The Product-Led Sales Podcast: Recent Episodes
HeadsUp.ai
The Product-Led Sales Podcast brings together the world's best leaders in sales, GTM ops, customer success, and revenue, to share their insights around closing deals and growing revenue at product-led companies! đ
A pivot after Series B. Sounds crazy right?
When Framer raised its $24M Series B in 2018, it was a design and prototyping tool.
Think Sketch or Figma.
Despite building up a good base of users, the team felt that traction was slowing.
After what must have been many agonizing meetings, the founders and leadership made a bold call. They weren't going to try to iterate the product.
They were pivoting completely.
In SaaS it's not common to see a 4-year company pivot. Especially one that raised $33M in total, with dozens of employees. It's even less common to see one do it successfully.
Yet, today Framer has gone from 0-to-1 once again. They are now a website builder with thousands of customers, including Zapier and Superhuman.
In this interview with Framer's Head of Growth Oscar Carlsson, he broke down the methodical approach the company took to the pivot:
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What they did to acquire the first 100 customers, the next 1000, and the 1000s of customers after that
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How they rebuilt their GTM team into a customer discovery engine
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What channels and growth initiatives worked at different stages
With the recent tech correction, we will probably see more growth stage companies considering a pivot. Framer is an example they should look to.
Check out Framer.com and follow Oscar on Linkedin here.
There's a Chinese saying - the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step. For most products, that first step is activation.
Many PLG companies onboard 10s of thousands of users a month, but only activate 10% or fewer of them.
In this economic climate - efficiency is more important than ever.
Failing to activate = wasting money acquiring users.
Priya Bhatia worked on a project that lifted 7shifts' activation significantly.
So how did she do it? It comes down to:
- Getting alignment and clarity on the definition of activation
- Simplifying the onboarding experience by running experiments to remove low-value flows
- Surfacing the value that the user has yet to discover, while not overwhelming them with notifications
Listen to the episode to find out the details of how she did it, as well as pitfalls she faced along the way!
Connect with Priya on Linkedin for more PLG insights!
In 2020, Github ran a simple 2 week experiment.
The result? Dramatically more free AND paid signups.
Sounds too good to be true? Hereâs how đ
Thibault Imbert leads Growth at Github.
When he first took over, he looked for somewhere where his team could get a quick win. Something simple but impactful.
He landed on the pricing page.
Here are the 3 changes the team made to the pricing page that produced MASSIVE results on conversion:
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Visual contrast between tiers. The old pricing page showed the features offered by free and paid tiers. But the number of features looked similar. The growth team changed it so that visually the higher tiers had many more features displayed than the lower tiers.
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Emphasizing features that customers cared about. After interviewing customers, the team realized a lot of the features that drove them to upgrade werenât the emphasized by the pricing page. This was a simple fix.
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Making the page prettier. âWe used different colors to make the page more vibrant. We also removed one of the tiers that we werenât even trying to sell anymore. Itâs much cleaner now.â
Connect with Thibault on Linkedin for more PLG insights!
Ethan Schecter joined Snyk when it was just 20-odd employees.
Today the company employs 1000+ people.
Whatâs the secret to the growth? âNot treating your PLG funnel as just a lead genâ, says Ethan.
It is really important that PLG sales teams know which users want to be engaged by what type of outreach.
Snyk has expertly split its user base into âpersonasâ and each type of user gets a different in-app experience, is shown different types of content, and Sales only touches some of them.
Listen to this episode to find out how Snyk used this approach to grow its user base rapidly.
HashiCorp started as an open-source tool.
Itâs now a $6B public company with PLG, enterprise, and open-source products.
Caroline Guo, HashiCorpâs Head of Growth, shared with us how HashiCorp built a cutting-edge internal engine for its PLG motion.
Here are some of the learnings we discussed on the latest episode of the Product Led Sales podcast:
- The data available from open-source products differs from sales-led and product-led products. HashiCorp had to retool itâs approach to data as it moved into PLG.
