Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna
Lenny Rachitsky 4/23/23 - Episode Page - 1h 17m - PDF Transcript
The most important thing in product-led sales is that there is a different configuration internally
of collaboration that needs to occur. In traditional sales world, marketing creates pipeline for
sales. Sales sells product. Product engages with the paid user to drive retention. In a product-led
sales product acquires and activates a customer and product creates pipeline for sales. So
relationship is not that there is a go-to-market org with marketing and sales and product just
kind of throws features across the fence for them to sell. The collaboration here is between product
and sales. But that means that product has to take on accountability over pipeline. The worst
thing that you can do is to say, I'm going to do product-led growth or I'm going to do product-led
sales and I'm going to do it in marketing. Recipe for disaster, you will be failure mode within
six months because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself.
Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts
to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.
Today my guest is Elena Verna. That name sounds familiar. Elena is a return guest and you be
the judge but I think this episode is even better than the first which is a very high bar because
that first episode continues to be one of the most popular of the podcast. Elena has worked at or
advised companies like Miro, Amplitude Survey Monkey, MongoDB, Netlify and a dozen others.
She's also a longtime instructor and EIR at Reforge where she helped create their experimentation,
monetization, growth leadership and their soon-to-be-released PLG course and in this conversation
we go incredibly deep into the emerging space of product-led sales. Elena explains what exactly
is product-led sales, how it fits together with product-led growth and sales-led growth,
who and when you should consider investing product-led sales, how product-led sales changes
your approach to sales and marketing, what sorts of data, tooling and people you need in place to
do it well and what common pitfalls you need to avoid. I've said this before and I'll say it again,
Elena is possibly the smartest and most experienced growth person in the world,
especially when it comes to B2B and I never get tired of learning from her.
Enjoy this episode with Elena Verna after a short word from our sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using
today isn't very helpful. Why is it that it always seems to be working against you instead
of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's
incredibly fast, beautifully designed and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire
product development process from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps.
Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the
powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient github integrations, cycles that actually create progress
and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works.
Linear is the default tool of choice among startups and it powers a wide range of large
established companies such as Vercel, Retool and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams
describe using Linear as magical. Visit Linear.app slash Lenny to try Linear for free with your team
and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's Linear.app slash Lenny.
This episode is brought to you by BrainTrust where the world's most innovative companies go to find
talent fast so that they innovate faster. Let's be honest, it's a lot of work to build a company
and if you want to stay ahead of the game you need to be able to hire the right talent quickly and
confidently. BrainTrust is the first decentralized talent network where you can find, hire and manage
high quality contractors in engineering, design and product for a fraction of the cost of agencies.
BrainTrust charges a flat rate of only 10% unlike agency fees of up to 70% so you can make your budget
go four times further. Plus they're the only network that takes zero percent of what the talent
makes so they're able to attract and retain the world's best tech talent. Take it from DoorDash,
Airbnb, Plaid and hundreds of other high growth startups that have shaved their hiring process
for months to weeks at less than a quarter of the cost by hiring through BrainTrust network of 20,000
high quality vetted candidates ready to work. Whether you're looking to fill in gaps, upskill your
staff or build a team for that dream project that finally got funded, contact BrainTrust and you'll
get matched with three candidates in just 48 hours. Visit usebraintrust.com slash Lenny or find them
in my show notes for today's episode. That's usebraintrust.com slash Lenny for when you need talent
yesterday. Elena, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me back. I thought I would
be the first returning guest. I'm a little bit upset that I'm been beat by Casey so you should
explain yourself on that one. Okay, here's the explanation. You're the first that we rebooked
back and then this one just kind of got pushed a little bit and Casey had a slot earlier. So
technically you were the first scheduled return guest. All right, all right, I'll accept that.
Okay, great. So I guess I'll just say I'm really excited to have you back. Your episode that we
did maybe a year ago is still one of the most popular episodes of all time. I still see people
tweeting about it and sharing it and so I am really excited to have you back and have a take two.
I'm excited to be back. Let's dive in. Before we get into the content, when we met last time,
you were interim head of growth at Amplitude. What are you up to now? What's happened in the
past year? I just wrapped up interim gig at Amplitude in February, so it's just been a couple
of months since then. I'm passively exploring if I'm going to take another interim position,
but between interim roles, I always take about six to eight months of break because interim roles
are very intense because there's so many deliverables that are loaded in in the first year that you're
working at the company. So I'm just advising. I have incredible companies that I started advising
such as Virio and Sanity, Clockwise, and I'm building up my next level of frameworks that I'm
going to dive into potentially new interim position to prototype. If people are listening to this and
they're like, how do I get to work with Elena? Should people reach out to you? Are you booked up?
What do you suggest? I'll never take down an opportunity to have a great conversation and
to learn about the business and to see how I can be helpful, but I'm not proactively sourcing
clients, but that doesn't mean that I don't have availability to schedule something in the future.
Awesome. So if it's amazing enough, you're open to it. Absolutely, always.
Okay, here we go. Always have to be open to new opportunities. Yes. I love that. I feel the same
way. FOMO kicks in. Anyway, as you know, we're going to be devoting this entire podcast to just
one topic, which is product-led sales, which is this go-to-market motion that seems to have
emerged over the past year, maybe a bit longer. And it feels like there's this increasing amount
of interest and also this increasing amount of confusion around what it is, how to approach it,
who it's right for. And so we're going to spend the next hour diving really deep into product-led
sales. Let's go for it. Let's do it. Okay, so let's just start with a bigger picture kind of
question of just how do you define product-led sales? What is product-led sales, especially
when it comes to what is it versus product-led growth? Great question. So let's start with
product-led growth. We 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. So you bring people, you get them
to an aha moment into the habit loops, and then you're able to extract value back out of them.
Extraction of the value can be direct, where you're actually capturing revenue from them,
or it can be indirect, where they're participating in your growth model via virality or user-generated
content and bring additional business through the doors. But let's talk about direct
phase to capture that value. There is self-serve monetization. So I'm using product self-serve,
I go to the pricing page, I find the plan that best suits me on features that I want to unlock,
or usage that I want to unlock, and I buy it. However, that's not the only way to monetize
that usage. You can monetize that usage with sales too. Why? Self-serve monetization has a cap
of about $10,000. That's just how much we're able to process on the credit cards before they start
getting flagged and declined by the banks. And so much we as consumers and prosumers are even
willing to put on our credit card, because not all credit cards have limits of over $10,000,
$20,000, $30,000, $40,000. So self-serve monetization is very much a prosumer use case,
where an individual is trying to solve the problem on their own. Product-led sales converts the usage
that you've generated via self-serve into a sales opportunity. And it attaches a salesperson to
close a much larger contract, which can be $15,000, $20,000, $100,000, in order to bring an enterprise
level solution to a company that has already been using it in a self-serve manner.
Amazing. Would you say that product-led growth has always been, in a sense,
product-led sales, because sales was involved and there's has been kind of like
wave describing it, or is this a new trend and wave approaching product-led growth?
So product-led growth has actually started more on individual use case. So an individual has a
problem. They have a job to be done. They come into the product and they solve it. And that was
product-led growth in a nutshell for a lot of the B2B companies. However, if you're going to
touch a salesperson, there is nobody in the company that is going to pay $10,000, $15,000,
$20,000 for one individual to solve their problem. So product-led sales assumes that there is a
migration from an individual use case that you acquired an end user with and an escalation
into an enterprise-level solution that solves enterprise-level problems. Let me break it down
and let me use, for example, amplitude as an example. So amplitude, individual. What is individual
wanted with amplitude? I need data of my fingertips to make better decisions for my product. So I'm
going to put an amplitude SDK into my product and it gives me behavioral data to help me build my
pillar better. What is the company-level solution? Well, it's more self-serve ability of the data.
It's democratization of data. It's enhanced insights in the more data-driven culture.
That's what company is solving for. Individual is not solving for data-driven culture.
Individual is just solving for data insights for them. Company is solving for data-driven culture.
So in product-led growth, you can just have an individual be very happy with their
solution for their job to be done. However, what product-led sales assumes is that there is an
escalator to an enterprise-level solution. And enterprise escalator is valuable to attach
sales resources to because products fundamentally do a really bad job at communicating enterprise-level
value prop. They're very good at showing you as a user what you can do. They're very terrible at
showing what organization actually can benefit out of the solution. So sales can tell that story.
Sales can bridge that gap and then you can increase the perceived value in order to
bridge the gap to that $15,000, $20,000, $100,000 contract. So I would say self-serve monetization
is very much an individual use case versus product-led sales is turning that individual
use case and self-serve usage into a sales pipeline with enterprise-level value.
I really like that way of thinking about it. Basically, product-led growth has a ceiling.
You're only going to get so high in terms of spend. You can only explain things so much
to a potential user. And then sales comes in and solves a lot of those problems. And
product-led sales is essentially this. I think you even have this visualization now that I'm
thinking about as a bridge, right? Yeah, there's a bridge between the two. And so in this world
of product-led sales, does sales as a function outbound sales continue to exist? One, and then
two, is it radically different in this world of product-led sales? Yeah, so to understand how
sales should be applied in this situation, you need to understand end-user's motivation,
ability, and permission of an organization. So for example, if the user and user is very
motivated, they have full sense of ability to solve the problem, and they have all of the
permission from organization, or maybe not even permission, maybe forgiveness from organization,
to go and explore and bring in a new solution, then it can be a very much organic motion
up that escalator. However, that's not always the case. A lot of times, end-users miss permission
of solving enterprise-level problems. There's lots of stakeholders. There's a committee that
has to make a decision. It impacts departments outside of their purview, and maybe they even
lack ability to do it. Maybe they can do their little job to be done, but not the entire enterprise-level
integration. So in my amplitude example, yeah, I can drop an SDK in my product area,
but how do I convince entire product to adopt amplitude and put an SDK on every single interaction
across the entire app? So there's different level problem statements. And this is where
product-led sales either can be a truly organic motion where people raise their hands,
they submit sales forms, and there's already a need and desire and understanding of it,
or end-user might hit friction points. And product-led sales has to bridge those friction
points by either attracting the right decision makers to the process so they can find an enterprise
buyer out there. They can understand who's the champion and what their capabilities and what
their permission levels are, and they can create a committee for the decision. So they almost slap
a band-aid on the problem of people not wanting to be able to and not wanting to necessarily
resolve the problem on their own. And they can be very powerful with that as well as marketing,
because we cannot forget about marketing where they can educate of how to help people bridge
that gap and how to sell things internally. You mentioned this idea of enterprise-level
problems. It might help if you give an example or two of what those might be. And then also just
what are companies, examples of companies that are doing enterprise or product-led sales well,
just to kind of give people a mental model as you're talking about some of this stuff?
Sure. So let's go through a couple of them. Let's go through Miro. Miro is an online whiteboarding
platform. What is an individual problem that people come to Miro to solve? They have a workshop
they need to facilitate. Maybe they need a board to just do brain writing in, and they use Miro
for individual jobs to be done. However, what Miro is designed for is a team-level problem.
So I come in and I bring you in, and we collaborate together. So now there's two,
three, four people involved. But even that is still on the project level. It's on the team level.
Nobody's going to pay $100,000 to solve a team-level small problem that is solving.
What is the enterprise-level problem? It's increased innovation. It's increased productivity
across the entire team, because now we have this new outlet in which we can collaborate.
Now, can Miro very clearly show increase in productivity across the organization by using
the product? No. Can sales tell the story? Yes. So Miro takes you from an individual user to a
team step, and then sales bridges the gap to an enterprise. Let's give another example of Figma.
In Figma, I come in as a designer, and I just need a better way to capture feedback
from my stakeholders. A more scalable way to capture it so I can iterate on the perfect design.
What is it at the team level? Now there is a team that can collaborate with me more openly. I can
capture more feedback from more stakeholders faster and get the project done sooner. What is it on
the enterprise level? Well, on enterprise level, our designs are just better fit the business needs.
They have faster turnaround time, and our product is performing better. That's an enterprise-level
value problem. Again, I think in the product development space, we've gotten a little bit
lazy of actually showcasing that enterprise value in product. We rely on excellence of sales team
to tell that story. I do hope that changes, by the way, in the future, that we put more pressure
on the products to take it all the way up the escalator. We don't have to be 100% dependent
on the sales team going and showcasing that story. The product can really power that escalator from
the starting point till the end on its own. I want to dig into that for sure. I know that's
something you just shared on LinkedIn recently, and I thought that was a really interesting topic.
But before we get there, let's talk about this bridge a little bit more.
So people might be listening to this that are maybe a product-led growth company, and they
may feel like, wait, we're already doing this. We have this product-led growth motion. We have a
sales team they figure out who to talk to. What exactly is in that bridge that makes product-led
sales so interesting? I imagine it's helping you identify who to go after, helping people
go further and further and escalator themselves. How do you think about that bridge between product
and sales? Let's talk about how product-led growth companies start with product-led sales.
It usually starts by an organic demand from a user base. They reach out to them through
support channels by just pinging people who work at the company saying, hey, I want to purchase
this for my entire company. That's an organic pool that you start feeling from product-led
growth model into enterprise sales world. And by the way, you should never hire any salespeople
until you feel that pool. Because if nobody's asking to purchase, then you cannot just hire an
SDR and make a purchase happen. So you need to see those handraisers. You need to see those people
demanding an enterprise-level adoption. Then you hire, start hiring salespeople to actually
suffice that demand. And that's great. And you're starting to do sales and surfacing, really
addressing organic demand within your product. But that organic demand very quickly dries up.
If you rely on handraisers of your champions, if you rely on having enterprise buyers in your
user base that are asking to just sign on the dotted line, then you have a very limited ceiling
for your growth. Because what majority of the usage transforms to be is to have product qualification
that there is a meaningful sales conversation that could occur based on the signals within usage.
But the buyer is missing. 90% of product-led sales is converting the usage
into an opportunity by finding a buyer outside, by finding the decision maker outside. This is
where marketing and sales are so crucial in the process, connecting that decision maker to the
usage and then driving an opportunity through sales funnel all the way to close one deal.
So it's great when you start having sales seam and you surfacing this organic demand. That's
beautiful and power to you. It doesn't last very long just because end user fundamentally does
not equal enterprise buyer. And that organic demand ends up plateauing very shortly because
you cannot just make enterprise buyers happen from your users. If a founder is listening to
this right now and they're like, okay, so I have maybe a product-led growth component or self-serve,
maybe I have a sales team, maybe I don't, what's a sign that your product is a fit for investing
in product-led sales? Essentially, every product-led growth oriented company should be
eventually investing in this area or is there certain companies that are like, no,
you don't need to worry about it. Just stay product-led growth forever or just stay sales-led
growth forever. To have product-led sales means you're going upmarket. Period. That means you go
for contract values that are probably over your sales floor, so the minimum that the sales is
willing to engage in close, which is traditionally around $15,000. If you're going for contract
values of $15,000, that means you're probably trying to close $100,000 to $100,000 contracts as
well. Who can handle a $100,000 to $100,000 contract? It's not going to be a small startup.
It's not going to be an SMB. It's probably going to be higher end of more of a mid-market segment,
so 200 employees plus. More likely, it's going to be towards the enterprise segment of 1,000
employees plus. If you are not ready to go upmarket, I would say keep it easy on the product-led
sales because sales means quotas, sales means large contract values, sales means you are going
upmarket, whether you like it or not. Some products, they should stay in the prosumer
individual space. Maybe they're geared towards contractors or freelancers or squarely towards
startups. Those personas are not interested in talking to sales in the first place. They have
much lower bearing of how much they're willing to spend, so their price sensitivity is much higher.
They prefer to do all self-serve in the first place, so it really needs to be conscious about
what that will do to your go-to-market motion because it definitely skews it and pulls it up.
Got it. What I'm hearing is that if you're starting as a self-serve-oriented product
and you're starting to maybe hire a first-sales person, is the approach start approaching it from
product-led sales motion versus now we're going to add the sales independent team that's doing
their own thing. Right. There's two ways to get to product-led sales. First, the wave is that we
talked about. I started as a product-led growth company. I really started with this individual
use case, and I'm escalating to a company-level value prop, and this is what I need product-led
sales for. On the other side, I might start as a top-down sales traditional organization,
so I have product that I only sell through sales. Those are usually anchored at larger
segments in the first place. In order to build a top-down sales engine, you're most likely
going after enterprise segment of 1,000-plus employees or maybe upper-mid market of 500
employees plus. The reason to go into product-led sales is either your existing top-down motion
is not working because customers need to see value before they sign the contract,
so they want to see that usage and at least the first signs of perceived value before they sign
on the dotted line, or you're going down market 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 going down market, so you want to create a lot more automation in
the selling process to remove as many as possible humans out of it. You can approach it for both
ways, adding PLS on top of product-led growth or adding PLS on top of existing sales-led growth.
For PLG, you're going up market by adding PLS for SLG or sales-led growth by adding PLS,
you're going down market. Awesome, and we're going to talk about how to actually build this
infrastructure and what's required, but it reminds me, one of the biggest takeaways from our first
podcast and something I've quoted many times now is your bet that every sales-led growth company
needs to add a product-led growth element, otherwise they'll be disrupted by someone that does.
Is that still your perspective? Absolutely. Now, I think there's different stages of what
does it mean to add product-led growth elements. I think every sales-led company should be putting
pressure on product to assist with the sales process that does not mean that there is product-led
growth, but there is a product assist in the existing sales-led motion that can materialize
into product-led growth if you can truly solve for self-serve activation, self-serve engagement,
and have product be able to sell itself. Because the biggest difference here that starts to come in
and that is so apparent in every single company is that in B2B, unfortunately, we've let go of the
product having accountability over monetization model. We've gotten into the spiral of product,
just builds a product, and it throws it over the fence to marketing and sales, it's to sell.
Marketing and sales have done an incredible job over the last couple of decades of coming up with
these stories and elaborate playbooks of how to attract enterprise buyers and how to sell them
this product. The product literally only obsesses after contract is closed and there's usage that
starts to materialize after contract closed. We've alleviated our product management in B2B
from monetization ownership. When the SLG company actually goes into product-assisted
tactics or product-led growth, the biggest pain point is actually educating product team
on how can you get product to sell itself, which is all about monetization awareness,
monetization friction of conversion to get into the paid plan, and then having actual correct
value metrics that are understood self-serve by the customer. Yes, I agree with you.
Every single, I agree with myself, so I should say, that every single sales-led company should
at least add some product-assisted tactics, but I would even take it further that every sales-led
company should start educating and putting pressure on the product to own monetization
components of the business. Let's pull on that thread a little bit more. What does that actually
look like? Does the head of product or specific group PMs, let's say, have revenue goals
and responsible for P&L and things like that, or what does that generally look like when they
start to own revenue? There's two ways that you can own revenue. Revenue stream number one will
be your self-serve revenue. If there's self-serve revenue, that means product is selling literally
itself. Yes, there has to be somebody in product that has self-serve revenue target.
A lot of times, it doesn't fall on the core product managers. A lot of times, it falls on the growth
team. That's because core product management is really focused on feature deliverability
and just that incremental expansion of the core use case and growth product management owns
the product distribution strategy. Then the PLG case, it would be a true self-serve monetization
model. Now, when it comes to PLS, you don't own revenue target, in my opinion, but what you do
own is the pipeline that was created by product that you have a handshake with sales team over.
What that materializes in is product qualified accounts. It's actually a product threshold
of engagement that differs from activation and it differs from core engagement. It's what volume,
velocity, feature breadth, or behavioral signals that account is throwing that says,
hey, right now is the time to engage with sales. That is the bridge to monetization
that product team should own, even on the core team, in order to drive healthy, predictable,
and sustainable pipeline to sales. This is a really important topic. There's this concept.
You just describe product qualified account. It might be a good time to define a couple other
acronyms and compare them. There's PQA, there's PQL, product qualified lead.
There's marketing qualified lead. Can you just maybe describe this suite of
acronyms and then I want to follow up on the PQA because that seems really important.
I'll start with PQA just because we just breezed over it. PQA is product qualified account. It's
on account level. It's aggregation of multiple users that are using the account. It might be on
the overall logo level. Let's say you've attracted a company, so you qualify PQA across the entire
company usage, or it might be on a specific team or workspace level, depending on what is the
better predictor for you and who the sales team is going to be engaging with. Product
qualification is very much product metrics. It's the volume of use. It's the velocity change.
For example, yesterday I've been adding one user per day, and then today I've added 15 users to
account. That's the velocity change that you need to pay attention to. There is a feature usage that
can be highly correlative to enterprise interest. The product should be driving towards every single
account reaching in order to qualify them for sales conversation. Within the PQA, there may or may
not be PQL. PQL is a product qualified lead. Lead assumes there is a person in the account
that I can go and sell to. Now leads are those buyers. There are those decision makers in the
account. If you have a smaller segment, for example, you and more small businesses or a lower end of
the market segment, you may very have PQLs in there, because user is maybe equals buyer,
and user can make those buyer decisions. However, the more you move up the market,
the more end user is many steps separated from the buyer. You might have very healthy usage,
and you might have a PQA that is off the charts, but you don't have a PQL in it. If you just sick
your sales against that account, you're going to have a very terrible situation and very terrible
user journey where users are like, why is sales talking to me? I have no decision-making power
in my organization. I love the product, but please leave me alone. This is where you get a bunch of
cold outbound, and I put big quotations on outbound emails that are just not getting returned.
