How a PLG team can add a sales function with Correlated's Tim Geisenheimer

00:00:01:16 - 00:00:20:04

Ben Hillman

We've all got a favorite band, and every band began by playing in tiny venues and relying on word of mouth to build their fanbase, their talent and charisma. The equivalent of a great product attract an organic following their content, performing for the love of their craft and the connection they share with their loyal audience. But then they begin to dream bigger.

00:00:20:06 - 00:00:40:15

Ben Hillman

They realize that it truly make their mark in the world. They need to venture beyond the local scene. This requires a different kind of work, like a tour. To go on this tour, they must proactively promote their music, play at major venues, and engage with fans on a larger scale. This band's journey parallels what often happens in the B2B SaaS world.

00:00:40:16 - 00:01:00:20

Ben Hillman

A company can develop an excellent product and build an initial customer base, primarily through organic product led growth. But if they want to accelerate growth and reach their true potential, they might want to consider a sales led motion. This isn't just about pushing for more sales. It's about understanding their customers, personalizing their approach and delivering value beyond the product itself.

00:01:01:02 - 00:01:21:23

Ben Hillman

And much like a band taking on a tour, it requires strategic thinking, planning and execution. And there's no one better to guide us through this process than Tim Geithner, our CEO and co-founder of Correlated. Tim has been instrumental in not just applying a sales led approach to a product led company, but also intertwining these two strategies in a seamless, effective manner.

00:01:21:23 - 00:01:44:03

Ben Hillman

His deep understanding of this duality, coupled with his ability to operation allies, it makes him a valuable advisor for companies looking to bounce and integrate these growth strategies. In today's episode, recorded at the end of 2022, we'll dive deep into Tim's approach, explore the journey of correlated and understand how they've managed to blend a strong sales led motion with a product led growth strategy.

00:01:44:05 - 00:02:06:04

Ben Hillman

From discussing the trends and go to market strategies to lessons from his time at Twitter. We will navigate the intricacies of selling and serving in the SaaS world from Paddle. It's Protect the Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Tim Guys and I speaks to Andrew DAVIES about adding a sales motion onto product led growth.

00:02:06:07 - 00:02:25:20

Ben Hillman

They talk about the inconvenient truth of PLG product led versus sales led aka makers versus Shakers, how Appeal G team can add a sales function selling to different personas and current trends in PLG. After you finish the episode, check out the show notes for a look at the steps to implement a sales led motion on top of your product led growth.

00:02:26:00 - 00:02:41:21

Ben Hillman

Then, while you're leaving your five star review of this podcast, tell us what resonated most about Tim's story. First up, The Inconvenient Truth, a PLG.

00:02:45:10 - 00:02:53:21

Andrew Davies

Hey, Tim, great to have you on the hustle. Perhaps I can just give us a quick introduction to yourself and what you do Monday to Friday with correlated to.

00:02:53:23 - 00:03:12:09

Tim Geisenheimer

Your educate the senior team CEO and co-founder correlated correlated helps sales go to market teams at product led growth companies identify the best users of accounts to go after for conversion and upsell and expansions. Now happy to obviously dive in more on on kind of what we're doing, what we see and talk more generally about PLG.

00:03:12:13 - 00:03:20:22

Andrew Davies

You set let's define PLG first. So product led growth is a seasoning, I'm assuming is the acronym you're meaning what is PLG into you before we dive in?

00:03:20:22 - 00:03:40:16

Tim Geisenheimer

You know, I think to really distill it down, PLG is sort of a way of distributing your product as a SaaS company. The simplest definition is can and end user. Somebody who goes to your website, click, get started and start using the product kind of on their own without any impediments, without having to talk to sales or, you know, do something like that.

00:03:40:16 - 00:03:45:08

Tim Geisenheimer

They just get into the product and actually speaking that, that's like the best definition of products.

00:03:45:08 - 00:03:59:18

Andrew Davies

You sit as a very interesting kind of next step for many PLG companies in the you work, my understanding is you work with companies who are then layering on sales teams on top of product led growth. Is that correct? And at what stage do you see that happen?

00:03:59:21 - 00:04:16:15

Tim Geisenheimer

Oftentimes we come into the picture once you have reached a certain level of scale. And so you might have started your company, you had a couple of developers and you're sending out a new building. Your first version of software you believe said it's self-serve. You get customers paying on a credit card. You're kind of off to the races.

