How to Access the Book
Founder Led Sales is the process by which startup founders discover, refine, and scale their product’s initial sales motion. This includes the messaging, ideal customer profile, prospecting, sales materials, and more needed to close the first few dozen customers themselves, and then successfully hiring and onboarding early sales reps, before finally handing off this running sales machine to professional sales leadership.
Founding Sales is the book that provides a detailed roadmap for achieving all of the above for founders and other first-time sales staff written by Pete Kazanjy, founder of Atrium Sales Performance Management Software and the Modern Sales Leadership and Operations Community.
This book is the distillation of Pete’s experience at TalentBin going from a founder with a product marketing and product management background to early sales guy, early sales manager, and eventual post-acquisition sales leader at Monster Worldwide in addition to his later experience founding Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, enablement, and leadership community.
The book’s goal is to accelerate the learning and success of those who find themselves in a similar spot Pete did in early 2011—don’t know much about B2B sales, and need to figure it out in a hurry.
Check out this sister presentation on Founder-Led Sales here.
And the Founder Led Sales Coach here.
Be sure to follow Pete on Twitter and LinkedIn for more Sales and Leadership insights.
Interested in having your company be sales excellent? Check out Atrium Sales Performance Analytics.
Founder Led Sales Coach Chatbot Test Drive
Give the Founder Led Sales Chatbot a spin - the free version is limited to 7 messages per day (paid version has no limits)
Anything you’d want to ask Pete - ask this chat interface! It’s trained on all of Pete’s writings, including Founding Sales, presentations, interviews, and more.
Founding Sales Book Quicklinks
From the book Founding Sales: Sales for Founders (and Others) in First-time Sales Roles by Pete Kazanjy founder of Atrium sales analytics.
Introduction
15 minute read
In Spring of 2010, our startup, Unvarnished, launched to a massive cataclysm of press coverage, venture capital interest, and general gnashing of teeth.
Part 1: Doing the basics correctly, yourself. Going from 0 to ~30 customers and proving you’ve got something that can be non-zero sold.
Chapter 1: Mindset Changes in First-Time Sales Professionals
10 minute read
One of the biggest things to adjust to when approaching sales for the first time is the often-counterintuitive shift required to your mindset.
Chapter 2: Baking Your Narrative & Product Marketing Basics
20 minute read
The first step on the road to a repeatable, scalable sales process is to build your narrative. That is, craft the "story" you will be presenting to…
Chapter 3: Sales Materials Basics
50 minute read
Now that your narrative is baked, it’s time to start building the materials that you’ll be using to communicate that narrative to your would-be…
Chapter 4: Early Prospecting—Finding Your First Customers
35 minute read
Now that you have your materials pulled together and are ready to engage with some prospects, you need some prospects to engage with!
Chapter 5: Prospect Outreach & Demo Appointment Setting
40 minute read
Now that you’ve got your list of highly targeted potential accounts, and associated points of contact, it’s time to tackle the business of actually…
Chapter 6: Early Inbound Lead Capture & Response
15 minute read
I don’t want to get too deep into inbound marketing, because when you’re very early in your go-to-market, it’s usually pretty unlikely that…
Chapter 7: Pitching—Preparation, Presentation, Demos & Objections
100 minute read
You’ve been probably thinking this whole time, “Pete, when do we get down to the actual selling, man?” Now is the time, friend. So far we’ve…
Chapter 8: Down-Funnel Selling: Negotiation, Closing, Pipeline Management
30 minute read
In the last chapter, we covered how to prepare for and execute customer-facing pitches. While you would prefer that pitches and deals proceed in…
Chapter 9: Customer Success Basics—Implementation, Ongoing Success & Renewals
60 minute read
You’ve just closed a new deal. You’re pumped up, having gotten a customer across the line and booked the revenue, with the check in the mail…
Part 2: Scaling it up with others. Taking what you’ve proven can be done yourself, and getting others to do it, too.
Chapter 10: Early Sales Management & Scaling Concepts
60 minute read
What the hell is “scaling”? People use the term all the time, but I find that about 80% of the time someone talking about “scaling” is usually a great…
Chapter 11: High-Impact Sales Hiring
50 minute read
Now that you know that your initial go-to-market strategy is working, based on the metrics we covered in prior sections, it’s time to scale by…
Chapter 12: High-Impact Sales Onboarding & Training
30 minute read
Now that you’ve gone and invested all this time and energy in hiring sales staff, the next step is to get the most out of your investment. You want…
“A successful go-to-market is key in giving your early stage company the best change of success. Founders who lean into this and get good at selling will have a key advantage, and Founding Sales is a great source to help founders do just that.”As a technical founder learning enterprise sales, I have found his advice invaluable. Pete’s grounded, practical suggestions have significantly accelerated the early growth of our company.”