Product-Led Growth

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WHAT IS PRODUCT LED GROWTH?

Product led growth (PLG) is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion.

There is nothing stopping PLG from being a straight up lead-gen tool for the traditional sales model.

Companies with a PLG strategy—think Slack, Expensify, Calendly, Dropbox—are able to grow faster and more efficiently by leveraging their products to create a pipeline of active users that are then converted into paying customers.

The center of power has shifted from the buyer to the end user. And the consumerization of software means that end users now demand better experiences from the tools they use every day.

Product led companies prioritize a short time to value (TTV).

Users must realize your product’s value for themselves.

In order for that to happen, you need to either solve the user’s problem in that short space of time, or get them to the critical “aha moment” wherein the proverbial light bulb goes off and the user understands exactly how your software will improve their day-to-day life.

This involves not only creating features and functionality that embody that value, but also removing things that distract from or create barriers to reaching the core value.

For products that can be adopted through a purely self-serve experience, that means keeping the initial product experience simple.
For products that require human touchpoints, the way to deliver value before capturing it is to put customer success before sales in the user journey.
For products where the creation of value for the end user requires upfront investment of that user’s time—such as in infrastructure software and API-driven developer tools—investing in rich documentation and enabling technologies can help customer success scale to meet the demands of being at the front of the funnel.

Whether you have a low-touch or high-touch business model, the principle of reducing all potential barriers to users solving an immediate problem is a cornerstone of building a successful PLG business.

PLG companies apply this insight to their go-to-market strategy by investing in the product with the intent of driving acquisition, conversion, and expansion. They do this by:
Investing in robust product data that allows teams to track, measure, and analyze user behavior.
Building out a growth function that is responsible for ensuring the product enhances its own distribution, enablement and ability to capture value.
Running go-to-market experiments that lead to incremental improvements to the user journey.

PLG metrics
There’s a good chance you’re using the wrong metrics to measure product led growth. That’s because some of the metrics typically used to measure SaaS businesses just aren’t well-suited to this new go-to-market motion. For example:
Growth Rates. For typical SaaS companies, high growth is key. But our data suggests that PLG businesses often have lower growth rates than their peers until they reach the $10M ARR mark—after which the inverse is true. Metrics that emphasize growth rate too early could actually detract from the promising high-growth engines at the heart of a PLG business.
CAC Payback. Public PLG businesses spend 44% more than their SaaS peers on R&D costs (product and engineering). That is partially offset by lower sales and marketing spend, but it’s nearly impossible to understand the ROI of spend on the product itself.
LTV/CAC. This classic SaaS metric doesn’t work for PLG companies, mainly because it doesn’t take into account some of the core pillars that make PLG businesses attractive: low churn and the chance for revenue expansion from accounts.
Logo Retention. How do you measure logo retention in a bottom-up adoption model in which you may have there are dozens of individual users from an organization, each with their own account?

The Natural Rate of Growth (NRG) succeeds where traditional SaaS metrics fall short. It allows PLG companies to pinpoint the percentage of their recurring revenue that comes from organic channels and starts with the product.

Natural Rate of Growth = 100 x Annual Growth Rate x Organic Signups (%) x ARR from Products (%)
What’s great about the Natural Rate of Growth is that it:
Provides companies with a strong indicator of future revenue.
Can be tracked from the early days of monetization all the way through to IPO.
Applies to all software companies, no matter where they are in PLG maturity.
Is easily measurable without sophisticated processes or tooling.
Can identify whether a business can drive efficient growth via the product itself.

key drivers behind product-led growth.
the most important thing. Users expect a seamless experience and you need to be able to deliver it.
if you are able to drive demand through your product, you can create a much faster and more efficient funnel and marketing and sales teams. Smart, fast growth in a product-led business is a competitive advantage.
Shorter cycles to launch new features: if you can master an efficient product delivery pipeline, you will innovate faster and receive greater quality, more valuable feedback from your users.

Now, let’s look at the five foundational elements of a product-led growth strategy.

1. Define your North Star metric

Measure the successes and outcomes that your product delivers for your customers.

Your North Star metric should guide your whole customer journey. From the moment you onboard customers, guide them into the features and value areas of your product that lead them towards your North Star – the metric that proves you are driving the best outcome for them and you.

2. Transparent pricing
3. Apply a paywall
4. Make your product viral
5. Frictionless onboarding

The Enterprise Product Success Formula in a Product-Led Growth Strategy

1. Create a consumer grade product experience
2. Easy to learn
3. Accelerate Time to Value
4. Become sticky and viral
5. Built-in ability to expand
6. Easy signup and adoption
7. Create an Enterprise Grade Ecosystem

PQLs – a lead who has signed up and performed an action that demonstrates buying intent

PQLs are a far more accurate method of tracking customer journeys from signup to upsell and a key metric in product-led growth strategies.

1. Marketing focus
Product launch and positioning
Driving trials/demos
SEO & paid media channels
Social/Podcast/G2Crowed
Promoting webinars through the app

PQLs are a far more accurate method of tracking customer journeys from signup to upsell and a key metric in product-led growth strategies.

2. Sales focus
Show me vs tell me – using the product to demonstrate value
Product-oriented sales team – where the buyer tends to be in control of the process
Using usage and features as levers
Land and expand strategy, with incremental spend as a key revenue generator
Strong understanding of competitive landscape

3. Customer success focus
Using automations and measurements to drive adoption at scale, from onboarding to continuous adoption strategies
Maximizing the outcome of the product
Dealing with larger accounts and use cases
Becoming the architects of implementation at a larger scale

Mike of Hubspot
Solve for the customer
Help them use the product
Optimized for their usage

Free Trial + Context(Sales)  = $$$
We know challenges
Mapping challenges to usage
We know how to make user most productive

Align sales process to journey - Things they need to do before within trial before they can even purchase / trial limit.

Plays

Map Deal Stages to Prospect Behavior, Not Rep Behavior
Determine which actions in your product lead to purchase and map to those instead
Examples
Logged in
invited teammate

Forecasting with Trials
How far along are leads in trial?
How many actions have they taken?
When was their last login?

Provide Promo Codes to  provide more time evaluation in exchange for extending the sales process
Setting meeting with teams to look for alignment
Set a date for evaluation
Set a date for legalese  (contracts)

Use product triggers to drive reps to act in real time
First of all use follow up emails to get action
Noticed you did this, have you considered doing this? I'd be happy to talk with you why this will help. If you'd like to talk through this heres my calender
In app messages. Provides better context. Higher conversion rate. Always be adding value

Sales Reps take on support
15%-20% of their time on support
meeting buyers in their journey
build trust education on how to get value out of the product
push for more aggressive sales action
Requires high product knowledge

Your sales process should be: get out of the way and let the customer buy.”

I love a good sales process as much as the next person, but qualifying buyers who are ready to purchase your product is the wrong approach.

Sales, customer success, and support need to be tightly aligned, matrixed together and have playbooks for collaboration and coordination so they can all meet the buyer where they are in their journey.

Bottom line If you come into a product-led growth company and try to apply the standard SaaS sales playbook there is a good chance you will get in the way of what’s happening organically with your preconceived notions about how a sales organization is supposed to run.

BUILD AN AMAZING EXPANSION SALES TEAM.
In a strong PLG company, it’s not about land, it’s about expand. Get out of the way of “land” (as outlined above) because it will happen on its own, and put your energy and effort into “expand”.

Build a team that can take a small team of 10 people using your product at GE into a multi-million dollar deal. Build a team of people who can prospect into accounts you already have to build a stronger base of users so you can speed up that organic growth that’s already happening. Build a team that can call individual users to make inroads to centralized decision-makers.

In a PLG land and expand motion you want to move from a bunch of individuals choosing your product to the company choosing your product.

Great salespeople can transform the relationship your company has with your customers. When your top-down expansion team meets your bottoms-up growth machine, magical things can happen. You’ve essentially added fuel to a flame that was already burning.

Evaluators
Beginners
Regulars
Champions

Activate
Adopt
Adore
Advocate

Evaluators

Evaluators are at the earliest stage of the user journey. They are browsing everything that your product has to offer. And, they're cautiously excited about how it can potentially help solve their problem. Evaluators are likely to have heard about your product from a friend, colleague, or through your company's marketing efforts. Either way, they are ready to confirm that your product will deliver the value they were promised it would.
If you have a low-cost, free trial, or freemium tier, your customer is probably trying out more than one SaaS product to see which will be the best fit.

Evaluators are usually: 
In a trial or demo phase
Not installed or using real data
Not using your product in their existing workflows
Still searching for a SaaS solution to a problem they are trying to solve

Evaluators want to know that you understand their problem. They're asking if you can offer them a clear path to solving it. They don't care about the nuances of your product, or how many uses cases it can address. Their only concern is whether your solution meets their needs.

What are the trade-offs between your product and your competitors'? Can they build it in-house? Your competitive advantage lies in ease of use, core functionality, and unique features.

Guide Evaluators to their "aha moment"

Evaluators are searching for value. So it needs to be easy for them to find it. Let evaluators experience your product in action. They need a basic understanding of its core functionality. Don't drag them through an exhaustive tour of every single feature.

Assume they have zero experience, but have a firm goal in mind. Use your product onboarding experience to gather info about those goals and guide them toward the features that will help them reach those goals.
That's the "aha moment."

Evaluators need a map to initial success, not an advanced user manual or tutorial. Be ready to help them when they want to dive deeper. In-product support, walkthroughs, and your help center can be overwhelming. Be sure that users don't get buried in the details.

Keep them focused on solving the initial problem they came to you to solve.

Activation

Activation only happens when a user sees and understands your product's value. They want to learn more about your product. They're willing to invest time and money, because they've seen the software can be an asset to improve their professional or personal life.

Beginners 
The next stage in the users journey is when evaluators become beginners. Beginners understand the value your product provides and are excited about it. Due to this excitement, they spend time exploring your product and using its features. They develop a deeper understanding of your product and how to use it effectively. They may not be paying customers at this stage, but they're ready to make the leap.

Beginners are usually: 
Incorporating your product into their workflows
Starting to use real data and receiving tangible value
Not using advanced functionality or implementing sophisticated use cases
Feeling confident that your product is the best solution to solve their problem

Learning how to use your product effectively and become great users is top of mind for Beginners. You will want to give them some extra support in this stage with guidance, tours, and tips.

Remember that Beginners are trying to get stuff done. Give them the freedom to do what they need to do, and reduce any possible friction. They'll need easy-to-access guidance.

Beginners are working your product into their day-to-day.

Regulars are usually:
Logging in on a regular basis
Using your product to complete core parts of their job
Defaulting to your product as a possible solution when new problems arise
Exploring deeper layers of your product to see what else your product can help them do
Champions are usually: 
Actively participating in the future of your product
Pushing the limits of your product with new use cases
NPS promoters
Wearing your brand's t-shirt

The Value Gap
 
It’s one reason why product-led businesses are booming. People want to “try before they buy” and experience your value proposition. If you keep your word, it’s a great way to build trust and sell your product. If you fail to deliver, your user experiences a nasty value gap.

The bigger your value gap, the leakier your funnel. You’ll see users sign up but never return to your product. According to Intercom, 40–60% of users who sign up for your product will use it once and never come back.
Tackling your value gap can be the single, most profitable lever you can pull. It will help you launch and build a free trial or freemium model that (actually) turns users into customers. There are three main reasons why value gaps are so prominent in the SaaS industry:
Your product has serious ability debt;
You don’t understand why your customers buy;
You overpromise what the solution is capable of.

Before launching a product-led arm of your business, declare war on your value gap. You’ll be in a much better position to create a product that can reduce your CACs, acquire more customers, and turn non-paying users into customers.

In a world of over-hyped products, the organization that delivers on the value they promise sticks out.

Value Gap 1: Ability Debt

Ability debt is the price you pay every time your user fails to accomplish a key outcome in your product.

Value Gap 2: You Don’t Understand Why People Buy Your Product.

If you don’t know where someone wants to go, you can’t help them get there. Until you know what your users are trying to accomplish in your product, you’ll lead them to mountaintops they never wanted to climb.

Once we know the main outcome that our user is looking for, we can catapult them into the area of the product that is most relevant to them.

When it comes to onboarding, most businesses walk you through the entire product but bring you no closer to achieving a meaningful outcome in the product.

When you understand why people use your product, you can catapult them to the right destination. If you don’t know the primary outcome behind why people use your product, you’re growing your business on hard mode. What outcome does your product help people with?

If you don’t understand your product’s value, what’s stopping you from showing unnecessary features that might be helpful?

To reduce your value gap, set the right expectations.

Value Gap 3: You Suck At Communicating Your Value

Delivering on your value and reducing your value gap starts and ends with helping people. There are no shortcuts or magic tools.

Forecasting PLG

You look at each deal, you evaluate how likely it is to convert and then you factor in the potential size of the deal based on how big the account is.

The sticking point here is the “how likely the deal is to convert” — it’s not based on the deal stage in your CRM anymore.

A demo request, for example, would have been around 20% likely to close. Someone who had already requested pricing might be at a 50% likelihood to close. Proposals sent? Those guys are 70% or 80% likely to close. Let’s make another revenue forecasting table for the traditional sales-led model

What is Activation rate?
n. Static measurement of how far along a user or account is in their journey toward “first value” or the “aha” moment where they realize how great your product is.

Here’s an obvious fact that follows: Activation rate is just the percentage of steps completed. That means if an account or user has done 2 out of the 5 steps above, they are 20% Activated.
They are 20% of the way to hitting first value with your product. Excellent!

what is not different is that Activation measures how much value someone is getting from your product and therefore how likely they are to convert. It makes sense, right? The more value someone has gotten from your product during their trial period, the more likely they are to pay for the product after the trial is over.

Activation as a proxy for the likelihood that they’ll convert

That’s because it’s based on an objective measurement of how much value users are getting from the product, not a person’s estimation of how much they can make an account believe in a future promise of value.

Forecasting net new MRR in a product-led growth world is actually more accurate than in a traditional sales-led model

Reps must 
reframe the story for each role / use case focusing on how the product will save time or money
educate themselves on how the buyer already uses the product

Product led journey
initial aha moment (There's a problem I think this product can help me solve)
Consistent aha moments and activation points along the product-led journey

Journey
Preview
Seeing the product as a solution
First-time Customer
Consecutive 'aha' moments and activation points
Converting to paid account
Committed Customer
Starting to use add-ons and other integrations
Engaging directly with brand
Power Customer

The ultimate goal of PLG sales is to motivate your users to use your product, unleash the value as soon as possible, and convert your users to power-users (i.e. users who can’t live without your product — just like Slack did).

“In every case, our sales team had the advantage of a lot of very happy end users. Our history of strong bottoms-up adoption is a vital factor in our success. We only win if people choose Slack, and they choose Slack if it provides real value to them. There is no other path.” - Steven Butterfield on Slack PLG

"It even turns out that one element of user pain is not having someone to help them do things like fill out security questionnaires, navigate purchasing processes and work through legal requirements for things like GDPR.

Sales can actually enhance the user’s experience by helping guide them through the buying process rather than forcing them to go it alone."

So what should sales look like? Here are four principles that should guide your design process:
Start with the customer journey
Validate that sales improves on natural growth
Define the right plays leveraging what you already know
Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations

1. Start with the customer journey
When you’re spending money on proactive sales outreach, it’s important to make sure your team engages with the right person at the right time in their product journey. Ask yourself, what customers need more help? It likely comes down to no more than three vectors: the size of the organization, the complexity of their existing systems or their level of product sophistication.

One useful technique is an in-depth look at your funnel and account data. Are you having trouble converting accounts above 200 employees? 500 employees? Do you find that your large enterprise customers only spend a few hundred dollars per month, but could be spending $10,000+ per month? Remember there may also be account types that should never get any proactive sales resources, for example because the opportunity size can’t generate a positive ROI or you don’t have product-market fit in that segment.
Another technique is to conduct a 360 degree retrospective with customers who had the biggest in-account growth (we call this a ‘patient zero’ analysis thanks to Brent Chudoba). You should be able to answer the following questions:
Who was your first user inside of that account (your ‘patient zero’)?
Who was user two, three, four, five and so on?
How did patient zero evangelize the product to others inside their organization?
When were there inflection points in the account’s spend and what catalyzed it?
What touchpoints did your team have with this account that helped them expand?
What new features is the account using and what incremental value do they receive now that they’ve expanded?
Answering these questions will help you identify which accounts are the ripest for expansion and what sales plays can accelerate expansion that otherwise might’ve happened organically over the course of months or years.

You’ll want your sales reps to act more like customer success. Think of their role as a sherpa who works hand-in-hand with the customer to resolve blockers to adoption and ultimately navigate to the summit. They need to have a strong grasp on the product, customer use cases and the distinct needs of different audiences. These team members should be motivated by understanding the product in a deep and meaningful way – not just by crushing their quota.

Offering help: When a potential high value account signs up, sales can offer to help them get set up correctly and make full use of the product. This could entail anything from adopting a complicated integration all the way to guiding the account through a proof of concept for a broader company-wide rollout.
Empowering power users: Your power users love your product and have strong loyalty to the brand. They’ll often take meetings to learn how to make better use of the product. You can equip them with tools, resources, ROI calculators, etc. to build a business case for broader adoption of the product. If you have multiple users within the same account, look at who has the most breadth and depth of product usage rather than the user with the most senior job title.
Going top-down: Initiate sales efforts (email, calling, InMail, account-based marketing and the like) towards C-suite executives and/or business unit leaders at high value accounts that are already using your product. The pitch should be tailored to the executive pain point that you solve. Ideally, you would lead with personalized insights based on the usage behavior of existing users from that account
Dangling an incentive: How can you equip sales to deliver more value than the user could get via self-service? The specific incentive doesn’t need to be complicated. You can start by allowing sales to extend a user’s free trial for another 14 or 30 days.

“The product urged employees to invite their coworkers. Once the network hit critical mass, our sales team would reach out. We built a dashboard for the sales team called Mission Control, which surfaced active networks. Sales reps couldn’t see the content but they could see which users were frequent contributors (our likely champions at the company) as well as VPs and C-level execs (our likely buyers), making it easy to prospect into the company.” - Yammer CEO

Be thoughtful about sales compensation and operations

You’ll inevitably run into gray areas between the self-service and sales assisted funnels. The hairiest issues will likely be around sales compensation and business operations. For example, if a sales rep has activity on an account that eventually purchases via self-service, should they get compensated on it? If so, does that drive sales towards ‘false activity’ – emailing as many accounts as possible? Another conundrum is how to handle compensation around the expansion that might happen after a sale, a phenomenon that’s extremely common in land-and-expand businesses. If you don’t compensate for the tail, will reps slow down the deal to try to make the ‘land’ as large as possible? And what about contraction?

When you’re just starting to layer on sales to an existing PLG motion, you may want to consider ditching commission-based sales compensation at least in the short term and instead pay sales the same way as engineers or PMs. That’s the approach taken by balena.io, as described by CEO Alex Marinos on the BUILD podcast. It allows you to experiment quickly with the sales process and optimize the funnel without the ‘gaming’ or ‘jockeying’ behavior that might take place with a commission-based incentive. It also helps you hone which customers you want your team to spend time on and cut loose prospects who aren’t a good fit. Finally, it can be a catalyst for connecting your sales and product teams to better collaborate around the customer experience.

On the business operations side, some of the challenges might seem basic at first. For example, what counts as a ‘lead’ versus a ‘contact’ in terms of sales and marketing activity? How do you define the appropriate sales stages when the account is already using your product?
The operational challenges will certainly evolve over time as your process matures. As a starting point, over-invest early on in revenue operations and consider having dedicated resources between the two funnels. This function will help you set up the infrastructure that will allow you to test, iterate and move quickly.

The best PLG companies empower their sales teams to improve the product so that it does an even better job of selling itself.

“If you’re a large enterprise customer that has more complexity, or potentially more value to us, we have a team that can help steer you in the right direction and answer a more complicated set of questions that you have. We call them enterprise advocates and it’s something that we began to grow about four years ago, with a focus on really complex large customers." - Atlassian CEO

A really common friction point that people insert is cost. I’m not going to share with you how much the products costs on our website, or you have to contact us to find out. The psychology is: ‘I don’t want to scare the customer away, potentially with a higher price point, before I can explain to them what this could really do, and understand their problems and try to persuade them that it’s going to be worth that ultimate cost.’
 
In our model, we’ve focused on removing price as a potential point of friction, even at the upper end, which in turn aids velocity.

Sales People

Product Complexity: To successfully consult with customers, a salesperson has to have broad and deep knowledge about the product. The more technically complex a product is, the more technically savvy a salesperson needs to be. SaaS companies that sell directly to developers, for instance, need sales people who deeply understand how to engage with developers and drive a more technical discussion.
Sales Associate Motivations: Traditional salespeople get excited about hitting quotas. Product-minded salespeople get excited about becoming technology experts. They aren’t just hungry for the sale; they want to understand the product in a deep and meaningful way.
Internal Training Capabilities: Once you’ve found salespeople who are excited about becoming experts, you need to make sure you have the resources to properly train them. There are a number of companies (Lessonly, for one) who do this at scale.

https://openviewpartners.com/blog/selling-in-a-product-led-growth-company-its-not-about-you/#.YBJHs3dKjDI
This is why PLG companies thrive best when they take a coordinated, collaborative sales approach that blends the perspective of all the different functions in order to focus everyone on a single, function-agnostic goal: always do what’s best for the customer.
In order to achieve success in this new model, sales needs to develop a more service-based mentality. Instead of taking the “shoehorn” approach, PLG sales teams need to take the time to really understand the buyer persona and value that the solution provides to the market. Understanding how each audience segment wants to buy—what kind of experience they want; and then—to ensure a sustainable, scalable business model—they will need to make sure they establish the most effective cost of sale as well. It’s a balancing act between enhancing the customer experience and managing the company resources required to enable that experience in a fiscally responsible way. A $100 annual revenue transaction should be sold much differently than a $50,000 annual revenue transaction.
At SendGrid, for instance, sales’ role wasn’t to sell to all customers–we split out the buying process in essence to a “self-serve and full-serve” approach under different circumstances. This was usually triggered when a customer experienced an increase in volume or complexity and required hands-on guidance to help them figure out the best solution. When a customer raised their hand or reached such a milestone, sales was there to offer advice and help them solve problems, whether that meant configuring plans or setting up architecture or addressing deliverability issues.

Links 
https://productled.com/how-to-build-a-product-led-sales-team/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMehUylSk1w&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=ProductLed
https://productled.com/product-led-organization/

https://www.guidecx.com/using-psychology-to-your-advantage-in-client-onboarding/

- 1: Keep Things Simple
Many companies assume that the more information you give your clients, the better. Too many choices and too much information can be detrimental, according to one study where researchers discovered “action paralysis”—that more choices can make a person feel too overwhelmed to make a decision. During onboarding, keep things as simple as you can and provide clear and concise instructions to move forward in the process.
2: Give People Tasks to Complete
Have you ever noticed that television shows often end an episode or season with a cliffhanger? The reason is that psychologically people want things to be complete, so they are more likely to come back next week or next season to see how it ends. You don’t need to create Hollywood-level suspense in your onboarding, but you can use the psychological desire for completion to your advantage by giving people important tasks that you know will help them succeed when they use your product. For this to work most effectively, you need to have an understanding of the things that create value for your clients and lead to long-term customers, as well as what steps they should take to get there.
3: Get Clients Invested
Researchers from Harvard studied the value people place on something and realized that when people have to do some work to create a finished product (like assembling furniture from IKEA), they are willing to pay more for it. They dubbed it the “IKEA Effect”, and you can use it to your advantage. The more you can get your clients involved by assigning them some tasks along the way, the more invested they feel and the higher value they will assign to your product. The GuideCX platform allows you to easily integrate clients in your tasks just like your own team members, allowing them to see their assignment and check off a task as soon as it’s complete. This has the added benefit of keeping everyone accountable because everyone can see who is holding up the process if a task is overdue.
Use software as a tool to create a more effective client onboarding process with GuideCX. Find out how we can improve your onboarding workflow by scheduling a demo.

Users need to feel good about choosing you every single day

Roundtable: How to succeed in product led growth with Atlassian

Specialize
Red
Yellow
Green

Considerations
Don't burn good will
have a product story
don't extend the sales cycle
bring in sales ops

Figure out what plan they should be on
how they would upgrade
when upgrade
how to pay for it

conveyor belt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUWJ-8FZrEU&ab_channel=SaaStr
Monetize the entire app life cycle
sell to all apps not just mission critical
capture more new applications

cloud team
be the bumper rails for best practices
educate
sell
teach
long tail csm
feature adoption
education
leads to increased retention
bigger deals
customer centric, know what drives sucesss
what benefits the customer first
faster deals, larger deals

"Hey, I'm not trying to sell you anything I just want to understand why your usage is spiking. We've seen scenarios where people are spending that kind of ramp and it's actually they're doing something wrong we can help you save costs just let me know if we can get you some technical help

Use real time product data to have targeted conversations

Need tons of metabase business

Don’t Just Follow the Buyer’s Journey, Enable the Buyer.

It’s imperative that you assess the “jobs” that B2B buyers are trying to complete in the journey and find ways to reduce friction in the journey. The easier you make it for buyers, the more apt they are to choose your company and product.

Gartner has stated that buyer’s remorse (“high regret, high-quality deal”) goes down when they experience a low-friction buying experience. Companies that make it easier to do business with will tend to win over those that have less customer-centric approaches.

Buyers can be anywhere in their journey: they might go back to a step after learning something or they might multi-task and simultaneously pursue information across multiple steps of a journey. To categorize these steps, Gartner has broken these out into 6 different “jobs” that a buyer pursues.

The 4 jobs that can go in any order, or repeat:

Problem Identification. Realizing there is a problem
Solution Exploration. Researching what’s out there to solve the problem
Requirements Building. Determining what is needed for the organization
Supplier Selection. Shortlisting and making a final decision

The 2 additional jobs that are occurring during the 2 steps above:

Validation. Ensuring the information and research collected is reliable and accurate
Consensus Creation. Making sure other parts of the organization buy into finding a solution

The goal is to remove friction from each one of these tasks and make it easier for them to complete it.

For example, what type of content might be useful during problem identification? Perhaps there are benchmarks or assessments you can offer to prospects so they can determine their performance against peers in their industry. Or consider when a sales lead goes “dark.” What if you could provide assets to your prospects to help them work their inside sales process? What if you created guides based on your existing customers and understanding of the buying process, that helps them overcome internal objections and get around landmines that usually stall deals? For example, a guide that helps a buyer present the solution to the board with ready-to-go questions could make your company seem more in tune and also help speed up the sales process. A win for both sides.

Build out buyer enablement tools Similar to how an organization goes about building sales enablement tools, you need a team or committee that can help  ideate and execute a sustainable stream of assets that make buyers’ lives easier.

Start with an audit to see what assets exist that might be useful in the buyer’s journey. Evaluate the quality of the assets in helping reduce complexity and enabling the buyer in that specific task.

If you’ve developed a whitepaper, does it fall into the Problem Identification task or Solution Exploration task? Once you identify the task, evaluate if the whitepaper is useful to complete that “job.” A worksheet that helps prioritize the possible trade-offs among potential solutions to the problem could be useful in helping a buyer through the Solution Exploration stage.

While buyer enablement is how you’ll gain distinction in the market, you still need to level up.

Most organizations have put a lot of effort into high quality, thought-leadership pieces. The problem is that most of your competitors have the same approach as well. So, at best you’re maintaining a positive impression and at worst you’re making opposing statements to your competitors, and for sure, your buyer is confused.

There is too much content for buyers to digest. If you want your organization to stand out, you need to help buyers make sense of all the content they’re consuming.

According to Gartner (who recently acquired CEB), each B2B buyer is evaluating 4.5 pieces of content. So “sense-making” is additive to the consultative sales approach. Of course you want to share content, but what you really want to do is provide evidence and lead them to their own conclusion by helping them make sense of the confluence of materials they are sifting through.

The approach to buyer enablement requires a cross-functional, multi-workstream approach. On one workstream, you have buyer enablement kicking off and identifying a couple of deliverables – prioritizing the low hanging fruit when a prospect is evaluating solutions. Then the sales training organization can start to roll out the “sense-making” addition to current sales methodology. This way, you have both marketing and sales in alignment.

By stepping into the buyer’s process and empathizing with what they are trying to accomplish, your organization can resonate with prospects and increase your win rates. This approach will help you stand out before this becomes the norm.

PLG Plays

BRING DOWN ANY HURDLE, LARGE OR SMALL.
In a traditional SaaS sales model, all qualified leads go to sales. Period, end of the story. But in PLG, routing all the hot leads to sales may not be necessary. In a true product-led company a lot of leads can probably skip sales and go straight to a purchase.
They may need to issue a PO or have already issued a PO and need somewhere to send it. They may need wiring instructions. They may need some security questions answered before they are allowed to sign up. They may be required by their procurement team to actually speak with a vendor before forking over money. But what they don’t need is to be put through your sales process. 
Not every buyer in a product-led world can whip out a credit card and sign up online. If you are sending these people to sales, you might be overcomplicating it. And if you aren’t allowing these customers to buy via a sales-assist instead of online self-service only, you are probably leaving money on the table. 
Self-service takes many forms. You think of it as signing up on a website, but for your buyer it may be that they are ready to buy (just like a self-service deal) they just need to interact with a human to do it. Think of this as sales-assisted versus sales-driven.
And it doesn’t have to be “sales” as we traditionally think of it. You can assign a deal desk coordinator to transact those inbound hot leads who are ready to close. There is no need to pay commission on this type of deal (more on this later). 
If people are reaching out trying to buy, don’t force them to a salesperson, and don’t force route them to buy online. Just have a process that supports a lightly-assisted sale.

I love salespeople. I am a salesperson. I just don’t think it’s good to put salespeople in roles closing deals that would otherwise close on their own. That’s not sales. That’s customer support. And don’t get me wrong, a product-led company needs sales, just not for those leads who will close on their own.

Drift Playbook

Building Pipeline

Play #1: Stop Calling Potential Buyers “Prospects”

I am violently allergic to the word “prospect.” I don’t like it. Instead of “prospects,” I always call them “buyers.” But really, I think of them as future advocates. I think of my buyers as future advocates of the company that I represent, of the product or solution that I sell, and of me, Jill.
 I always try to look at language through the lens of the customer. I ask myself, “Does this customer want to be hunted or farmed?” (Answer: Of course not!)
The bottom line: We should start to use new language in sales that is more customer-friendly and that reflects the experience today’s buyers actually want.

Play #2: Be Where Your Buyers Are

Where should salespeople be spending their time? I always say “be where your buyers are.” But to clarify, that doesn’t just apply to social networks. When your buyers are offline and attending events, you should be at those events.

Play #3: Lean Into LinkedIn

Building pipeline is really just about getting to know your buyers. It’s about doing research and understanding what’s important to them and what really matters to them.
The more you understand about the person you’re reaching out to, the more likely you are to make a connection because you’re genuinely showing that you have taken the time to understand who they are, a little bit about what they do, and some of what they work on at their company.
You have to have a genuine curiosity and willingness to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before you can have a smart conversation with them about anything. The tactic is to take the time, do the research, and understand who you’re reaching out to.
For our sales team here at Drift, LinkedIn is the most powerful network for doing that research. You can learn a tremendous amount about an organization, its size, who used to work there, who works there now, and how their roles have changed over time.
People also tend to be more receptive to getting messages on LinkedIn. From a communication standpoint, it’s less crowded than email, which makes it a great option if you’re doing outreach.

Play #4: Dare To Be Different

One thing we have really taught our team here at Drift, and have held onto dearly, is the belief that if we are going to do outbound, if we’re going to reach out to somebody, we need to have something to say. It needs to be interesting and attention-grabbing. Our message needs to stand out from everything else a potential buyer is getting.
For us, that can mean creating personalized videos or creating animated GIFs that show what our product will look like once it’s up and running on their website.
Whatever you do, remember that you can’t be perceived as better unless you’re perceived as different. It’s the only way.

Qualifying Leads

Play #5: Give Contextual Customer Examples

The most important thing SDRs need to be able to do is make a “deposit.” They need to be able to deliver something of value to the buyer before asking for a “withdrawal’ (15 minutes of someone’s time).
Ultimately, many of the activities SDRs are doing aren’t actually creating the conversations buyers want to have. Nobody wants to be marketed to or sold to, so what is the role of the SDR? It’s not to market or sell. It’s to create the opportunity and environment for conversations that are contextual to the buyer – to that human person that is on the other end (and to the buying committee, because it’s not just one buyer anymore). So, it’s the ability to put it all into context.

Play #6: Use Chatbots To Streamline Your SDR Strategy

Today, new technology – chatbots in particular – allow SDRs to hone in on high-quality leads that are coming through a website. Instead of using brute force and hitting the phones as many times as they can and seeing what trickles out the other end, they can do their jobs more intelligently and efficiently.
As a sales leader, I can now say, “Okay, let’s have this SDR engage with the ten best leads that our chatbot has qualified on our website.” That’s a much better use of that SDR’s time than having him or her make hundreds of cold, outbound calls. Chatbots take a lot of static and noise out of the job, making it easier for SDRs to connect with potential customers.

Play #7: Remove Friction By Removing Forms

Conversational marketing is catching on faster than any of the marketing and sales movements that came before it. And that’s because marketing technology has been around for a while now. Marketers and SDRs have had ample time to use what’s available, and they’ve recognized that simply doing more of the status quo isn’t working. More content, more calls, more lead capture forms – just doing more isn’t going to work. You need to do better.
I don’t want to fill out a freaking form to read your white paper. So please, take the form away. Get the friction out of the process. Take the friction out and let me do what I want to do, on the channels that I want to be on, in the timeframe that I want to be operating in.
The expectations of buyers are so much higher today than they were just a few years ago. If you’re still stuck using forms instead of optimizing for a great customer experience, your competitors are going to pass you by.
Sales Email

Play #8: Do Your Research Before You Send

Email is the cockroach of the internet.
Now that every marketer and every salesperson has everybody’s email address and the ability to automate a series, sequence, or cadence of emails to everybody, nobody wants to check their email. All we want to do when we go into our email is delete, delete, delete. We’re looking for the delete button so we can get all the crap out of our inboxes.

So, how can salespeople use email effectively? For me, it comes down to this:
Do not send me an email if I’m not your ideal customer. If you haven’t done the research on me, do not email me. Do not put me on your list and spam me.
The only time it does make sense to email me (or any potential buyer) is when you actually have something worthwhile to say that you know I will find relevant based on your research. Before you hit send, you need to know me. You need to know where I work, you need to know what I do, you need to know what kinds of problems I might be struggling with, and you need to know what types of tools I’m using day in, day out. Otherwise, don’t bother sending me an email.

Play #9: Stop Wasting Time Trying To Write The “Perfect” Email

One of the most common sales email mistakes I notice is that salespeople spend too much time writing them. That, to me, is the biggest one: Everyone tries to be Shakespeare in their email. They try to write the perfect sentence and use the perfect words. I’ve even seen reps on the sales floor give each other high-fives over well-written email sequences.
But here’s the thing: as an executive, the chance that I’m ever going to read an email you write is very, very low. In fact, when I have a spare minute in my day, one of my favorite things to do is to go through my inbox and swipe-left-delete outreach emails that I know I’m not interested in. So there’s a chance that somebody spent a half hour writing an email that I’m never going to see ?‍♂️
Of course, you want to say something smart in your emails, but you’ve also got to be able to time-box it and understand that of the emails you’re sending out, for every ten you send, maybe only three get read, especially if they’re cold. For those three that get read, you need to have something of value in there, but it needs to be short and concise. If the value’s there and the call-to-action makes sense for who’s receiving it, the elegance of your prose doesn’t matter.
Your buyers don’t care if you write like Shakespeare. They care if you can help them solve an actual problem.

Play #10: Cut The Jibber Jabber & Write Like A Human

A lot of salespeople make the mistake of taking on a formal, stuffy persona when writing emails.
Don’t do that.
Instead, write like you talk. You need to sound like a human in order to make a human connection.

Add value and write like a human, or get lost.

Sales Conversations

Play #11: Use The Right Channel At The Right Time

The important thing here is to know what the math is. Figure out what channel is working and when to use it.
At the end of the day, your goal shouldn’t be to make it easier for you to sell, it should be to make it easier for your customers to buy. And in order to do that, you need to use the communication channels your customers want to use. That’s how you keep a conversation going after you’ve had that first interaction.

Play #12: Use Video To Create A Deeper Connection
 
That being said, if your buyer doesn’t want to do a video call, I think you should push them on that. You should try to push them into the modern age, which is video.
With video, your buyer gets to see the real you, face-to-face. Outside of an in-person meeting, video allows for the deepest connection possible, which leads to stronger, more meaningful relationships. And developing those relationships between buyer and seller is how you build a successful brand and a successful business.

Play #13: Smoke Out Objections As Early As Possible

Dealing with objections is a natural part of a salesperson’s job. But instead of dreading them or avoiding them during sales conversations, you should try to smoke them out as early as possible.
One objection I hear frequently from a lot from buyers is, “It’s just not good timing.” Well, why isn’t it good timing? If you dig into that objection and ask questions, you end up learning more about your potential buyers.

Play #14: Hone In On A Specific Pain Point

If during sales conversations potential buyers keep raising the issue of price, it’s an indication that they don’t understand the value of your product and how using it can make their lives easier. This, in turn, can mean a couple of things:
It can mean you’re talking to the wrong people.
It can mean you’re doing a poor job of positioning your product and showing people how it can solve a specific pain point they have.

It’s so important to steer the conversation away from the features and benefits of what I’m selling to focus on uncovering the problems they’re actually experiencing. That’s how you get the value proposition to bubble to the surface. And it all starts with identifying a specific pain point that buyer is experiencing.

Play #15: Understand What Matters To Every Stakeholder In A Deal

As a salesperson, it’s your job to understand the wants and needs of each individual stakeholder and to provide satisfactory answers to all of their questions. Because if you don’t, if you only have eight of the nine people on board with your proposal, that one person can become an obstacle who can slow down (or potentially stop) a deal.

The takeaway: You need to appreciate every single individual who’s involved in a deal because there’s a reason they’re a part of it. And you need to understand how your product will affect those individuals specifically.

Product Demos & Presentations

Play #16: Use A Scheduling Tool

One of the biggest time-wasters in sales: going back and forth with a potential buyer in order to set up a meeting.

Today, intelligent scheduling tools do all the work for you, and they integrate directly with your calendar. That way, potential buyers can see when you’re available and choose times that work best for them.
Just like with removing forms, using a scheduling tool removes friction from the buying process. Specifically, it removes the logistical aspect of nailing down a meeting time. And from a salesperson’s perspective, it helps you stay organized.
This isn’t just a nice-to-have for modern salespeople, it’s a must-have.

Play #17: Check Meeting Invites To See Who’ll Be Attending

Sometimes a buying committee will try to hide who else is going to be in a room during a meeting or product demo. That’s not productive for either side, but unfortunately, it still happens.
As a salesperson, you need to know everyone you’re going to be talking to so you can A) bring the right people into the conversation from your side and B) do your research ahead of time and understand the potential pain points someone might raise.

Play #18: Ditch The Script

A product demo or sales presentation is equal parts give and take. Going into it, you need to know: What are the success criteria? How do you know if it makes sense to move onto next steps after you demo or give a presentation? Ultimately, the answers to those questions are going to vary based on the specific things potential buyers are looking for.
Preparing for a demo is really about knowing who your buyer is, knowing who’s in the room, knowing what they care about, and knowing why they’re interested in the first place. And if you present to that, if you demo to that, as opposed to just having a cookie-cutter or boilerplate demo that you go through every time, then you’re going to have a higher likelihood of being able to land that account.

In reality, it’s better to take the time to understand who you’re actually dealing with and to speak to them as individuals. There should never be a single pitch you use every time – it always needs to be different. It always needs to be personalized.

Play #19: Practice CRM Discipline

CRM discipline is common among top performers, especially in high-velocity sales environments where you’re doing a lot of transactions. Because when you talk to so many people, send out so many notes, record so many videos, and you do so many different things, it’s really easy to lose track.
If you’re not good about knowing where you left off, that’s a major problem. Luckily, tools like Salesforce give you full control over your ability to stay organized.

The best salespeople appreciate why that admin work is necessary because they’ve burned themselves in the past and forgot to follow up. I’ve noticed at Drift that our best performers are the ones who can track longer term deals. Sometimes those deals take six or even nine months before they come to fruition. Only by having strong CRM discipline are salespeople able to track those deals and stay with them until they’re closed-won.

Play #20: Make Your Follow-Ups Count

Follow up is so freaking important.
Why? Because most people today don’t do what they say they’re going to do. And more specifically, they don’t do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it.
As a salesperson, you can differentiate yourself by breaking this pattern. That alone will go a long way.
Also, when you do follow up, make sure you actually have something to say, or a question to ask. 
Make a deposit!
If you’re not going to tell me something new, or give me a nugget of something valuable, don’t bother following up.
Sales Measurement
Play #21: Start With The End In Mind
 
I am a huge proponent of sales math. It’s something that we rolled out here at Drift, and at its core, it’s about starting with the end in mind. What’s your end goal? What’s your quota? How much do salespeople want to earn? And then you work backward from that to figure out how much you need in the pipeline, i.e. how many opportunities you need to create. And then you work backward from that to figure out how many meetings you need to book in order to create those opportunities. Finally, you work backward from that to figure out how many quality activities you need in order to book those meetings.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you have a $5K quota. Now, you’re not going to hit that all in one day. But you’ve got to start somewhere. So, when you come into work each day, you think to yourself, “I know that doing 30 quality activities a day will get me five meetings. And I know that those five meetings will result in two opportunities. And I know that those two opportunities are worth $2K. And I know I need a rolling monthly pipeline of $20K.”
So, you can figure out how your daily activities will get you to your end goal because you know what your close rate is against your pipeline, and you know what your conversion rate is from meetings to opportunity, and you know what your conversion rate is from quality activities to meetings. By starting with the end in mind, you can make your sales performance more predictable. And the best part is, it puts you in control of your results. It allows you to understand what a good day looks like – so you can leave the office feeling good about your output every single day.

