When in doubt, copy HubSpot
HubSpot added $900M of ARR after shifting to Product-Led Sales. Read on to learn how.
Did you know that PLG companies have raised 4.5x more cash than sales-led businesses and grow 10% faster, even though they’re more susceptible to churn during economic uncertainty?
You do now. Speaking of data, contribute to this survey to answer how companies are takling product-led sales head on. Respondents get priority access to results.
On this positive note for team PLG, here’s what you missed the last 2 weeks👇
🌎 One change at Twilio led to millions of dollars
💰 How to get sales buy-in for PLG
🚀 You’re doing things wrong
🎯 Upselling without being annoying
🎁 Cheat sheets & templates
🌎 One change at Twilio led to millions of dollars
Laura Schaffer is the brand-new VP of Growth at Amplitude. In Lenny Rachinstki’s most recent interview, she described one change that Twilio made that unlocked tens of millions of new revenue.
Source: Lenny’s podcast
Twilio’s ecosystem used to be mainly composed of developers. At one point in time, Laura realized that the non-developer customers were growing. Users in this segment would struggle during onboarding and few became high-value customers.
To many employees at Twilio, they weren’t valuable. The word going around was that these users were lost. They signed up by mistake!
Not to Laura. She looked into understanding them better, and realized that non-technical users truly wanted to build with Twilio. They didn’t have access to developers.
🪄 The magic, multi-million dollar question: What do they need to succeed?
What her team did to fix it:
Iterate on a “low-code” version of Twilio with a siloed onboarding flow, to help folks activate without developers.
Analyze product usage and interview users to understand where humans needed to be involved to avoid roadblocks. Essentially developing a sales-assist motion. And just recently Twilio RVP, Steven Boone gave us insights on how sales participated in that process.
The result: Sales were now dealing with highly-motivated buyers who converted and grew like wildfire 🔥
💰 How to get sales buy-in for PLG
You’ll fail to activate bottom-up sales if you can’t get buy-in from reps. David Barron, Global Director of Sales at HubSpot, used a 5-step process when he led the transition from top-down to self-serve sales back at Hubspot.
Source: Calixa.io
1) Show reps success stories
For example, we'd have a rep sell five licenses of our CRM product. A month later, that account gets a 50-seat upgrade and the rep didn't have to do much.
My team would interview the rep and blast it in a sales email that goes out each week to everyone on the team.
2) Adjust comp to favour PLS deals
We implemented a weighted compensation structure when we transitioned to PLS. We increased comp by 1.1x when deals included multiple products (upsell) or when accounts would organically grow (expansion).
3) PLS reps are solution engineers with sales skills
Why? Because prospects are already in your product. For sales, this translates into a lesser need for evangelizing the solution, and more emphasis on identifying under-utilized product use cases.
4) Tell reps exactly what to do
Don’t forget: many reps have never used product data to sell.
Make it as easy as possible for them to understand the context and how best to take action by equipping them with playbooks and digestible product usage.
5) Is this shit?
Is what we’d ask when sending reps new product-qualified leads.
We basically gave a form to fill out to send us feedback. When folks weren’t sure what to do with certain lead batches, we would go through iterations on some of the content or revisit our qualification criteria.
💯 You’re doing things wrong
Community, then product. That’s Adam Schoenfeld’s bet and it’s paying dividends. Kyle from Openview broke down the fundamentals behind this powerful strategy.
Source: Adam Schoenfeld
“We knew who we wanted to serve before we knew the problem they needed us to solve. So we started with the research we felt was missing in B2B SaaS.”
Adam spent hours researching PLG companies and published zero-clicks, data-heavy content on social media. Everytime he did, subscribers for PeerSignal grew, and so did his audience.
Adam’s 🔑 takeaway: Consistency, credibility, and big swings. Over 90% of his audience came when he released new reports.
“We’ve carried the PLG mindset of giving more value upfront (instead of forcing folks down a funnel) by first sharing most of the insights from our indexes and newsletter on social.”
Building a product after audience-building helped avoid one of the startups’ nastiest diseases: building features people don’t care about.
Now, Keyplay’s product powers the data shared in the community, and PeerSignal creates awareness for Keyplay’s solution. Powerful flywheel. Well played Adam.
Another solid example of this is Hubspot’s community.
🎯 Upselling without being annoying
Substack just quietly gave the world a lesson on how to upsell. Leah Tharin broke it down for us.
Source: Fred Melanson/Leah Tharin
Substack now allows you to automatically message your most engaged users with a custom email.
Upselling to your users without annoying too many of them in the process.
It highlights exactly how to do PLG right:
👉 Wait for a specific signal to be triggered before reaching out (sales or customer success) → High conversion rates.
To produce features like the one Substack just introduced to drive upsells, you need to set objectives that incentivize customers’ success, not just business success.
Here’s an example of a key result that is business oriented but will not drive a better customer experience:
“Increase paid conversions from 500 to 700 in the next quarter”
Now here are 2 revised versions that will drive both business value and customer value:
“Convert our engaged users from 15% to 20% in the next quarter”
“Convert more free users into engaged users from 0.5% to 1%”
Whenever you target a metric in your key results, you need to check if the targeted metric (for instance free-to-paid) directly correlates with user success. Is it a clear signal that our users are successful?
Lastly, does the metric really differentiate users meaningfully?
Set the desired result correctly, and the right initiative will follow to capture revenue.
🎁 Cheat sheets & templates
Script formula for high-performing videos
Full email wizardry course by Lavender
How to enrich your account list with ChatGPT
The right questions to ask in a sales call
📊 New Data
Share how you run bottom-up sales and receive early access to the findings.
Who the friggin’ frig is hiring RN!?
📅 Coming up
PLS panel discussion with leaders who led revenue at Coda, Stripe and Zendesk.
🎧 and 📺
How a $100M business shifted from sales-led to product-led
🔥 Hot conversations
I beg you, do not try to create a new category
How to start your newsletter
You’re f*ing up if you don’t have women in your sales team.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaad that’s it for today!
Found this valuable and in need of a karma boost? Share High Intent with ONE friend 🙏
Appreciate y'all! Have a fantastic weekend!
✌️Fred