The data is increasingly clear: it’s not PLG versus sales, it’s PLG AND sales.
Today’s go-to-market playbook embraces product-led sales, which reduces friction in the sales cycle and converts users into revenue by pairing product usage with personalized assistance. Recent survey data from 200+ companies shows that product-led sales now accounts for nearly as much revenue as self-service for the average PLG business.
While product-led sales sounds great on paper, it’s much more complex behind the scenes. Folks struggle with questions like:
Where should sales reps prioritize their time?
What are the right signals to look for before having a rep reach out?
Should we be tracking product-qualified leads (PQLs), product-qualified accounts (PQAs) or both?
How does the tech stack change to support a product-led sales motion?
Fortunately for us, there are early adopters like Jesus Requena who we can turn to for guidance. Jesus now leads Marketing and Growth at Hex, the data platform for data scientists. Before that he built and led the Growth Marketing team at Figma, the PLG darling that Adobe intends to acquire for a whopping $20 billion, which was the focus for much of this conversation.
Figma, the maker of visual collaboration software, arguably wouldn’t be where it is today without product-led sales. They’ve attracted four million users and an extremely vibrant (read: vocal) user community. The company reportedly grew 100% year-on-year – from $200 million to $400 million ARR – with positive operating cash flow and an enviable 150% net dollar retention (NDR).
Keep reading to learn from Jesus about the role of growth marketing in a PLG business, how Figma does product-led sales, why you should consider product-qualified accounts (PQAs) one of your top KPIs, and how emerging tools like Endgame help accelerate your time-to-market.
KP: What’s the role of growth marketing at Figma?
Growth marketing supports new user acquisition (traffic -> sign-ups), and pipeline generation for sales (sourced dollars from marketing). We focused around 70% of our efforts on the top of the funnel, driving traffic and new sign-ups with the right profiles because we know that will fuel sales along the way.
We focused on making sure our efforts on SEO, paid, affiliates and others bring users that activate. Activation is the North Star metric and it drives the optimization of all tactics. Activation at Figma means a user collaborates with other users in their first week, you can call that our aha moment.
On pipeline generation, Figma is very unique. 95% of the pipeline comes from the existing user base (active). Sales’ books of accounts get allocated from active accounts with the right profile both in our professional (paid self-serve) and starter (freemium) tier.
My team served the sales teams in two ways:
We helped increase sales velocity and deal size by constantly optimizing the product signals reps can work from to reach out, and enable them with the right messaging (value proposition) for each of those signals.
We targeted decision makers in those accounts with content around the value of Figma when scaling design and product teams, and bring new contacts in the form of MQLs they can also reach out to while multi-threading as part of their account engagement. It’s a bottoms-up meets top-down approach.
KP side note: In my opinion, part of what allows Figma to generate such powerful bottom-up adoption in the first place is their approach to inviting new users onto paid plans. People can add new editors at any time — with no gates or immediate costs. Team admins then get an email before payment each month, which recaps the new bill and highlights any new team members. This brings the best of both worlds: frictionless in-account growth + admin control.
KP: How do you define product-led sales?
Product-led sales is the motion that starts with users finding value in the product, then sales reaching out to the right accounts to educate them that there is a better product tier for them.
The product leads because it brings in the account and shows the value first before there is any sales interaction, as opposed to sales finding the account and educating them on the value. The critical piece of product-led sales is understanding when sales should reach out to users.
KP: What have you found most effective in turning self-service users into opportunities for the sales team?
We focused on product qualified accounts (PQAs) for sales assistance and for reps to understand how to prioritize accounts. It’s not so much a binary yes or no (qualified or not), but a signal of strength based on first-party product data to help them prioritize. We split accounts into high/low fit (firmographics) and high/low product signal or intent. We want reps to prioritize based on best fit and highest signals and go down from there.
We do not use product qualified leads (PQLs) per se, but we do surface all the users in an account and highlight the ones that are either a champion (top users based on actions) or an influencer or decision maker (based on titles or roles within the product). The sales rep will decide who to reach out to, when, and with what message. All we try to do is accelerate their discovery and research by providing them with the data in a structured format.
For growth marketing, we try to engage users that are not necessarily in the product due to their seniority or just because they are not a daily user. We engage them with content and events, and then bring them to sales for them to pursue at the right time. Remember, these accounts are hot in the product, so it’s not really a top down sale, but the decision maker (or senior title) is a nice-to-have when going into later stages of the deal.