Slack, circa 2016: “I think we can get away without having a sales team in any kind of traditional way probably forever.”
Slack, circa 2023: 900+ people in sales.
Well, that took a turn…
Gone are the days when it was PLG versus sales. Also gone are the days when PLG companies (over)hired sellers with a growth-at-all-costs mindset. You might not realize that PLG companies actually outspent their traditional SaaS peers on sales & marketing as a percentage of revenue as of July 2022.
Today, the new frontier is how to combine PLG and sales for efficient growth.
Over the last year I’ve had a chance to feature stories about PLG and sales from some of the top SaaS startups including Figma, ClickUp, Webflow, Zapier, Supermetrics, and Hotjar. Now I’m distilling those learnings into a concrete guide to PLG and sales in 2023.
Your five step plan:
Start with the customer journey
Validate that sales is incremental
Identify product signals to drive engagement
Define the right sales plays
Be thoughtful about comp & operations
This post recaps my keynote at Pavilion’s CRO Summit in London. Special thanks to those who provided feedback on an earlier version!
Anti-patterns to avoid
Before jumping into what to do, I wanted to start by highlighting what not to do. Here are six anti-patterns I see when SaaS companies try to combine PLG and sales motions.
Hide pricing and force all users to talk to sales.
Water down PLG offerings so they don't "compete" with enterprise deals.
You might notice great logos who are sitting on your free plan or on a cheap self-serve plan. Sales’ instincts will be to cut away at self-service offerings and hide your pricing in order to force these high-value prospects into paying more.
This is certainly tempting, especially if the sales team is under pressure to hit this quarter’s revenue goals. But it ultimately leads to a disinvestment in PLG and subsequently a smaller and smaller pool of new prospects entering the sales pipeline.
Call on every new free user independent of what they’ve done in the product.
Over-index on commercial conversations rather than customer experience and delivering value upfront.
Get too greedy on the initial purchase.
PLG and sales requires patience. You’ll attract users earlier in their purchasing process, often well before they’ve generated buy-in for enterprise-wide adoption.
Rather than go for broke right away, give these folks time to find value in the product and advocate for broader adoption inside their organization. You might find that in time they’ll resurface as a Product Qualified Account that is ready to buy.
Only talk to existing product users rather than navigating to the buyer.
As the hype grew around Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) – that is, existing users who signal buying intent based on their product interactions – selling into PQLs became the default starting point for many PLG companies looking to add sales.
While selling into PQLs does generate quick wins for sales, the reality is that those who use your product within a large organization are generally not the same people as those who buy your product. You’ll want to work with those product users to navigate to the buyer with dedicated messaging and enablement that speaks to the buyer’s priorities.
Step 1: Start with the customer journey
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.