Elena Verna (00:00:00):
The most important thing in product-led sales is that there is a different configuration internally of collaboration that needs to occur. In traditional sales world, marketing creates pipeline for sales. Sales sells product. Product engages with a paid user to drive retention. In the product-led sales, product acquires and activates a customer and product creates pipeline for sales, so relationship is not that there's a go-to-market org with marketing and sales and product just kind of throws features across the fence for them to sell.
(00:00:40):
The collaboration here is between product and sales, but that means the product has to take on accountability over pipeline. The worst thing that you can do is to say, "I'm going to do product-led growth," or, "I'm going to do product-led sales and I'm going to do it in marketing." Recipe for disaster. You'll be failure mode within six months because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself.
Lenny (00:01:09):
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Elena Verna. If that name sounds familiar, Elena is a return guest and you be the judge, but I think this episode is even better than the first, which is a very high bar because that first episode continues to be one of the most popular of the podcast. Elena has worked at or advised companies like Miro, Amplitude, SurveyMonkey, MongoDB, Netlify, and a dozen others. She's also a longtime instructor and EIR at Reforge where she helped create their experimentation, monetization, growth, leadership, and their soon-to-be released PLG course.
(00:01:51):
In this conversation, we go incredibly deep into the emerging space of product-led sales. Elena explains what exactly is product-led sales, how it fits together with product-led growth and sales-led growth, who ...