Play #22: Measure Customer Advocacy (A Lagging Indicator)

When measuring sales performance, there are leading indicators and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators reveal immediate progress and help show how likely you are to hit your future goals. For example, average revenue per customer is a leading indicator of what your overall revenue might end up looking like at the end of the year.
Lagging indicators, on the other hand, are the outputs. They’re the results you see after the fact. And for a lot of sales teams, the most important metric they measure is a lagging indicator: annual revenue.
For me, the most important metric you can measure in sales is a different lagging indicator. It isn’t revenue, it’s customer advocacy.
Customer advocacy refers to the degree to which your customers are not only succeeding with your product but also actively promoting your product to other potential buyers. When your company has strong customer advocacy, your best “salespeople” aren’t on your payroll – they’re your customers themselves.
In order to produce that result, your actual salespeople need to focus on what’s best for their customers. To get people to be advocates of your company, you first need to be great advocates of theirs. That means, as a salesperson, making your customers as successful as possible should be your number one goal while hitting a revenue target should come second.

Play #23: Focus On Individuals (Not Averages)

It’s really easy for a sales leader to say, “You need to make 50 dials a day. That’s what the average is on the team. We know that if you do an average of 50 dials, we’ll get the result we want, which is to book five meetings.”
And while setting a benchmark like this can be helpful in some situations, especially to give a new hire guidance out of the gates, it overlooks the fact that different salespeople have different skill sets. For example, some salespeople are great on the phone and might be able to book five meetings with just 20 dials. In contrast, some salespeople struggle on the phone and might need to make 100 dials before they’re able to book five meetings. So, from a measurement perspective, holding everyone to that same 50-dial benchmark doesn’t always make sense.
At Drift, when we hire new salespeople, we start by giving them the averages. Then we weigh their performance out over time and figure out where they settle in. Here’s our thinking behind that: For people on our team, we know what their quota is. And when they’ve been around for a while, we know what their average pipeline has been. We know what their conversion rate has been. We know all these things, so we can go to them and say, “This is how many quality activities we suggest you do. Right now you’re 10% lower than that on a daily basis, so if you boost that by 10%, the rest of it is going to take care of itself.”
The trick is to set those benchmarks at an individual level as opposed to blanketing the team with a directive and saying, “You have to do this every day.” Personalizing it and focusing on the individual is what makes it work.

Play #24: Pay Attention To The Mix Of Deals (Not Just Deal Volume)

At the end of the day, in sales, the rubber still meets the road with revenue.
Salespeople, after all, have incomes that are largely based on commission. The amount they earn is tied directly to how many dollars they bring in the door. And when you count up those dollars at the end of the month, or at the end of the quarter, it’s always clear who the top salesperson is. And it’s always clear who closed the most deals.
Those metrics are definitely important. But at the same time, I think it’s equally important to look within that and to measure the mix of deals salespeople close.
Are they little ones?
Are they little and big?
Are they proof-of-concept deals or pilots?
Are they all 12-month contracts? Or are they longer?
By digging into the mix of deals, you can better identify the strengths and weaknesses of different reps and help them improve. For example, if Bob is only doing 12-month contracts, while Mary is doing three-year contracts on a consistent basis, it might be worthwhile to have Bob learn from Mary about how he can negotiate those longer contracts.

Play #25: Simplify Your Dashboard

There’s a tendency to overcomplicate as opposed to simplifying. Simple is hard because it forces us to be reductive when the natural tendency is to add more stats, more numbers, more graphs, more everything.
But I think the simpler you make your sales dashboard at the management level, and at the individual level, and at every level in-between, the easier it becomes for you to manage the business.
Even with a simplified main dashboard, it’s easy to get nuanced and dive into very specific details when you need to. You can do that with sub-dashboards, or subcategories, or by doing deep-level inspections when something’s not working. But as a sales leader, you can’t afford to look at minutiae every day. It just gets in the way of the actual heartbeat of the organization.
Sales Leadership

Play #26: Keep An Even Keel

I think the most important quality a sales leader can have is consistency – or the ability to keep an even keel when faced with the inevitable peaks and valleys of sales.
Because here’s a secret about sales: it’s constant peaks and valleys. If you’re in a monthly business, twelve times a year you’re faced with peaks and valleys. Quarterly, it’s four times a year. So the best sales leaders are able to maintain a steady, objective leadership style in the good times and the bad.
For example, let’s say I’m a sales rep and I’m having a bad month. So I go to my manager and I say, “Here are the things that are going on. This is what I’m finding. This is what I’m seeing.” If the reaction of that sales manager is to blow up in my face and put me down and make me feel terrible about myself, guess what? I’m not going to go to my manager anymore when I’m dealing with a problem.
So the best leaders, during both the peaks and the valleys, are able to react objectively with feedback, with recommended actions, and with teaching, coaching, and guidance versus just having an emotional reaction. And I think that’s super important, especially in sales where there’s a tendency for people to get overly amped up when they’re having a really good month and, then the reverse, to get incredibly low when things aren’t going well. To succeed in sales at any level, you need to find balance.

Play #27: Use Data To Set Realistic Sales Targets

Something I learned early in my sales career is that generally as a sales organization grows, your territory gets smaller while your quota gets bigger.
If you think about the natural growth progression of a company as it starts to invest more in marketing and sales, sales will inevitably start to grow alongside that. So, you need more salespeople. But if, as a company, your sales territory stays the same (e.g. you remain US-centric and keep serving the same 50 states), you’re going to need to carve out a little bit for the new recruit, right?
These are the types of nuances you need to consider in order to set realistic sales targets that motivate your team. You can’t simply pull a number out of the air and say, “We want to grow 120% next year.” You have to build up those numbers based on a multitude of factors, including the investments that you’re going to make, the historical conversion rates that you’ve experienced, the number of reps that you have, and the productivity of the team. Only by digging into that data will you be able to dole out sales targets fairly.

Play #28: Balance Your Left Brain & Right Brain

Great sales leaders – especially in this day and age – are equal parts left- and right-brained.
It used to be that you could just be an extrovert and a good storyteller and that’s what made you a great salesperson and, with the right grooming, potentially a great sales leader. But today that’s not enough.
In order to succeed as a sales leader, you need to be able to dig into data, to quantify the impact, and to understand the quantitative implications behind the decisions you make. And this is something that really didn’t come about until the mid- to late-2000s when you started seeing high-velocity sales at SaaS businesses.
With the rise of SaaS came the need for sales leaders to be able to demonstrate equal parts extroversion and the ability to use data to make decisions. And that applies at the individual level, too. For example, if you’re selling a product like Drift, you’ve got to be able to go to a potential buyer with a point of view that is data-driven and that is based on their conversion rate, or how many qualified meetings they’re trying to drive to their SDR team, or whatever it is they’re trying to move the needle on.
Regardless of where you are in your sales career, being equal parts left-brained and right-brained will be crucial to your future success. And since most sales professionals have a natural tendency to favor their right brain (i.e. the subjective, intuitive, creative side), you need to make an effort to tap into your left brain (i.e. the objective, analytical, scientific side). That means avoiding knee-jerk reactions to things like territory changes, comp plan changes, and quota moves. And for sales leaders – to hiring and firing. You need to strive for balance and make a conscious effort to be equal parts data-driven and people-driven.

Play #29: Keep An Open Dialogue With Your Team

It would be unfair to ask somebody to lead a sales organization through different stages of growth if they hadn’t been through those stages of growth already. Because there is a feeling to it, and more than anything, a leader’s responsibility when going through different stages of growth is to let people know whether or not what they’re feeling is normal.
When you have a leader who’s been through it a couple of times, who’s “seen the movie” before, that leader can – and should – recall stories of the feelings, experiences, changes, and mistakes that people can expect as a company grows. (Although hopefully, that leader will help his or her team avoid making the same mistakes he or she made earlier.) The underlying goal should be to have an open dialogue with the team and, when things go bad, to reassure the team that the world is not ending.
If you look at HubSpot, LogMeIn, CarGurus, Toast, Slack, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, whomever… all of those companies experienced peaks and valleys. As a sales leader, it’s one of my core responsibilities to help my team understand what to expect based on the different stages of growth we’re in. It’s my job to talk openly and to answer questions about what’s going on, why a particular stage might be hard, and what we can do about it as a team to turn things around. As a leader, that’s how you create a trust and transparency loop within your team.

Sales Career Development
Play #30: Be Confident & Courageous (But Not Cocky)

One of the most important lessons you can learn as your sales career develops is that it’s okay to whiff. In order to succeed in this field, you can’t be afraid to swing big. Even if you’re just starting out, you need to be confident and you need to be courageous. Why? Because people don’t want to buy from someone who seems unsure about what they’re talking about.

Play #31: Learn To Ask The Tough Questions Up Front

The SDRs who go on to become great AEs are the ones who first excel in the role they’re already in. They dominate that first phase in their career trajectory. And, more specifically, they tend to have a particular characteristic: They aren’t afraid to ask tough questions up front. As a result, they can quickly get to the bottom of whether or not someone is a good fit, and, if someone is a good fit, they can quickly understand that person’s pain points.
This ties into the (false) notion that winning a deal happens at the end of the sales process. In reality, winning a deal happens at the beginning. And the really good SDRs ask questions that open up deals early on.
As a sales leader, you need to keep an eye out for SDRs who exhibit those characteristics and who aren’t afraid to ask the right types of questions to find out if there’s something there.

Play #32: Scale Your Team Through Internal Development

I think the only way you scale is if you develop. To me, the two go hand in hand.
Think about it this way: Let’s say our sales organization at Drift, which is about 80 people today, grows to 200 people in the next two years. We won’t be able to get to that 200 by going out and hiring a bunch of enterprise reps and managers from other companies who have no clue how to sell our product. Instead, the best course of action is to develop the people who already have great institutional knowledge, who have demonstrated proficiency in their current roles, and who are ready to take on more responsibility.

