Pete Kazanjy
Pete Kazanjy is the author of Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook and the founder of Modern Sales Pros, an invite-only peer learning community focused on sales operations and sales leadership. He’s also the co-founder of Atrium, a B2B SaaS company that provides data-driven sales solutions. Pete got his start in product at VMware and then dove deep into the art and science of sales. He explains the difference between old-school sales and modern sales, which focuses on human connection and solving problems for customers.
Launch & Go-to-Market Skills
Founders must personally lead the sales process for at least the first few dozen customers to avoid breaking the critical feedback loop between the market and product development.
"This is why Steve Blank always talks about startups can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales, it's oftentimes because they skip that step, and so the founder's like, "Hey, man, I'm go..."
A founder must develop a repeatable "selling while loop" in their own head before documenting and packaging the process for new hires to execute.
"You're playing a game of telephone with that with a third party seller versus even you just want to keep that in one brain to start, then package it, and then when you have a repeatable while loop, a..."
Overlay: Zero-to-One / Founder Skills
Sales is a learnable, operational discipline rather than an innate talent, and founders must embrace it to ensure their product finds its market.
"The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers and what have you is just don't be afraid of sales. There's a lot of people out there who would love to tell you a story that it's..."