00:04:16:15 - 00:04:51:06

Tim Geisenheimer

You start maybe doing maybe a couple million and there are all of a sudden your products are expanding the surface area and then your your go to market functions are expand. So you add marketing on that. You start to maybe add your first dollars. And so I think where we come in is once you have this level of scale of maybe thousand, tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands of users or more using your product, representing hundreds or thousands of accounts, the salespeople who enter that not equation are tasks of figuring out, okay, which of these thousands are more users and accounts that I spend time on beyond the self-serve part of the product to to

00:04:51:08 - 00:05:00:12

Tim Geisenheimer

maybe try and upsell them, to get them to spend more or if they're on a free version, to get them to convert conversion free to parent. That's where we come in. We help kind of cut through the noise and help those teams figure it out.

00:05:00:13 - 00:05:22:20

Andrew Davies

I think one of the inconvenient truths of pro led growth is that it doesn't mean no sales team, right? You know, almost every product led business adds on a sales team at some point in time for some different element of their expansion or retention or whether it's upsell or a different type of product set before we dive into, you know, product qualified leads and how to product led or sales assisted coexist and all of the good stuff that sits under the skin there.

00:05:22:22 - 00:05:35:16

Andrew Davies

It seems like a pretty niche bit of marketing and sales technology to to set up. What brought you to this point of wanting to start correlated and wanting to help sales teams of revenue teams sell in to free user bases and product led user bases?

00:05:35:16 - 00:05:56:07

Tim Geisenheimer

Problem that I had directly experience as a seller and someone building an early team at a startup that had this this problem of distribution in motion. I was employee 11 at a company called Time Scale Open Source Database Company and open source piece of software that was free. They created a cloud version of that software that was pay as you go self-serve.

00:05:56:08 - 00:06:15:08

Tim Geisenheimer

I was tasked early on with trying to figure out at zero revenue, you know, what was the initial go to market share and how do we start to get the engine going on top of thousands of thousands of free users of the product? Yeah, I saw it firsthand. And the challenge for me was there's too many leads, there are too many people to go after.

00:06:15:08 - 00:06:28:00

Tim Geisenheimer

And I needed I felt very mechanism. And so I kind of built with my co-founder Derek Correlated, who was a product manager. There, kind of an early version correlated a much more kind of stripped down version there, a time scale. And that was the impetus for starting the company.

00:06:28:03 - 00:06:39:08

Andrew Davies

Let's just go back to those days. Let's talk in a bit of depth about what you actually did there. So were you in Salesforce or HubSpot or Marketo and what do you actually do to build up that tooling to better see the signal in the noise of all of these four uses of time scope.

00:06:39:08 - 00:07:02:03

Tim Geisenheimer

There was less tools than exists today, but we did have Salesforce early goal. That sort of what we did was, Hey, I want to understand this is kind of just me at the time, which accounts I should target. And so what I did was took in data related to what those four users were doing. I actually did to get a little more tactical IP enrichment on all of those users so we could do some account matching.

00:07:02:03 - 00:07:16:21

Tim Geisenheimer

I went through and thought a little bit about our ICP and said, okay, here's sort of the list of some of the top accounts that are both indexing high on usage and our good potential. ICP targets. And then we went through and tried to ascertain if we could figure out who or the people that were actually using the product that we couldn't.

00:07:16:21 - 00:07:34:02

Tim Geisenheimer

We did a little bit of cold outreach and that was sort of the early kind of scrapped together a go to market version. But simply combining that product usage data they were collecting from the product into Salesforce and doing some IBM along that those lines was really transformative and allowed us to find out early revenue there, a time scale.

00:07:37:08 - 00:07:42:08

Ben Hillman

Next product led versus sales lead a.k.a makers versus shakers.

00:07:45:23 - 00:08:10:11

Andrew Davies

Many in this listening to this podcast will be, you know, building a product led business customer base. We got thousands of proto led businesses, most of which are about two or have recently added some form of sales team on top. Talk to me in a bit more depth about when a product led business, whether bootstrapped or venture funded, when a of that business should think about adding a sales team, what are those early warning signs that this is going to be something that's going be high yield for the business.

00:08:10:11 - 00:08:40:23

Tim Geisenheimer

There's not necessarily a one size fits all sort of rules, but I think there are a couple of markers that that jump out at me. I think, one, have you achieve some level of kind of scale in that early product where you know that that machine's moving along and you're starting to get people coming to you raising their hand and saying, hey, I have security kind of concerns or, you know, this set of needs that are maybe outside of kind of a pure, seamless self-serve process, then you might say, hey, we're going to these hand razors that you need.

00:08:40:23 - 00:08:54:21

Tim Geisenheimer

Security questionnaires filled out, have sort of other parts of maybe a procurement process that you need to attend to. That's sort of a breaking point for us. A lot of sales teams. So we had sales to help kind of help those people by in a way that we're not helping them buy with the product. So I think that would be one.

00:08:54:22 - 00:09:18:06

Tim Geisenheimer

I think the second would be in from a product standpoint, do you have more kind of enterprise type features that go beyond the single end user? Are you enabling kind of team based features in your product or some other upsell mechanism? And is that something that maybe isn't intuitive in the product itself? And if so, you know, is there that now where your sales data can come in and sort of upsell beyond that?

00:09:18:06 - 00:09:30:06

Tim Geisenheimer

I think those are kind of two aspects that, you know, basically indicate, hey, it's time for us to really add folks on who can work with our existing users, existing customers, and then got them to be more successful and all the way to spend more on us.

00:09:30:06 - 00:09:52:10

Andrew Davies

When I think about product led versus sales led, I often think about makers versus shakers. You need product led when you're serving a maker who is the end user, the person who gets the value personally from the product. And often you need to use sales assisted When you're serving a buying committee, When there's a shaker, there's an economic buyer who has to choose a vendor, choose a provider that's going to form, process and team around them.

00:09:52:10 - 00:10:10:16

Andrew Davies

So does that correlate how you think about the world that often these tools are built for a maker, an end user, a developer or a designer, and then suddenly they get to the level of scale or complex. It's your usage that you now need to serve that shaker that has. You say, I have very different needs security and compliance and collaboration and integration with other tools.

00:10:10:16 - 00:10:12:03

Andrew Davies

So is that often the tripping point you.

00:10:12:03 - 00:10:29:04

Tim Geisenheimer

Can get pretty far with the makers? You know, I think if you look at a company like Figma, for example, they had a lot of success with this credit card spending both on the individual level, on their team level. And then, you know, obviously they have a very successful sales margin that they've layered on over the last several years as well.

00:10:29:04 - 00:10:53:16

Tim Geisenheimer

But it's certainly possible to get pretty far, especially in this day and age, with tools like paddle to, you know, have seamless payments and and all that in your product so that you're able to be pretty pretty successful without sort of sales to having to appeal to the shaker. That said, in the example I gave earlier around kind of that security, you know, consideration and those are, yeah, different personas that are up and, you know, not the end users.

00:10:53:20 - 00:11:14:14

Tim Geisenheimer

And if you are trying to do a consolidation play saying multiple different teams are using the product, we're trying to consolidate the spend across an organization. And yeah, those people don't have no knowledge of Figma for example, because they're on the procurement side. They're going to need to get involved, you know, sort of the assurances around requirements and security or whatever laid out for them.

00:11:14:14 - 00:11:22:12

Tim Geisenheimer

And that's often kind of a sales approach. And yeah, it's it's going to be different than appointments, those end users. So I do like that from what the what.

00:11:22:14 - 00:11:38:23

Andrew Davies

Do you find yourself having to talk to people at businesses about the value of adding sales lead, or have they already seen these triggers themselves? Because I'm sure that, you know, I certainly I know from some of our research with with Todd Gardner that ACV average contract value is massively correlated with, you know, the the growth of your software business.

00:11:38:23 - 00:11:47:09

Andrew Davies

If you add up the ACV, that's how you bake in higher, higher multiples of growth. Do you find yourself I mean, to talk about track or are people coming to you already understanding that in the market?

00:11:47:09 - 00:12:07:23

Tim Geisenheimer

You know, maybe a few years ago that was more of a debate. I don't think we're in a place today where we're having to convince people that that adding sell is, you know, something they need to do. I think they've already by the time we're talking to them, at least they've already made that that decision. I saw one study and I'm going to miss the attribution error, but I think 96% P.A. is our sales team.

