Episode 649 | Learning to Sell SaaS as a Founder (Book Recommendation)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 649, Rob Walling chats with Pete Kazanjy about his book Founding Sales, which is designed to help SaaS founders learn how to sell as well as how to hire and scale sales. We cover a lot, including objection handling, how to ask for the sale, and mindset shifts you need to make when learning how to sell. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 3:53 - Overview of Founding Sales 7:54 - Growing TalentBin to $6M ARR 10:28 - What Pete is working on today with Atrium 12:28 - Mindset changes when doing sales for the first time 19:26 - Speed vs. production value for sales materials 22:46 - Handling objections 26:50 - Asking for the sale 31:03 - Relentless execution 32:15 - What sets good sales reps apart from those that struggle? Links from the Show: Pete Kazanjy (@Kazanjy) I Twitter Atrium Founding Sales Modern Sales Pros Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com The Lean Startup The Startup Owner’s Manual

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of startups for the rest of us. I am your host, Rob Walling. This week,
0:05.4	I talk with Pete Kazanji about his book, Founding Sales. His book is one of the best books for a
0:10.0	founder to learn to sell, and it's specifically focused on SaaS. I was very impressed with both
0:15.5	the breadth and the depth of topics Pete covered in this book, but before we dive into that,
0:19.8	do you notice anything weird about
0:21.3	my voice? This is not the real Rob. This is an AI generated voice made to sound like Rob. A Robbot,
0:28.1	you might say. And now, won't the real Rob Walling please stand up? I'm curious if before I called it
0:33.9	out, if you were thinking to yourself, boy, Rob's voice really sounds odd today.
0:38.7	Thanks to Justin Vincent of the texting podcast for the heads-up about the 11 Labs Voice API.
0:45.5	I spent a little time messing around with it over the weekend, and it was just too fun of an opportunity to pass up.
0:51.3	But just because the AI said it doesn't mean it isn't true. Pete
0:54.7	Gazanji and I have an amazing conversation today about his book, Founding Sales, which is
0:59.6	absolutely one of the best books I've ever read about learning how to do sales and how to hire
1:05.5	for sales and how to scale sales as a founder. It's a really interesting interview to hear
1:10.3	Pete's story, and I recommend
1:12.7	checking out his book, Founding Sales. But before we dev into that, I've talked before about
1:17.9	microconf US here in Denver in just a couple of months, mid-April. But I wanted to talk in a little
1:23.0	more detail. Patrick Campbell, the former founder and CEO of Profitwell, now the chief strategy
1:29.8	officer for Paddle, is going to be telling his story, the story of bootstrapping Profit
1:35.2	Well and growing it to exit that's north of $200 million. It's incredible story. We've heard
1:42.1	bits and pieces of it, but if you haven't seen Patrick
1:45.1	speak before, he's an incredible storyteller and has a very strong presence on stage. This isn't
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rob Walling, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Rob Walling and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.