Pete Kazanjy
Co-founder & CRO, Atrium. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@Kazanjy ↗LinkedIn ↗kazanjy.svbtle.com ↗
Pete Kazanjy is an early-stage go-to-market specialist, the author of Founding Sales, and the founder of Modern Sales Pros. He previously co-founded TalentBin before co-founding Atrium, a sales performance analysis platform.
Everything Pete Kazanjy said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Founders learn sales faster than sales hires learn domain expertise
“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…”
Startups cannot outsource sales for their first couple dozen customers
“And so the founder is like, Hey man, I'm going to like pour a little bit of sales on this, hire some, you know, sales leader or whatever, some sort of seller and outsource this. And you really just can't do that. Not for the first, like couple dozen customers.…”
Early startups must hire pioneer AEs before a VP of Sales
“Generally what you want to do is 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 gotta, you have to get to…”
Founders need a 15% to 25% win rate before hiring reps
“It's going to be like, you know, that you can reliably at like a, at a pretty okay win rate. So like maybe 15% or 20% or 25% turn first meetings into eventual customers, right? And like do that in a reliable fashion. It's not like, you know, I engage 10, Arm's…”
Product-led growth companies eventually stagnate if they avoid building sales
“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 sales piece.”
Dropbox is a prime example of delaying enterprise sales too long
“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 would be Dropbox.”
Remote work severely harms junior sales rep coaching at early startups
“Having asynchronous distance is really problematic for that, especially for junior folks, like SDRs, junior AEs, all of that, it really is problematic. Once that sales motion is baked and can be like distributed, okay, that's potentially a different situation,…”
Transitioning founders should hire two initial sales reps, not ten
“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 going to get too successful if you're trying to onboard 10 co…”
Second-meeting conversion is the best early leading indicator for sales
“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 an appropriate way of doing it is like, Hey man, are we getting second dates? Right. So like, just, y…”
Selling requires a manager's schedule with constant context switching
“Salespeople 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 five customer facing meetings a…”
Early startups need gritty pioneer sellers, not polished corporate reps
“Early stage selling takes like early stage sellers where 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 tho…”
Leading indicators reveal a new sales rep's performance within two months
“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, …”
Evaluate new sales reps sequentially: onboarding, first meetings, then proposals
“In the first month, maybe you spend that time like onboarding the rep, teaching them, you know, going through mock discovery conversations, mock demos, et cetera, having them ride along with you. In the second month, we would expect them to have like, you know…”
Written pre-interview screening documents filter out unmotivated sales candidates
“So we actually have a written screen that we do with folks where it's just 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 that, how well it screens people like, you know, 50% of…”
Salespeople act as microeconomic agents matching supply to demand
“The way to kind of think about like what sellers are is they're kind of like the microeconomic agents in the market that brings supply to demand. Rather than waiting for demand to find supply, like they have supply in their back pocket and they run around tryi…”
The other half of the tape: Pete Kazanjy's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 2
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Pete's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CRO, Atrium | 1 | 15 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Co-founder & CRO, Atrium | 1 | 0 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |