Pete Kazanjy:
Literally somebody whose paycheck is paid by revenue that comes from sales is like somebody cold call me, somebody prospected me on LinkedIn.
Pouyan:
I shame them publicly on there. I tag their VP of sales and say, tell that to the people who pay for your salary.
Pete Kazanjy:
Oh, wow. Yes.
Pouyan:
I've done that a couple of times on LinkedIn.
Pouyan:
We are back with Pouyan from Scratchpad. I'm still trying to get used to calling Ross court. But for now, on this one, I'm just going to call you Ross again.
Ross:
That's okay.
Pouyan:
Yeah.
Ross:
Whatever you want to call me, I get a lot of different names, some better than others.
Pouyan:
We're super excited for this session because we've got the OG Pete Kazanjy here? What I'm assuming most folks listening here will know who you are, but if not, you've led sales. You've founded several companies. You've written a book you've advised, you've invested. We're thrilled to have you.
Pete Kazanjy:
Thanks. Yeah. I'm stoked to be here and we can talk about, yeah, we can talk about all sorts of things beyond quota.
Pouyan:
But also we should start where you got into sales and how you went to Stanford and then fucked up and ended up in sales.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah, I think it was one of those things. I mean, let's be honest. I think my attitude about sales, probably 10 years ago, it was your prototypical attitude, was just like, oh my God. That's where bros go who can't get a better job or whatever. And so my first software company, TalentBin, was a recruiting software company. It was founded in 2011, pretty quickly we were like, somebody's got to sell this shit. And so, yeah, that's how I kind of went from being initial founder to first seller that took a lot of lumps on the way. But yeah, I guess that is the succinct story of how I fucked up and ended up in sales.
Pouyan:
Yeah. Did you have a welcome-to-sales moment where you're... Any of those early deals you were trying to close, where you're like, oh, I should know that or oh, this is how this is going to go.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah. Probably the best example of that would probably be where I think our ASP at TalentBin early on was 10K, because I didn't know any better. I was just like, oh yeah, I should probably go on site. Right. Because that's what people do, is they go to, the customer drove all the way down to, it wasn't San Jose, but it was like Sunnyvale. And then the person ghosted the meeting. And I was like, well that sucks because I just go back to San Francisco. It's the dumbest thing ever on my part. And I was like, okay, there's got to be more efficient way to do this.
Pouyan:
That sucks. I mean, people complain all the time about being ghosted on zoom calls. And you forget if you've never actually showed up at somebody's office or gone for an in-person meeting and were ghosted that way, that sucks.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah, that was, I mean, just one of a long litany of got-punched-ball kicks, threat punches, et cetera, which essentially is how you learn sales.
Pouyan:
Getting punched right in the dick over and over and over again.
Pete Kazanjy:
Again? Yeah.
Pouyan:
Yeah. It just hurts so good, eventually.So how did your opinions of sales evolve when you from being a founder to then being in sale, leading sales and then back out again, how did that progression kind of change for you?
Ross:
And I'll just, let me add to that question quick because I think-
Pete Kazanjy:
Sure.
Ross:
... At some point it feels like from the external perspective, you developed an appreciation for it-
Pete Kazanjy:
Oh totally.
Ross:
... Creating a community for it. You wrote a book on it. So when did that happen?
Pete Kazanjy:
Well, I think what it is? Is that there's just wild misunderstanding of what the craft of sales is amongst people who don't do it. Where do sales leaders come from? They come from AEs. Where do AEs come from? They come from STRs. Where do STRs come from? You graduated from XYZ with a business degree. And you're like, oh, I need a job. Right. And you hop on the sales train. And then so people have been on that track. They know how it is because they just live it all day long. Whereas somebody who's a product manager or a founder, you have no idea. The only way that you interface with sales, watching stupid shit on movies like Glengarry Glen Ross or Boiler Room.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah. It was just an information-transparent or information-transfer-like shortfall. And that's why I ended up writing Founding Sales, because a couple of bad things happen. One is that people have these stupid opinions inter-organizationally, literally somebody whose paycheck is paid by revenue that comes from sales is like someone cold call me, somebody prospected me on LinkedIn. And so you just see I have empathy because I'm just like, okay, well clearly you just don't understand how this works. So maybe I should just send you a copy of my book. It's like that's the one problem.
Pouyan:
I shame them publicly on there. I tag their VP of sales and say, tell that to the people who pay you for your salary.
Ross:
Oh, wow. Yes.
Pouyan:
I've done that a couple of times on LinkedIn.
Pete Kazanjy:
And anyway, I think at this point, yeah, that was kind of the impetus around Founding Sales. It was like, okay, cool. I just went through this, so I should write it down so that other people don't have to eat the same bowl of glass that I did, or at least it will be very quick.
