Georgiana: Welcome to the Forget the Funnel podcast, where we help SaaS and recurring revenue businesses stop guessing and start making more customer-led and data back.
To make decisions about how to grow. We're a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps teams learn from their best customers and map and measure their experiences to unlock your most effective levers for growth. If you're ready to evolve past best practices and other people's playbooks because you know that what got you here won't get you there, then this show is for you.
With that, let's dive into the episode.
April: Hey, Gia. We're back. It's been a while. How have you been?
Georgiana: I've missed you.
April: It's good to see you again. You could tell we're wearing the same time at the same thing. I was gonna ask about wearing the last. We should have changed. Shouldn't we? Yeah, we should have changed our outfits.
We've been busted. We're recording multiple things together. But that's 'cause this is so much fun. Today, we're talking about product-led sales. Um, and so we recorded something earlier where we were talking about the difference between messaging and positioning. And it's interesting; we kept getting side-polled into talking about pure sales motion versus a combination of product-led growth with sales motion.
And so we thought it would be a good thing to cover this. And this is a lot, uh, you know, a lot of the companies you work with are pure. Product-led growth. A lot of the companies that I work with have an A-A-P-L-G thing, but then they have a sales thing over the top. So, I thought this would be a fun one for us to talk about.
'cause I think there's some overlap there, but I think we deal with slightly different kinds of companies. So it'd be fun to explore that. So, talk to us about product-led sales. What do we mean when we talk about this being a topic?
Georgiana: Product-led sales is such a trendy term. Because I mean, I talk to a lot of teams at like. They're doing product-led sales, but they don't call it product-led sales.
April: That's right.
Georgiana: And a lot of the teams that we work with, yes, they are product-led. And I think thinking about it in terms of the center of gravity is helpful because we work with teams who are product-led, and they have.
Maybe a small sales org, but they're mostly like inside sales. They're not like I keep referring to now, like the center of gravity of things. This team is really looking to build, um, a lot of demand on the front end of the product at the functional user level. And they wanna use those functional users as their sort of acquisition model.
And so for product-led sales, that's even the case if they're selling into very complex organizations. They still wanna leverage this product at the front end. So, I don't know what the sort of official definition of product-led sales is. Me neither. And you know what, as marketers, we just make up definitions for things I know.
I know. Well, we could call it PLG with a sales motion. We could call it a sales-led org that leverages the product, you know, leverages PLG in some way.
April: Yeah, yeah. In my opinion, there's, there's all kinds of flavors of that, right? I work with a lot of companies that offer free trials, and they don't think that's product-like growth at all.
Right, right. So they're like, this is not a product-led growth thing. Like, I dunno what you're talking about.
Georgiana: But I think the PLG people would say it is exactly the case. And I know we work with some teams too where they're more sales-led, and they're like, we know we can be leveraging the product more.
We want 'em, we wanna start leveraging the product for acquisition. They're because, like, the unit economics just don't work out, or they recognize. Most who are coming through the front door are functional users, and trying to go direct with an outbound model to the economic buyer isn't working for them.
April: I mean, I think this is a very good distinction that I don't think people understand enough. Often, in a product like growth motion, these two constituents are what we have. So we've got the end user. Then we have, you know, what would maybe be an economic buyer? Yeah. Sometimes, yeah. That is like a manager or an executive and not necessarily the user of the product at all.
Right? And so we need to decide who's the right champion in this account, like who can make a deal happen. And often, you know, there's this assumption that we will get the end users in. Then, we'll upsell the end users on something. Mm-hmm. But then, sometimes, the end user does not actually have the ability to do that.
They go up to the manager. Well, the managers have a different definition of value. The manager's like, well, what's in it for me? Like, I don't care if you guys use this.
Georgiana: Yeah. And it depends. It's not always one. It's not always one. Right? In some cases, it genuinely is that functional user because of the, because of the pricing model, or, you know, because it's like, sometimes it's because it's usage-based pricing or because the functional user happens to also make the economic decisions for their team or, or have, you know, budget control, but not always.
So, in the case of product-led sales, what I would say is it's where it changes hands, and you know, it goes from a functional user to an economic buyer. And so what we're often looking for when we're actually genuinely trying to leverage PLG. A, you know, a model that requires sales to get that economic buyer involved and make decisions.
What it takes is helping that functional user get to a certain point of value in their product usage, where they're like, yeah, this thing can work for us, and this thing matters. How long have they used the product in a useful way? It is not always the same. Sometimes, it's over a long period of time, and then they hit this threshold.
Sometimes, there's a shadow going on where they can. Oh yeah. Use it for a little while.
April: Absolutely. And kind of get away with it. You know? I don't think the PLG people think enough about shadowing it. Oh yeah. That's a why. 'cause a lot of times that's exactly what they're doing. That's exactly what they are: shadow it.
Georgiana: In fact, I would say that many of the companies that have, you know, have that more upmarket customer base, they. They don't understand how that product is being used and the sort of threshold, and they often don't see the opportunity to go back into their existing functional user base to identify who those are.
Not only economic buyers are, but who those enterprise deals might be in that. Yeah. Sort of low touch offering and like, I don't like this analogy, but it can be like, what is the analogy? Like shooting fish in a bucket or something.
April: Like, you bought this. It's amazing. I believe it's a barrel. Some, for some reason, we have fish in a barrel, and we're shooting them.
Why would we, I don't know. Patient a barrel. Thank you. I was like, what is the other, that analogy? But I say all that to say, which now you think about, it sounds like the dumbest thing, like why would we? Do that.
Georgiana: Yeah. But okay. And they put the sales team out, making this outbound motion to net new customers.
And that's like, they're only focused on that when, like, actually, you've got this whole base of customers that are using your product in really interesting ways. And their ICP actually lines up perfectly Yeah. For your sales team. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I would say that like, in terms of, you know, a definition of product-led sales or whatever you wanna call it, which really isn't that important, is like.
The sales team is engaging customers who have gotten some sort of value instead of going directly out to the market. It's like taking advantage of the customer base and the sort of push in the market. To use a product like yours, you can basically go to that customer base of people who actually really love your product.
They're using it in really interesting ways, and they, I, you identify your ICP in there, you identify, and we'll talk about the, you know, definitions of all these things, PQA and PQL and all that. But the sales team doesn't reach out to somebody on your website. It's not book a demo on your website.
It's to try to get to some moment of value and use the product in a meaningful way so that sales talk to amazing product-fit customers.
April: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I've seen companies use this in a different way for the clients I've worked with. But a lot of times, you know, if they have really great adoption on, you know, whatever, the free or Low cost, whatever way the thing is. Yeah. They're using that as a signal. So, like, you know, I've worked with a couple of companies where they have this very limited functionality thing that they give away for free, and just everybody and their dog uses it. And so it's everywhere. And what the sales team is doing is looking for penetration in an account.
So, yes. You know, once we hit something like. More than five users. Yep. Or more than 10 users. Yep. Then, what the sales team is trying to do is come in over the top and talk at an executive level. Mm-hmm. And sell this much bigger thing. Yep. And say, look like we have this bigger thing that could use be, be used by departments that are not using it, but we see already that this group is using it and so it works for this part of your process, but look, there's this other value if you were using it across all these other parts.
Yeah. And so. That seems like a nice, sensible thing, but I think a lot of companies aren't really thinking about like even that company. So, here are a couple of companies I'll give you examples. One was when I had this great conversation with the founder of Postman, and he told me about when they started.
They were an open-source thing. They were giving it away for free, and they just weren't; they weren't concerned about how they were gonna monetize it. It was kind of their side hustle thing at the beginning, and then it really took off. And he said, even at the moment when he raised his first round of financing, they really didn't know how they were gonna monetize it.
So the idea was, I don't know, we'll figure something out. And so they didn't know if they were gonna upsell, cross-sell these same users on other things, or if they were gonna have some other thing. And then eventually where they landed in the product strategy was this idea of that. The original idea was they had this API testing tool, and then they started thinking about it.
Well, you know, what's our mission here? Our mission is to deliver amazing APIs, but if you look at what's holding us back from delivering amazing APIs, well, we're actually using different tools. Across the API lifecycle, everybody's using us for testing, but they're using something else to do development.
So when testing finds a problem, then it's gotta go to development. They fix it in a different tool, and then it comes back, and there's all this lag and things going back and forth and different tools. Then, the same thing happens when we take the API and deliver it to people. We use different tools to do documentation, different tools to distribute the API, and different tools to package it and all this stuff.
