Elena Verna: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it, so what I'm hearing is that if you're starting as a self-serve-oriented product and you're starting to maybe hire for a salesperson, is the approach start approaching it from product-led sales motion versus now we're going to add the sales independent team that's kind of doing their own thing? Right, so there's two ways to get to product-led sales. First little wave is that we talked about, I start as product-led growth company. I really started with this individual use case and I'm escalating to a company-level value prop and this is what I need product-led sales for. On the other side, I might start as a top-down sales traditional organization, so I have product that I only sell through sales. Those are usually anchored at larger segments in the first place. In order to build a top-down sales engine, you're most likely going after enterprise segment of a thousand-plus employees or maybe upper mid-market of 500 employees-plus. The reason to go into product-led sales is either your existing top-down motion is not working because customers need to see value before they sign the contract. They want to see that usage and at least the first signs of perceived value before they sign on the dotted line. Or you're going downmarket and your fixed cost of sale that you have from the traditional sales motion does not scale. It stays fairly constant, yet your contract values are starting to drop as you're doing downmarket, so you want to create a lot more automation in the selling process to remove as many as possible humans out of it. You can approach it from both ways. Adding PLS on top of product-led growth or adding PLS on top of existing sales-led growth. For PLG, you're going upmarket by adding PLS. For SLG or sales-led growth, by adding PLS you're going downmarket. Awesome, and we're going to talk about how to actually build this infrastructure and what's required, but it reminds me one of the biggest takeaways from our first podcast and something I've quoted many times now, is your bet that every sales-led growth company needs to add a product-led growth element. Otherwise, they'll be disrupted by someone that does. Is that still your perspective?…

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