- Product and GTM teams in PLG should be goaled against a standardized set of metrics. Listen to the episode to hear Caroline deep dive into the exact metrics HashiCorp cares about at each step of the user journey.
- How HashiCorp enriches its Salesforce to arm its sellers with product usage data and PQL scores
âŠand much much more in the full episode!
When it comes to PLG, Drew and Visakan are pros.
And they work on a product used by 2 million developers. 2 million.Â
We spoke to them about Netlify's open source beginnings, how they think about Product Qualified Leads, and more in this episode of the podcast.Â
One MUST LISTEN part of the podcast is when Drew and Visakan went really deep into how they kickstarted their system for identifying PQLs.
From building out the initial list of product signals to look out for, to deciding how to work together across growth, sales, marketing, and data teams.Â
There are a lot of articles about PQLs out there.
There aren't very many operators going really step by step into how they did it.Â
Listen to this episode and you can actually bring Drew and Visakan's learnings to your own product tomorrow.
Evernote has hundreds of millions of users.
So how does this OG PLG juggernaut keep on growing?
- Data, data, data. At this scale the company is more like a B2C than B2B company. No wonder Rick Sawyer, Evernote's Senior Director of Product, Growth used to work at DraftKings, a sports betting company. From the backend, to the human resources, Evernote has built up a sophisticated set of data operations.
- Personalization along the funnel. Having been around for 15 years, Evernote has accumulated tons of features. Not every user is interested in all of them, so the Product team works hard to funnel users towards the right set of experiences. No one should feel overwhelmed by the features.
- A large analytics function to support GTM and growth teams. Oftentimes, Growth teams notice user needs through the data, not just from talking to customers. When your users number in the millions, sometimes the data tells a more complete story than trying to sample the user base.
Listen to this episode for even more on Evernote's sophisticated PLG data engine!
Connect with Rick on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.
How do you design the perfect SaaS free plan?
CircleCI re-designed it's free plan recently, giving users up to 3x more credits and unlocking features that were previously only for paid users.
While a ceiling on a free plan is better for conversion, sometimes optimizing for that one metric is too short-term.
CircleCI made the decision to enhance their free plan after speaking to users.
They realized that a better experience for these users would:
- increase engagement
- allow users to get a deeper experience of the product
- help with users who are choosing between competing solutions
We spoke to Sammy Shreibati, CircleCI's VP of Product, Growth about this decision. We discussed how to think about structuring your free plan based on your objectives and the nature of your product.
Connect with Sammy on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
It's almost a truism that companies move upmarket as they scale.
Must that always be the case?
In this episode of the podcast, we spoke to Grant Freeman, the Chief Customer Officer of Thryv. Thryv is an end-to-end business management software for small businesses that has scaled to $1b in revenue while staying laser focused on SMBs.
Grant shares with us why Thryv has decided to stay focused, and how it has been able to create a culture of customer-orientation despite Thryv growing into a pretty large company itself.Â
He also challenges some myths, such as serving SMBs is not scalable, and SMBs are not 'worth it' because of the low ACVs.Â
Most traditional SaaS companies will not successfully pivot to PLG.
They will disrupted by PLG challengers just like on-prem companies vs the cloud.
This was a surprising learning in our latest podcast episode. Mark Roberge runs Stage 2 Capital and was CRO at HubSpot. He's seen how hard it's been for many top-down companies to try to go bottoms-up. Â
Listen to the episode to understand:
- Why it's so hard to pivot into PLG
- The only way to survive the transition if you are dead set on becoming PLG
- How to develop your PLG go-to-market tech stack and why growth stage companies are better off buying tech rather building in-house
Follow Mark on Linkedin for more such content. Also check out Stage 2 Capital's Accelerator programme that just launched!Â
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin.Â
Very Good Security isn't Mahmoud Abdelkader's first rodeo.
Learn how he helped build a Series C PLG powerhouse.
VGS is the 3rd startup Mahmoud has worked on, and it was born out of a pain point he faced when building out Balanced Payments, a fintech startup.
From day 1, Mahmoud knew that he had to make the product as self-serve as possible, since he was selling to developers.
