Why Dev-First loves Product Led Growth (Sales)?

Why dev-first companies are gaga for Product Led Sales.. ehrm, why it's a great match for developer first companies

Tons of companies want to know how to sell to developers. I’ve never sold to anyone but developers and I do think that developers have less patience with salespeople than folks in other roles (why? I think the same things I mentioned in Show and tell). But there’s been an exciting transition in the past few years: the Product Led Sales motion that my friends at Pocus have espoused over the past three years has become a reality for companies outside of the Developer Tools space and many companies like Ngrok, Loom, Linear, Productboard and Hubspot are using a hybrid sales model to grow their businesses, often with Product capturing leads for the sales led motion.

From Pocus’s 2022 Product Led Sales Benchmark Report

GTM teams are always looking to increase net dollar retention, improve sales efficiency and CAC payback. Product Led Sales is an additional sales engine you can add on that can improve those measures significantly. It’s also the best approach to selling to software developers for two reasons:

• The Product-Led Sales motion rests on having end users trying out and actively using your product and software developers love test-driving new software. This process inspires belief in your product you couldn’t get from the incumbent enterprise sales model where time-boxed demo with a sales rep was their only path to understanding your software.

  • Additionally, in a business with a strong Self-Service customer base, you can build a massive customer base within key accounts before introducing a Product Led Sales motion.

• Because users are actively using your SaaS product your team has insight into their habits and challenges, something that is much more challenging to do in the enterprise sales model. This allows for smarter more targeted outreach that developers and their managers will appreciate.

  • Products like Pocus make it really easy to surface this data from your data warehouse in a way that’s easily actionable by your sales reps and account managers.

  • When the time comes to pitch, you don’t need to call the developers directly to sell them a product they already use. You can call their boss, someone who is more senior and has larger budget and team oversight who is looking to solve big problems and will be more willing to speak with you. You already have adoption amongst their team, so it is easier to start these conversations.

To summarize, Product Led Sales is a tactic that’s being used for developer tools companies precisely because product usage gives a very strong signal of intent. Once you have that product signal, it becomes easier to surmise the needs and wants of a customer to faciliate deeper conversations.

Some things to get right before you launch a Product Led Sales motion. Some of this might seem basic, but as someone who has worked in the range early stage startups to public companies, I now understand that nothing should be taken for granted. Everyone grows across different vectors at different rates, so what you think is basic or obvious advice might be valuable or novel to someone else. I love this post from my friend Alexa Grabel on how to launch a PLS motion using a Crawl, Walk, Run approach. Some of our advice is similar, but she paints the picture very clearly!

One of my first principles is parsimony, or simplicity. I always guide people to start as simple as possible and then grow more complex over time. When starting in the crawl stage, don’t overthink it, but be intentional. Nothing will be perfect when you start, but you have to think of the simplest approach you can take to learn something meaningful.

• Easily Accessible Data: A unicorn, I know! It’s really challenging to give your team access to the right data that they can meaningfully interpret and use. Ultimately, as long as you have a team that can pull the data for you and help you understand what the data means, there’s hope here! Ideally you will have a data warehouse, a product analytics BI tool like Amplitude or Mixpanel that can help you reason through the trends and identify groups of users to reach out to.

• Ideal Customer Profile: What are the common traits of users who buy your software? This doesn’t have to be perfect, but understanding one or two attributes here will help you immensely!

  • Company size or industry

  • Technology overlap, for example, the perfect marriage of DBT and Snowflake, Node.js and MongoDB back in 2012

• Product Signals: Try to understand common engagements with the product that signal buying intent. Look beyond basic metrics such as clicks or page views and dig deeper into the customer journey. By identifying key touchpoints and common engagements with the product, you can gain valuable insights into how customers interact with our brand and what drives their decision-making process. Lots of companies will use an “activation” metric, and it’s likely your product team has developed a paradigm that aligns to this already. If you’d like more insight here, Amplitude has an awesome guide to Product Metrics that serves as a great primer. Again, this doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough to start for now.

• Prioritization: Based on the above, you’ll be able to put in some type of prioritization approach for your teams that will help them sort through all the leads!

This week’s links

• Love the Problem: Live for opportunity, not for solutions. Wise words by Julie Zhou

• This essay on using GPT-4 to understand how time passes in written text is so well written and the TL;DR that LLMs are very cool because they’re capable of explaining to you how they thought about a problem is 🤯

• The cognitive load developer’s handbook, for anyone who wants to develop empathy for the developer and the impact of context switching on their work, look no further than this post which articulates why software engineering can be so mentally taxing. Everyone in DevTools is trying to make this simpler!