Omer Khan: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omer Khan. And this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Pete Kazanjy. the co-founder of Atrium, a sales management tool that uses data and smart analytics to help sales leaders and managers improve team performance.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:01:59] Hello. Hello.
Omer Khan: [00:02:01] So for people who aren't familiar, can you just tell us a little bit about Atrium? What does the product do? Who is it for? What's the main problem you guys are helping to solve? Yeah, so
Pete Kazanjy: [00:02:12] Atrium makes software that helps sales managers do what we like to call data-driven rep management, such a use these data and analytics to better manage their, their AEs, their SDRs, their AMs, and CSMs using metrics using continuously monitored analytics that is really super quick to set up out of the box. You know, it takes 90 seconds and then importantly, kind of monitors those KPIs for those managers sits as they don't have to stare at walls of charts in order to figure out what the hell is going on, but this operates just does it for them using, using math.
Omer Khan: [00:03:01] Great. So today we're going to talk about your book, Founding Sales, the early-stage go-to-market handbook, startup sales for founders and others in first time sales roles.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:03:34] Yeah, so, so the book is really focused on kind of two, two stages, but the way to kind of think about it is it's like the missing manual, if you will, for early-stage go to market. And really the reason why I wrote it was because when I at my last software company, TalentBin when I, when I started TalentBin, when my co-founder Jason.
Omer Khan: [00:05:28] Great and then can you just explain why the book is relevant, not just for sales folks and why other people or disciplines in an organization can also get value from this?
Pete Kazanjy: [00:05:40] Yeah so the way to think about it is it the primary user of the book is a person who does not have selling like early-stage selling experience. So who could that be? It's called founding sales cause like the primary user for it is a founder. But if you think about who founders, we're kind of like founders come from, if you will. Usually they're like former product managers, former engineers, former designers, what have you.
Omer Khan: [00:07:53] Great. So today we're going to talk about building a narrative or a story, and this is kind of like the foundational product marketing stuff. And when you're you're nearly stages and you're going out and selling a product from what I've seen a lot of founders, especially if they don't have experience with sales, they sort of tend to.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:09:47] Good goal, good goal.
Omer Khan: [00:09:49] All right. So let's start from the top. Tell us about, from your perspective, why is this important? What does it really mean to build a narrative or a story?
Pete Kazanjy: [00:09:58] Yeah. So I think this is a little bit of kind of like my product marketing background kind of like peeking out.
Omer Khan: [00:12:29] Great. Okay. So the first step is really to identify what the problem is, and that might seem. Obvious it's like you think, well, yeah, the problem is the thing that my product solves. But it's, I think it's going deeper than that really understanding from, from the customer's perspective, what are their pain points?
Pete Kazanjy: [00:13:15] Yeah. So the interesting thing, you, you totally nailed it and, you know, spoken like a true former product manager on your back. Cause I think that actually kind of starts even before you're formulating the narrative cause like you can't just like, pull it out of your ear and be like, here's this problem, right?
Omer Khan: [00:16:28] Yeah a couple of points on, on that. Like you said, that the sort of like, you know, themes or patterns emerge, and that's a really important point because it's not like you had these interviews and you're like, ah, we've got the answer and this is the thing that if we just are going to go and talk to people and they're gonna be, yes, yes, yes. Where do I sign? But it's, it's more like you sort of start to get, okay. Here are sort of like five or six things that we keep hearing over and over again. Maybe there's going to be some of them that are important enough that.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:17:36] Yeah. I mean, in this case, this was before this was pre-product right. We were doing just research. So that's fine. I guess, better to understand that there actually isn't a problem there and it's well solved. And then you solve your, you save yourself from, you saved yourself from spending a bunch of engineering resources, building something to solve a problem that doesn't exist for instance. But yes, you certainly certainly should not be talking about your product at that point, because ideally, ideally you're doing this research before the product, the product exists because it should inform the thing that you're gonna, you're going to end up building, but yes, for sure.
Omer Khan: [00:20:09] Great. And then the second part of this is, so we've sort of defined what is the problem? The second part is like, Which you made the point in the book is just as important is like, who has the problem initially when we're thinking about this, it's like, we think of it, like the company has this problem, but then you need to sort of figure out who specifically who's your, you know, your ideal customer profile or your target persona.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:20:44] Yeah. So, so oftentimes there's like multiple people who are responsible for solving a problem and in kind of a different, different ways. We've kind of just talked about that a little bit with the TalentBin, but really what it comes down to is like, who's the person that's measured on this, whose success is measured on this result.
