What is the structure of the marketing, sales & success teams at HeadsUp, & what are their KPIs related to user engagement & usage?

I think the big difference is that we see a lot of sales and success being blurred together. The person that I've been talking about -- this sales assist or product specialist -- they're essentially a hybrid between a sales rep and a customer success rep and even a customer support rep. They usually do belong to the sales team formally at these sorts of companies, but we've also seen the inverse where some companies are very light on actual formal sales reps and heavier on a customer success team whose whole goal is to drive these account expansions.

I don't think the market has found or coalesced on the right way to do things because we still see a lot of different structures. But I think that one consistent theme, long-term, will be that the lines between sales and success increasingly become blurred, because there's not much difference between a user who's free and a user who's been a paying customer for a while. Your job as a go-to-market team should be to help that user unlock value from the product and continue to realize new value in the product, because that's ultimately how you're going to drive revenue. The role increasingly becomes much more consultative and success-driven than what I think we view traditional sales as.

Now, the marketing teams. It's interesting because we see in most cases that marketing teams are still focused more on just getting people to reach that sign-up status. Where you see the notion of marketing applied in a product-led sales context is more in growth teams that are thinking through, “Well, what are the types of email campaigns I should be sending to get people activated?" Because ultimately activation drives towards conversion, so these growth teams are, I would say, a parallel layer on top of traditional sales, marketing, and customer success. They're the ones focused on, "How do I set up all these automations that allow you to have a scaled way of nurturing and eventually converting users?"

What we also see is that sometimes growth teams will own conversion or the sale where there isn't a need for a human to drive that conversion. With product-led sales there are customers that will just sign up for the product and realize value really quickly, and you don't need a person to intervene and be like, "Hey, you should sign up for this business tier or enterprise tier." They'll just do it on their own. In fact, you don't want that because otherwise you're spending precious sales calories or sales reps time on things that would've already happened. So there's this segmentation of a growth team that would own this fully automated sale, and then a true sales team that is inserted to help grease the wheels and convert users that may not otherwise convert if there weren’t some hands-on help in figuring out how do I apply the product to solve my business problem.

There are essentially two primary buckets of “sales” here. One is a team that's dedicated to do fully automated at-scale conversion, and then there's a team that is much more of the human consultative-driven motion, where you're helping people realize value in a much more hands-on way. This is the case with products where there is a single-player mode that eventually tees up into multiple different stakeholders in the business. Consider a tool like Mongo. Any developer can start using Mongo on their own and start realizing value in that product in isolation. But if you, as a sales rep at Mongo, are going to make a large enterprise sale, you need some human being in the loop to talk to, like the IT department or the VP of engineering, who's not actually the one implementing things, but who will basically map out how this solution, as a whole, fits into the organization.

At the same time, Mongo has plenty of fully automated sales as well -- much smaller teams that are just signing up for their cloud product. That's where you might have these sorts of sub-automated email campaigns to drive people towards conversion there.