Founder-Led Sales: Taking Your Startup to Market (Peter Kazanjy, Atrium)

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1. 1:50

   of technologies that they have in play that we know are indicative of the problems that we solve. And then importantly, who are the humans within those organizations that we should be engaging? Then the second component of that is the outbound communication to then get in contact with those contacts. “So messaging that out, identified you for these reasons right here.” These are the characteristics that made me think that you have this challenge that we're potentially are thinking about solving. I'm doing some research on this right now. Would you be open to chatting with me? We landed our first meeting. What's number two? Cool. Now we got to talk about interviewing them, right? Getting information out of the prospect.

   In Offer and messaging

2. 2:29

   You want to have a deck that guides the conversation. The first thing you want to start out with is, do you have this problem that we are thinking about solving, right? Then get to the magnitude of that problem, like easy way of doing a scale of one to five, because if you want them to be able to say, yeah, I have this problem, but it's not that big of a problem. “You want people who have really the big problem.” Then the thing we want to figure out is how are you solving this problem right now? And then how happy are you with that right now? And then what you can do is you can pivot to, great, here's how we're thinking about solving this. Let me go ahead and tell you about that. What are your reactions to that? How appealing does that sound on a scale of one to five?

   In Problem and use-case fit

3. 4:28

   People say, man, I really have this problem. Like my current solutions are really not getting it done. And then what we want to do is we want to go after the close. And so that close might be, Hey, would you like to be a beta customer for us? But if it turns out that we have a bunch of people who have really high pain points associated “with this, the close could be for a sale, right?” Okay. We have a number of pilot customers. We have a couple openings for more. So if you're interested in that, we could talk about that. Then you might end up in your customer interviews with a half dozen or a dozen pilot customers giving you $50,000. But again, it's a read option off of the magnitude of their pain. How do you entice people into those conversations? Because everybody's busy, man.

   In Campaign offer design

4. 9:34

   And I'm sitting next to both the managers, normally this is a problem. You just learned something, right? Like this size of organization that has two managers or three managers or four managers, they don't have this problem. But then you'll get above a certain size. Oh, okay, cool, you've got 10 managers. Then all of a sudden that problem starts going into the four and the five range. Here's the segment that I'm gonna be going after. And so that's why you wanna cast the net “a little bit wider and then do these interviews” to hone in on where the size of the organization or some characteristic of the organization are where this is like a white hot problem. The second piece is how do you solve this problem right now? What's unsatisfactory about this? You'll start seeing patterns in there. So like in our case, when we were doing all of our customer interviews, the pain point would show up

   In Segmentation

5. 10:54

   How does that sound? Or you might start out like, yeah, that doesn't actually sound all that terribly great. By doing these research interviews, you're eventually going to converge on like the white hot center, which then eventually turns into your sales motion. So to recap, essentially what you're doing is you're setting an agenda and then you're coming in with research “that allows you to build a point of view on the problem that you think they have.” And you're saying like, hey, typically when you have this many SDRs, this many reps on your team, you probably have this type of problem. Is that true? Is it not true? To what extent do you have that problem? And one of two things will happen. They'll either say, yeah, I have that problem or no, I won't.

   In Belief-based messaging

6. 22:09

   have to move to our final question. We talked about a lot of good habits as it pertains to founder-led sales. It's time to talk about a bad one. So if there was one bad habit in the world of founder-led sales that all founders should break today, what would that be? Expecting somebody else “to sell your first customers for you. Doesn't work. That is about as much of a mic drop as we need.” Done. Pete, thank you for an amazing show. Everyone hang on for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Cheers. All right, Mark, it is time for a two by two recap email from this episode with Pete Kazanji. Number one, I know he said it at the end. I know it was the mic

   In Founder-led sales