You’re 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.
Importantly, like any good sales conversation, first, we’re 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 “founders are always selling” 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.
In short, direct sales of the sort a B2B SaaS software startup would engage in.
If you are looking to be a first time salesperson, transitioning in from another type of role, or fresh out of school, in an organization that meets those characteristics above, you will get value out of this book.
Similarly, if you are a first time sales manager, either of the founder type or a sales individual contributor who is transitioning into that role, again, in an organization who meets the criteria above, you will also get value from this book.
Then there’s the open question of why I am even qualified to be dispensing this sort of advice.
Aside from the above existence proof of success—albeit not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue—I believe that a book written for non-sales people becoming sales people requires the point of view of that very same non-sales person who became a sales person, and then a sales leader.
While I did not learn at the knee of more senior sales professionals inside an existing organizational framework—say by starting as a Business Development Rep at Salesforce before moving into a Jr. Account Executive role and progressing from there—I believe that this was actually a benefit. It compelled the derivation of many best practices, which both aids with strong internalization (when you derive the answer, it sticks with you much more robustly) and opens up opportunities for innovation, as everything is on the table for questioning.