But if we had the same tool, we could do all of that for the full lifecycle. The end result would be that we'd ship APIs faster, and the APIs would be of much higher quality. And so that's kind of where they ended up leading. But then you think, well, who do we sell that to? Well, it's not the developer that's, you know, using my freebie thing, product-led growth, API testing tool, they don't care, they're just the testing people.
Mm-hmm. So they then had to figure out, well, how do we get into this? Who's the right person to sell to to pitch this bigger thing? What's the value proposition for them? So, the positioning they're using for the PLG part of this motion is very different from the positioning they use for this over-the-top sales motion.
Where do you think people screw this stuff up? But because you've worked with a lot of companies like this that are pure PLG, what's their biggest problem? When you go in there, what is the thing that you're like, oh God, yeah?
Everybody messes this up. When it comes to like, layering
Georgiana: In sales, you mean? Yeah. When it comes to product lid sales, we're working with the team on this right now. Actually, in that situation, we wanna help customers get to value on their own. Okay. I'm gonna make the, the example of, uh, this, it's a landlord, uh, basically like property management tool.
Super, super vertical, and we haven't actually gone through the whole customer experience mapping exercise with them yet. But you know, we're, we're starting to think about it, and we're gonna go in, in, in, uh, a week from now and really dig into, like, how can they help lower the touch? What we have found is that regardless of the number of tendencies, so like a number of properties, so you can imagine like over like I own 200 properties, I'm managing 200 properties versus, and they have those versus these customers who are coming through the front door who have like one or two.
What we learned was that the sort of context that these people are in actually is, has no correlation with the number of tendencies. Interesting. Which is kind of frustrating for this team. It was kind of frustrating. We were hoping to see a correlation, and like, no, actually, there's no direct correlation between in their jobs to be done, so they, it's gonna be important for them to figure out.
What is the context that a customer is in? Again, I'm using jobs to be done, but I only mean by that, which is the context of somebody coming through. What's the problem they're trying to solve? Coming through the front door, find out the number of tendencies because legitimately, if one of these landlords has a hundred, 200, you know, locations or rentals or, you know, tendencies again.
They're gonna need handholding, they're gonna need sales, they're gonna need an onboarding specialist to get them over the hump of the onboarding because it's just such a big lift for them. And also, it's worth so much more; their willingness to pay is obviously way higher. And so it's a higher value deal, and they're not just gonna sign up without talking to somebody.
That's right. There is an opportunity for us to show them value in the product without involving sales. Right, because of what they told us really matters to them. And there are very specific parts of the product that we can surface to them very early in that customer experience to then demonstrate to even the big guys that like, oh yeah, this thing, yeah, this thing is gonna solve my problem.
Because we can show them what, in this case, it was, it's like this bird's eye view of being able to understand at a very high level, many, many properties. And there's like these different, you know, I'm not gonna get into the details of the, of the feature set that really stands out to those big tendencies, but.
Or those bigger, uh, landlords, but helping the team figure out who to reach out to and when, what the threshold for the number of tendencies should be, and also what to say when you do reach out.
April: And so that's a really small example. And it sounds like this connection between product and sales, if you're gonna do this stuff, there needs to be this good glue between product and sales.
No. Oh boy.
Georgiana: Yeah, and I mean, that's where this always falls down. And so, the other example I have is that the opposite extreme of this is a company that I don't know if I can, but I can necessarily name. So I won't name them, but let's say, you know, what their re-user base is? They've got like 6 million users.
They sell to individuals basically at the consumer level all the way up to Fortune 100, like the huge span of customers. That is a perfect scenario for product-led sales. You would have to incorporate some sort of product-led sales motion, and also, because they're so ubiquitous and because they've been around for so long, they're so a.
Established in the market. Everybody expects a PLG motion, even the enterprise folks in those cases. Uh, so helping that team identify the ICP that comes through the front door, what does ICP even mean for them? What is important from an ICP standpoint? Ideal customer profile. So helping them figure that out.
But then also, what product usage should the sales team be looking at? Or a product-qualified account, for which I'm just throwing out these terms. You can think of a product-qualified account as such. Like that, hitting that seven threshold that we talked about, like. There are seven people from a company now using the product.
