Selling a Product Into an Existing Category

Our guest is Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and author of “Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook.”

As an early-stage founder, there’s something comforting about the build stage. You’re tinkering with the nascent product, honing your MVP and dreaming up the possibilities of how much folks are going to love what you create. But once you get out of that comfort zone of quietly building and start trying to sell, things tend to get infinitely more complicated.

In today’s conversation, Pete lays out the roadmap for getting founder-led sales right in the early days. From small exercises to build up your selling muscles, like his “turbo rapport” challenge to thornier topics like self-diagnosing if your selling narrative is working, he’s got tons of advice for breaking down the art of a sales call. Pete also shares tailored guidance for folks who are facing the additional hurdle of creating a new category (and trying to create a new budget), with the playbooks he used building Atrium.

You can follow Peter on Twitter @Kazanjy. Check out his articles for First Round Review, including his lessons on building a customer advisory board.

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson