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.
This book was the culmination of many people’s efforts. Thank you to my editor, Christina Bailly, for reducing redundancy and unnecessary loquaciousness. Thank you to my designer, and wife, Tracy Moeller, for laying out the book for print and epublishing, designing the cover, and building the entire FoundingSales.com website. Thank you to the First Round Capital portfolio community that supported me at the earliest stages of my journey, specifically Sean Black and Angus Davis for their peer support. And while we’re on the topic, thank you to First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures for funding TalentBin, and now Atrium, and providing the initial capital for the companies in which these lessons were learned.
Thank you to my TalentBin team, including my cofounder, Jason Heidema, and engineering leaders, Ignacio Andreu and Rodrigo Leroux, for providing a market-leading product on which I could learn to sell. And thank you to the early TalentBin sales team, including Rob Perez, Brad Snider, Manny Ortega, Akio Aida, Marcus Knight, and Jared McGriff, for being the combination guinea pigs/mad scientists with me as we figured this out. Thank you to Adam Abeles, who lead TalentBin’s customer success function, as well. And thank you to my extended peer education network of Modern Sales experts, including Jeremey Donovan, Trish Bertuzzi, Jason Jordan, and Jacco van der Kooij, for constantly pushing forward the frontier of Modern Sales, and teaching me along the way.
And thank you again to my wife, Tracy Moeller, for being my partner in my entrepreneurial journeys. Last, but not least, thank you to my parents, Cathey and Bob Kazanjy, for instilling in me a lifelong love of learning and critical inquiry without which none of this would be possible.
Founding Sales is dedicated to my brother, Michael T. Kazanjy, and my son, Michael P. Kazanjy.
importantThis book is written in stages, in that your sales efforts, like your product development efforts, will typically take a stepwise path where subsequent stages build on the prior stages.
You can read through the entire book if you want—each chapter has estimated reading times, and all in it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two per chapter. That said, usually you should only go as far as the stage that you’re at—in that worrying about things like, say, sales hiring, before you even have your sales narrative, slides, or outreach collateral in place, is going to be a premature optimization, and likely a distraction.
The goal of the book is to be a resource you can come back to frequently, like a textbook, when you need to refresh yourself on something or when you’re about to enter a new stage of your sales maturity process and need to see what’s coming next.