Alexa and Kevin Young, VP of Sales at UserEvidence dive right into what Kevin calls his "anti-playbook playbook," why he feels strongly that repeatability is sometimes overrated, and how to build a sales team that thinks from first principles.
Alexa chats with Adam Carroll, Founder at Carroll Sales Consulting and former sales leader at FullStory, Recurly, and Outbrain. Adam shares his advice on segmenting your playbooks, moving upmarket, coaching your team on playbooks, and how he built a global expansion strategy.
Alexa chats with Kareem Agha, Head of Sales at Haus about the value of warm outbound, the dangers of ignoring cold outbound, and how to get the entire team excited about doing pipe gen.
Alexa and Andrew Thompson, VP of Sales at Agora, talk through the foundational elements of any good sales playbook, how to build a feedback loop on playbooks, and how to iterate your playbooks.
Alexa and Devin Schiller, Enterprise Sales Leader at Sprout Social talk about the early days of PLS playbooks at Slack, the learnings he brought over to Sprout Social, and how the playbooks have changed.
Alexa interviews Riley Harbour, Head of Business Development at Grammarly about how Grammarly built a successful playbook for B2C user acquisition and how they're turning that success into a powerful enterprise motion.
Alexa sits down with Reed McBride, VP Business Development at Carta on Carta’s PLG playbook for their new product called "Launch."
Ben joined Paperspace to build a revenue engine on top of their already successful PLG motion. Within six months and after adopting Pocus, Ben created a customer-first program that grew top-line revenue by over 2.5x YoY.
Namrata Ram, Head of Revenue Strategy and Operations shares her insights for building and scaling a product-led RevOps organization.
Andrea Wang is currently a partner at General Catalyst investing in and partnering with ambitious early-stage founders. She loves helping founders with product and GTM strategy, especially product-led growth. Previously, she built and led the product growth team at Amplitude, was very early at Lime, and led international expansion on the product team. In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, we were excited to talk to Andrea about how to drive a product-led growth (PLG) motion from a product perspective, all while collaborating closely with sales, marketing, and the rest of the go-to-market function. Tune in for: Deep dive into growth product management (and how it differs from growth marketing) Strategies for winning PLG buy-in How to introduce a PLG motion into a sales-led company Tips for building a robust growth feedback loop Amplitude’s 6-step experimentation process Written recap of episode highlights: https://www.pocus.com/blog/optimizing-growth-product-management-to-scale-your-b2b-motion-with-plg
David Barron, Global Head of Sales at HubSpot, was recruited to join HubSpot in 2014, as their first sales hire, to monetize their customer relationship management (CRM) using a freemium model. In this episode of the Unlocking Revenue podcast David shares advice on: - How to establish a smooth sales + product feedback loop - The best way to identify product-qualified leads - HubSpot’s sales model and acquisition channels, and how they decide in which to invest - How to outbound in a way that doesn’t feel spammy - Tactics for boosting retention, velocity, and ACV Read the main takeaways here: https://www.pocus.com/blog/product-led-sales-strategy-hubspot
In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Pocus Head of Marketing, Sandy Mangat, chats with Emily Kramer — she's built and scaled the GTMs of well-known PLG and PLS brands like Asana and Carta, and now helps marketers with her newsletter, advising, and angel investment. Listen in for advice on: 👉 The GTM spectrum: from pure PLG to fully sales-led 👉 Hiring and org design to complement your GTM motion 👉 Marketing strategy for each motion: top-down, bottoms-up or hybrid About Emily: Emily Kramer is co-founder of MKT1, where she helps founders and marketing leaders build high-growth B2B companies through investment and advising. Prior to founding MKT1 she built and scaled marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly, and Astro (acquired by Slack).
We partnered with Kyle and the folks at OpenView on our second annual Product-Led Sales Benchmark survey. In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Kyle and Alexa dissect the survey results and share their SaaS trend predictions for 2023. Listen in for insights on topics like: 👉 How are customers buying products? 👉 PQAs vs. PQLs 👉 Pros and cons of reverse trials 👉 The art and science of ICP definitions and lead scoring 👉 What PLS metrics should you be tracking? 👉 What sales roles are a PLG companies prioritizing? ... and more! 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Kyle: Kyle Poyar is Operating Partner at OpenView, the expansion stage VC. He helps OpenView’s portfolio companies fuel growth and become market leaders. In his past life, Kyle was a Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners, the leading consulting firm specializing in monetization. When he's not writing about growth for his Growth Unhinged Newsletter, you can find him playing tennis 🎾, cooking Mediterranean food 🍳, hiking 🥾, attempting to finish a Barry’s workout 💪, or hanging out in Boston.
Kenneth Vincent, former Director of Sales at ClickUp, shares the stories of ClickUp’s transition from PLG to Product-Led Sales. What it took to get PLG buy-in, the process behind defining and operationalizing PQLs at ClickUp, balancing automation and customization when it comes to sales outreach, and the details of ClickUp’s self-serve and land-and-expand motions. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Kenneth: Kenneth, former Global Director of Sales at ClickUp has been an early employee at 3 unicorns helping those early teams build a business and GTM strategy. Prior to ClickUp, Kenneth held senior enterprise sales roles at Goodera, App Annie, and Yammer.
In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Clearbit’s Julie Beynon and Colin White talk about how Clearbit's lead qualification engine has matured over time, Clearbit’s process to operationalize lead scoring, their failsafe to keep quality leads from slipping away, and why getting buy-in from GTM teams is just as important as using data to develop ICPs. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Julie: Julie Beynon is Head of Analytics at Clearbit. Julie was originally in a marketing ops role when she started dabbling in analytics, teaching herself to get the data she needed to do her job. And then she fell in love. Now Julie focuses mostly on analytics engineering at Clearbit, spending her days thinking about how to operationalize all the data that has been previously stuck in their warehouse. About Colin: Colin White is Head of Demand Generation at Clearbit. Colin began his career in software engineering but gradually moved on to analytics, marketing ops, and performance marketing. Now, his role heading up demand gen at Clearbit has him working closely with the data Julie produces to gather insights and put those insights into action across marketing and SDR and BDR GTM teams.
Tune in to hear Eleanor Dorfman’s, Sales Leader at Retool, playbook on building Retool’s sales process (using DoorDash as a real case study), defining Retool’s primary sales channels, and how she structured the sales organization. Eleanor also shares her tips on when to start an outbound sales motion, how to find expansion opportunities, and handling sales compensation. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Eleanor: Eleanor Dorfman has been Sales Leader at Retool since November 2020. At that point, there were only about three account executives, one sales engineer, and just a few sales development reps. Today, the sales org has grown to include around 30 AEs, many SEs, and an entire SDR team. Previously, at the customer data platform Segment, she also worked to build out the company’s customer success operations team before pivoting to creating an expansion sales team, renewals team, and a new business sales team.
In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, AJ Bruno, CEO and Co-Founder of QuotaPath, delves into topics like: sales comp at QuotaPath, sales comp trends, guiding business metrics, how to develop sales comp plans around usage-based pricing, and company cultures that incentivize value. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About AJ: AJ Bruno is the co-founder and CEO for sales compensation management platform QuotaPath, the host of an exciting series called Value Props where he interviews sales professionals while flying his Beechcraft Baron 58 (with his commercial pilot’s license, of course!), and an experienced leader in all things go to market — with a special focus on sales compensation.
In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Allison Pickens from dbt Labs dives into the role of Customer Success within self-serve models with topics like: the overlap between customers success, sales-assist, and sales, how the role of customer success is not only present but expanding within product-led growth organizations, choosing the right level of simplicity vs. complexity when building your product adoption and expansion journey, and scalable, self-serve tactics that help supplement customer success. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Allison: Allison Pickens, former COO of Gainsight, is current solo GP, and independent board director at dbt Labs, a product-led, high-growth startup. Allison is also a prolific writer and speaker about customer success and all things related to scaling operations (download the first-ever PLS playbook to see Allison’s awesome insights!)
Tune in to learn about Ramli John’s — Director of Content at Appcues — three-step onboarding formula that drives retention, his thoughts on who owns and who informs onboarding in a modern product-led company, how to deliver the best onboarding experience per customer segment, and how to convince your sales-led organization to adopt product-led onboarding. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Ramli John: Ramli is Director of Content at Appcues, PLG coach at ProductLed, and "Product-Led Onboarding" author. He uses his multidisciplinary skills in marketing, design, and software development to help product-led SaaS companies analyze their whole customer's journey and funnel to identify growth opportunities to 2-3X their MRR. Often, that means designing and implementing experiments to increase activation rate (trial-to-paid or free-to-paid conversions), decrease churn rate or increase average revenue per user (ARPU) On the side, he’s the creator, producer, and host of the Growth Marketing Today podcast.
In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Pete Prowitt, Head of Revenue at Stytch discusses challenges and opportunities when you’re the first sales hire at a PLG company, transitioning from sales IC to manager and shares his experiences building sales teams at Loom, Intercom, Box, and Quip. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Pete Prowitt Head of Revenue at Stytch, formerly VP of Revenue at Rewatch, a video hub that lets you securely save, manage, and search all your video content. Prior to joining Rewatch, Pete was the first sales hire at Loom, where he grew the business from one to seven million in ARR. He built out the entire sales and success engine at the company. Before Loom, Pete held a variety of sales roles both as an IC and manager at companies like Intercom, Quip and Box. Before his career in sales, Pete was actually a basketball player by trade, playing in college and internationally. His path to sales was not linear from playing basketball - he had a few pit stops in investment banking and speech writing, before discovering his passion for software sales.