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Pete Kazanjy: observation

15 Dec 2022 Lenny's Podcast Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

“Oh, I just think that there's a little bit of a mindset change. It's a little bit related to some of the reasons why founders and other folks maybe have this perception of sales be like, "Ew, sales, ugh" because people, their only experience with sales is Glengarry Glen Ross or movies with a sleazy used car salesman and stuff like that, whereas the way to think about what sellers are is they're the microeconomic agents in the market that bring supply to demand rather than waiting for demand to find supply.”

— Pete Kazanjy

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Pete Kazanjy
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
observation
Recorded
15 Dec 2022
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Can you actually just briefly talk about what is modern sales versus what you called traditional sales or old-school sales? Oh, I just think that there's a little bit of a mindset change. It's a little bit related to some of the reasons why founders and other folks maybe have this perception of sales be like, "Ew, sales, ugh" because people, their only experience with sales is Glengarry Glen Ross or movies with a sleazy used car salesman and stuff like that, whereas the way to think about what sellers are is they're the microeconomic agents in the market that bring supply to demand rather than waiting for demand to find supply. They have supply in their back pocket and they run around trying to find people who ought to have the demand, maybe they have the demand right now, maybe they don't realize that they have the demand, and then they elucidate to them why they ought to have the demand. So, A, that process is very important from a technology deployment standpoint and also, B, it's very measurable, especially in a modern environment with modern CRMs and also all the digital activity that we do, email, calendar, phone, Zoom, et cetera, all this information is now being recorded such that you can then measure, manage, and improve behavior. So, very similar to how back in the day, you do product analytics by licking your fingers and sticking it in the wind, and then Mixpanels showed up, then Amplitude showed up, then so on and so forth, and the same is the case in sales, as well. So, modern sales is a more thoughtful, operational, rigorous, analytical bent, it's been around for a while. It's one of those things, the future is here, it just wasn't widely distributed, but now it's being much more distributed and much more embraced. Like the pre-Moneyball moment in sports and baseball to the post-Moneyball moment, we're now just flipping over there, so that's the delta. Awesome. I definitely want to talk about ways to get better at sales and things you've learned about just how to improve at sales, but to set a little bit foundation for that conversation, I want to talk about founder-led sales. You touched on this topic, your book is basically named after this concept of founder-led sales. Can you talk about what that is, why it's so important, and maybe why founders often get this wrong?…

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