As a product-led business, you have an unfair advantage over competitors as you have unlimited access to a dominant growth engine and significantly lower CACs. But, it takes an entire team to make the strategy work.
This week, we’ll go over:
Wes Bush:
Now the big one here is sales. Sales probably has the most changes as it relates to going from sales-led to product-led. And it's not to say all of them are bad, either. Whenever we're thinking about pricing, many companies will have to undergo a completely new pricing model as they make the transition from sales-led to product led. And this is because, well, previously it might've been hidden or maybe folks had to request more info for the pricing, but now your users can quickly identify how much they're going to get charged if you're using value metrics. And so that really alleviates that part of the discussion for many sales reps.
Wes Bush:
So if they're not focusing on really describing the value of the product or pricing users, what do they do? And so this is, partly, it depends on what is your average contract value and how intensive they are. But let's say if you had a low touch sales team, they're focusing on not the smallest accounts, but let's say mid-market accounts. Well, these sales reps might actually be really knowledgeable about your product and be able to help people out see where they're getting stuck and offering helping hands. So they might be more of a hybrid between support and sales.
Wes Bush:
But there's also what are they using as an indicator of who is a good fit person to go after? And so previously, sales-led companies, this was marketing qualified leads, but now this might be more about product qualified leads and going after the people who already understand the value of the product. And so what's great about sales is often they're the most resistant as it comes to this transition, but when you start giving them product qualified leads, what starts to happen very quickly is they start to realize I need more of these, like these people understand the value, they get it. And they can be focusing on the larger accounts where they can add a lot more value. And the small self-serve accounts that are 10 times the amount of work for a sales rep, those people can self-serve. And so the sales reps' time is leveraged much better. And so they can often become some of the biggest advocates around becoming more product-led.
Wes Bush:
And the last big change that I've seen, some companies do and some companies not, is really just looking at the commission structure. So how do you really structure that? Are you giving sales reps commission or not? If it's more of a support role, support hybrid sales role, you might not offer commission one bit. You might just offer a helping hands as your users go through. So those are some of the main ones, but it's not limited to that. I really do encourage you, once again, to write down what are some of those other big differences that your sales team is going to have to undertake as they make this transition from sales-led to product-led.