Right. So you know that you've got a certain amount of saturation, or you've jumped into another team, which is also very interesting. Yes. And you've used the product in a way that indicates that you have a more complex organization.
April: A couple of the folks that I work with use that as a metric.
Georgiana: Yeah, exactly. But where I see a lot of teams mess up is that the ICP shows up through the front door, and they're like, who? And sales just like jumps on 'em, even though we haven't actually gotten in there yet. And, as you might, that might not even be the right person. That's, that's bad.
April: Like, that's just kind of, you know. I know. I don't think it's bad. I think in some ways it's appropriate, but it's appropriate where the client always needs handholding from sales, in which case I would question why. You're doing product-like growth, or you're trying to do product-like growth in the first place, so maybe it's just not appropriate.
Like I do think that we have these, these things come in waves, right? And you know, there was a period there where everybody was trying to do a product-like growth, and then a bunch of companies kind of failed at it. And in my opinion, they were companies where the product just wasn't appropriate. If you look at the size of the deal and the complexity of the deal and the complexity of the product,
It was just easier to sell with a salesperson evolved versus not a salesperson involved. And that the size of the deal was big enough to support it, so why not do that? But it was trendy for a while. Like everybody was like, oh my God if we're not doing PLG, we're dead. You know, again, and you see these PLG experts, you know, I, I, in the middle of this, I remember thinking we had reached peak PLG.
There was a PLG expert, and I opened up LinkedIn, and this person said, if you're not doing PLG, you're an idiot, basically. And all companies like sales are not even gonna be a thing in like three years or something like this. And I thought, okay, that's it. We've reached a peak, it's downhill from there. And that same expert, you know, now talks a lot about product-led sales because that didn't happen.
Georgiana: Yeah. No, it's very real. I mean, is it Lenny's Lenny, um, did a study I think of like what's the different growth models, the evolution of, I saw this model saw across a bunch of different companies, which I thought was really interesting.
April: It was really interesting because a lot of the companies that had been the real superstars, the G of, of PLG growth.
Yeah. As they moved upmarket. Yeah. They started adding a lot of sales horsepower, and a lot of them are doing it now; the majority of their deals are getting done with sales.
Georgiana: But those are typically the case. Actually, I wonder if that's always the case. So what I was gonna ask before when you were, when you were talking about this, was like the go-to-market motion, I guess.
And what I mean by that is the distribution models that they're leveraging and whether or not they've decided to double down on outbound or if sales are actually going out and finding new deals. Versus sales being more focused on more supporting, like from a product-led sales standpoint, like, uh, more inside sales.
I don't even know if that's a term that's used anymore inside sales.
April: Well, I'll tell you something. I don't think I see a lot of companies doing pure cold outbound. Like I said, I don't see any companies doing pure cold outbound. I do. Almost nobody I'm working with is doing that. Like they're, they're smarter than that.
Georgiana: Yeah. We're, yeah. I, so we're not generally working,
April: That's right. They, they're smarter than that. So they're, you know, at a minimum, they've got a very targeted account list. They're chasing at a minimum. Like that would be the most cold. I see. Mm-hmm. The company has gotten very clear on how they have a hit list.
This is the criteria list. Yeah. From that criteria list, each rep has a short list of accounts, and their job is to get something cooking in that short list of accounts. Yeah. They're doing account-based marketing, and often there's a marketing motion. Associated with that. So the marketers have the same short list of accounts, and they're running very targeted campaigns, whether it's advertising, getting these people to show up for events, or getting these people to consume their content or whatever.
And what marketing's trying to do is give these accounts a way to raise their hand and then, and then, the salespeople. On them, like paint and whatever. So, you know, I think sometimes people have this idea that when we say we have sales, you know, sourcing a deal, that they're taking a page outta the phone book, just calling randoms, right?
But a lot of them do. A lot of them. I do. I don't, I honestly, I don't know. Maybe I'm working with bigger, smarter companies. You are or something. You, but I don't work with anybody doing that.
Georgiana: Yeah. We ended up hearing from a lot of the teams that we tried outbound or ads. You know, we've been doing that for a while, and we know that that's not the best thing to do.
Then, we try to help them identify their inbound opportunity. How do we identify the people who have the problem? You solve. Right? And where, where, what are their watering holes? Where are they hanging out? So that you can, that that's right. Where do they hang out?
