Like trying a new haircut or type of jeans, a sales strategy picked to keep up with the latest trend often results in an ill-suited style that later become a source of embarrassment. 

Go-to-market trendspotters, still under the sway of postrecession and pandemic-propelled tech success, proclaim product-led-growth (PLG) as the new skinny jeans, but it must be remembered that what is just right for, say, a streamlined punk pop guitarist, couldn’t be more wrong for a hulking baritone.

Determining sales strategy is not an aesthetic or one-size-fits all choice. The “fit” of an effective planned growth process depends on the product or service offered, as well as the customer acquistion cost and the personalization of communication needed to close. This last factor involves an assessment of the prospect’s need and knowledge of the product or service, as well as the discernment of his or her internal buying process and influencing weight.

 Even if PLG is the best initial fit, expanded growth will necessitate adding on traditional enterprise sales. However, the success of those salespeople in todays changed market depends on character to a new, heightened degree. 

The 411 on PLG 

An evangelist of this “new” sales strategy, author Wes Bush, provides a succinct definition:

Product-Led Growth is defined as a go-to-market stategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers.

The conventional take has PLG as the evolved, maximally efficient sales solution from those ever-one-step-ahead tech companies. After all, a crucial consequence of our internet information age is that the relationship between buyer and seller no longer favors a specialized knowledge advantage to the seller. 

Let’s review the sales-led-growth (SLG) strategy of complex enterprise selling. It once enjoyed a theoretical and practical business-to-business (“B2B”) monopoly, instilling sales outreach conformity despite an inefficient information exchange.

In traditional SLG the peripatetic seller, after much cold calling and unrequited communicating, was welcomed to the prospect’s inner sanctum conference room to deliver a performance that educated, informed, and excited the buyer. The seller broadened the buyer’s understanding not only of the dangled product or service, but of best practices and marketplace insights based on hard won experience in solution selling to similarly situated customers. In the heightened confidentiality conscious, but deeply competetive and FOMO-fueled legal and financial worlds, the inefficiencies of the personalized information delivery was tolerated because of its unavailability elsewhere and the status quo, risk-reducing precedent favoring “that’s how things are done here” process. 

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Today the buyer, particularly if an end user and beneficiary of the product or service promoted, is already informed about the market and can easily research solutions and prospective providers. She needs both more (better understanding from seller of her specific process & work improvement) and less (how the flight was; market gossip; discussions beyond the specific product; what the local pro team was up to last night) than the traditional SLG presentation provides. 

Enter product led growth, the shiny, minimalist sales strategy that’s captured the imagination of start-ups and high-growth worshipping supplicants. And why not, with such rocketing companies as Atlassian, DocuSign, Dropbox, GitHub, Qualtrics, Slack, Stripe, and Zoom all attributing early and mostly exponential growth through this freemium-first PLG strategy. 

Accepting the “Dis” of Disintermediation 

Product led growth is not simply a tech bro, subscription as a service (SaaS) driven initiative. Sure, PLG worship has become a Silicon Valley signifier, joining monogrammed fleece vests, nootropics, and using “monetize” and “scale” as conversational mantras. 

But unlike those superficial tells, it’s not a fad.

PLG is a digital consequence of the larger business trend of disintermediation. This removal of layers (“friction”) between product and purchaser is at its existential purest when it’s just the buyer, alone, testing the tool. Big box stores have long leveraged lower pricing by cutting out supply chain middlemen, transforming retail selling through low price, consumer-led buying, and lessening or eliminating in-store, hovering salespeople. And how would cars (always) and clothes (mostly) be sold without the tactile, emotional comfort provided by the pedal to the metal, Springsteen-on-Highway 9 test drive, or the flattering visual reassurance of the slightly tilted up dressing room magic mirror?

Disintermediation provides a huge competitive advantage for those businesses who can bypass the time, cost, and dissipation of product and service focus required to recruit and wrangle a squad of salespeople. 

Moreover, frictionless sales disintermediation via PLG carries over into B2B the newish and nearly universal expectation of consumer absolutism. After all, every professional prospect is also an individual consumer, used to wise algorithmic curation suggestions and one click ease of purchase. Buyers expect a completely free trial and the ability to say “no” with simple return and refund, even for purchases made on a whim. (Thanks Amazon).

But here’s the rub. Product led growth is not a universally applicable sales strategy. Even though PLG adoption has been propelled into wider usage by COVID-19’s ending of the traditional center stage SLG focus of in-person presentation, the PLG transformation of selling is still limited to a discrete type of product and prospect. 

In the real world of professional B2B sales, no end-user prospect (except if C-Level) has the clout to authorize enterprise contracts. The PLG strategy works where prospects are both end users AND decision makers, and the product (usually tech) can easily prove its utility solely on a free trial. This is typically in smaller businesses or autonomous parts of larger businesses, where self-serve provides the prospect with all that is needed to buy or the internal justification to authorize procurement.

Growth + (New Type of) Seller 

 Andreessen Horowitz team members Peter Laten & Martin Casodo have provided a solid strategic case study analysis of the effectiveness of the initial bottom-up PLG, B2B process for relevant new software supplemented by a traditional top-down sales process to expand and capture enterprise opportunities. Carlos Gámez and Joel Lancaster have also smartly considered this integration of PLG and SLG for the legal tech world, so there’s no need for me to pile-on regarding the need to integrate traditional enterprise sales into your initial go-to-market product-led-growth process. 

What needs to be recognized is the fundamental shift in what kind of enterprise salesperson is required in this new reality of an information advantaged buyer, whether as added to bottom-up, go-to-market PLG sales or in updating the traditional SLG process. 

“Salespeople” are often seen by corporate leaders as a necessary means to the end (finding and signing customers) rather than the embodiment of that company’s values and purposes. They are, after all, the front line ambassadors (don’t say “soldiers”!) of the business to prospects.

It’s important to recruit keeping in mind the striking, and more relevant than ever findings of the Wharton School’s Adam M. Grant, and popularized by sales contempletive Daniel Pink. The most successful salespeople are not the confidently outspoken extroverts one might think would be natural persuaders. Instead, sales performance is highest with ambiverts; those whose behavior is between introversion and extroversion. These are people who excel at listening as well as speaking. (Ambiverts are also overrepresented as the best actors for the same reason; empathetic listening as a prerequisite to a believable presentation). 

Source: Adam M. Grant, “Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage” (2013)

 The effective professional B2B salesperson today needs to be more than an educator, advocate, and challenger. She needs to be an empathetic embodiment of the values associated with the service or product. Just as today’s companies are increasingly required to express values aligned with retaining employees (such as “ESG”), the salesperson as envoy must similarly embody a stronger ethical character baseline to be accepted as partners with today’s prospects. Gone are the Glengarry Glen Ross days of the shallow, close-at-all costs manipulator. 

In addition, top performers in this new world of sales need to have a deeper alignment to the customer’s specific needs. The top notch enterprise salesperson, as always, will have knowledge of larger business trends as well as industry specific insights. But what really distinguishes sales success today is the ability to know and integrate customer specific information (e.g. reorganizations; staffing changes; internal projects and initiatives) as the recent Salesforce study shows:

Source: “State of Sales,” Salesforce Research (Dec. 2020)

This requires establishing a deeper, empathetic level of trust to faciliate and skillfully extricate the prospect-specific frictions and challenges that the product or service can smooth out or end. The seller isn’t just a source of information, but a trusted confidant.

If your product or service makes the world better, get it out there expeditiously and forcefully. Choose product-led-growth only if it fits, but remember to choose and add on salespeople embodying values aspirational to your company’s brand to prospect and close those enterprise sales. We are living in a more connected, buyer-empowered world that demands alignment of salesperson values with those respected by your prospects. Your salespeople are your avatars of authenticity. 

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Before you click out and start looking for smart, empathetic industry-savvy ambiverts, remember my initial comparison of PLG and skinny jeans? It turns out, even the one-step-ahead (business); one-step-behind (fashion), Wall Street Journal has just written its obituary. 

Source: Cartoon by Robert Weber, New Yorker (May 12, 1986)