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Updated August 22, 2022You’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.
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.
While this approach was time costly, and opportunity costly, in that I made many mistakes that likely would have been avoided by just cloning an existing reference architecture from a Salesforce or SuccessFactors or Box.net or Oracle, I also was able to approach the craft of selling, and later, the scaling, operationalization, and management thereof, with the sort of fresh child’s eyes that, coupled with a product management and engineering mindset, beget new innovation and adoption of the state of the art.
As I have since become both a sales leader at a larger, legacy sales organization and have become the sales guru that many startups and venture investors in my network come to for help, I think we ended up winning the tradeoff. We were able to innovate and adopt new, better approaches, cherry pick the best stuff from established sales orgs, and avoid any of the baggage that often accompanies calcified processes from sales organizations who, say, grew to scale in the 80s, 90s, or 00s.
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.