Pete Kazanjy

Atrium · San Francisco

Author of Founding Sales, the handbook that popularised founder led sales

Why they're worth your time

Founding Sales is the most concrete text available on the exact stretch most founders get wrong: your first 10 customers, your first rep, and the handoff between the two. He is unusually specific about call structure, discovery questions, and what a founder should measure before hiring anyone into sales.

Background

Pete Kazanjy founded TalentBin, a talent search engine acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014, where he went from founder generalist to first sales rep to VP of Sales. He now runs Atrium, a sales management analytics company, and wrote Founding Sales, a free startup sales handbook aimed at technical founders selling for the first time. He also runs the Modern Sales community for sales operations and enablement people, and produces the Founder Led Sales Stories podcast.

Known for

Where they're public

Their own channels. Read the work first.

Others on the same ground

April Dunford Toronto
The person most B2B teams learn positioning from, and the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch She turns positioning from a vague branding exercise into a repeatable exercise: list your true competitive alternatives, isolate the features only you have, work out the value those unlock, and name the market segment that cares most. Her Sales Pitch work is the rare material that connects that positioning to the actual words a rep says on a call. PositioningICPSales processCategory design
Jason Lemkin SaaStr · San Francisco
Founder of SaaStr, the largest body of public writing on scaling B2B SaaS revenue He answers the operational questions almost nobody publishes numbers for: when to hire your first VP of Sales, what a rep should actually close, how long ramp really takes, and why most VP hires fail in the first 90 days. Read him for benchmarks and hiring sequencing rather than for strategy. GTM hiringEnterprise salesSales processPricing
Emily Kramer MKT1 · San Francisco
Writes MKT1, the reference on how an early B2B startup should actually build marketing She writes the thing almost nobody else does: what the first marketing hire should actually do in what order, how to scope the role, and how to tell a growth marketer from a product marketer when you have budget for exactly one. Her templates and org charts are directly usable rather than illustrative. PositioningInbound & contentGTM hiringICP
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy Upekkha · Bengaluru
Managing Partner at Upekkha and one of the clearest voices on capital efficient SaaS GTM from India He works with dozens of early Indian SaaS founders at the same time, so his public material is grounded in patterns rather than one company's story: how to pick a wedge ICP, what a founder should personally close before hiring, and where India based teams typically stall selling into the US. His framing of efficiency as a GTM choice, not a constraint, is the useful contrarian bit. ICPPositioningPricingSales process

Listed here and would rather not be, or something is wrong? Email [email protected] and we'll fix or remove it.

eChai Partner Brands