About the speaker

Pete Kazanjy the co-founder of the sales performance management software company Atrium, as well as the founder of the Modern Sales Pros community. He has a background in product management and product marketing, and prior to Atrium, he started and sold a recruiting software company called TalentBin. Pete is also the author of the book “Founding Sales,” which focuses on early-stage selling in startups.

Mark Lerner:

Everybody, welcome back to the RevAmp podcast. I’m your host, Mark Lerner. I’m joined here today by Pete Kazanjy.

Super excited to hear about Pete’s story and Pete’s insights. Before we get started. Pete, why don’t you tell the folks at home a little bit about yourself and your background and what you’re doing?

Pete Kazanjy:

Sure.

Hey folks, my name is Pete Kazanjy. I’m one of the founders of Atrium. Atrium makes sales performance management software that helps sales organizations improve attainment and performance through better management and better frontline management, which largely revolves around better data-driven management.

Of course, we now use large language model AI to facilitate that, but the whole idea is to help managers better synthesize and act, act on coaching opportunities, accountability opportunities, encouragement, opportunities, et cetera, et cetera.

So that’s what I do. And then before Atrium, I started and sold a recruiting software company called TalentBin. I started in 2009 and sold in 2014 to Monster Worldwide, and that’s really why I went from being what I call a business generalist founder to being a first seller sales manager and sales leader at Talent. That’s kind of like my background before that was in product management and product marketing. And so that’s kind of how I got on the sales train, if you will.

I ended up writing a book on startup sales subsequent to that called Founding Sales, which is kind of like the Bible of early-stage selling, kind of like zero to a couple of million dollars of ARR. And then when I started working on Atrium and doing the research associated with that, I started the nation’s largest sales operations and leadership community called Modern Sales Pros. So think a little bit about modern analytically excellent, operationally excellent sales. That’s kind of my thing.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, and I think a lot of people who are going to be listening and watching this are probably very familiar with Modern Sales Pros, probably are members of the community and I’m a big fan as well.

I’m a member. I love seeing Google Groups being used to its optimal performance. I think that’s actually a good way to kick things off. In your estimation, from your viewpoint, what is modern sales? Is that kind of a moving target, and how is it different from what sales were before?

Pete Kazanjy:

Yeah, I mean, the way I think about this is, and I think this kind of goes to, oh, I better have a copy of founding sales right here. The thing that people oftentimes get confused as to, especially people who aren’t in sales, probably the people who are listening to this are in sales or sales operations or what have you. But ultimately what sales is about is it’s about facilitating market transactions essentially. It’s like the grease that facilitates how market economies work. And so the way that that works is you have a bunch of people who are running around looking for demand, either a, looking for demand that knows it’s demand, the people who know that they have a problem, or alternatively looking for people who have the problem that don’t know that they have the problem. And that’s all we’re doing. That’s all we’re doing is we’re just running around.

And by the way, that’s actually how innovation gets spread throughout. The old joke about make a better mousetrap, the world will be the path to your door. No, it’s not at all. It turns out that there’s not a lot of people out there. You know what this mousetrap, it’s just really inferior. It’s like, no, man, we didn’t go to market in order to facilitate that. And so then the question then is, okay, and that’s how new technology distributes. That’s how market economies work. Entrepreneurship happens. So then you would say, okay, cool. That’s what sales does. Then what’s the modern version of that? Well, doing it more effectively. And so I think a lot of the times we’re kind of like sales is a bad word or whatever, old school sales kind of gets a bad rap is because doing that behavior of finding demand in the market and then connecting with it either to elucidate to the demand that it has this problem or finding that demand and being like, Hey, I have the solution to your problem.

That used to be a lot harder before we had prospect databases or the internet or CRMs or what have you. So that’s where sometimes you got bad sales behavior that people stereotype associated with sales, like, all right, we got to always be closing, right? Like, okay, we’re just going to close this deal. Whether or not they have paint or not, we’re going to make it happen. The joke I like to say is the old saying like, man, that guy’s such a great sales rep. He can sell ice to Eskimos. It’s like, dude, if you’re selling is to an Eskimo, you’re kind of an ass unless the Eskimo happens to be in Southern California and it’s missing out on their nostalgic for ice or whatever. And so I think what Modern Sales does is it’s more about helping to facilitate that go to market in a more fluid, in a more operationally excellent, in a more reduced customer acquisition cost version. And so that’s technologies, that’s messaging, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s what we all do as sellers or modern salespeople. And especially that’s what Revenue Operations responsible is responsible for is adopting new technologies that helps facilitate that adopting and deploying new technologies that facilitates that go-to market in a more agile, in a more less friction full capacity. That’s kind of how I think about it.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think that’s super interesting. We’ve kind of connected over the years a bunch of times, but I got to see you in person recently at an event for Modern Sales Pros here in New York, and there was some super interesting conversations from the viewpoint of sales leadership, some of the challenges there. And I thought it was really fascinating. Some of the challenges that exist, especially having been compounded by this kind of, we have whiplash from going from in-office to at home, to should we go back to in-office, to there’s kind of a glut of good sellers, then the market for the employment market is really tight. And then now it’s kind of shifting back. There’s so much going on, and there were some really super interesting stuff going on. But I mean, from your perspective, there’s beens a lot of back and forth right now. A lot of it’s hard to really even know where you’re at from a leadership perspective and from leading a sales team, leading a sales organization and sitting on top of that, how did that look, especially when Covid hit and everyone has to work from home, and the challenges around that. And now that we kind are moving into some other new phase, what are kind of the challenges there and some of the learnings that you’ve had along the way?

Pete Kazanjy:

Well, I think that the big thing there is, and I think before we started the show here, you and I were talking about the concept of agility and reacting to change and what have you. And I think there has been a lot of change. And I think the important thing that we have to do as sales leaders and revenue operations people is be mindful of the change, but then also be mindful of, there’s this terminology that I like. It’s called Lindy, the term Lindy essentially means old, it’s been around for a long time. Dancing is Lindy dancing has been around for millions of years, and it started out as meeting rituals or whatever. And I think that the important thing to think about is when things change or look like there’s a change happening, is it momentary or is it something that is just a new way of doing something that’s very old, right?

So I’ll give you a good example. Zoom is a very powerful tool for having face-to-face interaction and synchronous communication with a prospect. The reason why is because face-to-face communication with a prospect as compared to asynchronous email or what have you, makes for very rich communication. Now, we had that with the phone, but then I couldn’t see your face and you couldn’t see my face, and you couldn’t see my hand motions and things like that. And all of those things that we’re describing right there are really important for getting a point across. For me, reading you for essentially just information exchange, which is the crux of selling.

Zoom’s a great example of, okay, here’s this new technology that potentially could get adopted in the face of big change. Like, oh goodness, there’s this pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. But then I think the other thing to think about is yes, zoom is far superior to, actually, I’m going to date myself ready, guys. This is how old I am. I used to use ClearSlide a decade ago, never even heard of it. Oh, okay. So ClearSlide was like 1.0, zoom slash high spot slash seismic where you could present slides, the prospect would come to your branded URL, your meeting room. There wasn’t any video though. And so it was a little bit better than just being on the phone, which obviously was a pretty sweet advancement.

But when Zoom came around, all of a sudden, now I could see Mark’s face and he could see me and so on and so forth, versus just talking to a black box. So that’s cool, and that was really great, but then potentially mistaking, oh, okay, well, this is really good for customers and it’s better than calling on the phone. You know what? This is the same as sitting next to one of my colleagues next to me. Yeah, that’s actually not true. And so I think it’s important to be mindful of when using technology to reduce friction in certain situations. Like, Hey, now, and Salesforce is a phenomenal example of this. One might argue that Salesforce’s biggest innovation was figuring out how to sell SaaS software to the mid-market over the phone. So Salesforce had primarily an inside sales motion when they started out because there was this cloud-delivered CRM that, unlike Seabolt, had to be on-prem, et cetera, et cetera.

And because now you have sellers who are going and visiting these folks and helping on planes, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, I think the important thing there is to think about when things change. Is this change facilitating something that is long-term important and useful, or is this change actually kind of getting in between things? And another good example, so the conversation that we were having Mark, or the event that we were at was all around performance management. So we had a bunch of CROs, a bunch of VPs of sales operations talking about facilitating cultures of performance. And I think over the last five years, that’s actually been very difficult for a lot of organizations to do because as you were noting COVID happened, a bunch of capital came into the markets that then got pumped into a lot of technology companies by investors or VCs or what have you, who then turned around and were like, all right, we’re going to hire ourselves some AEs.

We’re going to hire a bajillion of them, and we’re over. We’re going to hire a bajillion of them. And then everyone else is trying to hire a bajillion ae, so that means they’re going after our account executives as well. So maybe we’re going to reduce performance requirements. Here we are, maybe a little loath to have performance conversations and hold people more accountable. They might just bounce over to this organization over here that’s whispering sweet, nothings in their ear, et cetera, et cetera. But if you think about it, ultimately all that’s momentary sales has been hard for a long time. And the reason why sales is hard is because there’s scarce purchasing resources that are being sought after by sellers. This is why win rates are not like 80% or 50% or whatever when rates are usually like 20%, 15%, or what have you. And so the notion that selling could be easy or that quota is not hard to achieve, or that sales are not a calorically intensive sport based on how many customer-facing meetings you’re having, or what have you, that’s certainly momentary. And the notion of sales being hard and being full of rejection and being high level of effort is something that’s been around for a long time, it’s not going to change. And so that kind of goes back to, so the notion of being hands off from a performance standpoint or performance management standpoint, that was a momentary glitch in the matrix if you will. Yeah.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think so. I think from this vantage point, it’s pretty clear. It does seem that there were some people that drank the Kool-Aid thought that, well, this is just the way things are. And they just, like you said, it was just built bazillions of people. And then there’s been a huge pullback, and this is kind of a side point, but you see, I think we in tech see these headlines about massive job growth, and then we look at our LinkedIn feeds and see all the people that we know that are looking for jobs and all the challenges around that. And it’s hard to square these two things, but I think there’s probably a clear correlation between the kind of low interest rate and the investment environment for tech. And when you pull that back, the investment dries up, budgets get lower, and then things kind of get more challenging.

Pete Kazanjy:

Yeah. Well, I think that the crux of all of it is that you just have to be agile and respond to it. Whether that means, okay, cool, budgets are drying up and people are being fussier about their spending, and that means that we need to refactor our discounting or refactor our approval, our approval workflows or whatever. And you want to be able to agilely do that in your CPQ as an example, something that you guys focus on. Or alternatively, this is something that we see all the time with our customers where performance managing, so sales performance, high performance comes from a high quantity of high quality sales effort, right? And then you can use metrics to then instrument those two things. You can instrument quantity of effort, so meetings and email volume and new opportunity inflow and stage advancements to stage three or pipeline advancement to this amount.

And then there’s quality, which is conversion rates like win rate, pipe hygiene stuff, untouched opportunities. And so in general, what you want to do is you want to measure and measure, manage and improve the thing that’s most important right now to an agility standpoint. So maybe 18 months ago, one of the big things that we would hear from our customers when everyone was hiring a bunch of reps and people were spending a bunch of money on marketing and so on and so forth, it was like, Hey, we want to instrument the ramp of these reps to make sure that they’re ramping appropriately from a precursor standpoint. Oh, also, these guys have so many opportunities in their pipe from inbound that we really want to keep an eye on our untouched opportunity in our stuck ops, our pipe hygiene metrics. That was something that was a very common point of view 18 months ago or whatever, paying attention to those specific things. And then things shift, and now it’s like, oh, okay, cool. We let go half of our SDR team. And so now account executives are expected to prospect 50% of their pipe. That now means we want to measure account executive prospecting activity and then account executive prospecting like outputs, like self sourced opportunities, self sourced pipe, et cetera, et cetera. But the whole point is you want to be able to be agile about those things for whatever the thing happens to be.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. I mean, it’s got to be tough from the standpoint of leading people through that kind of change and saying, okay, sure. And I think that’s the mark of leadership is being able to herald people through those changes and acknowledge that yes, it’s difficult, but this is the new reality and this is actually sort of the way it was before, and that the red herring was really kind of the last two years. But on the scheme of things, this is kind of normal. I think people around my age or maybe slightly younger came up in a time where it was years of plenty and they don’t remember 2008 or 2001 or all these things. So I think part of it is keeping things in context historically. Yeah,

Pete Kazanjy:

I mean, this is what we were talking about at that executive dinner where we’re talking about the role of the leader as one component of the leader is one component of the leader’s role is teaching. And so, and this has only been compounded in a remote environment, which I’m not a fan of, but for a lot of reasons, but primarily one of information transmission, I think. So there was a CRO at that dinner, and she was talking about how she came up through EMC, which is just a vaunted sales organization. And so she knows what sales is like because what sales ought to be like and is because she came up in an EMC sales environment with a hundred people on a sales floor. People are locked in eating lunch at their desk and the managers and the person to your right is making a bunch of calls.

The person to your left is making a bunch of calls, and in between that they’re on customer meetings and so on and so forth. You’re like, okay, cool. This is how it’s supposed to be. And then moreover, from a management standpoint, you see the managers cruising around, honeybees, checking in on reps, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, cool. That’s how management is like, and the manager comes over and talks to Bobby who’s maybe spaced out, goofing off on his phone or whatever. So it’s like, okay, cool. So what you have is you have learning by osmosis in an environment like that. So then two things happen. One is when you have people who are in a remote environment, you really can’t rely on that osmosis. And then secondarily, if the market changes where even if you had that environment that in-person environment, but it’s like, oh, man, all these inbound leads are showing up here and all these one call closes, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, you might also be teaching the wrong message. And so this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. When I was younger, I would probably just get mad about it. I’d be like, what’s going on here? Why are these people not understanding that sales is hard and this is a contact sport? But now I’m like, okay, cool. People need to be educated about this. And so one thing I’ve been doing on nights and weekends, I’ve been putting together this big deck on what high performance and startups and startup sales organizations look like, or mainly just startups, because I think the notion of, as an example, I grew up playing a lot of sports. Doesn’t look like it now, but coaching one of your jobs as an employee is to be good at taking coaching, and that’s what a manager is supposed to do.

They’re not like, yes, they are here to encourage you and lift you up when things are problematic or whatever, but they’re also here to sample your work. And when your work is lacking, their job is to redirect that. It’s literally their job. And so I think that there is a misapprehension or misconception in white collar work for whatever reason, that it’s kind of like, Hey, you know what? We hire smart people and we let ’em do their thing, right? It’s like the worst management advice of all time, or we support them or whatever. It’s like, no, actually what you do is you show them exactly how they’re supposed to be doing the thing and show them exactly how they’re supposed to be doing a discovery call, how they’re supposed to be down to very specific things like This is how you set the agenda. This is how you open the call, right?

Oh, right. And then you authenticate it and then you practice it, and then when it’s off, it’s okay. You correct it nicely, right? And I think that the notion of that behavior like, Hey, actually this is what management is supposed to look like and this is what you as a seller, this is what this bargain looks like, is something that maybe has fallen off some in the last five to 10 years, and so that’s fine. We just have to reeducate as to what that looks like. And I think it was a very emotional conversation at the dinner because I think there was a lot of frustration around, I never wanted to let it get this way. The leaders were thinking of this, but it’s like, but what can I do if the entire world is crazy? Then what can I do? Do I toe the line? And I’m like, no, no, no. We’re going to keep being the way that we’ve always been. I think maybe, and actually I think to your point about leadership, I think actually you could do that. What you’re going to do is you’re going to filter down to people who are really, really, really aligned with that message and that narrative, which might be a smaller set of folks than you might want. So you might impinge your growth, if you will, but at least you will keep your culture pure if you’ll,

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think that was a lot of that. I was hearing a lot of that and very much empathized, very much empathized with it because it was something I’ve observed from a distance across a lot of different companies that I’ve interacted with. And it’s like I straddle two different generations. I think they call us Geriatric Millennials. So I can see there’s a certain tension generationally, and I can be on one foot or the other, but I tend to, I think, empathize with the need for this concept here. I’ll do a hot take and then get your perspective on it. There’s this whole concept of the company being family. And then there’s the other extreme, and I think we actually talked about it at the dinner as well. The other extreme would be the Netflix model where it’s not a family, it’s a sports team.

Pete Kazanjy:

Yeah, exactly.

Mark Lerner:

I always felt a little uncomfortable with the family concept. I think maybe the sports team concept is a little too lacking empathy for the individual, but I never felt quite comfortable with the model of family, the company. So where’s the happy medium there in terms of what you think about?

Pete Kazanjy:

I think how about this? I think it actually, I am more on the sports team side of things, but I think the way that I would think about that is that so, and Scott wrote this book called Radical Candor and the two by two matrix around, so Radical Candor is all about effective managerial communication and the synopsis of it, it’s like, Hey, it’s not mean. It’s clear, and I forget what the two by two is exactly, but one of it is Care Deeply versus don’t really give a hoot about person. And then there’s be direct or be indirect. And so what you want is you want to be direct, but care deeply.

And so I think that oftentimes where the Netflix culture deck gets maybe tripped up a little bit, people are like, oh, cool, we want to be really direct, and because this is a pro sports team or whatever, we don’t actually have to care deeply. I don’t think that’s true, and I actually don’t think that there’s any loss associated with Caring Deeply. I’ll give you an example. We recently had to let go of some staff because our business changed. So Atrium really, really, really slaps when you get 5,000, 200 sellers. And the reason why, excuse me, is because when you get to around 50 sellers, that’s when you have six or seven sales managers. And it gets to the point where now as a CRO or as a VP of sales ops, you now need to actually enforce consistency on how your managers manage. Whereas if you have three sales manager, two or three or four sales managers, maybe you can let them get away with what I call artisanal management.

But when you get to eight managers who are 10 managers, it’s like, no way, man. Okay, cool. This is what our operating rhythm is going to be. This is what our one-on-ones look like. This is what our Python reviews look like. These are the goals that we’re going to set for our team. Here’s the quotas, but also here’s the pipe coverage goals on the mid-market team. We’re supposed to have this many customer facing meetings per month within this band. You’re supposed to have under this number of untouched ops, you’re supposed to have this amount of new opportunities to come in your pipe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that. This was something that we realized in the last 18 months was that that’s where people will get really excited about Atrium is when you get to that 8, 6, 7, 8, 9, I mean, we have organizations, we work with a hundred managers or whatever, but that’s where the pain goes from being that seven or eight is where the pain goes from.

Yeah, this is annoying to like, oh my God, this is awful. And so this is something that was new for us in the last 18 months. So we actually have a bunch of existing customers from the Go-go, like their interest rate period that have two managers or one manager, and some of those organizations, they just love Atrium and they’ll go at their places and they’ll come and buy us again, but it’s not really a net new focus for us. And so we had some staff who were more focused on those littler accounts, and it just turned out that we didn’t really have that. We weren’t going to be acquiring any of those going forward. So it was one of those things where it’s like, Hey, you’re great. You’ve done a great job on these things right here. That used to be something that we needed, but something changed. Something changed, and we don’t need, this role doesn’t exist anymore and we wish we had another role for you, but we don’t really have another role for you given your skill profile or whatever. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to let you go and we’re going to do it in a way that provides severance and we’re going to help you. We’re going to provide full throated recommendations and so on and so forth. And we’re going to go through Indeed and LinkedIn and find potential roles that we have contacts with.

