How to blend Product Led Growth with Enterprise Sales
Some of the most successful companies have followed a product led growth (PLG) strategy.
I bought and set up my company’s Gmail and Google Drive with no seller.
I bought and set up my company’s accounting with Xero with no seller.
I bought and built my company’s website with Squarespace with no seller.
This doesn’t work for every category - big Enterprise platforms like ERP, Payroll, HR are top down purchases,
But for the majority of software categories, buyers expect to be able to test, learn and buy without having to interact with the vendor.
As a company’s usage gets more complex, or their needs take them towards higher value products, then it does make sense to introduce sales support to guide them through the enterprise buying process.
I watched a couple of deep dives recently from executives at Amplitude (a product analytics tool), an Atlassian (the world’s largest product led growth software firm).
Amplitude
In the Amplitude talk, Mark Velthuis shares his strategy which he calls Product Led Sales.
There are four steps:
Great product - you have to have a fantastic product that is easy to use and that people will talk about.
If there is any friction in the trial, purchase or onboarding process then you can’t use your product to drive growth.
Freemium model - you have to provide your users with a free way of onboarding and getting value from your product.
This isn’t as effective if you provide a time-bound free trial - you need to give lifetime access and value. Great examples of this are Canva, Gmail, or Loom.
Product Signals - you then want to determine what usage of your freemium platform indicates the right time to contact the customer with a real seller.
Mark offers two examples.
Firstly when the customer is using 80-90% of the freemium unit of measurement - maybe users, or storage or events.
Secondly when the customer starts adding in users from different functions or business units.
Both of these are trigger to reach out and see whether now is the right time to benefit from some of the paid features.
Mark calls them PQL’s - Product Qualified Leads. As a seller you would be all over a PQL compared to an MQL!
Train your sellers - this outreach is different to your normal cold outreach.
These are now happy customers, who are familiar with your product.
Its a warmer and gentler approach focused on education and expansion - more akin to a CSM than an SDR.
Your sellers need to have a much higher technical knowledge of your products as they will be interacting with educated customers.
With this product led sales motion Mark is seeing 3x close ratios from his sales teams.
That gives revenue leaders choices about how they choose to scale their growth.
Atlassian
In this next discussion, which is wider than just PLG, Cameron Deatsch CRO at Atlassian discusses their journey from a pure Product Led Sales company to providing Enterprise sales into some of the largest organisations.
Cameron describes that it is much easier to go from Product Led to Enterprise Sales than the other way around.
PLG companies have built that behaviour throughout their business - the try, buy and grow model. The openness about pricing. The patience for a company to grow into the Enterprise model.
For an Enterprise sales company to back themselves into PLG is a huge change in culture and requires them to slow down from their current growth trajectory as they take 15-20% of their pipeline away from sellers and feed it into the PLG machine.
But the benefits in sales efficiency are huge.
By the time Cameron assigns an expensive sales resource to an account they are already sold on the product.
They likely already have four or five teams using multiple Atlassian products.
Just as at Amplitude, the Atlassian sellers can focus on the scalability and security that the customer now needs rather than having to convince them about the individual products.
Atlassian sellers can support a much higher quota and win rate than most software sales teams who are focused on cold prospecting and selling the product.
Cameron also discusses how they manage to sell to the smallest companies and the world’s biggest enterprises at once - not common in software companies.
“Our customer is a team. Our goal is not to land Adobe. Our goal is to land a small team within Adobe and for them to use our products for free, until they get to 11 users when we start charging…”
Ideas to consider
If you don’t have any PLG motion today - start thinking about it. If your full product doesn’t naturally lend itself to PLG, are there features that could be pulled out into a freemium version.
If there isn’t a single feature that on its own provides value to your end user - that may be a bigger issue to focus on.
If you are PLG only today, are there enterprise level features that your customers are asking for that would warrant an enterprise sales team? Additional security, managing multiple teams, complex user management, regional data storage?
As the buyer experience becomes central to the purchase process this trend towards PLG plus Enterpise - Product Led Sales as Mark calls it, will only continue to accelerate.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.