um the goal by uh Eli goldrat there are two books that inspired Atrium one is the goal um which essentially is a novelization of the

Toyota lean manufacturing system so it's like a process engineering book written as a novel it's like really fantastic and sales organizations are just Revenue factories so it's a really like if you want to think about like systems thinking and kind of like 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 um for Stanford Cardinal and the San Francisco 49ers and he just kind

of like broke down how you can't worry about the score in the football game you can only worry about the things that are in front of you you can control and that if you do a high quantity of high quality actions like whatever your position is as a quarterback or a linebacker 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 it in a high quantity of high quality uh way

then the score score will take care of itself so those are two two great books I like to recommend to folks favorite other podcasts oh boy I don't listen to too many I listen to Lenny's and I listen to uh the all-in podcast just you know so I can get my fill of like Doom and Gloom and knowledge with this one uh 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 Kanto so yeah love that one favorite interview question that you like to ask folks so I'm going to change this up on you it's less about uh interview questions one of the things I'm a really big fan of is um 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 where it's a Google doc that has like a dozen or so biographical questions that we allow people to answer and you'd be shocked like the way

it that how well it screens people like you know fifty percent of people won't do it and this is not these are not complicated questions right it's like Lenny tell me about something that you built that you're proud of right like it's a dozen of those questions and so like one you can filter out people who are not serious you can filter out people who you know have low levels of give a you also can see whether or not people can communicate in a compelling fashion right with a beginning and a middle and an end

you can also 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 that right yeah yeah or it's just something that I I mean I I for all my portfolio companies as well I I people just use it it's a Google sheet right I'm

sorry not a Google sheet a Google doc right just like and you just clone it give it to them all right you have edit right let me know when it's done and you'd be shocked like you know people are like oh I didn't I forgot to do it okay great you told me everything I need amazing final question do you have a favorite story of you or a salesperson 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 uh who is 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 gonna you're generally speaking not gonna close the deal on the first time through the pipe like as we discussed earlier if you have a 30 win rate that's pretty great if you're 20 win rate that's like pretty solid but that still means that like four out of you know four out of five are not going to close but the next time around they

might right so like win rate on the second time through the pipeline and so Sean you know closed one of our biggest customers is a company called grin they're absolutely fantastic they make 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 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 100 sdrs like 80 AES that are being managed using Atrium

and so I think there's a good lesson in 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 it's 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 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 uh in the United States as far as I can tell and Google will auto correct my name if you uh 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 foundingsales.com as letting notes the the whole book is available online as like hypertext I mean you can buy a physical copy as well but the reason why my wife

put it into a Squarespace site was because we wanted people to be able to search it and come back to it and use it as a reference and so on and so forth and then in terms of like folks 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 biometric 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 can also just you know Google Atrium sales and we'll be the top result as well amazing Pete thank you for being here yeah it was awesome thanks Lenny thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 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 lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode