Not every product-led company sells to tech startups.

Some customers are just a little more traditional.

So what do you when your customers aren't used to buying with a self-serve motion? Does that mean you have to give up being PLG?

Rohan Bairat is an old hand at this. At Spreedly, he sometimes encounters customers who even ask for a proposal or RFP.

Listen to this episode to find out:

1. What Rohan's playbook is when faced with a RFP
2. How to think about navigating more traditional enterprise customers
3. What to do when competing against more top-down, sales-led companies

Connect with Rohan on Linkedin for more information.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

What happens when you combine 2 PLG superstars?

Christof Jaritz is working on it right now at Bitly.

Bitly acquired QR Code Generator last year. Also known as Egoditor, it is one of the world's most popular providers of QR codes with 12 million users.

Since then Christof has been thinking about how to drive growth across the combined company.

He came onto the podcast recently and we talked about

1. What's exciting and what's hard about bringing together 2 winning self-serve tools
2. Whether it's better to be a GTM specialist or generalist, since Christof has spent time in Sales, Growth, and marketing
3. How to leverage culture to bring out the best of your team members

Connect with Christof on Linkedin for more information.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Jotform defies many product-led growth stereotypes.

It's bootstrapped, and it was globally distributed even before COVID!

Bulut Akışık, Jotform's VP of Growth joined us to explain how Jotform works with its millions of self-serve users.

"Many users start off completely self-serve and over the years graduate to 6-figure deals."

Have a listen to this episode to find out how Bulut thinks about growth, the interplay between sales, growth, and marketing, as well as Jotform's tactics for monetizing and activating its freemium users.

"We're building a cathedral at Vercel."

We knew this episode would be a great one when Kevin brought this up at the start of the recording.

Vercel is one of the hottest product-led startups with a ton of love amongst developers.

Morgane Palomares and Kevin Van Gundy came onto the podcast to pull back the curtain on Vercel's go-to-market. Here's what you can catch in this episode:

1. Vercel's 'product advocates' team - what is it, how is it different from sales or sales-assist, and how did they build it up?
2. The unique advantages and challenges of building an open-source product
3. Some common pitfalls in PLG GTM that Morgane and Kevin have seen across the years

Connect with Kevin on Twitter or Linkedin, and here's Morgane's Linkedin!

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Invoice2Go was founded in 2002 and was self-serve from the get-go! They targeted the under-served small business market and helped them generate, send and manage invoices.

Today, Invoice2Go has more than 200,000 customers. As part of the Bill.com family, it is starting to think seriously about adding a sales-assist motion.

Pranav Piyush is leading these efforts. He came onto the podcast to talk about his learnings, what common pitfalls to avoid, and how to use experiments to learn before scaling up the sale-assist engine.

Connect with Pranav on Linkedin.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Have you seen a company build a free tool just to attract customers?

Clearbit's Weekly Visitor Report and CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer come to mind.

Sadra Boutorabi is someone who is no stranger to this strategy. As co-founder and head of growth of Namescan, he built and launched a free tool, and helped to secure the first $1m in revenue for the company.

Today, Sadra leads growth at Tiny, a fast-growing company that provides an open-source rich text editor. 

On this episode we discussed:

• When is it a good idea to launch a free tool for lead gen
• How to decide what free tool to build
• How much resources to dedicate to this initiative
• What other growth initiatives and experiments he has been running

Connect with Sadra on Linkedin for more information.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Some companies have a free trial, whereas others have a free tier that encourages users to upgrade.

When do you know which strategy to pick? 

Chang Chen, who leads growth and marketing at Otter.ai, has tried it all - freemium, free trial, even how long each free trial should be. 

In this episode, she didn't just talk about which one worked for Otter, she dropped some brilliant frameworks for you to figure out what's best for your own product. 

We also discussed:

• How to run experiments to figure out what's the optimal length for a free trial
• How to conduct user research to understand how to structure your trial or free tier
• Why it often doesn't work to have both a free trial AND a free tier
• Common mistakes made when designing these free versions of your product

Connect with Chang on Linkedin if you wish to discuss more about free trials vs freemium!

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Allen Liao joined Lucid in 2018 and has been working on growth ever since. 

The company has added $50m+ in ARR since he joined! Listen to this episode to find out how! 

One initiative Lucid's product team has been working on lately is how to improve user engagement. I discussed with Allen:

1. How to identify the right baseline and set the appropriate goals for user engagement
2. How to segment and prioritize your users
3. 'Bright spot' and 'dark spot' analysis - what it means and how to use it
4. What worked and what didn't, and common pitfalls people encounter when working on growth

Connect with Allen on Linkedin. 

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

When Kelly Goetsch first joined commercetools, the company was heavily focused on selling bottoms up to developers. Why did it pivot towards a more Enterprise go-to-market motion?

Their self-serve engine was going too slowly.

Although developers were the users, they weren't the best buyers for a commerce platform. Often it was the Sales or Revenue executives who championed the purchase.

So how did commercetools layer on a successful top-down engine onto a #productledgrowth business?

What they did obviously worked, as they are a $1.9b business today. This episode covers:

1. How to hire the right people to layer on an enterprise go-to-market motion effectively
2. What are the most common needs of an enterprise customer
3. How to conduct research and build product for the enterprise, when you have far fewer users than a PLG company
4. What Kelly's career advice is for Product Managers

Connect with Kelly on Linkedin. 

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

Do you think becoming PLG is a decision your company can make on its own? 

Think again 🤔

Shrikant Mudliar, who leads many product-led growth initiatives at Airmeet, shared a radical opinion.

Going PLG successfully doesn't mainly depend on what your company does, it depends on your customers and your market. 

Listen to this podcast to understand:

1. Why your PLG initiatives might fail, even if you do everything right
2. Why the market needs to be ready and educated about your category before self-serve becomes a big hit with your users
3. How to tell if your own category is ripe for PLG
4. How to run experiments and build viral growth into your product

... and much more!

Connect with Shrikant on Linkedin.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin.

If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter.