
Guide to Launching Product-led Sales

Minami Rojas
5 steps to launch product-led sales from aligning on key goals, identifying signals, operationalizing the strategy, creating the sales playbook, and measuring impact
Minami Rojas
5 steps to launch product-led sales from aligning on key goals, identifying signals, operationalizing the strategy, creating the sales playbook, and measuring impact
Product-led sales = product data + sales. Product-led sales (PLS) is a go to market (GTM) motion that enables sales teams with plays based on product data, allowing them to target accounts with existing product usage to generate qualified pipeline and accelerate deal cycles. Unlike the similar acronym PLG, you don’t need to be a product-led growth company to use product data for sales!
This guide walks you through each step you need to take to launch product-led sales for your revenue teams. It highlights different approaches to each step along the way, flags any trade-offs you need to consider, and helps align your internal teams for maximum success.
The steps to launching product-led sales are:
✨Launching a pilot and want some easy template slides?✨
Make a copy of our template slides to use internally. The slides help explain each step within this guide and include example slides to help communicate your pilot cross-functionally.
As every company is focusing on efficient growth, sales teams are pushed to be leaner than ever. Layering in product-led sales on top of your existing sales motion helps unlock sales velocity and rep productivity by using product data to uncover qualified pipeline, accelerate deal cycles, and maximize expansion.
Data-driven selling is evolving rapidly and product data is the highest intent data revenue teams can access. Product data is:
Depending on your current sales motion, product-led sales is meant to layer into existing workflows to accelerate sales velocity. Here are common challenges we see in different companies that product-led sales helps solve:
Launching product-led sales is inherently a cross-functional project as it touches data, operations, and sales teams. So before jumping in, it’s important to align on the “why” behind launching product-led sales.
Aligning on the primary revenue focus allows teams to partner behind a common goal, help make faster decisions along the way, and ensure you’re tracking success after launch on the right KPIs.
While it may be tempting to see all the above and say, “I want it all!”, make sure to pause and be selective. Each revenue KPI from the above will drive towards different plays, tap into different product signals, be operationalized with different tiger teams, and have different success KPIs.
Focusing on one key area will allow you to rapidly build and launch without getting slowed down.
Trying to tackle more than one revenue KPI as a focus for your initial product-led sales launch could result in:
Now that you’ve identified the key revenue KPI to focus on, it’s time to identify what product signals matter and which accounts to send to sales.
You want to identify key product signals that indicate an account is likely to close or expand based on historical conversion and product data. From there you can decide which ICP accounts should be sent to sales based on their usage, and which signals you want to build a product-led sales play around.
There are three levels of maturity you can use to approach identifying the key signals:
Identifying key product signals is a critical step in building cross-functional trust and buy-in. Make sure to ask your sales team for their insights and feedback on the signals identified as they often have the best context from working with customers & prospects every day!
Product signals are key in understanding what usage indicates highest intent, but just because an account has good usage doesn’t mean there’s a large revenue opportunity for sales. It could just be a good self-serve account.
That’s where additionally filtering on which accounts are assigned to sales can be accomplished by a combination of the following ingredients:
Below is an example of how Figma uses a combination of ICP Fit and Product signals to prioritize accounts for sales. You can read more in Kyle Poyar’s Guide to Product-led Sales with Jesus Requena.
PQA and PQL scores are highly popular today, but it’s key to understand when to use a score vs when to use product signals. For more on these terms, read Elena Verna’s guide on how to use PQAs and PQLs in product-led sales.
Just building a score methodology doesn’t give the sales team the actual data they need to launch personalized plays. Prioritize the actual signals.
Now you know what data is important and how sales will use it, it’s time to map how this will actually come to life. To operationalize for likelihood of adoption, it’s important to consider the following:
Based on key signals and accounts identified in Step 2, create a sheet that outlines each field that needs to be created and/or synced. Here’s an example:
Our recommendation is to:
Another key decision when operationalizing is to determine if the data will be static or dynamic.
Our recommendation is that for a pilot, static data may be viable but dynamic data is the best way to ensure data accuracy thus sales trust.
Mapping into how your team works today is also key to adoption. Most sales teams either work off a set of accounts or new leads or both.
Below outlines how reps would use product data in either of those flows:
Leads or PQLs alone won’t paint the full picture for a sales team, prioritize driving data at the account level so they are armed with more context.
Oftentimes, we want to quickly test and iterate before operationalizing a full product-led sales workflow. Here are four levels of operationalizing from pilot to full roll-out:
Sales enablement and training is a critical step in launching product-led sales. The key to a successful launch is adoption, and building a playbook that helps enable your team to understand what they are looking at, why it’s important, and more importantly what it means about the account is critical.
Surprise! Some of these common sections of a product-led sales playbook may sound familiar already based on steps we’ve already covered 😀
Within your playbook should contain one key slide - the product signals one-pager that the reps can use to quickly compare what’s going on in their account and what it means for how they can engage. This should include:
Here’s an example of what this could look like:
In order to measure the impact of product data for your sales team, you want to create a control group within your sales teams. There are two ways you can approach this:
“When you roll out, make sure the training is ongoing. It takes time for new reps to learn the details of how to use a tool or incorporate the narrative into their own style. Open office hours, and get a recurring spot in your sales all-hands to update and refresh materials.”
Congratulations, now you are ready to launch!
Once you have launched, you want to ensure that your investment into product-led sales is driving the outcome you want.
Make sure to measure this over a specific time frame, at least 1-3 months. Depending on your sales cycle, you may only see impact to the leading indicators (Activity to Opp rate, and Opp Creation) vs. lagging indicators (Win Rate, Revenue).
As you get more mature, there are more metrics you can look at such as stage conversion rates, deal cycles, # of interactions, ASP, etc. to help fine tune your motion.
You want to keep iterating and improving after launch, so here are core questions you can ask your sales team to drive feedback loops:
Congratulations, you’ve made it through the guide and hopefully have a better understanding of each step to launching product-led sales.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, fear not, that’s why we built Endgame. Endgame helps you run product-led sales by taking the operational work of each step off your plate and letting you focus on driving cross-functional alignment and success.
Interested in learning more? Request a demo of Endgame today!
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