Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
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The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers, 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 or things like that. And it's really not, right? Like those people are just talking their book, if you will. And so just like getting good at those behaviors is going to, you know, it's going to 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 salespeople 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, wife founders should be doing sales themselves for a long time before hiring your first salesperson and also when it's time to hire that first salesperson. We get into how to hire or your first salesperson what to 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, helping 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 SOC 2 compliance. SOC 2 is a way to prove your company's taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential. SOC 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals or it can put your business on hold. If you don't have a SOC 2, there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table. Beginning a SOC 2 report can be a huge burden, especially for startups. It's time consuming, tedious and expensive. Enter Vanta. Over 3,000 fast growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2. Vanta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, less than a third of the time that it usually takes. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Just go to vanta.com/lenny. That's v-a-n-t-a.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing and flat file. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers? At least 40%. And how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do? Well, being still in our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave. I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important. Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of flat file. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster. If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out flatfile and 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 on founding sales, which we're going to talk about. It's just been a lot of fun knowing you. 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. I was obsessed with it. Then somehow, I ran into you at Brienne Kimmel's SaaS school. I gave a presentation on founder-led selling, and there was a scrum of people around me. I was talking about amazing writers and amazing content online, and I referenced the series. Then you raised your hand. You're like,
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