Pouyan:
Yeah. You brought up a bunch of interesting points that I want to dig into what it's like building a community of salespeople because I'm sure you've seen some shit and had to deal with some shit in doing that, but-
Pete Kazanjy:
They like to try to sell to each other, it's weird.
Pouyan:
Yeah, that's the natural state, and how do you take that out and be like, no, this is a place to discuss, not sell, but it is what it is. But it's interesting, though, because what you said resonated, and it feels like there was a period of time. And I wonder if that's shifting where it was almost a sense of pride that a founder or a company would have, if that they didn't have sales peaks
Pete Kazanjy:
I think it is changing. I think there was a moment, maybe in the early 2010s. And I think there's a lot of shifting going on there, probably because there just is more information transfer. I think like Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator had a pretty good article that she wrote a pretty good essay she wrote on sales instead of marketing. I think that kind of helped. I think a lot of the accelerators are kind of getting on that train.
Ross:
I want to go back to Pouyan's question around community talk, and so that's what I'm doing, too similarly building a community of sales folks and the hypocrisies are just aplenty; I mean, it's shit from sales people get mad when they get the unavailable calls and, like ‘God, another telemarketer’. And then they go to their day job and make 80 unsolicited cold calls. They're just somehow not processing it, or like, oh, this thing is too expensive. Dollar menu is not a dollar anymore. And they're like, ‘yeah, this guy won't spend 20K’ and it’s a million dollar company. There's just a disconnect there. But I love to hear about your experience building the sales community.
Pete Kazanjy:
My current software company is a company called Atrium. We make data-driven sales management software. It's just software that helps AE managers, like SDR managers use data to improve team performance. So what we knew when we were going to start selling this is that sales operations and sales leadership was going to be a really important kind of like component of who we're selling to. And so we were like, okay, cool. Well, maybe what we could do is aggregate those folks together. And so just to making sure that your community is focused on the topics that matter to folks and then allow people to facilitate interaction on that, is in a way that is low risk.
Pete Kazanjy:
And they won't get their leg humped by people potentially trying to sell something. Because what that will do is that'll then chill their ability to ask that question in the future. Or how do you prevent people from trying to sell to each other? They are sellers. The drop of blood goes into the water and they all go berserk. It's like, well, you just have to be a real Draconian.
Ross:
Yeah.
Pete Kazanjy:
And be like, we're going to toss your ass out of here. And we're also going to tell everybody that we tossed you out of here on the way out.
Ross:
Yeah public shaming.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah. And people love it.
Ross:
Salespeople love that shit.
Pouyan:
Building empathy of being the account executive, the SDR, the AE, the AM. And now you're managing a team and not only that, leading a team of managers. And so what's your journey been?
Pete Kazanjy:
So if you're not doing those, if you're not working on things that have longterm kind of reward or payback, then you're kind of screwing up as a manager. And so then if you then back that up, and say, okay, well as an AE, how do I get there? It's like, well you just kind of start doing some of that stuff just on the side. Traditionally, where people get promoted to managers, the worst possible cases, the highest-performing reps who just like slay quota. And it's actually, they're not really I mean, you could have great people who do that, who become managers, but usually those people are just wildly, wildly narrow, focused on just the stuff that they need to do in order to just crush quota. Whereas a manager they essentially like a babysitter plus like a cook plus, like a maid, you just doing things for other people.
Pouyan:
When you say become an amazing manager, do you judge that just based off their team performance or other factors, like, Hey, I like this person.
Pete Kazanjy:
No. I mean, I think the true measure of a successful manager is what they do with their reps. And how you can change behavior driving the performance of your B players, like bringing, bringing B players up to A-minus, because you're going to have like six B players. A truly successful manager can identify the problems, like the shortfalls in their team, on a rep-by-rep basis, and then improve that.
Ross:
Having played a very low-level professional sports, I always felt managers could take somebody from a B to a B-plus, but not from a B and an A. They couldn't do that. A lot of people have that skill. They've got the talent and they're more ego managers, psychological managers who like they're not making them actually better. They're just making them think differently.
Pete Kazanjy:
But I guess in that regard, they are making them better though, right?
Ross:
I guess so.
Pete Kazanjy:
What did you play, Ross?
Ross:
I was a baseball player.
Pete Kazanjy:
Oh, okay, cool. When you get to a certain level, I don't know if you were playing like minor league baseball or whatever, at a certain point you just cap out from a raw capacity standpoint, but that's not the situation in sales land. Right. There's so much stuff that people could improve on that are just sitting right there. And so understanding what the critical path is for that rep, like one of my reps was really struggling with that data-light stuff because he's a really bright guy and it's one of those things where it's just cool. You just need to shut up and be cool. So it sounds like you want to set up an account right now. Can you share your screen? Let's do it low and behold, and we had him practice that for like two hours in a row until his eyes were falling out of his head and you see his conversion rates change.