In our interview, we discussed:
- How VGS develops a deep knowledge of their customers (every startup is 'customer-obsessed', but VGS really goes the extra mile!)
- What Mahmoud means when he says PLG is really about 'customer-driven adoption'
- What were the pitfalls they encountered as they scaled the GTM motion
Joe Rideoutgrew Perpetua from the founding team to 100+ employees. Along the way he tried lots of initiatives to improve their self-serve engine.
Which were the most impactful ones?
We interviewed him to find out!Â
Listen to the full episode (link in comments đ») to hear about how Perpetua
- Perfected their self-serve and onboarding flow
- Built a referral program that generated tons of customers
- Figured out a usage-based pricing model that works!
Connect with Joe on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Are most startups one-hit wonders?
Find out how Kontent by Kentico engineered a second act.
Kentico Software was established in 2004 and Kontent by Kentico is their Enterprise headless CMS that was initially founded as an internal startup 7 years ago.
Incubating products internally may not be very common, but this one was wildly successful.
Vojtech Boril came onto the podcast to share how companies can develop adjacent products and write a successful second chapter to its growth story.
How do you come up with a good idea for the next problem your company should solve? Should you run the 2 products as one company or keep them separate? When do you even consider this strategy?
Listen to this episode to find out!
Connect with Vojtech on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
'PLG signals' sound complicated. They don't have to be.
Want to find out LaunchDarkly about how they use them in their GTM?
Check out our latest podcast episode, featuring 3 core members of the LaunchDarkly PLG team!
We spoke to Joe Ryan (Chief of Staff of Revenue), Kevin Gemulla (Sales), and Sydney Ziegler (CS) to get a deep dive into all things PLG at LaunchDarkly
This was an amazing interview packed with takeaways, such as:
- How LaunchDarkly thinks about #productledgrowth and what distinguishes its approach
- How to identify PLG signals - who needs to be involved, what the tech stack looks like
- How to practically deploy these signals into Sales and CS teams
Connect with Sydney, Kevin, and Joe on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
What took JumpCloud to $2b and Heroku to millions of users?
We recorded a podcast episode that gives you a glimpse.
Rajan Sheth led growth at both JumpCloud and Heroku, and is currently a Partner at HyperGrowth Partners.
He's been working on PLG before anyone called it 'PLG'.
Most companies are still dipping their toes into product-led motions or trying to figure out the playbook. So it was a great opportunity to speak to someone who's seen the movie many times.
Have a listen to this episode to find out:
- Why you should always start your monetization efforts by looking into engagement
- What monetization looks like at the early-stage, growth-stage, and beyond!
- How to hire and build out a world-class growth team
When Alexander Younes first joined Dovetail, it was a dozen-strong.
Less than 2 years later, they just raised a $60m series A.
In the early days, demand was exploding, with tens of thousands of users in their product. Yet their revenue team had only a handful of people.
How did Dovetail stay incredibly disciplined and efficient, and what can we learn from them when creating our own revenue teams?
Listen to this episode to find out!
We talked about how Alex thinks about sales efficiency, how to funnel enterprise customers to self-serve instead of talking to sales, and why even optimizing your legal documents can help your product led growth.
Connect with Alex on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
"How do I think about org in productledgrowth?"
We've had many listeners ask us about this. So we are sharing a masterclass in all things org!
Kristen Habacht is a PLG veteran. Before joining Shogun as CRO, she led revenue teams in Atlassian and Trello.
Having seen so many flavors of org structures, and designed revenue orgs herself, she's super qualified to teach us about all the tough choices and trade-offs.
Listen to this episode if you are part of a growing revenue team.
Topics we covered include:
- What are the most gnarly questions when it comes to org structures?
- Org is all about trade-offs. There is no perfection. So what are the key trade-offs to think about?
- What should the revenue org look like at $10m ARR, $50m ARR, and beyond that?
- The common mistakes people make when it comes to org
- Kristen's path to being CRO and how to chart your own progression in revenue leadership
Connect with Kristen on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.