Omer Khan: [00:25:12] Now the target customer or the person who has the problem, isn't necessarily always the same person who's the decision-maker.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:25:24] Yeah.
Omer Khan: [00:25:24] And so you might be in a situation where you have identified somebody who is really struggling with the problem, and they would love to have a solution, but maybe, you know, based on the price point of your product, they're not the right person to make that decision, that buying decision that's somebody else, but that's somebody else may not be experiencing that problem or the pain from that problem as much.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:26:13] Yeah. And so I think that that's just sometimes what you have is you have messages on a per persona basis, right or narratives on persona basis. You kind of heard me talking about that a little bit in the Atrium example where there's a couple of ways you can kind of skin that cat. One, one thing that you can potentially do is structure your product in such a way that it can be transacted at a lower price point, right?
Omer Khan: [00:28:29] Yeah. Yeah. And that leads us onto the next point, which is understanding the costs associated with the problem. And ultimately, I think this is about understanding what sort of value they're getting or not getting today, what's the impact to the organization.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:29:00] Yeah. So I think there's, there's kind of two ways of doing that. There's like hard ROI and then there's kind of like more soft ROI and really the, the reason why. Organizations invest in technologies in order to like, make their businesses more efficient and either reduce costs or make more money.
Omer Khan: [00:33:21] Yeah. And, and I think to understand that you really need to, I think it leads onto the next point is you, you really need to understand, like how, how are they solving the problem today? And where is that current solution falling short? So one, well, as you dig into that, you're going to be able to understand, okay, what the, what is the cost associated with how they're trying to solve this today?
Pete Kazanjy: [00:33:45] Exactly.
Omer Khan: [00:33:46] Or if they're not, if they're not even bothering to try and solve it, do they really care that much about this problem and maybe this isn't the right thing to, to be focusing on with your product.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:33:57] Yeah. Yeah. So the, the, how they currently solve it usually kind of buckets into a couple of different, like couple of different buckets.
Omer Khan: [00:37:02] And you sort of also mentioned like if they're already using a product to solve the solution or some of the problems, sorry. Yeah. But I think you also said something about like, it's, it's also important to understand that that product might not actually be a competitor to you. There may still be an opportunity. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Pete Kazanjy: [00:37:28] Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, the notion of competitor is kind of tough because things are like, things overlap if you will. Right. And, and so you use like Atrium as a, as an example, there, Atrium, you know, oftentimes organizations try to solve the problem of data-driven rep management via, you know Maybe by Salesforce reporting or business intelligence or what have you, these are like not actually direct competitors with, with us.
Omer Khan: [00:39:08] Awesome. Okay, great. So we've, we've sort of covered the importance of doing customer interviews, how that helps you to really start to understand the different themes or get more clarity around exactly which problem matters most to your target customers, that, that you can, your product can solve zeroing in, on your target customers within the organization and understanding.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:40:56] Yeah. Well, the one last thing that we didn't touch on just really quickly, of course we teed everything up and then the last thing is like, Hey, how does this new solution work and why is it, why is it better?
Omer Khan: [00:43:57] Yeah. I mean, we can kind of go back and forth and wordsmith and, and, and kind of make the email shorter and all that stuff. But what I liked about the way you went through that was you described the pains that. They're most likely having based on the customer interviews that you've already done, you describe it in a way which really resonates with them.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:45:04] Right. Exactly. And of course, all of this kind of cascades is you delineated at the beginning of this conversation, all of this cascades from a, like having gotten that narrative set up for success from the get go.
Omer Khan: [00:45:27] All right. Cool, Pete, thank you so much for coming back to joining me today. Really great conversation. I think, as I said, we've just unpacked, just a tiny bit of, of what you cover in the book.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:46:07] Focusing just find me on, on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm pretty easy to find I'm the only Peter Kazanjy. On there.
Omer Khan: [00:46:14] We'll include the links to those profiles just in case there's any Peter out there. All right. Great. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate the time and you know, congratulations on getting that book out of your head.
Pete Kazanjy: [00:46:59] Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
Omer Khan: [00:47:02] Cheers.
