Quotas Harm Early PLG Teams

Early quotas can distort the core job of an early PLG sales team, which is not to close every possible deal, but to learn when product usage has matured enough that sales help actually increases long term account value. In bottom up motions, the best move is often to let a team keep swiping a card, adding users, and building habits, then step in later once expansion signals are clear.

• In hybrid PLG motions, the key system is trigger detection. Teams watch who is using the product, what functions they sit in, how many colleagues they invite, and how deeply they use features, then use those patterns to decide when sales should engage. A hard quota pushes reps to force that hand too early.
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• Airtable shows the alternative. It let usage build from hook use cases like marketing calendars and ops workflows, then had customer success and services teams help accounts spread across departments. The expansion play was driven by product behavior and education, not just rep pressure to book an enterprise contract on day one.
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• DocSend is the counterexample that makes the point sharper. It hired into a more traditional outbound motion too early, found the payback long and the buyer misaligned with the end user, then refocused on self serve, support, and product improvements. In that model, support often converted users better than sales because it helped people buy at the moment they were ready.
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The long run direction is toward product led sales systems that look less like classic quota carrying field teams and more like a mix of rev ops, onboarding, education, and selective sales intervention. As more companies map expansion paths inside accounts, quotas tend to arrive later, after the company knows exactly which usage patterns reliably turn self serve adoption into large contracts.