Should product-led companies still do cold outbound?
Many might be skeptical, but Flowcode is proving that it works.
Jim Norton, Flowcode's CRO, came onto the show to talk about how Flowcode runs both a popular self-service tool and a direct sales team in parallel.
Flowcode is an extremely popular QR-code creator used by both restaurants and huge enterprises like GoDaddy and Sotheby's.
The company has always had a strong sales DNA, and has managed a fine balancing act between being product-driven, and customer-focused through its outbound sales.
Check out this episode to hear about:
- Jim's take on Coinbase's QR code Superbowl ad
- Why it sometimes makes sense to have both direct sales and PLG under one roof, and how to know if that's right for your team
- What role Flowcode's self-serve product plays in relation to its large enterprise deals
When it comes to product-led growth, Prefect is as purist as it gets. It does no promotional sales or marketing - even to its free users!
Christopher Reuter is Prefect's Head of Growth, and one of the most PLG-inclined people I've spoken to.
If you are looking for PLG content that gets really specific and tactical, this episode is not to be missed.
Why listen? Here're all the topics Chris dropped some truth bombs around:
- How to know if your customers are respond to direct sales, or if you should let content and community do the heavy-lifting
- Why many companies eventually have to layer on sales-led motions, and when to do so
- How to monetize an open-source user base, and what unique data challenges open source companies face
- Why Prefect turned off its ads and what was the impact
- What's a 'pairwise matrix' and how he uses it to measure activation
Georgios has tried dozens of experiments at Toggl.Â
On today's episode we get to hear his most interesting results.
Toggl is a time-tracking tool loved by more than 1 million users globally. That also means they have a lot of data to learn from and experiments to run. And Georgios is one of the most thoughtful and curious experimenters I've met, especially when it comes to pricing and packaging his products!
Here are just a few experiments we discussed:
- Should you push your free users to do a trial of the premium product, before they are allowed to stay on the free plan?
- Should you bundle seats (e.g., bundles of 5) or charge for each incremental user?
- What's this one pricing change that resulted in much more expansion with enterprise users?
Listen to the full episode to hear much much more!
Connect with Georgios on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Not every product-led company sells to tech startups.
Some customers are just a little more traditional.
So what do you when your customers aren't used to buying with a self-serve motion? Does that mean you have to give up being PLG?
Rohan Bairat is an old hand at this. At Spreedly, he sometimes encounters customers who even ask for a proposal or RFP.
Listen to this episode to find out:
- What Rohan's playbook is when faced with a RFP
- How to think about navigating more traditional enterprise customers
- What to do when competing against more top-down, sales-led companies
Connect with Rohan on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
What happens when you combine 2 PLG superstars?
Christof Jaritz is working on it right now at Bitly.
Bitly acquired QR Code Generator last year. Also known as Egoditor, it is one of the world's most popular providers of QR codes with 12 million users.
Since then Christof has been thinking about how to drive growth across the combined company.
He came onto the podcast recently and we talked about
- What's exciting and what's hard about bringing together 2 winning self-serve tools
- Whether it's better to be a GTM specialist or generalist, since Christof has spent time in Sales, Growth, and marketing
- How to leverage culture to bring out the best of your team members
Connect with Christof on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Jotform defies many product-led growth stereotypes.
It's bootstrapped, and it was globally distributed even before COVID!
Bulut AkıĆık, Jotform's VP of Growth joined us to explain how Jotform works with its millions of self-serve users.
"Many users start off completely self-serve and over the years graduate to 6-figure deals."
Have a listen to this episode to find out how Bulut thinks about growth, the interplay between sales, growth, and marketing, as well as Jotform's tactics for monetizing and activating its freemium users.
"We're building a cathedral at Vercel."
We knew this episode would be a great one when Kevin brought this up at the start of the recording.
Vercel is one of the hottest product-led startups with a ton of love amongst developers.
Morgane Palomares and Kevin Van Gundy came onto the podcast to pull back the curtain on Vercel's go-to-market. Here's what you can catch in this episode:
- Vercel's 'product advocates' team - what is it, how is it different from sales or sales-assist, and how did they build it up?
