FREEMIUM Chapter 13 Podcast
The Enterprise Sales Inflection Point
Pre-order FREEMIUM here (Ships August 26th).
When a PLG-first company decides it’s time to add sales, it can feel like an unnatural motion for a product-oriented founder. She may get all sorts of input on who to hire for sales, how to structure the sales team, and how to run sales motions. Much of this input is from people who grew up in sales-oriented environments, and much of this input is wrong.
Why wrong?
Only because sales is not one-size fits all. And sales next to PLG is a different thing altogether.
At Winning by Design we have worked with dozens of PLG-first companies who want to add sales in a systematic, congruent way: Snyk, Calendly, Asana, Vercel, GitLab, DocuSign, Dropbox to name a few.
Chapter 13 lays out the theory of when and how to add sales to a PLG motion so that both motions benefit from each other, and both operate within the same “system” (not PLG is “over here” and sales is “over there”).
The chapter is captured in a NotebookLM podcast, followed by the full text, below.
Enjoy!
Chapter 13 Podcast:
XOXO,
Chapter 13 Summary
All recurring revenue growth follows an S-curve. Initial high growth results from adding new sales to the compounding effects of recurring revenue.
To achieve high growth, companies must find both Product-Market Fit and Go-to-Market Fit, then invest in more of what works.
Saturation occurs when market conditions begin to throttle your ability to continue achieving the same growth results in the same market with the same repeatable process.
Adding a 2nd GTM makes sense after achieving GTMF and before experiencing an attenuating growth rate.
The best GTM motion to add to PLG is Product-Led Sales, because PLS can benefit from much of the work required to get PLG working in the first place.
Manager Minute
Thinking about your own company, take time to reflect on the following questions:
Have we achieved PMF? What evidence do we have?
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Have we achieved GTMF? What evidence do we have?
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Do we have more GTM motions running right now than we can reasonably manage at our scale?
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If we were to launch a PLS motion, when would we do so?
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