So you need to very clearly understand who's you buying persona, and are they in your user base?
And if they are, you have a PQL. Have some go for it. But if they're not, go find it out there.
And this is where MQL concept really comes into play, because then marketing has to still
qualify a lead to bring it and connect it to PQA. So PQA can have a PQL
as a user already in the user base, or it might need an MQL with marketing or sales
bringing that lead over and connecting them with the usage.
Amazing. So we're going to share a link. You have this awesome visual
that shows kind of like the funnel of PQAs and PQLs funneling into sales along with marketing
qualified leads. Basically, there's a kind of instead of one path to sales knowing who to talk
to, now there's two. Product is funneling you people that are qualified and then marketing
following you people that are qualified. And there is a third path. There might be marketing
funneling people that have no usage whatsoever. And that is a true top down lead. So you have
three buckets of lead attribution that is coming in. I have usage and one of the users is my lead.
I have usage. I have no lead on the account. Marketing is bringing me the lead, but I have
to leverage that usage against that lead. Or I have a lead coming through. There is no usage.
I have to sell the entire thing still to them. So there's no context that I can use of existing
usage. And those three channels are super important to identify. They all have very different
conversion rates. They all have different playbooks of how you close them. And honestly,
they require often different sales team to go after them, because it's a very different sales
enablement. You remind me of, you have so many hilarious memes that you share on LinkedIn.
By the way, everyone listening should go follow Elena on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter
because it's hilarious and also informative. It's a magical combination. One of my favorite
memes of yours is the shining one that we just kind of touched on where someone's just like
using a product for five minutes and then, hey, do you want a sales guy just reaches out with like
the axe? Hey, do you want to chat? So that actually, it's painfully true. That's one of my most
highly engaged memes that I put out there. I have also one of the urinals where
the man is using a urinal and then like one comes over, a salesperson comes on,
would you like to chat about our enterprise plan? It's like 10 urinals and he's like right next
years. Yeah, exactly. So the piece here that a lot of companies miss, unfortunately, is that they
jam product led sales into a traditional top down sales playbook. Now, what does that mean?
In traditional top down sales book, an MQL that you have or a lead that you gather already is in
consideration cycles for your enterprise level offering. However, in product led sales, a new
user that signs up, they no work close to enterprise level consideration. They're just
trying to complete an individual job to be done. They're not solving a problem for their company.
So if you can imagine it as like a very large funnel, you start with just users looking for
problem solve, then you transition to awareness consideration and intent channels for team level
problem. And then you escalate for awareness consideration and intent channels for enterprise
level problem. Top down sales process goes after the bottom of that funnel where there's already
an intent to solve company level problem versus at the very top is where product led growth starts
on individual level problem. It's a different timeline. So if you go after individual user
that just signs up for the account and you reach out to them 10 minutes later after sign up asking
what's your budget and are you ready to buy, it's a complete mismatch of where they are in their
consideration journey. So you cannot consider a new product sign up an MQL in the traditional
sense. They're just not there yet. They have a fraction of the enterprise problem that they're
solving and they're not ready to buy. And it's especially annoying because there's so many
SaaS products now and everyone is coming for you, especially if you're at an awesome company that
they're trying to sell. So yeah, I mean, anytime I even started, I remember I started at Amplitude
when I started a year ago. It's like my inbox was just filled with like, now you're doing this,
now you're doing this, bye, bye, bye. I mean, it's, I don't know, it's, I can't even, I can't even
notice anything in that outbound solution. Unless somebody reaches out to me with something
authentic that is already usage based, it's ignore. And it's going to get worse with GPT
oriented cold outbound emails. Absolutely. This episode is brought to you by rose.com.
The world runs on spreadsheets. You probably have a tab open with a spreadsheet right now,
but the spreadsheet product you're using today was designed decades ago and it shows. They live in
silos away from your business data. They weren't made to be used on a phone. And if you want to do
even the simplest automation, you have to figure out complex scripts that are nightmare to maintain.
Rose is different. It combines a modern spreadsheet editor, data integrations with APIs and your
business tools, and a slick sharing experience that turns any spreadsheet into a beautiful
interactive website that you'll be proud to share. If you're writing a report on a growth
experiment, you can use Rose to do your analysis on data straight from BigQuery or Snowflake.
If you're deep diving on marketing, you can import reports straight from Google,
analytics, Facebook, ads or Twitter. Or if you're working with sales, you can natively
plug Stripe, Salesforce or HubSpot directly into Rose. And when you're done, you can share your
work as a beautiful spreadsheet that's easy to read and embed charts, tables and calculators
into Notion, Confluence or anywhere on the web. I've already moved some of my favorite
spreadsheet templates to Rose. Go to rose.com slash Lenny to check them out. That's rose.com slash Lenny.
Okay, so let's shift to actually, how do you actually do this? How do you actually build
a system of product led sales? And I feel like there's maybe three buckets. There's what data
do you need? What infrastructure systems do you need in place? And then what are the people
you need in place and how do you resource it? So maybe let's start with the data. What sort of
data do you need in order to do this? Well, there's different levels of scale on how you should be
attacking this problem. First of all, it starts with just top down intuition. What are the signals
that you're seeing around the accounts that are highly correlative to sales being very excited
about this hand razor or about the sales form submit out of the usage? And you just start with
that. It's as simple as it how many of others are exhibiting those signals. When you have very low
lead volume sale, you don't want to get too complicated with it at the beginning, you want
to be very transparent, you want to just understand what sales are seeing, what they get excited about
and feed them as many accounts that fit that model. The one thing is not to do is just to start
sending every single user to sales, because that's the fastest way for sales to say this product
channel is garbage and I don't ever want to see a lead from it again, because they have such low
close rates and their quota, their salary depends on their ability to close that they just start
disregarding this as a meaningful channel. Now, the second escalation to it is okay,
now you will know intuition, but now let's actually look at the reality of who is hand raising
in the product. So you look at the signal of who looks like a hand razor, smells like a hand razor,
acts like a hand razor, but is not hand raising. And that's a maybe very simple regression model,
it might be just a simple histogram analysis that you do of what differentiates people that are
hand raising from people that are not hand raising and who else fits in into criteria and looks like
a hand razor based on those differences. And that should be your first PQA model. It should be very
simple, it should just be if you can run a linear regression against some of the top coefficient
that you notice, so you know, which has the biggest weight to predictability, and you go with that.
The main piece here is to involve sales very early on, so you're partnering with them,
you're not just dumping it on them, and that you have a very strong feedback cycles from sales,
or whether what you've identified is correct or not correct, because PQA definitions should not
be static, they're constantly evolving. So just because it's right right now, that does not mean
it's going to be right next quarter. So you have to have a lot of rituals with sales team to gather
that feedback. One thing I'll mention is amplitude and mixed panel both have a regression tool that
help you identify correlations and causal kind of connections between metrics. So maybe shout
out there, I think it's called Compass. Yep. And then mixed panels, I think it's called Signal.