- The unique advantages and challenges of building an open-source product
- Some common pitfalls in PLG GTM that Morgane and Kevin have seen across the years
Connect with Kevin on Twitter or Linkedin, and here's Morgane's Linkedin!
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Invoice2Go was founded in 2002 and was self-serve from the get-go! They targeted the under-served small business market and helped them generate, send and manage invoices.
Today, Invoice2Go has more than 200,000 customers. As part of the Bill.com family, it is starting to think seriously about adding a sales-assist motion.
Pranav Piyush is leading these efforts. He came onto the podcast to talk about his learnings, what common pitfalls to avoid, and how to use experiments to learn before scaling up the sale-assist engine.
Connect with Pranav on Linkedin.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Have you seen a company build a free tool just to attract customers?
Clearbit's Weekly Visitor Report and CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer come to mind.
Sadra Boutorabi is someone who is no stranger to this strategy. As co-founder and head of growth of Namescan, he built and launched a free tool, and helped to secure the first $1m in revenue for the company.
Today, Sadra leads growth at Tiny, a fast-growing company that provides an open-source rich text editor.
On this episode we discussed:
- When is it a good idea to launch a free tool for lead gen
- How to decide what free tool to build
- How much resources to dedicate to this initiative
- What other growth initiatives and experiments he has been running
Connect with Sadra on Linkedin for more information.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.
Some companies have a free trial, whereas others have a free tier that encourages users to upgrade.
When do you know which strategy to pick?Â
Chang Chen, who leads growth and marketing at Otter.ai, has tried it all - freemium, free trial, even how long each free trial should be.Â
In this episode, she didn't just talk about which one worked for Otter, she dropped some brilliant frameworks for you to figure out what's best for your own product.Â
We also discussed:
- How to run experiments to figure out what's the optimal length for a free trial
- How to conduct user research to understand how to structure your trial or free tier
- Why it often doesn't work to have both a free trial AND a free tier
- Common mistakes made when designing these free versions of your product
Connect with Chang on Linkedin if you wish to discuss more about free trials vs freemium!
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Allen Liao joined Lucid in 2018 and has been working on growth ever since.Â
The company has added $50m+ in ARR since he joined! Listen to this episode to find out how!Â
One initiative Lucid's product team has been working on lately is how to improve user engagement. I discussed with Allen:
- How to identify the right baseline and set the appropriate goals for user engagement
- How to segment and prioritize your users
- 'Bright spot' and 'dark spot' analysis - what it means and how to use it
- What worked and what didn't, and common pitfalls people encounter when working on growth
Connect with Allen on Linkedin.Â
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
When Kelly Goetsch first joined commercetools, the company was heavily focused on selling bottoms up to developers. Why did it pivot towards a more Enterprise go-to-market motion?
Their self-serve engine was going too slowly.
Although developers were the users, they weren't the best buyers for a commerce platform. Often it was the Sales or Revenue executives who championed the purchase.
So how did commercetools layer on a successful top-down engine onto a #productledgrowth business?
What they did obviously worked, as they are a $1.9b business today. This episode covers:
- How to hire the right people to layer on an enterprise go-to-market motion effectively
- What are the most common needs of an enterprise customer
- How to conduct research and build product for the enterprise, when you have far fewer users than a PLG company
- What Kelly's career advice is for Product Managers
Connect with Kelly on Linkedin.Â
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Do you think becoming PLG is a decision your company can make on its own?Â
Think again đ€
Shrikant Mudliar, who leads many product-led growth initiatives at Airmeet, shared a radical opinion.
Going PLG successfully doesn't mainly depend on what your company does, it depends on your customers and your market.Â
Listen to this podcast to understand:
- Why your PLG initiatives might fail, even if you do everything right
- Why the market needs to be ready and educated about your category before self-serve becomes a big hit with your users
- How to tell if your own category is ripe for PLG
- How to run experiments and build viral growth into your product
... and much more!
Connect with Shrikant on Linkedin.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Peter Soung founded Sprout Social, Inc. more than 10 years ago, and today it is a public company with $200m+ in annual revenue.
More impressively, he's knows all about the ins and outs of growing a self-serve product.
There's been a ton of content created about #productledgrowth in the past year. You might think you've seen it all.
But, if you want to actually hear about the tactical details of what worked and what didn't, or about the hard-won lessons that came from growing a company for an entire decade - this is the podcast to check out.
Things we covered include:
- How to find the 'dead ends' in your product that users can get stuck in
- How to streamline the user experience while customizing it for different use cases and different levels of user sophistication
- How to run effective growth experiments for your product
Connect with Peter on Linkedin or at peter [at] sproutsocial.com if you want to get in touch.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
James Labastida is the go-to guy if you want to talk all things revenue in product-led growth.
As the Chief of Staff of Revenue at ClickUp, he's overseeing a lot of the strategic work that's going on to fuel the crazily-fast-growing company (it grew more than 4x in a year!)Â
Listen to this episode to find out more about:
- How revenue and product teams work together at ClickUp
- What metrics are the most important to align teams with at PLG companies, and which to use at each stage of growth
- What kinds of growth experiments were the most impactful, and how long should you run them for
- What are some common misconceptions and pitfalls in PLG
If you wish to connect with James, check out his Linkedin.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
If you want to see a company in hypergrowth, look at Bitrise. It's doubling its revenue year on year, raised a $60m Series C recently, and serves 100,000+ developers worldwide.Â
And Alex Kudelka is holding the reins at Bitrise's sales org, as the VP of Sales. Having cut his teeth at other PLG superstars like Doodle, and Algolia, he's building an incredibly efficient sales org at Bitrise.
Have a listen to this episode to find out:Â
- How Bitrise built out its data stack to arm their sellers with the appropriate data
- How else you can make each seller extremely productive at a PLG company
- How to resist the urge to increase sales headcount while still overdelivering on your quotas
- How Sales leaders can embrace PLG completely instead of seeing it as just a change to the top-of-the-funnel
Connect with Alex on Linkedin if you want to reach out!
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
As a marketer of a product for sales teams, I was pretty excited to speak to Pete von Burchard. He's a seller selling to marketers!
At Wistia, Pete and his colleagues truly understand their customers.
They see go-to-market as a holistic craft blending product, sales, and marketing. If you need any proof of that, just check out their videos on youtube. They range from videos featuring their sales teams to a full-blown cartoon series!
Pete shared some great tips on:
- How Sales in PLG should work on customers across the journey, not just at the point of conversion.
- How Wistia thinks about PQLs, usage milestones, and identifying the right signals that predict conversion.
- What sellers in a PLG company should focus on, especially if they are looking to upskill themselves
Check out Wistia's cartoon series - it's super fun!
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin and Twitter.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.
Heroku is huge. Like, really really huge. It processes 60+ billion requests per day, and 13 million apps have been built with it.
And Christopher Lauer has been there right from the beginning. He joined Heroku when it was just a handful of employees and has been building its self-serve engine ever since.
In this episodes he shares a few golden nuggets about product growth, like why we should be more patient when working on growth, how to run the right experiments, and how to identify conversion signals.
Chris has been working on PLG and PQL before these terms even existed. And what he taught me in our podcast wasn't anything I heard from anyone else!
Connect with Chris on Linkedin if you have more questions.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin and Twitter.
If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
How do you grow your PLG product? What are the metrics you should look out for? How do you prioritize between different customers and their needs?
Product Growth in PLG is still very much uncharted territory, and to help everyone get smart on it we spoke to one of the pioneers in this space. Partho has been running product growth teams for almost at decade at companies like Unbounce, Bananatag, and now Hootsuite. If anyone knows PLG, PQLs, and product data inside out, it's him.
Have a listen to this episode if you've been thinking about how to grow and monetize your product. If you want to reach out to Partho, here's his LinkedIn.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin and Twitter.
