Youโre 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.
By no means was this a solitary enterprise. On our sales team we celebrated having an engineering mindset and felt that we were the product managers of our sales apparatus.
Chief among those who helped accelerate these learnings and overcome our errors were my sales staff, particularly Brad Snider, our first account executive; Rob Perez, our second account executive, whom we poached as an overlooked Sales Development Rep at LinkedIn; and Manny Ortega, who began as a particularly operations-minded Market Development Rep before transitioning more fully into a sales operations role before our acquisition. And on the customer success and enablement side, we went through a similar process of learning spearheaded by our head of customer success, Adam Abeles.
The First Round Capital CEO community was also invaluable, in that I was able to glean learnings from Q&A from the likes of Angus Davis, CEO of Swipely, and sales automation typhoon, Sean Black, former head of sales for Trulia, and later CEO of Crunched, amongst others.
And then there were certainly other organizations that we poached approaches from heavily. LinkedIn, ironically, as a primary competitor, was a particular pacesetter with regard to certain sales operations practices, from whom we heavily borrowed. And there were the writings of Aaron Ross, whose Predictable Revenue was influential in the later architecture of our sales org as it went from being me and a sole market development rep, to scaling up to a larger market development apparatus. Lastly Eric Riesโ The Lean Startup and Steve Blankโs Four Steps to the Epiphany were both influential in the beginning of our product development and hypothesis constructionโin fact, I consider Founding Sales a cultural descendant of both books.
This book was the culmination of many peopleโs efforts. Thank you to my editor, Christina Bailly, for reducing redundancy and unnecessary loquaciousness. Thank you to my designer, and wife, Tracy Moeller, for laying out the book for print and epublishing, designing the cover, and building the entire FoundingSales.com website. Thank you to the First Round Capital portfolio community that supported me at the earliest stages of my journey, specifically Sean Black and Angus Davis for their peer support. And while weโre on the topic, thank you to First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures for funding TalentBin, and now Atrium, and providing the initial capital for the companies in which these lessons were learned.
Thank you to my TalentBin team, including my cofounder, Jason Heidema, and engineering leaders, Ignacio Andreu and Rodrigo Leroux, for providing a market-leading product on which I could learn to sell. And thank you to the early TalentBin sales team, including Rob Perez, Brad Snider, Manny Ortega, Akio Aida, Marcus Knight, and Jared McGriff, for being the combination guinea pigs/mad scientists with me as we figured this out. Thank you to Adam Abeles, who lead TalentBinโs customer success function, as well. And thank you to my extended peer education network of Modern Sales experts, including Jeremey Donovan, Trish Bertuzzi, Jason Jordan, and Jacco van der Kooij, for constantly pushing forward the frontier of Modern Sales, and teaching me along the way.
And thank you again to my wife, Tracy Moeller, for being my partner in my entrepreneurial journeys. Last, but not least, thank you to my parents, Cathey and Bob Kazanjy, for instilling in me a lifelong love of learning and critical inquiry without which none of this would be possible.