Navigating the Shift from Product-Led Growth (PLG) to Product-Led Sales (PLS)
Navigating the Shift from Product-Led Growth (PLG) to Product-Led Sales (PLS)
Why, when and how to make the transition from PLG to PLS.
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Covered today:
Going from PLG to PLS.
More on GTM for your eardrums.
More on GTM for your eyeballs.
Startup to watch.
Hottest GTM jobs of the week.
GTM industry events.
The Journey and Transition from Product-Led Growth (PLG) to Product-Led Sales (PLS)
In the early days, product-led growth (PLG) can feel like magic. Users discover your product, sign up, and before you know it, you have a growing base of enthusiastic customers - all without a sales pitch in sight. But as your company evolves and moves upmarket, there comes a time when the product alone isn’t enough.
Enter: Product-Led Sales (PLS) 🤝
Transitioning from PLG to PLS isn’t just about adding a sales team. Rather, it’s about rethinking how you approach growth, engage with customers, and align your entire organization.
Outlined below are the key elements of making this transition successfully - let’s get into it.
Why transition to PLS?
Signs it’s time to shift:
Complex customer needs: When your customers start asking for more personalized support, custom features, or deeper integrations, it’s a signal that they’re ready for a conversation that goes beyond what PLG can offer.
Moving upmarket: Targeting larger enterprises means dealing with longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and a greater need for direct sales interaction.
But the biggest indicator? Your product is thriving, but you’re leaving revenue on the table because there’s no one to catch those high-value leads as they rise through the ranks of your user base.
Key challenges in the transition
Cultural resistance: Many PLG companies are built on the belief that the product is king. Introducing a sales team can feel like a betrayal of that ethos. Overcoming this mindset requires showing how PLS complements PLG, helping to unlock new growth opportunities rather than stifling innovation.
Defining your ICP: Knowing who your ideal customers are is critical. If you don’t get this right, you risk misdirecting your sales efforts. Refine your ICP regularly, and make sure it’s informed by real data and customer feedback.
The product-led seller is a different breed: In a PLS environment, your sales team needs to think and act differently. They’re not just selling; they’re educating. They need to:
Listen first, sell later. Product-led sellers earn the right to sell by first understanding the customer’s needs and providing value through expertise.
Recognize the signals. Train your team to identify when a user’s behavior signals indicate that they’re ready for more - whether it’s an upgrade, a custom solution, or an enterprise package.
Pitfalls to avoid
Assuming PLS is just a layer on PLG: PLS isn’t just a plug-and-play add-on to PLG. It requires a top-down shift in how your organization thinks about growth. Make sure your teams are aligned, from product to marketing to sales.
Neglecting ICP refinement: Your ICP is your guiding star. Without constant refinement, your sales efforts can become scattered and inefficient. Make sure your ICP is accurate, specific, and regularly updated.
Strategies for a successful transition
Start with a clear ICP: Look at your current customer base - who are your largest, most successful customers? What do they have in common? Use this information to refine your ICP and ensure your sales team is focusing on the right targets.
Involve the entire organization: Sales can’t operate in a vacuum. Your product, marketing, and sales teams need to be in sync, working together to create a seamless experience for the customer. Regular cross-functional meetings can help ensure everyone is on the same page.
Test and iterate: Start small. Pilot your PLS strategy with a subset of customers and gather data on what works. Use this feedback to refine your approach before rolling it out more broadly.
Adapting sales methodology: In PLS, the best salespeople are those who:
Educate and empower: They focus on helping customers solve problems, not just on closing deals.
Build trust: By providing value first, they build the trust necessary for a successful sales conversation.
Case study: Superhuman’s transition
Superhuman’s journey from a single-player, B2C product to a multiplayer, B2B solution is a great example of how to transition from PLG to PLS. Here’s what they did:
Revised ICP: They identified that sales teams and customer success teams, who are heavy email users, were their best targets for expansion.
Paid pilots: Instead of offering free trials, Superhuman implemented paid pilots. This approach not only created ownership on the customer’s side but also provided valuable data on how to scale the solution across the organization.
Quantifying success: pre-post metrics: Superhuman used pre-post metrics to quantify the success of their pilots. By comparing customer productivity before and after using Superhuman, they were able to demonstrate clear ROI, making the case for full-scale deployment.
Other companies that successfully made the transition
1. Slack
Tactic: Bottom-up sales motion.
User data utilization: Slack monitored product usage to identify which teams were highly engaged. They used this data to prioritize outreach, focusing on teams within large enterprises that were already heavily using Slack.