Yep. Honestly, to be fair, I've most most of the time I've done it manually at first,
because it requires so much understanding of the data, and if the data is correct, and if I'm even
seeing, because you don't want to throw in too many co related variables into the model, because
then you have issues of those variables, like describing themselves, so to speak, and even
if they're firing, there might not be actual predictive. So it's partnership with analytics
team, and it's partnership with the intuition from the sales team. And then you can start
throwing it into regression model and start to automate and think about scaling it, which there
is a lot of PLS platforms that are coming up and finding their product market fit at the moment,
they can do that for you. But I don't know if I would start there right from the beginning,
unless you actually understand the data, because buying a platform will not bridge the gap for
you understanding what actually matters in your data. Buying a platform or using a third party
solution will help you scale your efforts. Once you hit the first, I would say data sales fit
that you can then scale and just increase distribution of data sales fit. Wow. That's a new
term. There we go. I've not heard that before. Data sales fit. I love it. So you're saying basically
start manually to make sure you fully understand what's going on. That's my take. Yeah, I just,
I don't, I don't, I have a hard time scaling something that I don't fully understand because
data can tell you lies and you can just fit any story that you want into data and you to really
understand it and how it fits and what you are observing and that it makes sense before you go
and start using automation on it. Cool. Okay. And then just one last question on what you were just
talking about, which is finding correlations and causal relationships between usage and users and
understanding who to send to sales. What are some common metrics and attributes that you've
found that are indicative of they should go to sales? So one of the most important things
is to create network effects within the company, within a team, which each additional team member
added to an account benefits from everybody else. This does not mean you have to have platform
network effects. So you're not trying to be LinkedIn. You're not trying to be Instagram.
Those are platform network, network effects. What you are trying to create is the value of
each additional user into account. What that means, I'm going to go through slight deviation here,
is that there not should not be only pulling mechanism where I pull you into my account.
There also should be pushing mechanism. Any new sign up that happens from the company that already
has an account in my system should be presented with an option to join that account, not just
create a brand new account. What you don't want to create is hundreds of rogue individual accounts
that don't know about each other. We as humans, we are creatures of community, we're creatures of,
we like to be surrounded by people, to be validated by people. And at least you want to create that
herd mentality inside of the company and push and pull people into the account. So one of the biggest
PQAs is number of users in the company using your product. By the way, the magic number is
usually seven. The more time you have seven or more users in the company and there's like some
weird parallel here to seven friends at Facebook and seven connections at LinkedIn, but seven I've
seen very often as a check mark. Hey, there's enough value here distributed across multiple
people inside the company that there might be an enterprise conversation to be had.
The second most important is usually some sort of volume threshold. So for example, for amplitude,
it's number of events that you're sending through, which means that you are really starting to tackle
your entire application with analytics as opposed to just a small portion. Or with Miro, it was
number of boards that you have in the account. With Figma, I think it's number of revisions that
you have on any given design. And the last one I would say is velocity. Velocity is the trickiest
one just because we don't have a very easy way to measure velocity in our transactional data.
But it's actually one of the most powerful one that triggers the right timing for the
involvement because the change in velocity either in number of users being added or events being
sent or storage that is being utilized is usually a fantastic predictor.
Amazing. Okay. So kind of like the simplest model to tell you there's a PQA is number of users,
usage and velocity. Yep. Amazing. And users, by the way, can be either usage or velocity metric too.
It's just like, if you're going to do anything, just look at whichever accounts have most users.
It's like an 80-20 rule. For 20% of the efforts, you're probably going to get 80% of the value.
Love it. Okay. So I took us off track and you were talking about what data you may need in
places or anything else along those lines. I would say that it's very important to identify
behavioral signals as well. And I'll give an example. At Miro, we had a very strong behavioral
signal that if there's an admin switch in the account, some sort of evaluation is happening.
So admin transfer, new admin being assigned, that should be ding, ding, ding. All of the bells
are ringing that you should maybe reach out to that person and see what's going on. The other
one that is fascinating is your terms of use pages, your privacy and policy. Nobody cares about it
unless they're considering enterprise deal. If you see anybody from account land on your
terms of use pages, reach out to that person. More likely than not, you have a buyer on the hook
and you can assist them in increasing their perceived value. Wow, that is so interesting.
That's the kind of stuff you only learn having done it. Many, many times, yes. But those signals,
by the way, universal, we looked at it at MongoDB, it was very much true. So these things of when you
wouldn't product constitutes evaluation process and what are the enterprise buyers are looking for.
I wouldn't say, by the way, watching a webinar or landing on an enterprise landing page is a good
behavioral signal because it might be annoying that I just on accident landed on the landing page
and now I'm being spammed by an outbound SDR sequence. But more meaningful actions that are
deeper within engagement, user journey, are incredible predictors. You talked again about
this idea of spamming from sales and it made me think about, I don't even know if I want to ask
this, but have you seen downside to sales just continuing to hammer you as a potential user?
Does that actually hurt? I don't want to know almost because I feel like the answer is no,
but what do you think? I think you have to look at the channel effectiveness. You have only
so many channels to communicate with a customer. Email is obvious. You can communicate with them
in-app. You can have some sort of chatbot. Maybe you can deploy some sort of paid marketing,
maybe social or retargeting display ads, but those are very expensive to utilize.
So stepping back and thinking when it's the right time to reach out, how can I grab their
attention? And if you highly saturated the channel that you are, is your primary for reaching out to
the user, they're not going to react even if it's more of a right time for them to react.
So will it hurt you? I don't think you'll notice it right away, but over time,
I think people become blind to channel communication if it's not applicable to them because
fool me once, shame on you. You tricked me to opening this email. Fool me twice. It's
shame on me and I'll be a lot more frugal of which emails I open or which notifications I react to.
I think that you have to put user journey first and you have to really think about the timing
that it's right for user and PQA, all it is is the right time to engage with the customer
and then go hit them hard over all of the channels of communication. But then also know that accounts
go in and out out of PQA. So today I might be in the PQA, next week I might not be. So you need to
sunset the efforts if you didn't get in touch with the customer and wait for the next PQA moment.
It will happen if your product is holding that goal and is accountable for getting more and more
accounts to reach a threshold for PQA. Wow, that's really interesting. I'm also happy to hear that
answer. Great. Okay, so let's continue down this track of what it takes to implement a product
let's sales motion. Just talked about the data component. What about just systems and infrastructure
and tooling? What do you recommend there as a start? I approach the subject always as an evolution,
not a revolution. So start with your existing systems as much as possible. I would say the biggest
mistakes to avoid if your sales team is very heavily embedded in the sales force, don't try to
have them switch to a different solution. It's just not going to work. You need to try to figure
out how to embed what you need the data in the sales force, not get them to use some other third
party tool. And then I wouldn't jump into any big commitments until I really prove out
viability of product let's sales motion before automating any of it. So I'm more of
this kind of wizard of Osit as fast as much as possible to get the initial traction so then
we can validate that there is investment to be had in scaling it and there's a business value in it.
