What are the key elements of a successful product-led growth sales strategy and how do businesses execute it effectively with the existing tools?

The typical product-led sales motion is characterized by the fact that you are trying to upsell someone who's an existing user on the product, which means there's a set of data that sales teams, marketing teams, and even customer success teams can leverage to make that initial sale. I think what's interesting about that is it's not always free to paid. When you think about selling, you think about, “Oh, how do you go from zero dollars of revenue to some dollars of revenue?” Well, in the product-led sales motion, oftentimes this notion of converting from free to paid very much overlaps with transitioning someone from, let's say, a $10 month plan or an individual user into some sort of team plan. I think that's one important thing to call out about that motion.

How do teams approach that product-led sales motion? You typically have a team that's dedicated towards this high velocity movement. That’s someone between an SDR and an account exec, who is able to make the product-driven sale very quickly with limited light touches. There are teams sometimes referred to as a “product specialist team” or a “sales assist team” that companies will spin up. Those teams will go out there and try to identify which of the existing free users are likely to just become self-serve paid users or if there is a bigger opportunity to convert them into a $10,000 per year contract or $50,000 per year contract. They're generally equipped by a combination of BI tools and  a reverse ETL tool that syncs product user data back into a CRM.

Fundamentally, what you're looking for is the ability to give visibility on who is using the product a lot to the sales assist team or product specialist team. That’s the baseline. The question is, how can you provide this data in some sort of dashboard? Some teams have taken it further and set up some set of automations or alerts that trigger based on users hitting certain points in the activation flow. As soon as someone adds their fifth colleague onto the product, that's probably a good, opportune time to reach out as a salesperson and try to convert that user or to reach out and help that fifth user get onboarded onto the product and start to unlock some of the multiplayer use cases of a PLG product. It's that combination of providing a way for these reps to dig into what's happening in the product, and then also making sure that you can be proactive about it and flagging those accounts when these sorts of events occur.

Now, the way that people do it today oftentimes is with a combination of more generic data tooling: like Looker, and we've also heard Retool being used frequently as well. Most of this will hinge around some kind of data warehouse, whether it's BigQuery, Redshift or Snowflake. And then of course you've got reverse ETL syncing data back into the CRM. When you're not using a dashboard tool like a Retool or a Looker, we've also seen some companies hack together a solution where you're using the campaign object in Salesforce to house a lot of the same data that you might see on a dashboard. People are finding very creative ways to use essentially generic data tooling to push reps the right information. It’s probably also worthwhile mentioning the IPaaS solutions here. Some companies are using that instead of reverse ETL to push data back into the CRM, but increasingly I think reverse ETL tools have taken the forefront on that.