Founders learn sales faster than sales hires learn domain expertise
Pete Kazanjy · Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium) · Dec 15, 2022 · at 11:41
Sales author Pete Kazanjy explains why early-stage founders should handle initial sales rather than hiring external reps.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Pete Kazanjy
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,…”