Should you grow through the product itself, or through a sales team?
Experts
Let the product sell itself. Free trials, self-serve onboarding, and viral loops beat sales teams.
Enterprise deals need human touch. Sales teams build relationships and close bigger contracts.
How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures)
So, brought that with me then to Evernote back in 2011, early days over there. I was there from about 10 to 100 million users. And over that arc, I shifted from more of a core product role to starting our growth product function. This was super organic.
Yeah. We're going to clear some cobwebs here. It's been a while. But one challenge that Evernote really struggled with was this evolution from single-player to multiplayer to team to enterprise. It's a chasm that a lot of bottom-up SaaS businesses struggle to cross. Evernote was philosophically antisocial.
The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna
Elena Verna Great question, so let's start with product-led growth. We've talked about it a little bit in our first episode, but let's revisit the topic. Product led growth is all about product's ability to self-serve activate, self-serve engage, and convert that usage to a monetization opportunity.
Or you're going downmarket and your fixed cost of sale that you have from the traditional sales motion does not scale. It stays fairly constant, yet your contract values are starting to drop as you're doing downmarket, so you want to create a lot more automation in the selling process to remove as many as possible humans out of it.
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
Jason Lemkin If you truly build a self-serve product, you can either never have a sales team or Slack defer it or Canva really defer it. Canva didn't really build a sales team until they were well north of 500 million in revenue because it's epic self-serve.
The most important thing though I've found is however you get those first 10, 15, 20 customers, be honest, be honest, and if you've talked to them as a founder and you know that they need a sales type motion, they need effort to deploy it, they have questions about security, they have questions about competition, they have onboarding requirements, ...
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
And these ad hoc questions, they often take a lot of human time to just go in and a data analyst needs to prioritize it and find time to go run the query. And yes, you can invest in self-serve tooling to improve at this, but also I found that AI is quite good at doing that first pass answer as well.
Fantastic. Glad to hear that. Grammarly is a freemium business model, which means that over 90% of our users are on the free service and the rest of it pay for subscriptions essentially, right? And so one of the teams, they work on subscriber conversion, PM there is Kayla, that team is great and their job is to figure out the free to paid subscript...
The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)
I would think so because let's say if you are in the sales motion dominated kind of traditional B2B software industry, your competitors will be adding PLG, as soon as they add it they will have a benefit of attracting more end users and end users become case to the employer, to the clients. And you lose that.
Yeah, exactly. But I would say it is easier if you have PLG from early on. If you are pure sales led, you try to add PLG, that's the harder thing to change basically.
The ultimate guide to founder-led sales | Jen Abel (co-founder of JJELLYFISH)
Absolutely. I mean, it is the competitive advantage. I don't think people realize how much of a competitive advantage the founder led sales motion is, for three specific reasons. One is that the founder is the visionary. No one's going to be able to speak to it like they can. No salesperson, really no non-founder.
So if you have a really high win rate, let's say 30 or 40%, you actually don't need as high of a conversion rate on the outbound, because you know if you get someone in the funnel, the throughput is very healthy. If your win rate is really low, you need that conversion rate to be much, much higher, because you need more and more and more at bats.
How to work through fear, give hard feedback, and doing layoffs with grace | Matt Mochary
So anything that you can pick up without needing to have the keys to Dad's Porsche in order to test out can be product-led. More and more I'm also seeing companies that have a enterprise sales motion to capture the customer at the point of adoption, but then they want to use product-led growth frameworks or tools to expand their usage to e...
Ideally, that's something that you've thought about pretty deeply before you even started to code the product, because whether you thought about it consciously or not, you have already decided whether it is going to be product-led or sales-led.
The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin
And so when we worked together this collaborative learning, it's almost like a category name or a descriptor or something. They were so embedded that I decided, I don't even want to take it out, but can we define it in terms of a story? So the story they came to was, hey, used to be that companies train their people through basically a mindset of t...
I mean, I almost see them as orthogonal, like with HubSpot. HubSpot had this narrative around inbound. It used to be just outbound stuff, now we're going to have inbound. And that wasn't really a category. Back then they were probably known as marketing automation. Now they're probably known as CRM because they've broadened.
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO)
Yeah, I think it's a pretty big cultural shift. So, some of this intersects with the shift from product led growth to adding in a sales motion. So, when I joined Calendly, all of our ARR came from our PLG channel. We didn't have a sales team, we just hired a CRO who was going to build out a sales team.
And so, that's a very different profile of a sales team member than you might need after you need to pursue more of a heavy outbound motion, more of a hunter profile than a grower profile. So, I think that's the first piece is just make sure you think about the motion when you're moving towards a sales led model.
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2 comments · Share your perspective
As someone who built a PLG motion from scratch — the self-serve funnel is only as good as your activation flow. Most teams underinvest here.
We tried PLG first and it worked great for individual users, but enterprise deals still needed a sales team. Hybrid is the way.