00:12:07:23 - 00:12:18:08

Tim Geisenheimer

So it's sort of a foregone conclusion at this point that in order to kind of scale out, you really do need to add ad sales to your go to market motion, even if you have a self-serve product.

00:12:18:11 - 00:12:34:21

Andrew Davies

Before we dig into, you know, how someone adds a sales team, I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Do you ever see it work the other way where people who are have built a sales life business are now adding on, you know, a product led motion? And is that ever something you serve or really do they have to be scale on the part of that in motion before something like correlated becomes useful?

00:12:35:01 - 00:12:57:19

Tim Geisenheimer

We see that a lot, and I would say that is something that is harder in some way. They're adding sales to a product wide motion. I think often if you start out with more of a sales led motion and forget about the go to market side, just the product side, if you have kind of a product that is, you know, not initially designed to be self-serve, there's a lot of changes that occur on the product side that can be tricky.

00:12:57:19 - 00:13:16:14

Tim Geisenheimer

And then you also have with a sales led motion, you know, some level of process related to how customers can get access to your product and and pay you and and all of that. That is, you know, quite a bit different than how companies that are self-serve or product cloud, you know start off and sort of evolve and grow over time.

00:13:16:21 - 00:13:29:14

Tim Geisenheimer

And so while we do see and do help a number of companies that have kind of layered on a self-serve motion on top of an existing sales of motion, I would say it's quite a bit harder and it's something that takes up, you know, the full company effort to to get the high.

00:13:32:18 - 00:13:35:18

Ben Hillman

And now how a policy team can add a sales function.

00:13:39:12 - 00:13:57:22

Andrew Davies

Let's try to be really helpful here for people who are listening, who have a pro led business that now are thinking about the sales led motion on top. So what comes first, then what's next? There must be are all kinds of challenges with the data infrastructure and team comp plans that never had to dealt with before and company culture and product release cycles.

00:13:57:22 - 00:14:03:20

Andrew Davies

Talk me through if you were now coaching a product led business on how they had a sales team, what they need to go, what they need to walk through.

00:14:03:20 - 00:14:26:12

Tim Geisenheimer

We've written additionally you know about about this quick plug go to our blog, get call intercom and there's a lot of content that we put out around this topic. But at a high level, you know, there are a couple of different areas and you ready to think through and some of these span both go to market and product and you know and and I do think that that in and of itself is telling is a full company effort to do go to market for product.

00:14:26:12 - 00:14:43:23

Tim Geisenheimer

But you know I think one of the biggest things that we recommend is you know, get your data house in order because ultimately your sales team is going to need to rely on an understanding of what's going on in product. What what are customers doing which customers they're going to target. And so, you know, I think today can't be an afterthought.

00:14:44:00 - 00:15:09:04

Tim Geisenheimer

It should be something that you really think through upfront as they're starting to add on sales. And so, you know, using tools like segment or data warehouse to make sure you're gathering all the billing usage, CRM data are getting it together and cleaned up and consolidate. And I think that is a hugely important task. And I think following that, you know, making sure that you have kind of the right playbooks in place for sales and a lot of those relate to products.

00:15:09:04 - 00:15:31:04

Tim Geisenheimer

We talked about a few of them, you know, earlier. Are you a consolidation plan? So that Sigma example where you know, your sales team is going to go and try and identify accounts that have multiple workspaces, a figma, and then go and try to find maybe a champion to then appeal to the sort of senior leadership to say, hey, we need to get all these together in one and here are the benefits of getting a site license for Figma.

00:15:31:04 - 00:15:53:01

Tim Geisenheimer

Is that kind of your strategy or are you going to play more of a upsell from pro to enterprise? And, you know, here are the features and functionality and enterprise that you're not getting today. So I think there's a ton of different playbooks and trying to figure out where to sell slot in in kind of your go to market and how your product works are self-serve product words that that's going to be really important as well.

00:15:53:08 - 00:16:25:00

Tim Geisenheimer

The last thing you mentioned is comp tech. That is something that a ton of companies have talked about that we've had actually on our biweekly community chat and a few few guests talk about comp. We had someone a few months ago from MongoDB and they talked a little bit about their kind of usage based comp. So they look at for a given territory, for example, with an blogger day, what is the expected forecast or accounts in our territory and that is how they've sat quarter and second, and then it's kind of based on a comfort level of usage.

00:16:25:00 - 00:16:41:10

Tim Geisenheimer

And so there's a lot that is maybe a podcast in of itself that going on the just the upside. But I do think at a high level, just being thoughtful on how do you price, you know, how should sales be compensated. It's not just an upfront annual deal necessarily that they're going to get, they should get compensated or commission.

00:16:41:17 - 00:16:45:08

Tim Geisenheimer

Yeah, I think those are some of the other key areas that I would think about is you're just trying to layering self.

00:16:45:14 - 00:17:16:12

Andrew Davies

Commission and complaining when it comes to usage based products I think is get super complex, massive shout outs to Tabrizi and the the bi weekly forum you run. I've been in that several times. I love it. I love the speakers. You're getting into that. I think there's crossover of two worlds of product lead and sales office. It is just super interesting from a cultural perspective to certainly we see in our in our customer base just a clear distinction between founders who are probably very technical and have set up maybe a bootstrapped business where everything is about the product, the marketing is the product, the sales is the product, the upsell is the product, the customer

00:17:16:12 - 00:17:28:19

Andrew Davies

success is the product from founders who set up and one of their first hires after they've got an MVP as a sales team. How do you think about dealing with perhaps that culture clash when you're adding a sales led business onto what's probably been a product, the business previously?

00:17:28:19 - 00:17:44:05

Tim Geisenheimer

What's the topic I like to, which is for early stage or what are the right fits for sales or go to market. You know, I've been in that role several times. You know, I think I have, you know, with myself, I've seen, you know, kind of where I fit in or hiring someone like me, you know, what would that role be?

00:17:44:05 - 00:18:00:22

Tim Geisenheimer

And I think, you know, regardless of product, glad or otherwise, when you're hiring kind of those first sellers as a relatively early stage company and I'm assuming here is there's like you could be, you know, maybe one of these examples of Zapier where I think they added sales on, you know, in their 59 RR or something like that.

00:18:00:22 - 00:18:25:14

Tim Geisenheimer

So I'm putting that aside for a second. But let's say a relatively early stage, you know, I think you're looking for someone that is extremely product aware and product focused and thinking through how does this product work? There may be no depth at using the product, you know, depending on what kind of product it is. They're passionate about the problems it solves and they can talk, you know, really fluently to prospective customers about the product and how it could solve different problems.

00:18:25:14 - 00:18:44:02

Tim Geisenheimer

I think it's it's much more important than in sales led businesses to have that product awareness because the assumption is for the most part, what you're involved in in sales deals. There are those people that you're working with, whether they're the champions or you're not always the buyer, but they're the champions at least will have a lot of familiarity with the product.

00:18:44:02 - 00:19:02:05

Tim Geisenheimer

So you need to kind of do a good job there. And I think also, you know, early sales hires need to be pretty flexible in terms of trying playbooks, iterating quickly. And this is very true for product line as well. You need to be trying different players, trying different approaches, seeing what kind of works or what doesn't work and entering quickly.

00:19:02:11 - 00:19:11:15

Tim Geisenheimer

There's unnecessary going to be just one play that that works. And we see that a lot with what our customers are constantly trying new things. So to have that kind of level of experimental motion as a skillset.

00:19:11:16 - 00:19:21:18

Andrew Davies

Before we go on and just talk about a couple of other topics here, have you got some examples of those playbooks that have really worked or companies you point to who have really done this well and how have they done it?

00:19:21:18 - 00:19:49:13

Tim Geisenheimer

Well, I feel like I'm plugging website, but we actually published the Playbook Library on our website, so we have a number of examples kind of players that we've seen work. Well, I'll maybe highlight some examples I've personally used and the path is like time scale that I think can be effective and that obviously work well. I mean, I think one of the things that we really recommend is because you hopefully have actions that that product that you should be leveraging the usage of the product in your outreach.

00:19:49:14 - 00:20:09:18

Tim Geisenheimer

You know, you can assume your outreach is somewhat warm because that person you're you're reaching out to maybe has used the product as a result. Why not mention how they're using the product, how maybe they could be using it to be even more effective, name some things that they haven't done yet, haven't enabled this integration or haven't used a feature that they have access to anyway.

00:20:09:18 - 00:20:34:11

Tim Geisenheimer

You can personalize that outreach based on usage. Really important. I think the other thing that we recommend is trigger point. You should send the email or that message over here. You're deciding the sequence that based on when some sort of key moment happens and that's going to be different for different companies and different approaches. But know some examples we've seen, let's say DevTools product and you price on API calls.

00:20:34:11 - 00:20:53:21

Tim Geisenheimer

If you see a spike in API calls for an account that's in your ICP and you know it's kind of on your on your list and getting notified about that using that spike in your messaging when that having the message obviously sent out in a timely way can really help get someone to reply, Hey, they're paying attention, they're aware of our usage here and there.

00:20:53:22 - 00:21:02:12

Tim Geisenheimer

You know, that's helpful. I think those are just a couple tangible examples of things we've seen, you know, tactically work well on the sell side for for PLG.

00:21:02:12 - 00:21:18:03

Andrew Davies

And I'm glad you reminded me about it because I think your PLG Playbook library is killer. You do such a good job there. And if people haven't had to look at it, you know, what we're talking about here is saying, okay, for sales teams, here are some playbooks. For example, you know, maybe an executive title user has signed up and used one key feature.

00:21:18:03 - 00:21:37:03

Andrew Davies

Therefore, we create a task for outreach or maybe for the marketing team. Someone has just suddenly boosted, you know, 30 or 40% in their usage or in their growth. And therefore we want to reach out and trigger a reach out to write a customer story. And there are, you know, I don't know if there's hundreds but certainly tens of different playbooks for marketers, for customer success, for sales in their Playbook library.

00:21:37:03 - 00:21:52:23

Andrew Davies

And they're just really good whether you're a customer of of correlated or not. I think they're really good examples of how a product that is sales led can work alongside each other. So I guess all of this comes down to, you know, identifying products qualify leads, leads and opportunities and accounts based on all of these attributes, the all storing within your system.

00:21:52:23 - 00:22:10:17

Tim Geisenheimer

I, I appreciate the kind words there. And, you know, I think that that we're we could do even better job out of you more players we we have probably dozens there but but you know hopefully we'll get the hundreds soon enough And I think it's it's definitely something that you see a lot of innovation and sequencing and sort of cold out about.

00:22:10:17 - 00:22:22:06

Tim Geisenheimer

And, you know, over the last several years, I think that's been an area where there's been a lot of innovation. There hasn't been quite as much, I think, until, you know, hopefully we're helping at least on the pages outside. Yeah, I think we're going continue to invest there.

00:22:25:07 - 00:22:27:13

Ben Hillman

Next, selling to difficult personas.

00:22:31:05 - 00:22:50:19

Andrew Davies

So let's change tack slightly because one thing that I think you've written about before and I find really interesting is that when you add sales to a product led motion after you're selling to people and salespeople have the hard job of selling to people who aren't used to receiving sales calls or sales emails, I'm probably one of the toughest personas is the developer persona developers who perhaps they've been using a product.

00:22:50:19 - 00:23:20:05

Andrew Davies

Maybe they've started paying for it on a small monthly fee, maybe had a small plan, and now using correlated, that vendor is going to start reaching out to them to try and upsell them to some wider enterprise plan with some extra security features. And selling to developers is is really, really hard. So please talk me through your thinking on let's take that persona specifically as a type of make up that you've now got to, you know, understand, communicate with influence to play power, play a champion role, or some role in a wider purchase of the software that they use it as.

00:23:20:06 - 00:23:43:07

Tim Geisenheimer

Was near and dear to my heart, because time scale, you know, was not product that was for developers. The database, you know, developers are using it to build, you know, their core application or something really important. And so trying to understand timing was the most important part, and that's true for sales anywhere. But, you know, I think what I learned there and what's really important with developers is timing matters.

00:23:43:07 - 00:24:16:23

Tim Geisenheimer

And so most of the time we're going to for the most part, they're going to want to maybe figure things out on their own, do a lot of their own research, and not necessarily want to talk to sales. But there are key moments when you know they're going to be more open to having a sales conversation. And I think for just to use time scale, this specific example we saw, there are moments where the research phase ended and more of a formal policy not involving us, but, you know, having developers looking at us versus maybe two or three other competing solutions to decide, okay, what's the database I'm going to use for this project, knowing

00:24:16:23 - 00:24:42:19

Tim Geisenheimer

that that was starting, that process was starting and they were going to look at pricing and think through, okay, how much is this going to cost? What are some of the features of benefits of time scale versus other solution? Having that knowledge of that inflection point around the PSC was invaluable because then we were able to hopefully insert ourselves before the handrails of there was even going to be and have some influence over over the decision for developer sales understanding.

00:24:42:19 - 00:24:59:05

Tim Geisenheimer

Is there maybe a decision point around a PRC if they're making a decision about building on top of certain technology like APIs or database, if it's more of like a developer productivity tool, you know, is this something they were looking at us against other products that are quite, you know, similar, whether it just doing a trial to see if it works in a team.

00:24:59:05 - 00:25:17:03

Tim Geisenheimer

I think that timing piece is really important so that that that be one thing getting the time right versus just hitting somebody up with an email right after they sign up because I might not be there at times. You have to get a little bit more creative. I think the other thing that you know, I mentioned earlier, but that was really important for me is referencing sort of what they're doing in the product.

00:25:17:03 - 00:25:34:14

Tim Geisenheimer

One of our customers also has a database product and they have multiple product lines and they have a specific product where if they know that their customers are doing certain things in their product, it actually means that they're a really good fit for this, this cross-sell opportunity. And so they look for the markers of the things they're doing in their product, in the data.

00:25:34:14 - 00:25:51:05

Tim Geisenheimer

And so if that happens, it's a notification, right? The saying, okay, they're doing the things that indicate they'll would be a really good fit for this for for pretty fairly technical reasons. And then the play is basically to say, hey, I saw you're doing these things, you could have much better performance and all the different, you know, benefits and features or whatever if you to use this product.

00:25:51:05 - 00:26:07:01

Tim Geisenheimer

And so I think those are some key examples where if you're appealing tactical level to the developer, you're appealing on a timing, you know, from a timing standpoint or to that when they're kind of doing their research and making a decision from the PSC standpoint, those are some key ways. I think you can win on the sales front.

00:26:07:03 - 00:26:26:10

Andrew Davies

Just to close that thought. And so timing and trigger. Yes, absolutely. Making sure, as you said, there's that there's that context, the understanding as they're going through that PSC. Is there also like an additional burden to show them what you know in terms of data and proof of what they're doing because they'll want to understand why you're reaching out and what the extra value prop is here.

00:26:26:10 - 00:26:44:11

Tim Geisenheimer

This are like the collect people who sell to us to see who does a good job and who doesn't have a whole library of that that I don't know to share publicly. I never share who the people are or the companies. I sometimes share the example, but anonymize them. And so one of the good ones we saw recently was from an infrastructure provider on neighbor.

00:26:44:12 - 00:27:02:03

Tim Geisenheimer

They mentioned that they analyzed our usage, their products and that they didn't go into detail. The email, I think maybe for for obvious reasons, but that they saw some areas we could improve from a security standpoint. And so they said that to me and I sent that to our CTO. Now that, you know, really caught our attention, right, you security is super important.

00:27:02:03 - 00:27:22:07

Tim Geisenheimer

And if we're using the product and they notice some things that could be better from a security standpoint, we're going to want to hear them. We got on the call and then they say, Oh, by the way, if you switch everything over from person you're currently using to us, yeah, there is this incentive or that. So obviously it went from a helpful security call to a here's how you can spend more with us and some inducement to do that pretty quickly.

00:27:22:08 - 00:27:37:06

Tim Geisenheimer

I think that's another strategy that can work. And yeah, referencing usage to add value, I think adding value is really important. But then obviously there is a, you know, a sales component to that where you can have a pretty productive conversation by getting that book in from value in the first place.

00:27:37:08 - 00:27:44:11

Andrew Davies

Correlate its own go to market. You know, how much do you blend product or sales lead or is it mostly sales led? At the moment we.

00:27:44:11 - 00:28:07:16

Tim Geisenheimer

Have a pretty heavy sales led component, although our product is self-serve. By that I mean we know a lot of the good companies that could really benefit from us. So we have a well-defined ICP not waiting for them to find us. We'll work on them going out and saying, Hey, we're pretty confident we can help out here. So and so there is a, you know, an outbound motion there, an effort to have folks that we think we can help, you know, find us through through our efforts.

00:28:07:16 - 00:28:28:23

Tim Geisenheimer

We also do have a self-serve product, though, and a number of our customers and come through that product and have converted from, you know, self-serve usage. And we expect that to be a compounding advantage over time. I think there are a couple of ways that it's important to us. One, we get the dog food correlated, then use our product as a way to help find customers and help work with existing customers and all that.

00:28:28:23 - 00:28:46:08

Tim Geisenheimer

And it makes our product better. It makes us better talking about our product. And then I think the other thing is just it's hard to imagine being persuasive about PLG if you're not yourself. PLG So I think we evolved from a very early, early on that we had to kind of live our values here off about step one.

00:28:46:08 - 00:28:50:22

Tim Geisenheimer

So while we do have a decently sales led brochure, we have our our apology motions reference.

00:28:53:19 - 00:28:55:23

Ben Hillman

And now current trends in PLG.

00:28:59:10 - 00:29:15:12

Andrew Davies

Before we finish up here, let's just zoom right back out for you. What are the big trends in go to markets and particularly within product led or product adding sales led? What are what are things that are happening that you would point to in your customer base or beyond that you think are going to be increasing as we go into 2023?

00:29:15:12 - 00:29:35:12

Tim Geisenheimer

Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me and I don't know if it's just Q4 or what, but there's just so much cold outbound that's happening. The thing that I think really sticks out to me are cold out bounding. That happens to me for products we're already using. That doesn't reference our usage. It doesn't have a hook in related to how we're already using the product.

00:29:35:12 - 00:29:53:09

Tim Geisenheimer

And I feel like that's such a missed opportunity. And and I feel like the days of cold sequencing for PLG companies that list maybe sells it could last for a bit longer. But if you have a self-serve product, the days of kind of just pure cold sequencing know I feel like those days are numbered. We're beating the drum for our customers and helping our customers.

00:29:53:09 - 00:30:08:15

Tim Geisenheimer

Do you know what what some of the tactics that I described during this podcast and then, you know, I would hope that whether or not they're using correlated or not, that most companies in my sales team will kind of move past just pure, cold, outbound, and especially to people who are already using the product, their existing customers.

00:30:08:18 - 00:30:27:15

Andrew Davies

I can't end without noting that I saw on your LinkedIn profile the you were at Twitter for a couple of years after being part of a team that got sold into Twitter. So Tim, what's going on? What's your perspective as someone who is on the site leading a sales team there in the early days, or I think it was probably seven or eight years ago, hey, you know, what are you thinking as you load Twitter each day?

00:30:27:15 - 00:30:48:16

Tim Geisenheimer

Before I joined Twitter, I was a Twitter addict and I was a Twitter addict. I was there and I'm still a Twitter addict. I have a lot of love for the product. You know, I believe it's a great product and I think it's had its struggles for years being able to be a successful business and compete with the likes of, you know, Facebook or Google or even sort of more peer companies like a Snapchat.

00:30:48:17 - 00:31:06:14

Tim Geisenheimer

I can't comment on the chaos over there. Seems chaotic right now. You know, I do think, though, that any opportunity to have the product be the pace of innovation move forward like that, I hope that's a good thing. And, you know, if there's a if if there's a way to kind of invigorate the product in the company, you know, I hope that happens.

00:31:06:14 - 00:31:15:02

Tim Geisenheimer

I don't know if it's going to, but I certainly do. I hope that happens because I have a ton of love and respect for the product and I'm a power user for better or for worse every day.

00:31:15:03 - 00:31:29:07

Andrew Davies

I really appreciate the time today. Tim And as a geek of gtb of Go to Market, I love what you're doing and helping companies kind of merge and blend and add on layers and so they go to market promotions. I hope for continued growth as you do that for many, many businesses. So thanks for the time today, Tim.

00:31:29:07 - 00:31:30:02

Andrew Davies

Really appreciate it.

00:31:30:02 - 00:31:31:04

Tim Geisenheimer

Thanks Andrew. Rolling. Join it.

00:31:33:17 - 00:31:56:19

Ben Hillman

Thank you to Tim for being on the show. Now you have a better understanding of how to implement a sales led motion on top of product led growth. Today we talked about the inconvenient Truth, a PLG product led versus sales lead, aka makers versus Shakers, how a PLG team can add a sales function selling to difficult personas and current trends and PLG make sure to give Protect the Hustle a five star review.

00:31:56:21 - 00:32:06:14

Ben Hillman

Tell us what lesson from Tim was your favorite. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Paddle Studios dedicated to helping you build better SaaS.