Dakota McKenzie
With two months in the seat as the revenue leader at Endgame, I want to share why I joined Endgame to define the future of product-led sales and what I've learned working with some of the best PLG companies.
To kick off 2022, I joined Endgame (backed by Unusual Ventures), the world’s first product-led sales platform. I’m here to be a part of the company modernizing how software companies go-to-market through product-led sales.
I’ve spent the last decade building my sales career at some of the world’s best SaaS companies including Demandware, Sumo Logic, Databricks, and Segment. From there I joined Unusual Ventures to take what I learned and drive GTM strategy at portfolio companies.
Working at these companies taught me what “best-in-class” looks like from product to a well-defined sales process driven by value selling vs. gunslinging transactional deals. It’s exciting to see pieces of that in the Endgame team and through partnering with companies who have the same “magic” I felt at previous companies.
The sales leaders that we work with are facing similar problems in supporting a product-led sales motion. I’m not referring to “bottoms up vs. enterprise selling,” rather the data problem that forces PLG companies to fit CRM constructs (leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities) into product constructs like users, tiers, workspaces, domains, etc.
Within a product there are users and the workspaces they are a part of. These are the basic mechanics of SaaS. But CRMs were built with rigid constructs like leads and accounts. The data problem for product-led sales is sorting out how these constructs map to each other. Is a user a lead? Or is a user a contact? What happens if a user is part of multiple workspaces? And how do you reconcile an account that has users across multiple domains?
Revenue teams try to solve this problem by wrapping their product-led sales motion around Salesforce and then pull in Product, Data Science, and Engineering to add product attributes to opportunities.
Building this in a CRM requires a heavy lift from teams who are unfamiliar with what sales actually needs to execute product-led sales in a repeatable fashion. And ironically, the market of product-led sales experts is guided by people who haven’t sold before and don’t appreciate the magnitude of the data problem that needs to be solved to make product-led sales a reality.
Endgame has taken the opposite approach, instead facing the data challenge head-on and focusing on product and making sure that our customers get value out of Endgame on a daily basis.
Product-led sales teams who think about their customer’s buying journey and lifecycle through the lens of product-usage will win in the long-term. So, what do our best customers do? They use the product data to power key use cases in product-led sales:
In each of these use cases, sales is critical in using product data to identify the right users and accounts and facilitate the user’s buying journey. The objective is to convert through each segment and leverage humans in the loop to ensure fewer users drop off. The outcome is materially better conversion across the board.
What blows my mind is that all of the customers we work with already have the data – they just need a way to turn a complex data problem into a simple UI for GTM teams to gain insight and take action. I’m incredibly excited to be part of the team that partners with the world’s best product companies to create the category of product-led sales.
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