If you have personal questions for me about PLG, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.Â
Community-building is all the rage today, but Bubble mastered it way before it was cool.
Way back in 2012, Emmanuel and his co-founder chanced upon the no-code movement before they knew it was going to take the world by storm. However, building a no-code tool takes time and patience. For almost 5 years, they barely hired anyone and quietly worked on Bubble. In that time, they built a community of steadfast supporters.
On this episode, Emmanuel shared his hard-won lessons on community, as well as what's next after Bubble's $100m Series A.
Have a listen to find out:
- When is community-building the right way to grow your user base
- How to do it well, and how to nurture your community champions
- Common pitfalls when it comes to community
- Bubble's next act after its recent $100m Series A
- What Emmanuel believes the future of the no-code movement is headed
Check out Bubble.io, and follow Emmanuel on Linkedin or Twitter.
Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin and Twitter.
If you have personal questions for me about PLG, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.
Sophia Francis has worked across both Product-Led and Sales-Led SaaS companies. She came on the podcast to share about her learnings from leading Revenue Operations teams.Â
Have a listen to learn:
- How she prioritizes the various initiatives RevOps teams typically have on their plate
- Why it is extra important for RevOps teams in PLG companies to collaborate closely with Product, and how to do this
- The skills a PLG RevOps specialist should pick up to excel at their job
- Working and living remotely even before COVID
Check out Dooly
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content
Connect with Sophia on Linkedin
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter
Troops started off completely product-led. Then, it took away the self-serve motion and became sales led. Now, it's back to product-led growth.Â
Why did they make so many transitions? What was the framework that Scott Britton, Troops' founder, used to decide what to do? And what are some of the limitations of product-led growth that Scott discovered over his 6+ years growing Troops to a Series B company?
Listen to this episode to find out:
- How Troops found product-market fit, and how it started as a skincare company
- Why did Troops transition away from PLG and then back again
- What the downsides of PLG can be and how to overcome them
- How Troops uses data in its own go-to-market motion
Check out Troops.ai and their new product, Grid
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content
Connect with Scott on Linkedin
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter
When it comes to Product-Led Sales, it's hard to beat Kevin Nothnagel's resume. Kevin has spent the last 7 years in Sales roles at product-led growth companies, starting at Dropbox, before moving onto Facebook, Productboard, and now Clockwise.Â
Listen to this episode to find out:
- Why Kevin chose to do a rotation in Sales Strategy and Ops, and how that made him a better seller
- How product led selling has changed since 2014
- The lessons from selling an enterprise software in a consumer company at Facebook
- How different companies equipped their sellers with product usage data
- What skillsets or knowledge product-sellers should focus on
Connect with Kevin on Linkedin or Twitter, and also check out Clockwise!
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter
Ravi was doing product-led growth before it was cool. After spending a year as a DJ post-graduation, Ravi started Heap. He grew it to 8 figures in revenue, raised ~$100m in funding, and today Heap is a leader in the product analytics space.
Ravi is now onto his second product-led startup: Airplane.
In this episode, we cover:
- What was different about starting a SaaS company in 2013 vs today (5:02)
- What Ravi thinks about the rising popularity of product-led growth (12:50)
- How Heap's PLG motion evolved at each stage of its growth (17:52)
- How to know if your pricing should be fixed or priced separately for each customer (22:55)
- Hiring generalists vs specialists, and how to help the generalists you hire grow (28:06)
To read more of Ravi's thoughts, take a look at his pieces on the Airplane blog, it's a phenomenal source of knowledge for B2B builders.
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter
Abhijeet has done stints in both Customer Success and Sales in his career. He's now the founder and CEO of a Salestech startup, Nektar. So what has he learnt from spending time across the fence in CS, and why does he think CS reps make great sellers, especially in a product-led world?Â
Tune in to hear about:
- What kinds of skills Abhijeet had to learn and unlearn from transitioning from CS to Sales
- How he felt some of his Customer Success skillset gave him an edge in Sales
- How he as a Sales leader cultivated a CS mindset amongst his own Sales team
- Why he believes the future of B2B sales lies in the lines between CS and Sales becoming more blurred
- Why for some companies it makes sense to even combine these 2 functions, and how to tell if you are one of them
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Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter
Kyle Poyar is a Partner at OpenView, responsible for advising portfolio executive teams on strategies to increase revenue growth. Kyle has particularly deep expertise in pricing, having written an entire book on it (link below), while also working on it as a consultant for almost 6 years before he moved into VC.
