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

**Pete Kazanjy** (0:00)
The thing that I just like to encourage founders and product managers, what have you, is just don't be afraid of sales. There's a lot of people out there who would love to tell you a story that it's magical, or like, you got to be a born seller, things like that, and it's really not. Those people are just talking their book, if you will.
And so just getting good at those behaviors, it's going to benefit you in a myriad of ways.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
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 Kazanjy. 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 their 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 my 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 Kazanjy.
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Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile, how many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (2:53)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:54)
And how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (2:58)
Well based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chopped full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:17)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leveraged opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (3:32)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:47)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. Pete, welcome to the podcast.

**Pete Kazanjy** (4:00)
Hey Lenny, super awesome to see you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:03)
Even more awesome on my part. Ever since I launched this podcast, I've always wanted to have you on it. We're finally here. We've been online buddies for a few years now. Ever since I discovered your book, Founding Sales, which we're going to talk about.
And it's just been a lot of fun knowing you. So thank you again for being here.

**Pete Kazanjy** (4:20)
The quick story was Lenny had shipped his different genres of marketplaces and how to start the liquidity and growth and whatever. And I was obsessed with it. And then somehow I ran into you at Brianne Kimmel's SaaS school. And I was like, after I gave a presentation on founder-led selling, and there was a scrum of people around me and I was talking about amazing writers and amazing content online and I referenced the series and then you raised your hand, you're like, that was me.