Pouyan:
What do you do if you're the rep that's working for a shitty manager, do you just pray that it doesn't last long? Do you try to help yourself by helping them manage? Or do you go above? And then there's a lot of stuff that's built for managers to help their reps, but as a leader, how do you assess your managers and say, Hey, what's going on? Who's a poor-performing manager so that you can manage the manager.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I know the answer to the first one. I certainly have a point of view on the second one, which is when you're a sales leader, really, it's incumbent on you to enable your managers. Right. And so that means that they need to know what their operating rhythm is, what are the meetings that they should be having with their teams? And what's the contents of those meetings providing that framework to managers is the first kind of step there. And then inspecting that it's actually happening by kind of like dipping in. And then of course, you then see it. You can use data to evaluate that.
Ross:
From the rep standpoint, though, how do you... And this is the classic business school case. When do you decide to actually try and make someone better versus just cut bait?
Pete Kazanjy:
You can see that in the data. And I think the first thing is, your skill will kind of like two-by-two, where if somebody doesn't have the will, they're not putting in the work.
Ross:
Right.
Pete Kazanjy:
Just from an activity standpoint, or they're not following through on the coaching that has been provided or you assign them homework and they don't necessarily do it well, in that case, all right, can't really fix that they're checked out. And then if you're trying to up-skill somebody, I think that there's, I don't know if it's three strikes and you're-out sort of situation, but you want to make sure that they're actually improving over time. And so that to use the examples we were talking about earlier, that's looking at some sort of metric that would indicate that they're like... Let's use baseball again. Right. Hey man, you're getting shelled. I was a pitcher: Hey, man, you're getting shelled.
Ross:
So was I.
Pete Kazanjy:
Oh, okay, cool. You're getting shelled because what ends up happening is you get behind on the count and then you get nervous. And so then you put it right down the pipe and you get rocked, right. So instead, what I need you to do is I need you to hit first pitch strikes such that you don't get behind on the count, and then you don't have to do something stupid later and get yourself shelled. So what we're going to do is we're going to measure whether or not you're having first pitch strikes and we're going to come back to it.
Pete Kazanjy:
And if you don't, we're going to make you run until you puke. And then if you continue to not do that, well, then you're not going to pitch anymore. Or if you are hitting more first-pitch strikes, then wonderful. You get some more big league, too. Right. And I think that's kind of the approach to take that. And so that just applies to whatever the skill short-fall is in the case of the rep that you're working with.
Ross:
Yeah. We had to convert, we had 80% or 85% first pitch strike and then 80% one-one conversions as well.
Pete Kazanjy:
That's fantastic.
Ross:
Yeah. That's what we were trying to get. So.
Pete Kazanjy:
No, I mean, that level of granularity is-
Ross:
Yeah that what we would do-
Pete Kazanjy:
... Absolutely track-
Ross:
Yeah, we had to track at every game, I mean, that's why I think it transfers. So I mean, working at Oracle is like every dude played baseball at some pretty good level, but yeah. I mean, I was definitely averse to... The metrics were annoying, but they were very useful. I'm still very metrics driven across everything that I do, just cause it's interesting. I like data, and looking at it, but I definitely had moments where I was like, fuck this leaderboard right now. All it is doing is like, I know I suck right now. Thank you. The TVs around the office. If you're not on that leader, that top 10, you just feel like a piece of shit.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah. Anyway, this is one of the things that kind of cracks us up with Atrium, it's kind of like bringing that religion to sales land, like, Hey, it's okay. It's okay to like sales math. What do you think that Nick Saban and Bill Belichick do? And by the way, if you don't, someone else will and you're going to get fired.
Ross:
Yep. Yeah. It's true.
Pete Kazanjy:
Like all the Scouts in Moneyball.
Ross:
Yeah, iTest no longer works. No one's buying iTest anymore.
Pouyan:
But as we come towards our time here, Pete. We'd like to end with two questions with everyone. And question number one is, what's your hype song?
Ross:
More importantly. What's your walkout song? When you're coming out in the night and you got to close the game, what's playing right now?
Pete Kazanjy:
I think we'll go with Thunderstruck by AC/DC.
Ross:
How about your song of mourning afterwards? You just gave up the first-
Pouyan:
the recovery.
Ross:
... So you got poled. You couldn't even get through the first recovery cover song.
Pete Kazanjy:
It's probably what is it? Closing Time? I forgot who the-
Ross:
Yeah Closing Time. We had a guy, our closer came out to that song.
Pete Kazanjy:
Closing time. Yeah, exactly.
Pouyan:
But this is great, Pete. Thanks for joining us.
Pete Kazanjy:
Yeah. Super fun.
Ross:
Thank you sir. Much appreciated.
