Pete Kazanjy says validate founder-led sales first: hit a 15-25% conversion rate over 50-100 attempts, document your playbook, then hire 2 reps to reproduce it. Don't scale before you know what works.
What are signs that it's time to hire your first salesperson? It's kind of like begs the question, when do I do this?
Yeah, I'm not a software engineer but like I like to use technical metaphors with technical audiences when I'm. Because I think it's like helpful. And so it's kind of like when it runs on your local right now it's time to like see if it reproduces over here. Right? So if it reliably runs on your local and it doesn't like error out. Right. And so, so then what would the definition of like not erroring out look like? And so generally speaking it's like it kind of is contingent on your, on your sales motion, but it's going to be like, you know that you can reliably at like a, at a pretty okay win rate. So like maybe 15% or 20% or 25% turn first meetings into eventual customers. Right. And like do that in a reliable fashion. It's not like you know, I engaged 10 arms length parties and I got two customers closed. It's like, hey, that's great, that's a good start. Do that 5, like 5x that, 10x that, right? So you know, take 50 app ads, take 100 app ads. And now that you know that you reliably for every, you know, for every cohort of 10 first meetings that what's known in in sales land is opportunities. For every cohort of, of 10 that you engage. Are you closing? You know, are you closing 1. Are you closing? 1.5. Are you closing 2? Are you closing 2? 5 if you're in there. But if you're at like, yeah, for every 30 I interact with, I close one. Well it seems like that's probably like pretty inefficient unless you know, you're selling $500,000 deals or something like that. So it's, it's at the point where you like, you have the like, it feels like it's statistically significant. It feels like it's repeatable because what you're going to then do is like now it feels like it's a safe bet to try to abstract that out to somebody else because the only way we're going to get to success is like we're not going to have Lenny go and like sell from morning, noon to night, right? Where we're going to do is we're going to take the information out of Lenny's brain and we're going to put it into slides and we're putting into scripts and we're going to put it into email templates and all that sort of stuff. And then we're going to shove that into the brain of two more reps and see if we now we can get it to like run in the cloud. Right. In the, in the sales cloud here. And, and then to start out like, you may. It may fail like the same way, like. All right, cool. Like, it runs on my local. Oh, it breaks over here. Okay. Why? Right. And then that's like the sec. The next stage is now you're figuring out how to get those other folks to sell as successfully as you have, and that becomes like, the next job. This is a. Actually, this is the presentation I gave at Brianne's SaaS school was there's, if you Google it, it's just called like founder led selling. It's like available online. It's essentially there's like a bunch of stages in the B2B maturity journey and like, you have to go through them in order to get to the next one. If you jump stages, like, you're kind of hosed. And so in this case, like, if you know that you can reliably sell this yourself, that's great. Then the next thing to do is get, you know, at least a couple people reliably selling as well as you, not 10. Because you're never going to get too successful if you're trying to onboard 10 concurrently. And then if you get those two successful now, you've earned the right to go to four, eight, et cetera.
I love this heuristic that you shared that you want to get to about 15 to 25% of contacts closing to a customer. Yeah. So you're shaking your thumb. I think that's really useful. So it's like a third, a bit less than a third. And doing like 50 to 100 attempts is roughly where you want to go.
Yeah. And importantly, what you don't want to do is. And I think probably a lot of the product managers who like to listen to Lenny's podcast here might appreciate this is like, you want to bring on like cohorts of users and kind of like, see what's going on, then learn and then bring on new cohorts of users. Right. So going in like doing 100 at bats and then being like, okay, did it work or not? Versus, like, hey, let's, let's have 10 for like prospect and try to get 10 first meetings, have all those, like, have all those interactions, see how your conversations land, see how the discovery questions are, are evoking the right response and not the right response. See how your slides land, see how your demo lands, all that sort of stuff. If it's working well and you're getting to the next stage. Yeah, this is great. I would love to introduce you to my boss. Ah, that's a good sign. It's like, yeah, I'm just not getting it. All right, cool. Back to the drawing board, right? Versus doing, like, a hundred, like 100 all at once. And then, like, all right, now, did it work? Right? We want to, like, break it up and. And then, like, constantly just be iterating, iterating, iterating, and.
