The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna

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 the paid user to drive retention. In a 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. 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 gonna do product-led growth," or, "I'm gonna do product-led sales and I'm gonna 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.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Elena Verna. 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 ELG course. And 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 and when you should consider investing in product-led sales, how product-led sales changes your approach to sales and marketing, what sorts of data, tooling, and people you need in place to do it well, and what common pitfalls you need to avoid. I've said this before and I'll say it again, Elena is possibly the smartest and most experienced growth person in the world, especially when it comes to B2B, and I never get tired of learning from her. Enjoy this episode with Elena Verna after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is that it always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process, from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps. Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress, and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works. Linear is the default tool of choice among startups and it powers a wide range of large established companies such as Vercel, Retool, and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as magical. Visit linear.app/lenny to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Braintrust, where the world's most innovative companies go to find talent fast, so that they can innovate faster. Let's be honest, it's a lot of work to build a company. And if you wanna stay ahead of the game, you need to be able to hire the right talent quickly and confidently. Braintrust is the first decentralized talent network where you can find, hire and manage high-quality contractors in engineering, design, and product for a fraction of the cost of agencies. Braintrust charges a flat rate of only 10%, unlike agency fees of up to 70%, so you can make your budget go four times further. Plus, they're the only network that takes 0% of what the talent makes, so they're able to attract and retain the world's best tech talent. Take it from DoorDash, Airbnb, Plaid, and hundreds of other high-growth startups that have shaved their hiring process from months to weeks at less than a quarter of the cost by hiring through Braintrust's network of 20,000 high-quality vetted candidates ready to work. Whether you're looking to fill in gaps, upskill your staff, or build a team for that dream project that finally got funded, contact Braintrust and you'll get matched with three candidates in just 48 hours. Visit usebraintrust.com/lenny or find them in my show notes for today's episode. That's usebraintrust.com/lenny, for when you need talent yesterday. Elena, welcome back to the podcast.