Peter R Kazanjy - Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook

PRAISE FOR FOUNDING SALES

You cant build a revenue house based on outbound selling without a solid foundation. Founding Sales helps founders, and other first time sellers, understand the basics that create that foundation and allows them to successfully scale.

Trish Bertuzzi, Founder of The Bridge Group & author of The Sales Development Playbook

Modern sales organizations succeed by a thoughtful, rigorous approach to the art and science of sales. Founding Sales introduces founders and other first time sellers to these concepts clearly and comprehensively.

Jeremey Donovan, SVP Sales Strategy and Operations at SalesLoft & author of Leading Sales Development

[My book] Predictable Revenue introduced the world to scalable outbound sales. But it wont work without a solid foundation. Founding Sales helps founders and other first-time sellers go from a dead stop to first gear in sales (the hardest part). Time after time first time founders and sellers try to sell and grow sales too fast, leading to failure. Founding Sales gets you started, building that foundation first so youre prepared to scale later.

Aaron Ross, Co-CEO at PredictableRevenue.com & author of Predictable Revenue

For a searchable digital copy of Founding Sales,
visit FoundingSales.com.

Copyright 2020 by Peter Kazanjy

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the context of reviews.

All trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

Printed and Bound in the United States by Ingram/Lightning Source

Project Editing by Christina Bailly

Cover Design & Book Design by Tracy Moeller

Front Cover Photograph by Jeremy Bishop/Unsplash

Back Cover Photograph by Josiah Weiss/Unsplash

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910086

ISBN: 978-1-7345051-1-5

ISBN: 978-1-7345051-0-8 (e-book)

Founding Sales is dedicated to my brother, Michael T. Kazanjy,
and my son, Michael P. Kazanjy.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

How a Product Marketing & Product Management Guy Ended Up a Sales Leader at a Public Company

WHAT INSPIRED THIS BOOK?

In Spring of 2010, our startup, Unvarnished, launched to a massive cataclysm of press coverage, venture capital interest, and general gnashing of teeth. As the worlds first serious attempt at a community contributed reputation system for professionals, or a Yelp for professionals, we were featured on the Today Show, covered by many national newspapers, and enjoyed traffic spikes that would be the envy of any newly launched startup.

By January of 2011, had we concluded that our concept was a failure, and we needed to try something new.

At the behest of our board members, Josh Kopelman and Phin Barnes of First Round Capital and Saar Gur of CRV, we started looking at other potential ways to solve the same problem (that is, hiring well is hard, and there is likely a data centric way to help with that).

And while our first concept was a failure, the next one wasnt.

In April 2011, we started building TalentBin, the earliest versions of which were centered around employee network-based referral recruiting products to help recruiters better pro-actively mine the networks of their existing staff to assist in recruiting for their hardest-to-fill openings.

Rather than sit in a cave, pretending we were building the next great thing before revealing it to the world, we were dead set on getting outside, and getting this in the hands of our intended customers as early as possible.

And that meant selling.

Unfortunately, we didnt have any sales professionals on the team. Or anyone with any sales experience, really. We had my co-founder, Jason, who started his career as a software engineer, before progressing to, variously, interaction design, then product management, then product management leadership, with a sprinkling of professional poker playing in between. And we had three engineers, who, while very smart and hardworking, werent about to bang the phones all day every day plus we kind of needed them to focus on building and shipping the product.

It quickly became apparent that the sales piece would fall to me, and not because of my overwhelming qualification for the rolemy background was as a product marketing and marketing generalist, with some product management for kicks. Rather, everyone else had things that only they could do, so I had better get my ass in gear.

What followed in the ensuing three years was a massive exercise in painful growth and learning as TalentBin went from hypothesis, to early minimum viable product, to strong product-market fit and sales scaling, to acquisition by Monster Worldwide in early 2014.

And for me, this meant a transition from a generalist business founder, to TalentBins first evangelical sales rep, trying to get someone, anyone, to use our product, for free, through summer and fall of 2011, to our first smiling and dialing account executive, asking for the sale with real money and a straight face, starting in fall 2011, to the first beginnings of sales management as I brought on our first Market Development Rep to fill my calendar in January 2012, and then haltingly adding account executives and market development reps through 2012, all the way through robust, repeatable, scalable B2B SAAS sales, with account management and customer success apparatuses, in 2013 into 2014. When it was all said and done, we had a team of ~20 sales and customer success staff, and were cranking along at a $6m/year run rate.

It was not without its misfires, train wrecks, and victories, individual and team. Most importantly, there were countless learnings to be discovered at each step of the process.

The goal of this book is to share those hard-won learnings with those who are beginning, midway, or even at the end of a similar journey, so that others could potentially avoid the misfires and train wrecks and just skip ahead to the victoriesor in the very least minimize the misfires and train wrecks.

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

Importantly, like any good sales conversation, first, were going to qualify this opportunity. This book is specifically targeted for founders who find themselves at the point where they need to transition into a selling role. And not the founders are always selling chestnut you constantly hear, but actually turning their attention to revenue generating activities.

And not just any revenue generating activities, like monetizing your software with ads, or freemium $9.99 a month recurring revenues. Those are all fine on their own, but thats not our focus here. Rather, this book is specifically for founders who are leading organizations that have a B2B, direct sales model that involves sales professionals engaging in verbal, commercial conversations with buyers.

Moreover, many examples in this book will be targeted specifically to the realm of B2B SaaS software, and specifically as regards new, potentially innovative or disruptive offerings that are being brought to market for the first time. In short, direct sales of the sort a B2B SaaS software startup would engage in.

With that said, if you are looking to be a first time salesperson, transitioning in from another type of role, or fresh out of school, in an organization that meets those characteristics above, you will get value out of this book. Similarly, if you are a first time sales manager, either of the founder type, or a sales individual contributor who is transitioning into that role, again, in an organization who meets the criteria above, you will also get value from this book.