Elena Verna: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. Thank you for that. Imagine you see, and that I definitely see is companies always want to be product-led, B2B companies. They're like, "We're going to try to be product-led," and they start off thinking they're going to be product-led. Obviously, it's cheaper, grow faster, everything gets better. I'm curious if there's downsides, but let's put that on the side for a moment. Then a lot of these startups realize they can't really work product-led as far as they can tell and they start building a sales team sooner than they expected. Do you have any advice for founders starting a company that helps them understand? Is it likely that they can build a product-led growth motion or is it likely that they're going to have to be sales driven in the end? So my question would first be, which lever are you applying product-led technique to? So are you product led across acquisition, across retention, monetization, all or two out of three or one out of three? I think every single company has to first focus on being product led and retention, period. The only way that you will ever have any chance of acquisition being product-led is if you nail your product led retention. Let me break it down. Retention falls into two main KPIs, which is activation and then engagement. If your product is not able to activate and, more importantly, engage via habitual loops and be in the habit forming zone, then you'll have no chance to hooking an acquisition engine into your product because acquisition and product led means users invite or users refer or users create content that attracts other users. Well, if your users are not habitually using your product, there's less and less opportunities for you to actually create any product-led acquisition. So never start with product-led acquisition. You first always have to start with product-led retention, activation, and engagement. Then you can choose. Is your product has a relationship of one-to-many? If it has a collaboration at its core, say Slack or Miro or even the Amplitude or does it have more of a single mode relationship? So let's say Snowflake. There is not one-to-many relationships there between users. Well, if you have one-to-many relationships, product-led is a fantastic way for you to prototype that model. If you don't have them, then it becomes increasingly hard. Most of the B2B products don't have that one-to-many relationship, so it's very difficult to stand up product-led acquisition. So you rely on marketing-led and sales-led, and that's fantastic. Those are fantastic growth models as well. The only other question becomes in the self-serve monetization. That's product led. Otherwise, you go into sales-led and you chase after those large contract values. You can still be product-led and monetization with sales team via product-led sales or you can just be self-serve if you have a specific segment that is valuable for, but the question there is your use cases and your market matureness to handle self-serve or do you need that sales touch? Every industry and every sector is going through transformation at different velocities. So even if you don't have that product-led sales or self-serve in your industry now, I guarantee you it will pop up in the next 10 years, and if you are not going to introduce it, you will get disrupted by it. Say a company starts sales-led on acquisition. By the way, I love how you're expanding this very seemingly is a binary idea of product-led versus sales-led. Everyone's always talking about them in such simplistic terms and just your way of thinking about it, where it's this, I don't know, three by three almost it's just bending my brain. So I'm going to try to keep up. Say a company starts sales-led on acquisition and later wants to think about adding a product-led self-serve motion, do you find that that often works, doesn't work? Is that a rare success story or how have you seen that happen?…

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