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Updated August 22, 2022Youβre reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
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 worldβs first serious attempt at a community-contributed reputation system for professionals, or a βYelp for professionals,β 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, we had 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 (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 wasnβt.
In April 2011 we started building TalentBin, the earliest versions of which was a recruiting product based on referrals from employee networks to help recruiters better proactively mine the networks of their staff to assist in recruiting 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 didnβt have any sales professionals on the teamβor anyone with any sales experience, really. We had my cofounder, 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, werenβt about to hit the phones all day every day.
It quickly became apparent that the sales piece would fall to me, and not because of my overwhelming qualification for the roleβmy 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 TalentBinβs first evangelical sales rep, trying to get someone, anyone, to use our product, for free, through Summer and Fall 2011. Starting in that Fall, I moved on to become our first smiling and dialing account executive, asking for the sale with real money and a straight face, and then to the first beginnings of sales management as I brought on our first Market Development Rep to fill my calendar in January 2012. I then haltingly added account executives and market development reps through 2012, and continued 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 at each step of the process.
The goal of this book is to share those with those who are beginning, midway, or even at the end of a similar journey.
Importantly, like any good sales conversation, first, weβre 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 βfounders are always sellingβ 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 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.