Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

The, the thing that I just like to encourage founders and, and product managers, what have you, is 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 gotta be a born seller," things like that, and it's really not, right? Like, those people are just talking their, their book, if you will, and so just, like, getting good at, at those behaviors is gonna, you know, it's gonna benefit you in a myriad of ways.

(instrumental music) 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 Casangie. 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, why 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 for your first salesperson, what to look for in her 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 a 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 Casangie. 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 gonna 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 wanna 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. But getting 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 dot com slash lenny to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?