Elena Verna
In the part 3 of this guest series, learn from Elena Verna about the signs you're ready for product-led sales and best practices on how to layer on new growth motions.
Welcome to the final installment of a three blog series I'm partnering on with Endgame to help PLG companies better understand what product-led sales is and how they can incorporate it into their growth strategy.
Part 3 is all how to layer new growth motions, but be sure to check out the entire series including:
Layering growth motions is a complex exercise, and product-led sales is no exception. Each growth motion is incremental, starting with product-led growth, evolving into marketing-led growth, and scaling with sales-led growth.
The most efficient and highest growth software companies use a combination of all three – so they can grow revenue with frictionless self-serve conversion and maximize contract value and penetration by selling to enterprise buyers.
But going from product–led self serve monetization to sales-led contracts (or vice versa) requires you to change both monetization demand generation *and* capture tactics. Internally this feels like a revolution, with lack of ability to apply your existing superpowers to win.
Instead of looking at product-led and sales-led monetizations as the only options, consider introducing product-led sales as a necessary bridge to evolve your monetization strategies.
So instead of looking at product-led and sales-led monetizations as the only options, consider introducing product-led sales as a necessary bridge to evolve your monetization strategies. Regardless of which way you need to travel, product-led sales deploys teams to monetize on top of self-serve *usage*, meaning:
You should never try to replace a product-led motion with sales-led one (or vice versa). The goal is always to layer. Product-led sales allows you to evolve your GTM by introducing new growth motions while leveraging existing expertise. Avoiding starting from scratch increases your chances of success and helps prevent you from making incorrect assumptions.
The question of product-led sales is not ‘Should we do it?’ Rather, it is ‘When and how should we do it?’ So what separates the companies that do it well from the ones that struggle? There are three signs you should look out for:
Make sure that you have predictability and sustainability in your current monetization growth motion before embarking on the layering exercise. Perfecting your initial product-led or sales-led monetization is the key, with most companies waiting till first $10M in product-led, self-serve purchases or $50M in sales-led contracts before taking a bet on introducing new monetization channels. Each motion fuels the next, so trying to accelerate this process can leave your business in the lurch.
Watch for clear signs from your existing customers that there is demand for additional monetization motions.
In PLG, this may look like self-serve users reaching out saying they are looking to buy your product for the entire company and could you help them with invoicing/contract. This is the first sign of hand-raisers and a clear signal that there may be enterprise demand!
In SLG, this materializes two ways:
Network effect is when product value improves as more people use it. Although we frequently think of network effects on a platform level, in product-led sales it is important to establish network effects on a team level. This means that the team benefits when more users are added, which is the force needed to translate usage into company-wide purchase.
An example of a product with a high team network effect is Miro. The more people use Miro, the more collaborative and productive individuals can be with their team. This resulted in fast growing team sizes that quickly escalated into enterprise-wide deals.
Network effect can be measured by either direct usage or indirect utility.
When I ran the Growth team at SurveyMonkey, we solely focused on building a passionate base of individual users. They were happy with the product, but had no need for enterprise upgrade. Ultimately, there was no user reasoning to move to the enterprise product; it was based on the revenue strategy of the business. To sell to the enterprise, Surveymonkey had to completely change the product or use a traditional top-down motion that ran in parallel but didn’t leverage their greatest asset: their passionate user base.
Figuring how product-led sales fits in is not linear – it requires experimentation and should incentivize entire business growth vs individual quota attainment. Consider following tactics:
Although the existing team can help you prototype product-led sales, the same team will not be able to scale it. You will need enterprise marketing (ABM, ent channel lead gen, etc) teams as well as enterprise sales teams. You may even need an enterprise product management team building functionality for these finicky enterprise buyers.
Measuring success in product-led sales isn’t the same as PLG or traditional enterprise sales. For product-led sales, you want to center around acquiring self-serve teams that fit your ICP. You should also understand and grow PQAs and PQLs as not all usage will impact sales pipeline.
To get the most out of product-led sales, invest early in optimizing for organic hand raisers by developing a hand raiser health score. Letter grading works well here and can include:
Implementing a 15 minute SLA for sales to engage ‘A’ hand raisers improves conversion through the sales funnel. From there, it’s important to learn how to connect buyers and your sales motion to usage, especially if the buyers themselves are not users.
The future of product-led sales is an exciting one, but ultimately it is to-be-written. Don’t beat yourself up and like most new things, failure is critical path. We are all figuring this out and it’s incredible to see what product-led sales tools like Endgame are doing in this space and how the next generation of great software companies are using product-led sales to scale revenue growth.
Elena Verna is a Head of Growth at Amplitude, Growth Advisor to companies including Krisp, MongoDB, and Maze, and a Board Member at Netlify. She is also a former CMO & Advisor at Miro, SVP for Product & Growth at Malwarebytes, and SVP at SurveyMonkey. Elena has a breadth of experience in PLG models for B2B companies.