kazanjy.svbtle.comPeter Kazanjy

Svbtle Menu is writing on the Svbtle network. talentbin.com @kazanjy say hello rss feed about svbtle sign up Co-founder of TalentBin.com (Acquired by Monster.com) - Accidental early stage sales leader with the scars to prove it. Fascinated by revenue acceleration, professional identity, reputation, and recruiting. @kazanjy say hi talentbin.com Read this first Pete Kazanjy Speaking Bio Pete Kazanjy (LinkedIn, Twitter) is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. Pete founded TalentBin, a category-defining talent search engine and recruiting CRM, which exited to Monster Worldwide in early 2014. Pete currently is the founder of Atrium, a proactive sales performance analysis solution, author of Founding Sales, the definitive Startup Sales Handbook, and founder of Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, leadership, and enablement community. At TalentBin, Pete went from product and product marketing founder generalist, to first sales rep, first sales manager, first VP of Sales, all the way to leading new product sales for 600+ sales reps at Monster worldwide. After Monster, he wrote a book on startup sales for founders and other first-time sellers, Founding Sales, documenting all the mistakes he made along the way... Continue reading → Oct 30, 2016 The Best First Round Review Articles for Early Stage Companies As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I am quite possibly First Round Review’s 1 fanboi. The combination of relevant, actionable, and true information, delivered in such a well executed package is unparalleled. And when you compare it to the absolute sea of bullshit self-promotional content marketing (both VC and vendor) that founders have to otherwise contend with when trying to get insights to tackle day to day problems, First Round Review starts looking less like a VC publication and more a community treasure. That, and Camille Ricketts and Shaun Young are just absolute delights. My Favorite Review Articles So, the other day I was tweeting about how I seem to end up following up every startup coaching meeting I have with a handful of links to First Round Review articles that, if applied properly, will help solve the problem(s) the person I’m coaching has. My friend Tyler... Continue reading → Sep 24, 2016 SaaS Startup Pricing Strategies You ready to make it rain on these prospects? This is a section on pricing from the “Sales Narratives” chapter of Founding Sales. Other sections and chapters can be found on Twitter and you can sign up to be notified about them via email on the book’s website here. Founding Sales is a book for founders and other first time sellers as they figure out the earliest stages of their go to markets - so the recommendations contained below should be consumed in that context. Other resources for B2B founders I’ve published can be found here. Pricing Pricing is a funny thing. It could be considered part of your narrative, or it could be considered part of your sales materials. In a way, it’s the conclusion of the narrative arc for your solution: “And because of all this, you should pay us this for the right to access our solution.” While pricing is something that is likely to change—usually... Continue reading → Aug 4, 2016 Early Stage Startup Sales Maturity Health Check Checklist Who’s ready for their health check!? TL;DR : This is a “Sales Maturity Checklist” I evolved to help me be more efficient and helpful with my interactions with early stage organizations figuring out their go to market. Maybe it can help you with yours! I end up getting a pretty consistent flow of early stage founders showing up on my doorstep (either themselves, or referred by investors) who want to “pick my brain” on topics of sales, product marketing, go to market, etc. I’ve found these “brain picking” exercises can often be less than efficient, in that they typically happen synchronously, over coffee or a beer (or maybe a Google Hangout), without a helluva lot of structure, and thus end up ranging all over the map. Moreover, by waiting until the actual meetings to get the most basic of context, you can end up in a situation where it becomes apparent, mid-meeting, that you actually... Continue reading → Jul 28, 2016 What meetings should my startup be having? I tried to find the fugliest stock photo of a meeting. Did I win? One of the issues I see in early stage startups when they get beyond “two people in a garage” is that they don’t consider how important synchronous information transmission can be for making sure people are on the same page. You’ve got one, two, three folks who largely share a brain, and are constantly sharing information - so why would need to create structure around this sharing, right? Further, because they’re constantly pushing, and always on, they don’t consider the importance of cadenced checkpoints to measure the progress against their goals, and reevaluate that their previously agreed goals should continue to be their goals. You resist doing this when you have a huge pile of wood to chop, and instead just chop and chop and chop. Lastly, because “meetings” feel like a big company thing, and man, we ain’t got... Continue reading → Jun 26, 2016 Resources for Founders Yassss! Thousands of words on arcane enterprise software topics! Just what I wanted! These are an aggregation of materials produced by, me, Pete Kazanjy (Twitter, Linkedin) to assist early stage founders. So you know I have some standing for this, I founded TalentBin which exited to Monster in 2014, wrote Founding Sales, and founded the Modern Sales Pro community. These materials are primarily focused on b2b software companies with a direct sales go to market, but also applicable beyond. Many of the materials are from Founding Sales (Twitter, Website), my book on enterprise sales for founders and other first time sellers, while others are materials made for the companies I advise or have invested in. Many are linked from the invaluable First Round Review, source of other great materials for founders. Regardless of their source, the aim of publishing them here is to help folks in... Continue reading → Jun 18, 2016 Staffing and scaling a SaaS sales org? I’ve got a model for YOU. Did anyone need a model? About a year ago a founder of one of the companies I invested in and advise was asking me some questions over email about scaling a SaaS sales org. Specifically she was thinking through the costs, timelines, and outputs of hiring sales staff, whether SDRs or AEs, and how that eventually turned into a growing business. Rather than just email back and forth on the specifics of her organization, I decided it would be best to create an abstracted, basic Google Spreadsheet model that could be used to see the interlocking parts of how that might work for a given organization, based on certain inputs (like their Average Selling Price, win rate, and more.) And that way other organizations might be able to use it. You can find that model here: But then I started tweaking it some. I started out with just one tab, and one AE ramp time (3 months), but then forked the... Continue reading → Apr 16, 2016 Startup Sales Decks for Founders I spent ten minutes looking for the douchiest stock photo of a sales presentation I could find. This was the winner. So my buddy Rick Nucci asked me to take the Sales Decks chapter from Founding Sales and turn it into…wait for it…a deck to present at the Philly Founder Factory event in December. It was well received, and has been passed around pretty heavily, so I figured I’d put it up here so folks can refer to it as needed. The goal of the presentation is to provide a helpful framework and examples of what a beginning sales deck could look like for an early stage B2B offering, along with examples from real life sales decks! OMG. The observation being that there isn’t a lot of documentation out there to help founders and early sales staff in putting together a killer sales presentation…...