Champion creation: Slack encouraged existing users to become internal champions, advocating for broader adoption within their organizations. Sales teams would then engage with these champions to push for company-wide deployments.
Land and expand strategy: Starting with small teams, Slack used a land-and-expand strategy, where initial success with a small group led to expanding Slack usage across entire departments or organizations.
2. Atlassian
Tactic: No traditional sales team.
Self-service model maintenance: Even as Atlassian introduced sales elements, they maintained a strong self-service model, allowing users to continue buying without direct sales interaction. This minimized friction for smaller customers.
Enterprise advocates: Atlassian hired “Enterprise Advocates” who were tasked not with traditional selling but with helping large customers navigate their products and get maximum value. This role focused on relationship-building and problem-solving, rather than hard selling.
Solution selling: For larger deals, Atlassian’s team emphasized solution selling, where they tailored the pitch to the specific needs and challenges of the enterprise, often bundling multiple Atlassian tools together to provide a comprehensive solution.
3. Dropbox
Tactic: Team folder adoption.
Feature expansion for teams: Dropbox introduced team-specific features like Team Folders, which facilitated collaboration and data management across larger groups, making the product more attractive to businesses.
Account-based marketing (ABM): Dropbox used ABM to target specific companies that showed high potential for enterprise adoption. They personalized their messaging based on the company’s needs, leveraging insights from the free-tier usage to craft compelling pitches.
Executive buy-in: Dropbox targeted decision-makers with value propositions focused on security, compliance, and enterprise-level control, which were crucial concerns for larger companies.
4. Zoom
Tactic: Customer-centric sales approach.
In-app data mining: Zoom’s sales team used in-app data to identify users who were hitting limits on free plans or those who were consistently using advanced features. This data was crucial for prioritizing outreach and tailoring the sales pitch.
Customized enterprise plans: Zoom introduced tailored pricing and feature sets for enterprise clients, often including custom integrations with existing IT systems, which helped meet the specific needs of large organizations.
Customer success teams: Post-sale, Zoom deployed customer success teams to ensure successful implementation and ongoing satisfaction, which helped in upselling and reducing churn.
5. Airtable
Tactic: Product education and support.
Webinars and training: As part of their transition, Airtable invested in educational content like webinars and online courses that helped users understand how to leverage the product for complex workflows. This was critical in moving from individual users to team-wide adoption.
High-touch onboarding: For larger clients, Airtable introduced high-touch onboarding processes where a dedicated success team would work with the client to set up their workflows, ensuring they saw value quickly.
Enterprise-grade features: Airtable developed and promoted enterprise-specific features like advanced permissions, admin controls, and enhanced security, making the platform more attractive to larger organizations.
6. HubSpot
Tactic: Multi-product upsell.
Cross-selling across products: HubSpot used their PLS approach to upsell customers from one product (e.g. CRM) to their full suite (e.g. Marketing, Sales, Service Hub). Sales reps were trained to identify opportunities for bundling products, increasing overall account value.
Sales and marketing alignment: HubSpot ensured tight alignment between marketing and sales teams to nurture leads more effectively. They used sophisticated lead scoring to prioritize outreach, ensuring that sales reps focused on the most qualified opportunities.
Freemium to enterprise pipeline: HubSpot’s freemium model served as a pipeline for enterprise sales. Users who engaged heavily with the free tools were flagged for sales outreach, where reps would offer enterprise solutions tailored to the user’s expanding needs.
7. Calendly
Tactic: Targeted outbound campaigns.
Outbound sales on high-usage accounts: Calendly used outbound sales to target organizations where multiple employees were using the free version. They leveraged usage data to demonstrate the benefits of upgrading to a paid, company-wide plan.
Integrations as a selling point: Calendly emphasized its integrations with tools like Salesforce and HubSpot in its sales pitches, making it easier to sell to organizations that needed their scheduling to sync seamlessly with existing systems.
Enterprise features: They developed enterprise-specific features like single sign-on (SSO), advanced admin controls, and analytics that cater to the needs of larger organizations. These features made it easier for companies to manage scheduling at scale and integrate Calendly into their existing IT infrastructure.
8. Notion
Tactic: Community-driven growth with sales follow-up.
Community building: Notion initially grew through strong community engagement, with users creating and sharing templates. The sales team tapped into this community to identify power users within companies who could champion Notion’s adoption at the enterprise level.
Account mapping: Notion’s sales team engaged in detailed account mapping, identifying potential champions within companies who were already using Notion, and then expanding the conversation to IT and decision-makers.
Security and compliance: As part of the PLS transition, Notion developed enterprise-grade features focused on security and compliance, addressing key concerns that often held back larger organizations from adopting the tool widely.
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