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Revolutionizing sales with data: Atrium’s success with co-founder Pete Kazanjy

Discover the journey of Atrium, a data-driven sales management software company that achieved business success with its strategic hiring, strong inbound game, and valuable community content.

By Adam O'Donnell, Sit Down Startup podcast host

Last updated October 26, 2023

Atrium offers an AI sales management solution that helps sales organizations become more data-driven and efficient. It does so by continuously monitoring sales teams’ performance and alerting sales leaders and managers about any issues, so they can be addressed early.

Pete Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium, shares his tips on how to build a successful business and discusses how he formed a 35,000-member sales community by creating top-tier content.



Achieving product-market fit

“In the second half of 2020 and in 2021, founders had a lot of wins,” says Kazanjy. “But then you come up on product or service renewal in 2022, and all of the sudden, now that interest rates are much higher, consumers ask themselves if your product or service is a critical must-have or not.”

For Kazanjy, ensuring that your product or service fits the current market is key. While many consumers were investing and purchasing his company’s new products in 2021, many of those products didn’t make the cut in the renewal cycle due to macroeconomic changes. You must evaluate your product to be sure it responds to and resolves a critical problem—this is necessary for success.

Quality over quantity

Be strategic when it comes to hiring, too. Kazanjy mentions this is a common mistake among young businesses.

“You need the right hiring profile,” he advises. “We had 10 SDRs [sales development representatives], and our opportunity creation was dramatically lower than when we had three SDRs.”

Having a hiring strategy not only helps companies remain cost-efficient, but also helps them manage the costs per employee.

Creating valuable content and community for sales leaders

Kavanzy manages the content for Atrium’s sales community, where he shares upcoming masterclasses and other forms of informational content with sales leaders and managers. “Having lots of that expert content available for folks and broadcasting it as much as possible has been very powerful for us,” says Kavanzy.

Being at the cutting edge of data software management for sales leaders and managers, the Atrium team documents their learnings and best practices for their audience, allowing them to deliver high-quality content to their community of 35,000 members.

Kavanzy also highlights the importance of creating evergreen content for your audience. “It can be effective because at any given point in time, somebody may have a different problem than they had previously,” he says. “For example, three months ago, I may not have cared about setting goals and managing goals, but now all of a sudden, I have 10 account executives instead of five, and I need to think about setting consistent goals … and I could really benefit from that content.”

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