Peter Kazanjy didn’t just master founder sales—he wrote the book on it. Here's how he got there.

Peter Kazanjy literally wrote the book on founder-led sales. And, as the founder of Honestly.com, TalentBin, and co-founder of Atrium, you might assume he was a natural sales guy. 

He even teaches this stuff at Harvard. 

But nothing could be further from the truth. He started his career as a product marketer, and, in his words, was “kind of an introvert.”

And then, like every early-stage founder, he realized one thing: if his company was going to survive, he had to learn how to sell. Fast.

Today, Peter is one of the most respected voices on founder-led sales. And he’s convinced that anyone can learn it.

“There’s a lot of false narratives out there about born sellers. It's just a muscle that you can learn. It gets built over time if you do the push-ups.”

We sat down with Peter to learn how he built that muscle — and how early-stage founders and first sales hires can do the same. 

Growth Bytes

Top takeaways

• Sales is a skill, not a personality type. Anyone can learn it if you put in the reps.
• Nail your “sales recipe” first. Achieve a 15–25% win rate and 10–20 referenceable customers, then bring in reps.
• Document everything: Your demo flow, your deck, your talking points. Future reps will need it to succeed.
• Tailor your message to each buyer. One-size-fits-all pitches don’t work when you’re selling to a committee.
• Sales data doesn’t need to be perfect. You just need enough signal to spot patterns and coach effectively.

Start by nailing your sales recipe 

Peter compares founder-led sales to writing a new recipe. You start by cooking it yourself. It’s not great at first — you’re missing an ingredient, or you need to do things in a different order. Maybe it comes out well one time, and then flops the next.  

Turning the general idea into a foolproof recipe? “Literally, the only way that you figure that out is by repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.”  

Founders need to be out there, working on their sales “recipe”, tweaking the pitch, upgrading the messaging, finding the most resonant narrative, until it starts to work consistently. 

Two markers that your recipe is working: 

• A win rate of 15%–25% 
• 10–20 referenceable customers 

Then, and only then, are you ready to hire salespeople to support you. 

Peter says too many founders hire reps too early — if you’ve only closed a couple of deals, you won’t have the assets and process to onboard them successfully. 

Even when you’ve hit those markers, don’t go overboard on hiring your new “line chefs.” 

“Importantly, I don’t want to add five line chefs. Maybe I’d add two line chefs next to me,” Peter says. “Then you’re on to a new stage, because now your responsibility is to get those line chefs to success… to the point where they can reliably make the soufflé as well as you can.”

That next stage is all about enablement — giving your new reps the tools to replicate your success.

As Peter explains, that’s why doing the work yourself, over and over, is so important. “As you’re making assets for yourself, you’re making the assets for those future line chefs.”

That means call recordings, documented demo flows (even just bullet points), decks, discovery slides — anything you’ve used and refined in the process of closing deals.

“This is where a lot of founder sellers skimp,” he says. “But having a demo flow in your head is not great. You should have it documented.”

Micromanagement isn’t the problem you think it is

Founders often worry about micromanaging their first sales hires. Peter disagrees. 

“Micromanage is the dumbest word ever,” he says. “You mean you don’t want to manage? Got it.”

You just spent a year figuring out exactly how to sell — what to say, in what order, with which slides. Now is not the time to let a new hire wing it.

Think of it as onboarding in the NFL. New players don’t run their own plays. They study the playbook, drill it relentlessly, and practice until they’ve nailed every move. 

Sales is no different.

New reps should watch you sell on Gong recordings. Then they should role-play sales calls with you. Only then are they finally ready to start selling, with you riding along for the first few meetings. 

Each buyer needs their own reason to care

One of the biggest sales challenges new founders run into, especially in B2B, is that you aren’t just selling to one buyer. You’re selling to a committee with widely different priorities. 

Peter and the team at Atrium know this well. Their sales coaching platform needs buy-in from both sales leadership and sales operations. And each group feels the pain differently.

“Figure out who's got the biggest burning pain. You can start with them,” says Peter.

For Atrium, sales leaders are usually the easiest entry point. They know they need better visibility into team performance, and they feel the problem Atrium solves more acutely. So that’s where the team starts.

But they also need sales ops on board, and that takes a different approach.

They can’t walk into a meeting with sales ops and expect them to care about sales managers’ frustrations. It’s not just that the messaging won’t land. The ops team might also get defensive. After all, they’re the ones who built the dashboards everyone’s complaining about.

So instead, the Atrium team focuses on the sales ops’ pain: constant dashboard requests, low adoption of the tools they’ve built, and analysts spending entire quarters on QBRs instead of strategic work.

The takeaway: customize your pitch for each persona. Start with the stakeholder who feels the pain most sharply, then secure buy-in from others by addressing their specific challenges. Sales is never one-size-fits-all.

Sales data is messy — but useful

Founders who’ve mastered selling often stumble when they shift into managing. Why? Because now the job isn’t closing deals—it’s spotting patterns, coaching reps, scaling what works and addressing what doesn’t.  

That takes solid sales data. 

But, as the co-founder of a sales data company, Peter doesn’t pretend that sales is a clean, deterministic system. In fact, he says the opposite:

“When you're instrumenting a sales organization, it's not a factory. The “machines” are not reliable. The machines are messy. And you need those messy sellers, because they're interfacing with prospects who are also messy.”

In other words, sales data is people data — and people are hard to measure. 

“This is where a lot of sales operations people, especially BI teams, get super wrapped around the axle. They're like, ‘But it needs to be accurate, within 99.9% accuracy.’ No, it doesn't. We're talking about humans. All we're trying to figure out is like, ‘I think Bob has an activity problem. I think he's doing less activity than everyone else.’”

As a result, many sales orgs end up with a breakdown in communication. The BI team sends the sales team a complicated analytics breakdown. The sales team responds, “‘Thanks, man. What the hell is going on here? Close the tab.’ Then they're going to go back to ‘Let's talk about deals, deals, deals, deals.’”

Meanwhile, the sales managers kid themselves that they’ll listen to calls to spot any rep performance issues — but “they don’t.” 

Perfection is the wrong goal. The point of sales data isn’t to be perfectly accurate, it’s to be directionally useful. 

“We’re not running a physics lab — we’re trying to spot patterns. If Bob has 50% fewer meetings than everyone else, that’s a red flag.” 

You don’t need perfect data — you just need enough to spot where the process is breaking down, so you can fix it. 

Community can be a growth engine (if you do it right) 

“A lot of people have done community marketing in a pretty dumb way,” notes Pete.  

Not every community play makes sense — especially in saturated spaces.

“‘Oh, we're going to be the analytics community.’ It’s like, do I really need to be in my 10th Slack group for that?”

Before launching a community, he suggests looking at whether your audience already has a “canonical” online meeting point. If they do, it’s going to be an uphill battle. If they don’t, there’s an opportunity.

Modern Sales Pros, the 35,000+ member sales community Pete founded, has played a major role in Atrium’s growth, but only because it was built with a clear purpose.

“Your solution, and the problem that it's associated with, sits within a larger ecosystem of problems,” he explains. “If you can capture the attention of that audience, and all of the problems they have, then you potentially can be well-situated to be the thing that they think about when the problem that you solve pops up.”

Watch the full episode

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