So that’s a good example of being eyes wide open and business centric, but doing it in a way that is appropriate. Now, the way that it would not be appropriate would be like, Hey, we don’t have this role anymore, but we’re going to pretend that this person can do this new role that they can’t do because that would be awful. Now they’re just setting payroll expense on fire. They’re pissing off their colleagues. You’re shortening your runway to no end. And I think that that’s an important, oftentimes what I like to do is simplify things for my staff because I think a lot of times staff, again, need to be educated on how business and startups work is I just equate it to a hotdog stand or a restaurant. It’s just like, Hey, look, it turned out that previously we sold this type of dish over here that it turns out that there wasn’t demand for in the market anymore.

So we don’t need this person who, it would be silly to have someone continuing to make, I don’t know, baby hot dogs, when all of a sudden people don’t like corn dogs. People don’t like corn dogs anymore. They only want hot dogs. And so to pretend that we should have this person sitting here making corn dogs when they’re just stacking up in the corner over there, that’s not useful for anybody else in the organization, and it’s destructive of resources. So what we need to do is need to part ways in an amicable and supportive way, but we can’t pretend.

Mark Lerner:

Right? And I think as we kind of round things out here, one thing that becomes clear to me is that the agility, the requirement for being agile is not purely laid at the feet of leadership. I think we as individual contributors, as sales leaders, sales frontline salespeople have to be agile and kind of understand that it’s not the end of the world, but things change. Situations change, and you just got to roll with the punches. And I think if everyone had that mentality, things would probably be a little bit smoother.

Pete Kazanjy:

I think that’s what makes market economies so effective. If you have a rep who really wants to be a manager and they’re ready to do it and there’s not a managerial role within your organization, then sure as all get out, they should go look somewhere else to do that because in this case, it’s like this person has a need that is not being serviced within this organization. The converse of that is this organization doesn’t have a need anymore that would be serviced by this person in both situations. Having that person who’s ready to be a manager or sit around at the organization hoping and waiting or whatever, is probably not a good use of their human capital. And that’s why the American economy is so dynamic and produces so much value and richness for everyone is because we can move these resources around A, move these resources around in a very effective way, and B, motivate the high performance of these resources because they desire to make more money.

They desire to be more effective because then value will accrue to them. And so all these things that agility of moving resources out or bringing your resources in and also managing the performance of your resources, that’s good. That’s the thing that in stark contrast to less dynamic economies where, okay, cool, the resources can twiddle their thumbs or what have you, or alternative, we’re going to keep these resources on even though it’s not something that the business needs. And conversely, you can imagine the cascade of that. We’re going to keep this manager over here in this other organization who’s kind of like yucky. Even though, man, what we would do is we would kick him out and then hire this manager, this rep over here from this other organization to come over here. If you have that stasis, that gridlock across an economy, then

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think the proof is in the pudding. If you look at the growth as people exit the challenges or soft landing, if you look at the way different economies have handled it, our economy, compared to ones that have a little less dynamism, it’s clear. That’s definitely a conversation for another day one that I find fascinating. But Pete, thank you so much for your time today. This was really, really interesting. Yeah, for sure. As we end things up here, why don’t you tell the folks at home some places they can learn more from you, read your content where they can follow you, and things like that?

Pete Kazanjy:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if high performance sales management is a topic that folks are interested in, you find me on LinkedIn, I post a lot there. Same on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that’s all we focus on here at Atrium is high performance sales management, driving performance on sales teams. So if that’s something that’s up your alley, check us out. All right. Thank you so much, Pete.