Play #33: Create A Culture That Celebrates Customer Success
 
The idea here is that you shouldn’t be celebrating a signed contract. Because at that point, your company hasn’t delivered anything of value yet. As sales leaders, we should be training our teams to celebrate customer success, not contract signatures.
Sales Hiring

Play #34: Focus On The Qualitative (Not Just The Quantitative)

When evaluating candidates for positions within your sales organization, it’s easy to become obsessed with the numbers. How many deals did they close? How much revenue did they bring in? How often did they meet (or exceed) their quota?
But if that’s all you’re focusing on during the hiring process, you’re missing the bigger picture.
To make the best hires possible, you need to look at the qualitative characteristics of candidates, not just the quantitative. You need to consider their attitudes because you can’t afford to have a pouty Paul or negative Nancy on your team. They’ll sap your team’s productivity. And, above all else, you need to avoid hiring assholes, who will inevitably poison your organization.

Play #35: Ask Candidates About The Last Time They Missed Their Number

One question I love to ask sales candidates is, “What happened the last time you missed your number?” And then I dig deeper by asking, “Why do you think it happened?” and, “Did you change anything about your process as a result?”
I love this line of questioning because it reveals if a candidate is a “thumb person” or a “finger person.” Here’s what I mean by that:
A “thumb person” points to himself or herself when something goes wrong and takes responsibility. They own the failure. A “finger person,” in contrast, is quick to point the finger at someone else or at some set of extenuating circumstances. They place the blame for the failure elsewhere.
When I ask why they missed their number, finger people tend to say things like, “marketing didn’t give me enough leads,” or “my territory sucked,” or “the SDR I was working with was terrible.” So you get this litany of excuses.

Play #36: Ignore The “Would I Have A Beer With This Person?” Benchmark

This is a common hiring mistake I see sales teams make: They prioritize hiring people they like, as opposed to seeking out the best people possible.

Working With Other Teams

Play #37: Focus On The People

Sales is a people-based function. It’s all about connection and relationships, trust, and empathy.

Play #38: Align Sales & Product Around The Customer

The key to a strong and positive sales / product relationship is empathy. Sales needs to have empathy for product. Product needs to have empathy for sales. And – most importantly – sales and product need to have empathy for the customer.

Play #39: Treat Operations As A Strategic Partner (Because It Is One)

Operations is the team that can help you understand the customer journey, inside and out. They have the data intelligence you need to set sales goals and quotas and develop the strategies to meet them. You literally can’t plan without ops.

Play #40: Level Up Your Game With Sales Enablement

Sales teams are always having to adapt and step up to new challenges. From quarter to quarter and year to year, you don’t run the same plays. You need to level up your game and change up your strategy. This is where Enablement comes in.

Play #41: Develop A True Partnership With Marketing To Deliver The Best Journey For Your Buyers

Put the customer at the center of everything. It’s not about sales or marketing. It’s about how sales and marketing can work together to facilitate the buying journey for the customer.
Have the same goals. This seems like a no brainer, but it’s easy to start chasing different things. Ultimately, you’re all working to increase customers’ willingness to buy from you again and advocate for you.
Plan together. No secret counsels. Develop an approach that is essentially a waterfall – each function feeding the other, and everyone understanding their own and their partner’s responsibilities.
Doing all of this will allow you to tackle challenges as a coordinated team and overcome issues with more speed and grace.
What are you waiting for? Someone has to extend the olive branch. Why not you? Sit down with your counterpart, find out what matters to them, and where your goals intersect.

Play #42: Respect Finance’s Role In Protecting The Company

The biggest mistake sales teams make when working with Finance is failing to understand why the Finance team makes the decisions it does. Too often, salespeople – who are hyper-focused on booking deals and hitting their numbers – think of Finance as the “order prevention team.” They assume Finance is out to get them with red tape and inflexible protocols.

Play #43: Give Legal As Much Context As Possible (Then Let Them Do What They Do Best)

Just like Finance, Legal’s first loyalty is to the company. Their job is to do what has to be done to mitigate risk. Their responsibility is to flag anything that looks like it might be a problem, and deal with it.
Salespeople mostly interact with legal over customer contracts.

Play #44: Do Your Homework Before Bringing Your CEO Into The Mix

Having the CEO or founder involved at the opportunity, deal, or account level can make Sales’ job easier. After all, people at the leadership level have the power and resources to make things happen. They’re the most visible, with the most name recognition. However, they are not a silver bullet. You need to be selective and strategic about when and how you involve them.

Play #45: Work With Customer Success To Get Your Customers Started On The Right Foot (Don’t Just Hand Them Off)

Contrary to popular belief, the customer’s story doesn’t end with the sale. Unfortunately, the traditional approach to how Sales and Customer Success work together is based on the “handoff” model, which can create a less-than-positive customer experience.
The thing is, no one wants to be “handed off” from department to department. Customers want relationships they can depend on with people they can trust. While it’s not possible to give every customer a dedicated “cradle-to-grave” advocate, there are things you can do to create a more customer-centric experience around the transition from prospect to customer.
Sales can help customers prepare for life after the contract signing by looking at things through a Customer Success lens. What comes next for the customer? What does the onboarding process look like? What kinds of resources are available? What are their next steps? Don’t leave a new customer hanging. Help them get started on the right foot.

Sales Experiments
Play #46: Fence Off A Group Of Individuals Who Are Focused On One Thing

I think about experiments less as individual experiments and more as team experiments. Because the only way you can venture into something new is through teamwork.

Start by fencing off a group of individuals who are responsible for one thing. Have them be laser-focused on that one thing, with the objective of proving or disproving whether or not venturing into a new market, a new segmentation, a new product offering, a new way of doing things is actually something that you want to fully support in the business.

Instead of creating a cross-functionally funded segment, run it as an experiment. That means limited support from other business functions, unless you’re able to contain it within the experiment itself. Just keep in mind that you shouldn’t need to build anything from a product standpoint to support it. It has to be able to stand on its own, and you can use the feedback you get to understand whether or not it’s something you want to build out.

Play #47: Set Your Criteria Up Front

The most important thing to remember when designing a sales experiment: Set your criteria up front, attach yourself to it, and make sure you communicate it to your team. Specifically, you need to set the criteria as to what the experiment is, who’s involved, what the goals are / what you’re trying to achieve, and how long it’s going to run for.

The Future of Sales

Play #48: Weave The Customer’s Point Of View Into Your Sales Process

Moving forward, the fundamentals of sales will be the same as they’ve always been: Those who serve the needs of their customers the best are the ones who will succeed. That’s what the sales profession is all about and will always be about.
That being said, the way in which you best serve your customers’ needs is changing. Customer expectations will continue to evolve, so your modeling of your ideal customers will need to evolve, too.
One of the things we need to do a much better job of is to stitch and weave the customer’s point of view throughout every facet of the business. This includes product, marketing, sales, customer success, education, professional services… everything. Only by stitching and weaving the customer’s point of view throughout that whole ecosystem will you be able to create a seamless customer experience.
In the future, the companies that create the best customer experiences are the ones that will drive the most revenue. Meanwhile, the companies that don’t optimize for experience will disappear.

Play #49: Make Video A Regular Part Of Your Sales Process

Apart from an in-person interaction, video is the only channel that allows you to read tone, body language, and to see the whole room and what’s going on.
Using video just makes so much sense in a sales process and it’s something that’s been around forever. But only now am I seeing it get introduced as a regular part of a selling and buying process. It’s not just about selling, it’s about when your buyers are interested in having a conversation or learning more.

Play #50: Embrace Artificial Intelligence (But Don’t Forget To Be Human)

Sales will always require human-to-human engagement. That’s something that will never change. But what will change is that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a much bigger role in the funnel when it comes to buying.

Over the next 10 years, AI is going to become more commonplace in both B2B and B2C contexts, and sales and marketing organizations will need to embrace it in order to keep up with the competition. With that said, humans will still be part of that last mile when it comes to selling. Why? Because people still genuinely want to buy from other people, and when they’re transacting through complex processes and cycles, they want to have that human element. They want to hear how another company that looks like them is using your product, and that’s often a story that gets told during introductions and during human-to-human networking.

How Stripe Built a Sales Organization to Successfully Sell to Developers

Software developers are rapidly becoming the most important buyers of technology and infrastructure in companies of all sizes.

We’ve successfully reached developers thanks to an intentional sales strategy, and the creation of a team and company culture that treats the sales process as an opportunity to understand and solve our customers’ most critical problems and to improve our product.
Stripe is a company built by developers, for developers. As we’ve grown, we’ve come to understand that developer sales isn’t about selling in a traditional sense. The hard pitch, the feature list, rehearsed objection handling, competitor depositioning—none of these things matter when the buyer of a product is the person who builds with it, rather than a procurement professional.
At Stripe, sales isn’t about trying to convince a reluctant developer to sign a big deal. It’s about enabling developers to try our product, and understand how it can transform their business and build a case for them to use internally.

Step 1: (Really) know your audience

We’ve found that the product experience is a crucial component of the sales process. If a developer is looking to solve a specific problem, the best way to show them value is to get them using and exploring the product.
The only thing that will convince a developer to consider your product is first-hand experience of its value.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to gain this experience. Developers expect a quality product, strong documentation, frictionless self-serve signup, and the ability to experiment without commitment.

We give open access to the tools they need to explore our products and build confidence with experimentation. Our job is to stand by and unblock any challenges they might face, and then help them make their internal case for adoption. The rest can come later once they know that our platform is what they want to build on.

This isn’t the typical SaaS sales approach. That normally begins with an initial “discovery” conversation, a demo and a walkthrough of features. That said, our product-led approach doesn’t keep us from being proactive about sales. A lot of our business is built on developing larger relationships from inbound leads and self-serve signups. Of course, we’re very responsive when prospects reach out to us for support, but only in certain situations do we make the first move. When reaching out, it’s important to position yourself and enable them to ramp quicker on the product.
We also watch for specific behaviors and signals that tell us when a prospect or existing user has the potential to convert into a new or more valuable customer:
Product interactions: If we see an uptick in engagement—rising API calls in test mode, new products being activated or tested, increasing velocity of logins to the dashboard, etc.—that’s a strong signal of momentum building within an organization.
Direct contact: We are a product-led organization, but we see it as a good thing when prospects reach out to us directly. Sometimes, they reach out because they can’t find something (in which case, we know we have a problem we need to fix). But, usually any direct engagement is a positive signal for sales. If we reach out too early, our sales team has less signal at best and is annoying for customers at worst.
Customer value: We look at basic things like how big a company is, what their current revenue is, how much of that revenue is derived from online business, etc. But we also look at more nuanced information, like whether they’ve raised VC funding (a good indicator of future growth), and what other technical tools they use (as an indicator of ability to integrate Stripe).
Complex use cases: Typically, the more complex a use case or business model is, the more differentiated our product is. So, when we see something that’s more challenging than the average, it’s usually a good sign that we’re going to have a more in-depth conversation that will ultimately lead to a more robust relationship. These situations are where applying sales resource can be very valuable.