And the tools you're using at that point is like Google Sheets or is there something else
involved? It's Google Sheets, it's your looker tableau, dashboards, it's your amplitude, charts,
and reports. It can be widgets within sales force or ETLs that you pipe through HubSpot,
Mercados into sales force, or it can be CRM solutions for PLG specifically that you literally
deliver in Excel sheets to sales team to prototype a different outreach. Have you shared any of this
kind of MVP product let's sales stack that you recommend? And if not, I think you should
because that seems pretty useful. Yeah, I think I definitely should. All right. I have my idea
for next spot post. Done. Okay. Got anything out of this chat? We've got that. Okay. In terms of
people, so we talked about data, we talked about tooling infrastructure. What do you suggest in
terms of people and resources to invest in this area as a start and then also as you evolve?
For PLS, the people that you need is product managers that will be able to get account to
PQA stage. You will need sales people that will understand which usage triggered PQA and how to
apply that information to find a buyer and to enable a buyer to convert them to an opportunity.
You need marketing to educate both the end user or enterprise buyer
on why the value of this enterprise solution is going to make sense to you and you need an
analytics team. You need a data analyst that will continuously dig in the data to find
correlative signals that you can test causation in. Those are the four people that you need,
product, analytics, marketing. So I should say engineering too, obviously, but I'm kind of
bundling them together with product. Now, it's an evolution, not a revolution. So if you're
starting from sales led growth, I would highly suggest of you going to a sales team and asking
for somebody to run a pilot with you. So don't just throw these leads into the top-down sales
process and assume that everything is going to be just fine. Attach to yourself a pilot AE,
so account executive or an SDR and see how that works. So you kind of separate yourself from the
mothership of the sales engine and you actually prototype this separately in a little bit of a
vacuum, not under pressure of them top-down quota relief. And if you're in a product led growth
company, then I would suggest do your own sales. It's kind of like a founder led growth. So think
about it like, hey, you need to close maybe first couple of deals yourself first so you truly
understand what's happening. I would not get first handraisers and say, oh, we can close it unless
we have a salesperson. No, just have somebody on support do it, have somebody on finance do it,
you do it. I've been on chat myself plenty of times trying to close the deals just to understand
what's the sales process for the customers looks like. And then you can figure out who to actually
hire and who to actually scale. But for PLS that starts in PLG, you actually just start with more
of blend of an SDR and AE together, because you don't need two separations. So the same person can
both outbound to a customer and close them at the same time. And then you can go into specialization
of the role. So start small, start nimble, prove it out, scale along the way, but have marketing
and analytics support you the entire journey. That is really simple. What I'm hearing is you
don't need to hire someone new necessarily, you have the resources most likely, and then it's
just how do you a lot some time of this team to start investing in piloting?
Yeah, I'd say that my philosophy is that I want to have an ROI for a new hire before putting a
job break out there. And to create an ROI, I need to prove it out of what potential can there be
myself for. So I can almost fund this hire with the revenue that we can generate out of this channel
originally. But obviously, that includes a lot of individual contributor work that you have to do
in the area potentially that is not comfortable, but that's the fastest way to grow in your career.
So I think that's the necessary step for a successful execution.
You want to hear a crazy stat about product led growth and not hiring sales?
Sure.
Okay, great. I was chatting with the founder of Notion for the series I'm working on,
and Notion didn't hire their first salesperson until they were past 10 million ARR.
And believe it, Mira did not hire their first salesperson until they were like five or seven
million in ARR. They were literally closing the contracts through support team, and it was just
fine. Same with Notion, it was their customer success and support team. Yeah.
That is some product led growth right there. Yeah.
I love it. Amazing. Okay, so we've talked about data tooling people. Is there anything else
that you find is really important to being successful with rolling out a product led sales
bridge motion?
The most important thing in product led sales is that there is a different configuration internally
of collaboration that needs to occur. In traditional sales world, marketing creates
pipeline for sales. Sales sells product. Product engages with the paid user to drive retention.
In the product led sales, product acquires and activates a customer, and product creates pipeline
for sales. So relationship is not that there is a go to market org with marketing and sales,
and product just kind of throws features across the fence for them to sell. The collaboration
here is between product and sales. But that means that product has to take on accountability
over pipeline. The worst thing that you can do is to say, I'm going to do product led growth,
or I'm going to do product led sales, and I'm going to do it in marketing.
Recipe for disaster, you will be failure mode within six months, because product has to take
accountability over selling of the product itself. And that is not to be taken lightly,
because so many product teams are deeply, deeply uncomfortable with owning monetization
targets. Now, I'm not saying that product should just be gold on revenue, because that's a very
short term, short outcome, past performance. There has to be a very clear designation onto
long term goals and long term objectives and revenue ownership. And by revenue ownership,
I don't mean that individual product manager also should have a revenue target on their back.
What I mean is that the product leadership should be accountable for the revenue target,
but the product people should be responsible for more of KPIs, free to pay conversion rate,
package mix, PQA, maybe even PQLs, but those are all of the KPIs into revenue. So the piece to me
that is of utmost importance is to keep product accountable. Like you cannot start this product
sales motion and marketing and sales and think that you can continue with the same configuration
inside the company and still succeed. Product has to have a seat at the table and product has to
feel accountable and responsible for it. And when you say accountable, what does that actually
look like? Is it like their OKRs have certain goals around here is how many PQAs you're driving?
Is it a number? Like what does accountable mean? I think so. Every product has some sort of goals
and they definitely should have goals on keeping healthy, engaged user base.
They should definitely have goals in terms of maybe feature utilization or customer satisfaction.
But what I'm saying is to have also some sort of monetization goals. What that is for each company,
I think, differs depending on their level of comfort and how close they are to revenue capture
mechanism. But let's say at Miro, our head of growth product had a self-serve revenue target on
her back. She drove it. She had revenue goal that she had to hit in product. And she shared
marketing because I ran marketing in that company. We shared a pipeline goal creation
because pipeline cannot be created without marketing too. Marketing will need to educate,
marketing will need to find the buyer, marketing will need to do accounts based marketing in
order to attract the buyer and connect it with the usage. So product and marketing now pull
together to create the pipeline and give it to sales. But product can no longer sit on this island
as a feature factory. It only works for the top-down sales organizations, which, as I said,
I think are going to be heavily disrupted over the next 10 years with value-first product-led
growth. This is another hilarious meme that you shared in your LinkedIn. So another reminder,
go check out Elena's LinkedIn with this hilarious meme of product teams being presented. Hey,
you're going to own some revenue targets and they're like, oh, no. Yeah, exactly.
It's actually super interesting because a lot of growth leaders shy away from revenue targets.
Acquisition target, sure. Retention target, engagement target, sure. But monetary target,
oh, no. How can I possibly own a revenue target? I think we all in tech and I specifically point
to finger at why industry and B2B industry just got a little bit complacent with revenue ownership
from product side. And I do think it's catastrophic for us in the long term if we don't fix it.
