👋 Hi, it’s Kyle. Welcome to another free edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups. Today I’m exploring org structures, KPIs, and tools — and how PLG businesses look different from their traditional SaaS peers.
Who actually owns “growth” at a software company?
Is it product management? Product-led growth is a popular strategy.
Is it marketing? They build messaging and run campaigns which should drive growth.
Is it growth? Growth is in the name after all…
And what about sales? They’re closest to the customer.
Rather than simply opine, I wanted to investigate what the data had to say. I combed through the OpenView and Pendo Product Benchmarks report, which featured survey data from 1,000+ companies ranging from pre-revenue to $50M+ ARR.
Here's what the data shows 👇
Sales-led companies
Sales is the power player. The team owns sales-assisted revenue — aka nearly all revenue at a traditional SaaS company — and is highly influential across other KPIs.
Customer success owns retention – no surprise there. They also tend to own onboarding and activation (39% of the time) with an assist from product.
Marketing owns new sign-ups/leads (>50% of the time) with exceptions being among outbound-focused companies or early stage businesses lacking a mature marketing function.
Growth teams often aren’t really a thing at a traditional SaaS company. If they do exist, these teams can be all over the map in terms of their KPIs and reporting structures.
Product management doesn’t tend to have clear growth KPI ownership, which I think is a missed opportunity even if a company doesn’t see itself as product-led. Of course, even without “owning” a growth KPI, product teams (and the product itself) are highly influential for achieving all KPI targets.
You might notice that we didn’t include expansion revenue in the dataset. In my experience, expansion revenue tends to live in either sales (via Account Managers) or customer success (with less complex expansion motions).
PLG companies
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