In this episode we covered:
- Why companies tend to underinvest in pricing (10:00)
- When a startup should begin to seriously think about pricing and packaging (13:40)
- Who in a company should form part of the 'pricing team' - is it a dedicated specialist, sales, marketing, or product? (20:30)
- Kyle's process for companies that want to kick off a pricing strategy review
- How PLG companies should think about pricing (25:30)
- Why usage-based pricing is often under-rated as an approach (30:28)
Readings mentioned in this episode:
- Mastering SaaS pricing by Kyle Poyar
- Openview's Usage-Based Pricing Playbook
- Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke
Segment sold to Twilio for $3.2B last year, making it one of the biggest SaaS acquisitions.
In this episode, Segment's founder Calvin French-Owen joined us to discuss:
- How Segment found go-to-market success in its early days
- Why Calvin decided to open up Segment's product and make it self-serve
- The 3 main reasons for starting a product-led motion for your product
- What Calvin is going to work on next (hint: it's not B2B SaaS)
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content.
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter.
How did a startup founded in France go to YCombinator and become a $2.2b product-led success story? We spoke to Nicolas Dessaigne, Algolia's founder who is now also a Visiting Partner at YC to hear his lessons learnt from growing a developer-oriented, API-first PLG company.
In this episode, we discussed:
- Why Nicolas brought on a People team to help with recruiting when the company only had 25 employees
- How Nicolas built a culture of ownership that he believed was key to Algolia's success
- When and why Algolia decided to layer on a sales team to supercharge its product-led growth
- Growth lessons from the different stages of Algolia's journey: $0-1m ARR, $1-10m, $10m+
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content.
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter.
Esben Friis Jensen is the co-founder of Userflow, a user onboarding software. Onboarding is an increasingly important piece of go-to-market, especially for software with a free trial or freemium experience. You just can't rely on a sales rep to guide a user through your app so it has to feel intuitive.
In this episode, we get really tactical in terms of giving advice on how to optimize onboarding, including:
- Which companies do onboarding well and what can we learn from them
- A step by step process to optimize your own onboarding
- What kinds of tools do you use in your onboarding stack
- Is there a future for onboarding with a more human touch (e.g., Superhuman style)
645 Ventures is an early stage investor that has consistently invested in successful SaaS companies such as Iterable, Goldbelly, and Eden Health. Aaron Holiday, the funds' managing partner, joins us today to talk about product-led growth through an investor lens.
Product-led companies grow differently from other SaaS companies, so how do investors assess PLG companies? What metrics are important? What is a winning formula in PLG? Listen to find out!
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content.
Check out Aaron on Linkedin, and Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter.
Julio Bermudez leads Amplitude's sales efforts for APAC and LATAM as VP of Sales. This episodes covers Julio's wide-ranging career where he joined 2 product-led startups early on, and helped grow them to valuations of $4B+ today. Julio shares his learnings from running both enterprise and product-led sales teams. Julio also had an unconventional start to a sales career - listen to find out what he used to do in a previous life!
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Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter.
In today's episode we hear from Yaekyum Lee, Sendbird's Global Head of Customer Experience. Yaekyum joined Sendbird as one of its first employees focused on growth and revenue. Over the years he has led Growth, Sales, and now CX at Sendbird, and helped it scale from a seed stage startup to a product-led unicorn. Yaekyum talks about how Sendbird made decisions to evolve its PLG motion, and how its approach to sales changed over the years, as the company grew.
Follow HeadsUp's blog, and LinkedIn for more PLG content.
Connect with Nathan on Linkedin and Twitter.