I love it. I want to do a whole podcast on your meme strategy and your
parodies that you put out, but we'll stay on track here. In terms of the revenue target,
what is that goal like? Is it just in this quarter, X million dollars of revenue? Is it a
growth rate from year quarter to quarter? How do you find people actually define that revenue
target? Right. So there's different targets that you would have for self-serve revenue
versus product-led sales revenue. So for self-serve revenue, your KPI should absolutely be free to
pay conversion rates or trial to pay conversion rate. It's the package mix. It's the average
revenue per user or ARPU. It may be retention rates, first-term retention rate, second-term
retention rate in order for you to sustain the healthy revenue. That's what outputs
self-serve revenue. Those should be the pieces. Do I have a problem in friction then acquiring
new paid user in maximizing their value or in retaining that paid user? Those are the three
inputs that go into self-serve ARR targets. And you should just understand where the biggest
opportunity for your team to focus and driving it. In any of those cases, most of the time,
free to pay conversion is the biggest focus of any given team just because we want to better
convert and inflow into our user base, assuming we have good product market fit so we have a solid
retention happening. In free to pay conversion, there's three pillars that you constantly need to
work on. And one pillar dominates them all. It's monetization awareness.
Simple as that. If you have a freemium product, I guarantee you 75% of your customers in freemium
product are not aware of what you're selling. So only focusing on monetization awareness can give
you incredible output on driving monetization. And it's really its product's ability to communicate
via feature walls, via usage walls, via trials of what the value of the paid offering is.
And I've seen, I've heard stories from Slack of just showing message limits, messaging,
and how big of an improvement on conversion rate it had. I've had it firsthand at SurveyMonkey
where just adding consistent UI across all of the paid triggers that were that Amazon gold color
and making sure that each user has been able to see at least three of them. There's a rule of three
that goes into advertising that we need to see things three times in order to remember them
that drove monetization awareness and conversion rate up. But that's basically consumes 80% of
your work. The second one is just conversion rate optimization. So your pricing page optimization,
your checkout page optimization, your currencies that you offer, the payment methods that you offer
to make sure that there is as little friction as possible in order to actually pay. And then the
last one is what you're selling. Do people want to buy? This is where you actually go up to monetization
model change, which features are in each plan? What are the price points in each plan? How does
the upgrade path look like? Do you have add-on strategy? Do you have just paid-to-paid monetization
plan strategy? And that one is like the last one that you should cross because it involves
a lot of cross-functional effort and decision making. But free-to-paid conversion, upsell
potential, and retention, that's for self-serve AR. For product-led sales, what product should
you own into PQA? But who defines PQA? That's the big question. And who iterates on PQA?
And then how do you actually get people to get to the PQA stage? And just like product often
will own engagement metric or maybe even activation target, your own PQA target. So that just becomes
one of the goals. And depending on where the biggest effort that needs to be, it can be an
activation, it can be engagement PQA. But more and more, I see product-led, especially mature
companies needing to focus their product teams on PQA. Yet they don't have a clear definition
because sales kind of goes rogue and does their own thing. And product fails to deliver predictable
pipeline to sales, which pushes sales into a top-down motion prematurely.
And a PQA target would be like 1,000 PQAs this quarter. Is that the way you do it?
Yeah. Yeah. So you usually actually look at it almost from conversion rate. So you look at, okay,
how many teams do I have in my ICP? So ideal customer profile segment that are active,
that's my denominator. And how many of those teams are reaching PQA targets this month?
So it's like a conversion rate to PQA out of engaged ICP teams.
One thing that I love that you touched on is this awareness of monetization.
People knowing that you have more features and that you may get access to more if you pay.
How do you track that? Is it just like people seeing per account or per user?
Like what percentage have seen one of these upsells or seen them three times?
I track it fairly simple. Two ways. One, qualitatively. I just run surveys against people
and say, do you know what we're selling? It's shocking how many just have no idea what's in
our paid plans. And like we have major issue here. Or I just track pricing page views per
activated account. So how many of the activated accounts landed on the pricing page at least
once? Because that's at least a level of exposure that they hit some sort of trigger that pulled
them to explore pricing page. One of the things that just want to give a hint to anybody who's
listening from a sales top down companies. One issue you might have is that when your
product is developing functionality, especially paid functionality, they just design review it
and ship it for paid plans only. So if I'm in the free plan or in the lower tier plan,
I don't even see it. I don't even know of it existence because it doesn't exist in the app
because it was never designed for me to even see it. So just doing one small change of pushing
your design reviews to review functionality from every single state of the customer, free state,
lower paid state, and target state that this functionality is actually unlocked,
can do all of the difference in the world. Because then you'll actually understand how
that pink functionality is being exposed to a free user. So them to become aware in self serve
manner of its existence. I love love love all these little tactical little insights and tips.
So thanks for sharing all these little little things that end up being the most useful to people.
Just a few more questions and then I'll let you go. One is around pitfalls. What have you found
are the most common pitfalls that startups run into as they're trying to invest in product
let sales? You touched on a few, but what comes to mind when I ask you that? Let's just go through
some summary that we've mentioned already throughout our conversation. Don't treat PLS
as a traditional top down sales process. Every single user that's not equal, it's an opportunity
for you to co chase after you need to understand the right triggers and usage that can help you
automate qualification process. So it's almost automating some of the SDR efforts to say when
is the right time for my sales for my human that I'm paying a lot of money to intervene into this
account and add value because sales interaction has to add value to user journey, not be disruptive
or create additional friction. Because I've seen so many even people posting of like,
why am I getting a phone call 10 minutes later? It's annoying. I'm going to stop using the product
because of it because they feel misunderstood. For that profile, your customers understand
whether you have buyers, whether you have users are there in your ICP segment. No disinformation
up front so you can serve a best experience possible. Number two, hold your product accountable.
This cannot be just executed through marketing and sales. Product has to have a seat at the table
and product and sales relationship has to be one of the closest ones in this motion. And that's
really hard to change, especially in the traditional top down sales company where marketing and sales
have closer relationship. So try to create new rituals, try to create the new ways of communication
between the teams for them to be aligned behind the same goals. Number three, don't leave marketing
out of the equation. Majority of your usage will not have a buyer in it. You will need marketing,
your enterprise marketing, your account based marketing to go and find and hunt that buyer
and to bring them and connect them with usage. So lean on your marketing team just because you're
doing product led growth and product led sales does not mean you don't need marketing and strong
product marketer can do wonders here in helping you with messaging with outreach and sales
enablement materials. And number three, don't wait on data efficacy too long. You might be using
your intuition at the beginning very well, but start thinking about how you will need to scale
your data issues because product led sales is all about leveraging usage of pipeline creation
to be able to measure that usage, understand that usage, track it and evolve it.
Amazing. Two more things. One is you shared before we started chatting that you have some
benchmarks around some of these metrics that you've mentioned of just what is good so that people
can understand what their goals might be. What can you share there?
Yes. So in terms of benchmarks, first of all, it's time to get from individual usage when that
user comes in to have a single job to be done to creating an enterprise level contract. It does not
happen in hours. It does not happen in days. It doesn't even happen in months of usage.
So a couple of benchmarks for you all across Netlify, Miro or Amplitude, which are all of
the companies I work at, it was 12 months plus of usage that had to happen before sales contracts
can be created on sustainable way. Now, that's not an all-encompassing rule. You will have very
high intent buyers coming in sometimes and you'll be able to close them within a week.
But on average, it takes a year of usage to escalate the problem from individual
to a company level solution. It takes time. Be patient. So this is not the problem of get more
signups this quarter and close more pipeline in the same quarter. This is you're building for
long-term growth and you're closing contracts on the signups that happened really last year.
In the best case scenario. Number two is don't confuse user and buyer. Please,
please, please profile your users upon signup. Do not skip those onboarding questions.
No, they do not detract for your onboarding completion rates and people that do drop off
in the profiling stage. They were low intent anyways. They were never going to be activating
if one extra question deterred them from continuing with your product. So profile
your people know who you're talking to. It's more important than couple percentage drop off that
we're never going to activate in the first place. So no, no, no, die user, please, because all of
us are tired of receiving outbound that is not relevant to us. And then the third one is conversion.
So conversion rates here actually stand from the true PLG companies. So freemium conversion rate
is usually around 5%. Trial conversions are more closer to 10 to 15%. But your contract value
start to go up. So it's not so much that you increasing conversion rate, because a lot of
those companies will still go through self-serve monetization flow before they become your sales
pipeline prospects. So conversion rates stay the same, but your contract values and your lifetime
value of the customer is what starts to increasingly go up and that you can influx into creating a
smile revenue curve. Incredible. The question you had about profiling your user, I was going to ask
what questions to ask. I'm guessing maybe a better approach is just go to Miro or Amplitutor and just
go through the sign flow and see what they're asking. Yeah, I would give some couple parameters
in place. Number one, limited to maybe three to four screens, because otherwise it starts to feel
too long. Make sure they only ask information that you're either going to use in the data
segmentation, that then you can escalate to personalization and messaging, but at least that
you're going to use in data segmentation. And experiment with the how deep of an information
that you can ask. You should always be able to ask about company size, about the department which
customers coming from, about their seniority on the team and about their use case. Those four
questions are uniform. Everybody's used to answering them. The rest, like phone number,
or if you need to know the address or so on those experiments, how much you actually
want to make them required questions versus optional. But please, please, please,
experiment on your onboarding questionnaires, all of you.
Closing question. Everyone started with sales, sales-led growth, and then product-led growth
emerged, and now there's this bridge between the two of sales-led growth. Feels like there's always
this new way of growing a business and approaching go-to-market. Is there something beyond product
-led sales? What's next, if anything? Well, I wonder how much Ryzen AI is going to automate some of
those sales conversations. So it's not going to be truly product-led growth because it's not like
just the products it's going to sell itself. What if on the other side of that chat or other side
of that email or even a Zoom call because they can do a deep fake of anybody is going to be AI
selling to you and giving you very deep and personalized answers. I am curious to see how
that's going to evolve because the plethora of information that AI can surface to you in the
very personalized manner in matter of seconds is far stronger than any human or even content
management system can do at the moment. Do you want to coin an acronym right now for what that might be?
I have to be A.I. sales. A.I.S.L.G. Wow, that's mouthful. Elena, this was everything I was hoping
it would be. I imagine this episode will be even more popular than your first one. Thank you so
much for making time and getting into such detail in all the things we talked about. Two final
questions. Working folks finding online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners
be useful to you? I'm on LinkedIn a lot, but I have started my own sub-stack. So please subscribe
to my newsletter if you can. I put more short content on LinkedIn and longer form explanations
in my sub-stack not to compete with your landing newsletter. Plenty of room for everyone. I recommend
yours within sub-stack and we're going to link to it. There's no reason not to subscribe if you're
listening to this podcast. It's only upside. Well, thank you. We're also creating PLG course with
Reforge that is going to go into very nitty-gritty details of everything that I'm talking about to
help you operationalize these concepts. It's launching in fall 2023. So do check that out.
And other than that, I'm a really big believer in democratizing knowledge so we don't have to
all make the same mistakes over and over again. So the biggest way that you can help me is just
share your insights, share your knowledge, and share your learning. So we can all grow so much
faster together. Well, you're one of the best at doing that. And thank you again for doing this.
Thank you for having me, Lenny. Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating
or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all
past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.
Brought to you by Linear—The new standard for modern software development | Braintrust—For when you needed talent, yesterday | Rows—The spreadsheet where data comes to life
—
Elena Verna is a leading growth expert with over 15 years of experience in tech. She was SVP of Growth at SurveyMonkey and interim CMO at Miro, where she built high-performing teams that drove significant growth. She recently served as interim Head of Growth at Amplitude and currently advises and is a board member for early-stage startups. In today’s podcast, we discuss:
• What product-led sales is
• How product-led sales differs from product-led growth
• Unpacking common acronyms: PQAs, PQs, PQLs, and MQLs
• When and how to consider investing in PLS
• Metrics for identifying qualified accounts
• The team, data, and tooling required for implementing PLS
• Common pitfalls to avoid when adding PLS
—
Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led-sales-elena-verna/#transcript
—
Where to find Elena Verna:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/elenaverna
• Newsletter: https://elenaverna.substack.com/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Elena’s background and what she’s doing now
(07:13) Product-led sales (PLS) vs. product-led growth (PLG)
(12:47) How sales solutions can be applied to enterprise-level problems
(15:06) Defining enterprise-level problems
(17:51) How product-led companies start with PLS
(20:30) When to add sales
(22:36) Two ways to get to PLS
(24:27) Why every sales-led-growth company needs to add PLG
(26:50) Two ways you can own revenue
(28:37) PQAs, PQs, PQLs, and MQLs
(37:17) How to get started adding PLS
(42:01) Metrics to identify PQAs
(47:00) Why sales should be carefully applied
(49:07) Systems, infrastructure, and tooling
(50:59) The people and resources required for PLS
(53:42) Why you should have a clear ROI for every new hire
(55:05) Why product needs to be accountable for monetization with PLS
(59:57) Revenue-based goals product teams should have
(1:06:28) Common pitfalls startups run into when implementing PLS
(1:09:15) Benchmarks and the amount of time needed for implementing enterprise solutions
(1:12:04) Using onboarding to profile users
(1:13:08) Will AI be the next sales movement?
—
Referenced:
• Elena’s previous episode on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/elena-verna-on-how-b2b-growth-is-changing-product-led-growth-product-led-sales-why-you-should-go-freemium-not-trial-what-features-to-make-free-and-much-more/
• Miro: https://miro.com/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Elena’s PLS funnel diagram: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elenaverna_b2b-product-led-sales-guide-activity-7052664130763206658-yxLK/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
• Elena’s memes: https://www.elenaverna.com/memes
• Mixpanel Signal reports: https://mixpanel.com/blog/mixpanel-signal-launch/
• Amplitude Compass chart: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/235147347-The-Compass-chart-discover-your-users-a-ha-moments
• Looker: https://www.looker.com/
• Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
• Marketo: https://nation.marketo.com/
• Waitlist for PLG course on Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/programs/product-led-growth
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
—
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe