Let’s talk about how each of these go-to-market motions influences marketing and sales; from your marketing strategy to plans, channels, tactics, experiments, and beyond.
A pure product-led growth company is typically defined as not having a sales team at all. Customers buy on their own through the product or the marketing website.
GTM team structure: With a PLG motion, your GTM organization is typically marketing-heavy (and may not have a sales team at all).
Plan(s): Product-led payment plans often feature a free tier or trial as well as a paid plan.
Call-to-action(s): If your whole strategy is to get customers using and paying for your product on their own, CTAs should clearly invite visitors to “sign up” and “get started.”
Channels: On the product-led growth side of the spectrum, you’re OK with a wide net of users, so you can rely on people coming to your product inbound.
Marketing KPIs: In PLG organizations, you’re looking at web traffic, sign ups, and PQLs when measuring performance.
Lead scoring: PLG lead scoring looks at product + marketing behavior and firmographic data.
Average deal size: Not always, but often PLG organizations will have lower-cost products and therefore lower deal sizes. When you have a lower-cost product, it makes a lot of sense to offer a free version to attract customers, since you don’t want to spend as much on acquisition.
Time to upgrade/close: You may have a fast time to upgrade or close because people can complete purchases on their own as soon as they’re ready. But that's not always the case, sometimes it takes longer for users to feel the need to go from free to paid.
(hybrid)
The PLS motion usually includes a combination approach where folks can purchase and upgrade right through the product — but there is also a layer of sales (or sales-assist) using product usage data to develop ICPs and go outbound.
GTM team structure: In a PLS GTM team, sales and marketing work together — which one is larger will depend on your product and goals. You will often see the GTM motion is at least heavily guided by marketing.
Plan(s): Companies running a PLS GTM motion often offer free trials/tiers to pave the way to their paid plans.
Call-to-action(s): The PLS motion is exciting because you can invite users to both sign up and request a demo, depending on your goals and product lines.
Channels: Outbound, inbound, and a combo of the two are all used by PLS-focused GTM teams. In fact, channel is one way sales teams determine which leads to engage with.
Marketing KPIs: KPIs run the gamut in PLS orgs — sign ups, PQLs, MQLs, and pipeline. It’s fun to be able to look at full-funnel metrics, product engagement, and website activity in a product-led organization.
Lead scoring: When you’re using product signals in a product-led growth or hybrid organization, you can also use the product and product engagement to drive lead scoring. It’s usually a great predictor if people are going to buy. This is what Pocus is built to help with.
Average deal size: The average deal size can really vary between high and low in a hybrid model.
Time to upgrade/close: Time to close or upgrade will really depend on your offering and journeys.
On the other end of the spectrum from product-led is the fully sales-led motion, where every customer typically has to engage with sales in order to buy the product.
GTM team structure: A sales-led GTM org is, naturally, heavy on the sales.
Plan(s): Sales-led businesses only offer a paid version of their product.
Call-to-action(s): With a sales-led motion, don’t set an expectation that folks can start using the product right away. “Request demo” and “Talk to sales” are more accurate.
Channels: Sales-led organizations typically already know what companies and users they want, so the focus on outbound-specific channels makes the most sense.
Marketing KPIs: Sales-led GTM teams are looking at marketing-qualified leads and pipeline to measure performance.
Lead scoring: You're usually scoring leads to qualify them in a top-down sales organization based on firmographics, demographics, marketing behavior, and interaction with your website, email, etc.
Average deal size: It’s typical to see top-down sales when you have a really high-cost product, so these orgs often have a higher average deal size.
Time to upgrade/close: You know the drill — time to upgrade and close can change based on many factors. However, the more expensive the product the more high-touch and long the sales cycle tends to be.
Product-led sales is more complex than the other GTM buckets. Businesses moving to this hybrid option may be wondering how they’re going to support both a sales team and in-product growth.
It’s true that it’s a larger prioritization set, but it also means more options. Not everyone will want to buy through a sales team — and not everyone will want to buy through the product.
PLS gives you more options at the end of the funnel, which makes the hard work worth it.
Join our invite-only Slack community to learn firsthand from experts who have built and scaled hybrid go-to-market motions and connect with peers who are just figuring things out.
Table of Contents
Identifying where you land on the product-led spectrum
📍**[You’re here] How business model impacts GTM strategy (bottom-up, top-down, hybrid)**
PLS goals for product-led and sales-led companies
Getting exec buy-in and building internal support for your PLS motion
[Template] Exec proposal and GTM alignment for PLS
How to analyze usage data to create Product-Qualified Lead (PQL) definitions