You Need to Reinvent Your PLG Sales Team

A successful product-led growth (PLG) strategy should fill your funnel with all kinds of users of your product. There are no prospects, just customers at different phases of their product adoption journey.

And as Massimo Arrigoni (CEO of BEE) explains in his Hot Takes Live talk, most brands really need to reinvent their PLG sales team and how it runs.

As a team, Arrigoni explains that you need to:

• Change the way you’re qualifying leads and customers. 
• Change the way your team contacts these customers.
• Change what you do when you contact them.

Arrigoni’s company has used a product-led growth model since day one, so he’s seen this first hand, and he reinvented how they did sales in order to see stronger and sustainable customer acquisition. You can also figure out how to turn individual users (which they had a lot of at BEE) into larger accounts. 

This is different than a traditional sales process. 

And it also means a fundamental change in the sales function, meaning that the key skills your sales team will need may look slightly different.

First: Think “using vs. saying.” You’re dealing with product-focused customers who have already been using the product, have an account, and may even be a paying customer. 

Your sales team, therefore, needs to be deeply product-focused, too, knowing that tool inside and out. 

Second: You need to approach contact from a consulting standpoint instead of a selling one. Your team has to be curious, learning what’s happening and why. Who is converting, and why are they converting? What are they using the product for, and what area of the company are they working in?

Third: You need to focus on expansion instead of just conversions. How can you turn individual users into larger, higher-cost accounts? You can consider a single user as an “enterprise applicant.” With the right skills, you can guide your customers into the “next steps.” 

In practice, this translates into very practical changes to how the sales team operates.

It starts by rewarding meaningful conversations instead of just focusing on driving initial conversions. Data collection that can lead to expanded accounts is worth more than a single new product sign-up. 

You need to incentivize expansion MRR instead of new business MRR, which can benefit your brand in the long run.

Finally, you’ll need to invest in RevOps. Context is key to truly “assist” a customer, but an accurate “single customer view” is exceptionally hard to get to. You can learn more about RevOps here. 

So, it may be time to restructure your sales team, especially as a SaaS brand. Rethinking the way your sales team operates and what their priorities are can mean more sustainable and higher-retaining growth for your business and happier customers along the way. 

Want more? Join 48 of the top SaaS leaders on February 16th, 2023, as they dish out hot takes and surprising insights on product-led growth, RevOps, marketing, and sales. Save your seat now!