Step 2: Hire the right people
To work successfully with the discerning developer audience, you need salespeople who have sufficient technical prowess in order to earn their trust. They don’t need to be able to code, but they do need to deeply understand the logic and functionality of the API and be able to translate that knowledge into relevant solutions for each prospect, based on what they’ve understood the customer is looking to achieve.
Related read: Founders Shouldn’t Hire a VP of Sales—Here’s Why
The profile of people we hire into sales has evolved over the years. We began with a generalist profile, a common strategy for younger companies that are still figuring out product-market fit and defining the buyer audience. For the most part, that early team was comprised of people who had some technical experience—in product or consulting—but not necessarily a lot of hands-on sales experience. A common mistake that startups make is to hire a salesperson with too much experience as their first sales hire. This profile often fails, as early sales is about finding and refining product-market fit rather than closing as many deals as possible.
“To work successfully with the discerning developer audience, you need salespeople who have sufficient technical prowess in order to earn their trust.”
As our company matured and we gained more clarity about our position in the market, our sales process became more sophisticated and segmented. Now, we’ve refined our salesperson profile to focus on those who not only have lots of sales experience, but also have a specific type of experience. We need people who are familiar with selling to a technical audience, know how to sell a more complex product, and are comfortable with a consultative sales approach. Here it’s important to think of analogous products to yours and find people who’ve successfully sold those products. These may not be immediately obvious or similar products to yours.
We also look for people who can operate successfully in a product-led organization with a strong engineering focus, and with strong opinions about what products should and shouldn’t do. This is critical for us because we rely on sales to provide customer feedback to our product organization. They need to bridge the gap between the front lines and our own developer team, but we need them to do so impartially. We don’t want them trying to unduly influence the roadmap in order to close a specific deal. Our goal is to build products that help all of our users, not cater to one demanding customer.
That said, there is great value in partnering closely with a few larger customers to help inform how we evolve our product. Shopify is a great example of this kind of relationship. We listen very carefully to their needs and they work with us as a beta user on emerging features and products. Often they are building at the cutting edge of e-commerce and we listen very carefully to their needs and often adjust our roadmap to accommodate. What we build for them can often be useful for other users and so this speeds up our product development.

Step 3: Structure your organization carefully
Many SaaS companies struggle when faced with the question of whether to go broad or deep on their product offerings. At Stripe, we’ve been able to circumvent that issue by taking an API-led, platform approach. Our core payments platform (Payments and Connect) sits on top of our cloud-based infrastructure, and our suite of applications to manage revenue, prevent fraud and expand internationally sit on top of that platform.

While it’s powerful for our customers, this structure creates some additional complexity for our salespeople. Instead of only having to train them on a single product with a limited number of straightforward use cases, we now have to train our sales team on a range of interrelated products that address a wider range of more nuanced use cases and have variations in functionality depending on how they’re implemented using the API. It also means that each time we add a new product, we also have to consider the resulting connections and interactions between all the other products.
We believe the tradeoff is worth it. The platform approach delivers a much higher quality product and experience for our customers. We have several ways to make the situation more manageable for our sales team, both on the product side and the sales organization side.
Platform structure
Each of the Stripe add-on products—Radar, Sigma, Billing and Atlas—is anchored to our core payments platform. None of the applications can be used standalone. Instead, each one is additive to the overall Stripe experience. This makes it easier for us to scale because we can sell to our existing customers. It also makes it more straightforward for our customers because each component is pre-integrated, so it requires less work to implement.
Even though we’re adding more products, from a technical perspective we’re just adding to the scope of the existing API. This model makes a lot of sense because it gives customers the ability to easily do more without much incremental work, which creates a lot of product stickiness. This, in turn, results in higher retention, which leads to greater customer LTV. It’s a win-win.
Sales support
Over the years, we’ve iterated our sales organization but at the core is a commitment to making sure each salesperson has deep knowledge about not only each of our products and their various uses cases, but the larger ecosystem that encompasses all possible combinations and interactions. This allows them to adapt solutions based on specific customer needs.
As we’ve grown, we’ve used customer segmentation to enable sales specialization. In addition to segmenting by company size, we further segment based on vertical. This means that while each salesperson still has to be familiar with all the products, they can focus on the ones that are most common to the group of customers they are serving. Being able to specialize creates more opportunities to develop even more tailored solutions for that customer segment.
Finally, we’ve added additional supporting functions who step in to help facilitate larger, more complex sales. Our solutions architects help to flush out technical details during the sales process, while our deployment team helps with planning and managing the integration process. The lead sales person remains involved, but having these additional resources helps to ensure that each member of the team is spending their time as productively as possible.

Collaboration is critical
How you sell is as important as what you sell—especially when it comes to working with developers. You may have an amazing product, but if you aren’t able to capture your audience’s interest, it’s unlikely that they’ll take the first step and experiment with it.
To succeed, you need to align how your customers want to buy and how your sales team sells. If you’re selling to developers, this means taking a collaborative, product-led approach that leaves many of the more traditional sales approaches way behind.
“How you sell is as important as what you sell—especially when it comes to working with developers.”
Building the right kind of sales organization is no small undertaking, but it doesn’t need to be as complicated as you might think. Start by taking the time to gain a deep understanding of your buyers—who they are, what they need, and the kind of sales experience that will genuinely help them achieve their goals—and then over-deliver on their expectations.
Then, invest in hiring the right people to deliver this. These people are the face of your company. They are on your front line day in and day out, and their collaboration with and dedication to your customers can make or break the trajectory of your company. Choose wisely.
Always be strategic about how you structure and expand your sales organization alongside your products. Think ahead so that you don’t paint yourself into a corner on either front and maintain sufficient flexibility. Make sure that you keep your sales team well informed and well supported so that they can develop as your product does.

How Guru Layers Human Touchpoints Onto a Strong Self-Service Model

The initial team pulled top performers from Technical Support, Account Management, and Sales Development—an intentionally diverse cross section. Whether the user prefers to engage via live chat or consultation call, product specialists operate with the same guiding principles known internally as “The Core Four”:

Confirm the use case
Uncover the friction
Remove the friction
Guide next steps

Guru aligned their go-to-market teams with their customers based on a few factors:

Size
Bigger companies had a high-touch model—dedicated account managers and CSM access to tech support
Smaller companies were low-touch—product specialist team
Place in the Funnel
Pre-conversion for larger accounts. The team is all about helping customers use the product so they activate and adopt long term.
Post-conversion for smaller accounts that raise their hands and need an extra touchpoint can do so at this stage.

Rob ultimately landed on leveraging new logo acquisition as the primary KPI for the team. “This KPI measured a few things. It was about getting people started, adopting the product, and converting to a paid plan,”

“is there anything I can help you accomplish in [product] today? Happy to share best practices I’ve seen other customers use.”

“Product-led is really the rise of cross-functional.”

For example, on the activation side you might need a copywriter, data analyst, UX designer, a couple of growth engineers and a PM. This pod would then work together to impact a specific metric like increasing the number of activated users.

Operating this way means flipping the org chart on its head and looking at projects based on the different functions needed to do them, which is exactly what HubSpot does.

The only way to scale a product-led engine is with cross-functional teams. Adding processes, documentation and trainings isn’t the answer—it’s your org design that matters.

Buyers might already see some value if they’ve used your free trial or website tours, but there’s still a place for sales to point out added value that might not be immediately apparent.

Buyers now expect to have a different conversation. That means sales can’t just have the same calls script over and over again: you gotta get right to the point of what each individual buyer wants.

On the other hand, product-led growth is built on the premise that you want to put your product in the hands of your customer as quickly as possible.

In general, I believe a Test Drive experience should have two specific attributes — 1) It should have demo data and use cases that address the maximum number of users, and 2) the experience should be limited in time, typically a few hours.

https://userguiding.com/blog/product-led-growth-experts/

PRODUCT LED
GROWTH
Fueling the fastest growing software companies.
Learn More

1.00

WHAT IS PRODUCT LED GROWTH?
Product led growth (PLG) is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion.
Product led growth, explained
Companies with a PLG strategy—think Slack, Expensify, Calendly, Dropbox—are able to grow faster and more efficiently by leveraging their products to create a pipeline of active users that are then converted into paying customers.
Although it is rightfully associated with viral, freemium, bottom-up distribution, product led growth is more than a simple go-to-market formula. Any company—even those selling to large enterprises or operating in niche vertical markets—can adopt PLG principles to improve user experiences and increase go-to-market efficiency.
And they should: Product led growth isn’t going away any time soon.
The center of power has shifted from the buyer to the end user. And the consumerization of software means that end users now demand better experiences from the tools they use every day.
In order to succeed in the current End User Era (more on that below), software companies must rise to meet the demands of the market—and that means building a product for end users and then distributing that product directly to those same end users.

Pillar 1: Design for the end user
End users are now in the driver’s seat. Unlike organizations that think in terms of formal ROI, end users are people. And people want to solve the problem they have right now. As Tope Awotona, CEO and Founder of scheduling tool Calendly put it :“Designing for end-users is really understanding what they do—and it’s also truly understanding who you serve.”In other words, designing for end-users means putting the needs of real people first, listening to their problems—and committing to making consistent improvements to your product to solve those problems more effectively.
Pillar 2: Deliver value before capturing value
Good relationships involve give and take. You need to give your users something of value before you can expect value in return.This is why product led companies prioritize a short time to value (TTV).A common application of this concept is to allow users to access some or all of the product before they need to pay, often through a self-serve free trial, freemium model or open source model.But a delayed paywall does not inherently deliver value.
Something else needs to happen between when a user signs up for your product and when they enter their credit card information. Namely, users must realize your product’s value for themselves.
In order for that to happen, you need to either solve the user’s problem in that short space of time, or get them to the critical “aha moment” wherein the proverbial light bulb goes off and the user understands exactly how your software will improve their day-to-day life.
This involves not only creating features and functionality that embody that value, but also removing things that distract from or create barriers to reaching the core value.
For products that can be adopted through a purely self-serve experience, that means keeping the initial product experience simple.
For products that require human touchpoints, the way to deliver value before capturing it is to put customer success before sales in the user journey.
For products where the creation of value for the end-user requires an upfront investment of that user’s time—such as in infrastructure software and API-driven developer tools—investing in rich documentation and enabling technologies can help customer success scale to meet the demands of being at the front of the funnel.
Whether you have a low-touch or high-touch business model, the principle of reducing all potential barriers to users solving an immediate problem is a cornerstone of building a successful PLG business.
Pillar 3: Invest in the product with go-to-market intent
The upfront costs of creating software is typically higher than the costs of delivering professional services—to a first customer, that is.
After that, the marginal cost to deliver the same value to a second customer is near zero. That can make the upfront investment highly profitable in the long term.
The same is true for bringing a product to market. The marginal cost of distributing software, enabling users and customers, and capturing value using software is dramatically less than doing the same with professional services.
PLG companies apply this insight to their go-to-market strategy by investing in the product with the intent of driving acquisition, conversion, and expansion. They do this by:
Investing in robust product data that allows teams to track, measure, and analyze user behavior.
Building out a growth function that is responsible for ensuring the product enhances its own distribution, enablement and ability to capture value.
Running go-to-market experiments that lead to incremental improvements to the user journey.

Examples of PLG companies
So, what does a PLG company look like, exactly? There’s no cookie cutter answer. The four companies below are all decidedly product led—but each one has grown and flourished in its own way.
Datadog
Datadog is a monitoring platform for cloud-scale applications, and is beloved by the developers they serve.When we led their Series B back in 2014, we did so for a few key reasons:
They solved a pain point nearly universal among developers.
They delivered value to customers without any friction.
They grew rapidly inside an account after the initial adoption.
We’ve been fortunate to be Datadog’s partners as they’ve rapidly scaled, launched major new product lines, went public in 2019, hit a $25 billion market cap and continue to exceed expectations as a public company. Today they’re worth more than Slack.
They are also a shining example of how product led adoption can scale to the enterprise.
In an episode of OpenView’s BUILD podcast, Datadog’s longtime VP of Marketing Alex Rosemblat shared that the company’s high revenue comes from a two-pronged approach to distribution:
“We sell to the executive buyer level. At some point, they’re going to have to approve the purchase of a large contract. But at our roots, we’ve always tried to go in at the grassroots.”
Calendly
Calendly is a meeting scheduling tool that makes it easy for people across and within organizations to find mutually agreeable meeting times.
Calendly is a truly viral product. Every time someone sends an invite via the app, they are also automatically promoting the product and starting a viral loop. There are almost no barriers to entry and—here’s the key—because the product solves a nearly universal problem, it gets adopted quickly among invitees.
According to their VP of Product and Design Oji Udezue:
“There may be all kinds of complex strategies and tactics rolled up under PLG: good product-market fit, viral loops and more; but at the end of the day it all boils down to one simple core idea: Solve your customer’s problems.”
Airtable
Founded in 2012, Airtable is currently worth more than $1 billion, with customers up and down the Fortune 1000 list.
The spreadsheet-database hybrid is now found in offices worldwide. But in the beginning, many of Airtable’s customers were individuals looking for a better way to organize personal projects—everything from wedding plans to wine collections.
That trajectory was intentional: Airtable was built as a self-serve product that could be adopted from the bottom up. According to company’s founder and CEO Howie Liu:
“It was table stakes for us to make this product actually good enough and easy enough to use—yet powerful enough to convince end users themselves to invest not just the money but, more importantly, the time and behavioral change effort to go and build on Airtable.”
That philosophy is reflected in Airtable’s current go-to-market approach, which puts customer success before (consultative) sales in the buyer journey. Liat Bycel, VP of Customer Engagement explains:
“It’s about making sure that we’re decreasing the time to value that customers get when experiencing the product for the first time.”
Slack
Of course, no list of product led growth companies would be complete without the paragon of PLG, Slack.
Founded in 2009, the team collaboration platform is now a true household name boasting over 10 million daily users. And who can forget Slack’s eye-watering $23 billion valuation when they IPO-ed in 2019?
As Slack stated in their S-1 filing: “Many organizations adopt Slack initially as part of our self-service go-to-market approach. Organic growth is generated as users realize the benefits of Slack.”
The secret to Slack’s success lies in their thoughtful understanding of those benefits. The company understands they aren’t just selling software—they are selling a more productive, streamlined way for team members to communicate with one another.
As OpenView’s Entrepreneur in Residence, Natalie Diggins, explains:
The mechanism for delivering value may involve starting off by romancing users with a free trial. It may upsell existing users by promoting a version with more robust features. Or it may automate elements of the customer success function. But at its core, Slack is about delivering a positive user experience, and that is the foundation on which all of its PLG capabilities are built.
PLG metrics
There’s a good chance you’re using the wrong metrics to measure product led growth. That’s because some of the metrics typically used to measure SaaS businesses just aren’t well-suited to this new go-to-market motion. For example:
Growth Rates. For typical SaaS companies, high growth is key. But our data suggests that PLG businesses often have lower growth rates than their peers until they reach the $10M ARR mark—after which the inverse is true. Metrics that emphasize growth rate too early could actually detract from the promising high-growth engines at the heart of a PLG business.
CAC Payback. Public PLG businesses spend 44% more than their SaaS peers on R&D costs (product and engineering). That is partially offset by lower sales and marketing spend, but it’s nearly impossible to understand the ROI of spend on the product itself.
LTV/CAC. This classic SaaS metric doesn’t work for PLG companies, mainly because it doesn’t take into account some of the core pillars that make PLG businesses attractive: low churn and the chance for revenue expansion from accounts.
Logo Retention. How do you measure logo retention in a bottom-up adoption model in which you may have there are dozens of individual users from an organization, each with their own account?
How to measure product led growth
The Natural Rate of Growth (NRG) succeeds where traditional SaaS metrics fall short. It allows PLG companies to pinpoint the percentage of their recurring revenue that comes from organic channels and starts with the product.

You can think of this metric as a measurement of how fast a company grows without even trying—before layering on incremental investments in sales and marketing.
The formula looks like this:
Natural Rate of Growth = 100 x Annual Growth Rate x Organic Signups (%) x ARR from Products (%)
What’s great about the Natural Rate of Growth is that it:
Provides companies with a strong indicator of future revenue.
Can be tracked from the early days of monetization all the way through to IPO.
Applies to all software companies, no matter where they are in PLG maturity.
Is easily measurable without sophisticated processes or tooling.
Can identify whether a business can drive efficient growth via the product itself.
Natural Rate of Growth benchmarks
Companies with an extremely strong product-led motion—such as Zoom, Slack, and Expensify—typically demonstrate a high Natural Rate of Growth. These PLG companies started out by optimizing their self-service motion and layered on incremental sales and marketing later on.
Other organizations like HubSpot have made a conscious effort to become less sales-led can expect to improve their NRG over time.
How to become product led
Most companies—especially those with roots in the CIO and Exec eras—are not product led. Achieving product led growth is a journey.
While companies founded on PLG principles certainly have an advantage, any software company can adopt the core tenets of product led growth to improve user experiences and increase go-to-market efficiency.
It is indeed possible for non-PLG companies to become product led, if certain conditions are met.
Is a PLG strategy right for your product?
We have identified eight primary characteristics of successful product led growth companies. In order to make the transition a PLG strategy, at least some of these things must be true:
1. The product-market conditions are right. Product led growth strategies succeed when:
The marginal costs per each user are low
Users have direct buying power or have influence over buying decisions
Existing solutions do not fully meet users’ needs.
2. Your product offers a uniquely valuable solution that can be personalized to the individual user to help them achieve their daily tasks more efficiently.
3. The user is able to realize significant, ongoing value quickly and easily with little to no help from company personnel. This is achieved by having a product that is easy to understand, evaluate, adopt, and integrate into existing workflows.
4. Your product delivers real value before the paywall (demo accounts and “dummy data” do not fulfill this criteria), and pricing scales in tandem with value delivered as usage gradually increases.
5. Your product has features and functionalities that allow it to serve as an acquisition channel for marketing, selling, and onboarding new users. This includes:
A strong viral potential that incentivizes and makes it easy for a user to invite others.
The ability to monitor and adapt to user behavior to provide additional value.
Automatic, omnichannel communication through external channels like email, push, SMS that bring users back into the product.
6. Your marketing funnels lead to product engagement, rather than engagement with a sales team.
7. Your product has a built-in network effect—the more people using the product in a network or company, the more valuable it becomes. If it’s a platform, the more services a user connects to it, the stronger your product’s value.
8. Within your customers’ companies, there are product champions who drive internal adoption of your product and facilitate expansion.
If your company checks off a plurality of these eight characteristics, you can and should be using a product led growth strategy to grow product adoption. Yet even if all the criteria are met, the transition to PLG doesn’t happen overnight.
And, in fact, it shouldn’t. You have to create a space for product led growth. Going all-in all at once just won’t work.
When we asked him what it takes for an organization to become product led, HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar had this to say:
“[If you try to do everything all at once,] the antibodies are going to reject it. Everybody in your organization is used to doing things a different way. So you have to carve it out. Put dedicated people on it until it’s big enough that the antibodies can’t reject it and force it out, and it becomes your business. And then you merge everything back together.”

Never Should You Ever [b2b PLG edition]:
1. Never bypass profiling questions on signup
No, it does not reduce your activation rates. Always ask about company size, role, intent, and use case. The ability to segment usage is invaluable for prioritization & personalization.

2. Never skip segmentation (incl data from #1)
Set the correct denominator for activation, engagement, and monetization metrics. Focusing growth efforts on high business intent within the core use case is the key (instead of asking webmail lookie-loo to close the sales contract).

3. Never block webmail/gmail signups 
People go through the consideration stage with their personal/gmail email in b2b. Let exploration and personal/adjacent use cases grow, creating a long-term boost to the core acquisition target. But exclude them from your target segment (#2)

4. Never create main growth metrics on the user level
Always have KPIs (acquisition, activation, engagement, and monetization) on the team or the org level. B2b sells into the organization, and if the end goal is to close an enterprise deal, start accessing org health from the beginning. User growth within the org becomes a KPI.

5. Never goal your paid acquisition efforts on all signups
Paid marketing should only spend money acquiring on the business/work intent segment of users. It's a waste of money to drive personal email acquisition goals. That is what organic efforts are for.

6. Never forget to define ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Know from the start which orgs should have a destination with the sales team. Because not all should (i.e. can't bare sales floor - won't be a profitable sale). Acquisition of ICP orgs is the early pipeline predictor.

7. Never have sales prospect new user signups
Define PQA (product qualified accounts) on ICP orgs based on the volume, velocity, feature breadth, or behavioral aspects. Have product *qualify* accounts for sales interaction. Timing is everything.

8. Never assume you have a buyer in the user base
Sometimes buyers=users or buyers are brought in by users, materializing into hand-raisers or PQLs. But 80% of the time, product usage happens without the buyer (especially in enterprise). Make ABM and enterprise demand gen your best friend!

9. Never compare self-serve, product-led sales, and top-down sale ACVs as if they are apples to apples
Self-serve, PLS, and top-down sales channels target different problem maturity levels on different timelines and perceived values. No customers should not have an equal option to buy an 8-buck self-serve plan or close a $100k contract. If they do, revisit your monetization model.

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