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Transparency about your product in Product-led Sales

www.leahtharin.com

Transparency about your product in Product-led Sales

And the effect of it. Stop looking at the wrong measurement

Leah Tharin
Nov 26, 2022
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Transparency about your product in Product-led Sales

www.leahtharin.com

Siloed responsibilities suck. If you measure your teams with no quality attached to their goals they will do exactly as you tell them.

This will kill you if you try to do cross-team impacting experiments. Let's look at

"We display prices for our B2B business publicly"

You will lose leads. Almost guaranteed. But wait…

What philosophy do you want?

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  • Marketing creates a big # of leads with no quality accountability

  • Sales convert the leads with no conversion % accountability

Or

A team that owns both and understands:

The reason is that the bad leads are showing themselves the door in big numbers. This is usually not compensated by *absolute* numbers in gained leads that join *because* you show the prices.

These teams are empowered to adjust whatever lever is necessary, even decreasing a good metric (like absolute leads). If it generates more value downstream, why not?

You will get *different* customers as a result. Better ones.

Be careful with goal setting and organizational structure. There is no simpler example than this.

The change of control in PLS vs Sales-Led

  • You have more control over an individual buyer's decision in Product-Led Sales than Sales Led, not less. Even with fewer leads (initially).

  • Buying decisions tend to take longer the more transparent you are.

  • The more transparent you are with no-touch the more low-quality leads are sorting themselves out. It's an illusion to "convince" those by optimizing sales pitches alone.

  • PLS done right empowers your sales to leverage user data. Conversations shift from basic questions to targetted conversations

  • PLS leads to better product development as product usage data is a table stake for great experimentation. Better product-market fit.

Common pitfalls:

  • Siloed, matrix organization leads to segmented infighting. ("Sales can't handle our leads", "Marketing sends us just garbage", "Our product sucks, we can't sell"). Teams should *have* to own as much as possible of a customer journey.

  • The PQL funnel is too slim for your sales organization. Sales might grab leads too early before they can experience a product reverting everything back to a Sales-Led approach.

  • With no proper customer success metrics, neither marketing nor sales can succeed. Fix measurement first, then ship.

  • Only attaching customer success metrics to product teams. Marketing and Sales need to be measured on customer success as well. Bury MQLs and ticket-size compensation.

Thanks for reading Leah’s ProducTea Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Transparency about your product in Product-led Sales

www.leahtharin.com
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