April: But I think, you know, where we do have sales sourcing deals is generally not just a Wild West thing. It's a very targeted thing. And then they're trying to figure out marketing and if there's a product-led motion, like a free trial or something else going on. It is just another data point for these salespeople to decide whether this account is, you know, open to a call.
Georgiana: Yeah, so sometimes that we work with, and I don't consider this to be product-led sales, sometimes what we are doing is we discover that there's a functional user involved early that needs to validate before they float it up. The food chain.
April: This is the perfect opportunity for product-like growth.
Georgiana: Yeah. And I, but in that scenario, I would consider that person the champion, at least the initial. And, um, sometimes we're working with teams that are so, well, I don't wanna say they're so risk averse.
Obviously, introducing PLG is a big deal like that, which requires dev. It requires, you know, you've gotta make so many decisions about, you know, the product. So many decisions. And it's so messy if it fails. That's right. So what we, uh, sometimes recommend is, and I don't know that this is a term, but I call it like faux freemium, where you're just giving them a sandbox account to kick the tires on their own.
Yeah. It's not real freemium. It's not real PPLG. Well, I mean, it could be considered real PLG, depending on who you're talking to, but it's kind of a. Um, you know, a kick-the-tires account that you can't actually get that much value from. But when you can get in there, maybe you've said you are, you know, you've got quick ser a franchisee of Quick Serve restaurants, and once you get into the product, you see how it would look for quick serve, you know, a franchise of quick-serve restaurants or Right.
You know, that's a, as a real, you know, example. So you can, basically. Populate that sandbox account so that it emulates what it would feel like, look like, and feel like to use this product, even though they can't actually use it, they can't actually upload any of their own, you know, data, whatever. That is not a high-risk initiative.
Right, because, like, generally, I say it's not a high risk because, generally, the sales team already has these sandbox accounts all over the place. They use them in demos all the time. And so it's not a big lift, uh, from a technical standpoint to roll out something like that. It often gives the sales team much more qualified folks to reach out to, you know, capture an email address before you give that access to that account.
So yeah, still getting their information. And then if they fall into your ICP and they've actually kicked the tires in the sandbox account, well that's a way better, more qualified lead for you to, you know, spend your time on. Absolutely. But that's not what I think of when I think that's not product-led sales.
That's just like. Leveraging the product for sales, but product-led sales are much more, in my opinion anyway, and I think this is probably pretty universal like it's much more programmatic and at scale allows you to see, hey, our product is being used in really interesting ways, either because of number seats or some sort of, you know, product usage.
They fall into this ICP criterion where, all of a sudden, they're a product-qualified account. Yes. And then you can look at that account and say, There's my PQL, there's the person inside of that account that I care about. And we've actually done jobs research with, uh, you know, teams on this where we do the initial jobs to be done research on the front end.
So we identify who's coming through the front door. I. How do those people use the product? How does that, how does the complexity sort of get added? Uh, I shouldn't say complexity; really, what I mean is value. How do we identify the person in that account who is actually the decision maker in the economic buyer?
And we've done research as well where we've like coupled that with talking to their biggest customers, their actual, like enterprise deals and, and saying, how did this thing start? Like, who was the first person? How was the product used? What was valuable to you? Who was the second person?
April: Yeah. It is great to understand how things move around in an account.
Georgiana: Totally. And That gives you your ICP because then you can say, okay, here are the lookalike companies, right? Like, yeah, here's the industry. Exactly. That popped up. Here's the team I. Uh, you know, the initial team and then the adjacent teams that started using the product. So if you can do you sort of reverse engineer their experience and then you're giving sales ICP data and marketing ICP data, and you're also giving them, you know, you can give them the demographic and firmographics, but you also have that understanding of like the psychographics.
What do they care about? What do they come for, and what matters to them? And also the product usage so that it can programmatically, you know, served up to sales. Now I say where this falls down and, of course, is that that's really, it's a really hard thing to do, and there's gotta be a lot of, like, sales and, and product have gotta be in lockstep about.
What this means and to whom, and I think the glue that has the potential to bind is a really strong product marketing function, but that's often missing.
April: I agree with that. I think product marketing is technically the glue that brings it together, but I don't know. But often it's often it's this amorphous growth team.
Mm-hmm. You know, again, we like to give different names for things that have always existed, but.
Georgiana: Yeah, so I would say that like the biggest things that I am, to go back to your original question, the biggest thing that I challenge is, is like sales jumping into early there, there're, you know, being a misalignment with product around like what this all means and what this needs to look like because the product has.
The product has to be a really active participant in this product-led sales motion. Um, if they're not a part of it, the whole thing falls down, obviously. And that goes for sales as well. So they have to be in lockstep about what this needs to look like. But also, I see a lot of teams go like, well, there are tools for this now.
And then they end up. They fall into this trap of relying on the best practices that the tools are giving them instead of relying on what customers actually need. Why are you making that face? So what do you mean by that? What do you mean?
April: Explain that. What do you mean by saying they're relying on the tool? Like what kind of tool?
Georgiana: A lot of product-led sales tools have come onto the market in the last couple of years, and they promise product-led sales for these companies. And they have these like playbooks. Oh, so in, so they're like, okay, well here's, tell us your ICP, like they haven't done the work to find out and do that sort of reverse engineering of like, what does a successful enterprise customer look like?
How did they start using the product? What was that? What did that product usage look like? When did that economic buyer not always necessarily show up? But when does that economic buyer, that champion, need to show up? When does this shadow thing have to get cut off? Right? And who is that person?
They haven't done any of that work. They don't know how it goes from one team to another, and they go into these playbooks with these teens. I'm not gonna name products here, but a lot of them come with playbooks. The sales teams are like, well, the playbook in this tool that I'm using determines their strategy instead of actually figuring out when sales should be involved or when they shouldn't be involved.
Yeah, that sounds bonkers. That's how it's bonkers. It's so scary because there's so much on the line. There's so much revenue on the line. In those cases, that's what scares me about it. I'm like. You're, yeah. You're foiling this like a massive revenue opportunity. Right? And you're just throwing out somebody else's playbook at it.
Like what?
April: Yeah. That sounds like cuckoo town to me. Yeah. But it's coming back to this one where sales jump too early. How do you get around that? Is that just product and sales getting together and making a decision? These are the conditions that have to have happened before. You should be reaching out to these customers.
Like, 'cause it seems to be pretty prevalent. Right. You know, and I don't, like, often I find this like, you know, I used to find this when, um, you know, if sales were jumping the gun and trying to jump into accounts that weren't ready yet. Then, I'm talking about a non-product-like growth thing. It was usually because sales just didn't have enough stuff to do, and so it was like, you know, we had to make sure that we were keeping them busy with leads from other places or with a targeted account list for them to go after or some other stuff going on.
Like, I was curious what you saw. How do you stop this sales team from reaching out to these accounts that just aren't ready yet?
Georgiana: It's different if it's a sales team if it's a predominantly sales-led product that adds in A PLG, the answer is different than if it is a PLG product who is then layering in product-led sales.
And in that scenario where it is a predominantly product-led company that layers in sales, 'cause they're moving upmarket, as you know, as all mature, good, mature PLG companies do. And they need to, you know, they move upmarket, they start selling to more sophisticated, what ends up happening is they have such a small sales org that they can't.
Tackle everything at the same time, and so they shouldn't be right. They should be preserving their energy for, like, the leads that actually legitimately need them versus just. An ICP showed up to the front door, like, let's, let's go get 'em right. Um, which is different if you're learning and you're, you're, you know, in, in learning mode it's a little bit different.
But if you're in a situation where you've got a small sales org and you're trying to layer in on top of a product-led organization, not all customers are created equally. Not all leads, you know, are created equally. So like, use your resources wisely. Actually, talk to the people who get value, and you won't even need to sell them.
It's gonna be such a no-brainer for them because they're gonna be like, oh, I've got 15 people using this product and I should have, you know, a purview over them. I should have admin access. I should know that my security standards are being met. I should know. You know? That's right. All these things are needed.
It's gonna be so obvious you're not even a need to. You're not even really gonna need to sell them. So, like, make good decisions. Um, don't waste your time on people that aren't ready. Um, but again, it's a different scenario if you've got this big sales team that's twiddling their thumbs.
April: Yeah, they're the ones that are, they're the ones that are gonna jump again.
Georgiana: That's a leadership problem. That's not a sales team problem.
April: That's a leadership problem. Yeah. A sales and marketing leadership problem, in my opinion. We're coming near the end of the time. Would you like to leave us with any parting pearls of wisdom? I mean, is there anything we didn't cover that you wanna talk about?
Georgiana: Oh, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this too, but I would say that if you were a product-led company looking to move up the market and have an offering for these more sophisticated, more complex customers, Don't just blindly build out a sales team because you've got one sales guy that says he can scale up the team and actually learn first from those more complex, more sophisticated customers.
How did they adopt your product? How did it go from being a PLG for them to needing, you know, something more complex? Learn about the product adoption patterns, learn about the team adoption patterns, because if you can sort of reverse engineer that and then you know, identify who that ICP is coming through the front door, then you can.
Tag them appropriately when they sign up. You can recognize when they turn into a PQA, and then your sales team can go look and find out who the appropriate person to talk to is.
April: I think that's super advice, and I think, uh, you know, I also think that the companies should open their mind a little bit more and think about why the customer needs a salesperson involved.
Like, what is the role? What is the salesperson getting done here that couldn't get done in the product? And, you know, and then question number one is, do we actually need a salesperson to do that or could we just do that? You know, are we'd fallen down the product somewhere. If we do need a salesperson to do it, then let's be clear on what the salesperson's job is here.
Yeah. Right. So, if the salesperson's job is to come in and sell a different persona that isn't a user. Let's talk about how that happens. Let's talk about the right moment for the salesperson to reach out. Let's make sure they understand what the value proposition is at that level. Yeah, and that might be very different from the value proposition at the easier level it is.
I think there just needs to be some deeper thinking about it. We can't just throw sales at it to do this, the same thing that the product is doing. For example, if we need sales resources, we need them for a reason. So, what is the salesperson's job in that situation? Are we clear on it? Are we clear who the persona is that they're talking to?
Are we clear on the positioning and the value process? And then what constitutes. Really a qualified account so that they're ready. And I think if you do all that, that's good. But I mean hard, right? Like when you actually lay it out.
Georgiana: Yeah, it sounds super hard. And when you start talking to customers, you realize, oh, there's actually a lot of stuff that we are not doing in this product today that these more sophisticated customers need.
And then you're gonna keep the product team real well there's, right? Like, are you even ready to go? Win in that market. That's right, that's right. And be honest with yourself about the value that you're providing today. Because if you are new to this, if you're newer to this enterprise space, you're gonna learn right quick that, like. Actually, you don't put; you don't have a lot of them, the features and the functionality that they're looking for.
And that's why I, I was talking about the relationship between sales and product being like real and, and you know, uh, candid with what the product can actually do. 'cause like there's a, there's gonna be a disconnect there, but it's a great opportunity and you, you know, there's the crawl, walk, run version of this.
And, you know, just make sure sales is, feels like they're in a, you know, a good position to be able to actually provide something of value and, you know, say things that these customers actually care about instead of, you know, it being a bit of a pipe dream because your product actually isn't ready for those more sophisticated customers.
There's sometimes some catching up to do. So, yeah, it's a big thing. At the end of the day, again, I'm, I'm gonna rely on the, like, spend some time learning about what is actually gonna provide value to those customers before you go and build out this big old sales team that might be just driving everybody crazy.
April: Yeah. Yeah,
Georgiana: It's a big topic. There's a lot there, but, um, there's a crawl, walk, run, I think in all of these scenarios. If you're a sales led and you wanna layer in product A-A-P-L-G motion, if you're a PLG and you wanna lay layer in a sales lead, there is a path, but, uh, it's, there's a crawl, walk, run in all of those scenarios.
Hopefully, they became a little bit more obvious when we were talking about this. But yeah, that's probably a good place to wrap up. Well, thanks.
April: This was fun. Yeah. We should do this again sometime. Yeah, we should. We should. Okay. Sounds good. We're very bad at organizing these things. We both have busy schedules and so by the time we do it, it's like three months after we originally said we were gonna do it.
But yeah, look at us getting it done. I know totally. We're gonna, we're gonna get better at this April. There we will. Okay. All right.
Georgiana: Bye-bye. And that's it for this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topic that we covered, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn, or you can visit our website@forgetthefunnel.com.
Also, if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe and help spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. Okay. See you next time.
