WTF is PLS even? (with Jesus Requena, VP Marketing at Hex)

What is PLS? When does it make sense to use it? How do you get started?

These are just a couple of the questions we asked Jesus who's been building PLG and PLS motions at Unity, Figma, Algolia and Hex.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:57) - Meet Jesus
• (04:35) - PLG at Unity
• (05:45) - Solving a big problem
• (12:12) - Is this the right motion?
• (16:49) - Can you bring users to a pain state?
• (21:18) - If it was a demo
• (23:08) - It's about signals
• (30:31) - Looking towards revenue
• (33:14) - Qualification is the same
• (36:39) - Narrowing your focus
• (39:16) - Activating 10K accounts
• (42:59) - Indicators of scale
• (46:26) - Hard lessons

*** 

This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.

That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.

***

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Head of Demand at Growblocks

Host

Toni Hohlbein

CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

Guest

Jesus Requena

VP Marketing at Hex, Ex. Unity, Figma & Algolia

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein from GrowBlogs. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we talk with Jesus Requena. He's worked at Algolia, Figma, Unity. He's currently at Hex
[00:00:14] We talk with him about product led growth and product led sales and a bunch of other things. Enjoy
[00:00:24] Mikkel: So, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of awkward though. Mikkel. Because I have my old boss, Jesus, here. And also my old boss and now current boss, Toni here. So I'm hoping we're not going to get into like a performance review kind of thing. No, I think Jesus and
[00:00:40] Toni: I just are going to have a good conversation.
[00:00:41] You're going to listen
[00:00:44] Jesus Requena: We might go back
[00:00:45] in time and talk about a few things
[00:00:47] yeah.
[00:00:49] like you like Repeating bosses. I don't know. I'm the
[00:00:52] Mikkel: I like
[00:00:55] Toni: it's like with ex girlfriends, right? You know what you get into.
[00:00:57] Mikkel: So I should also be really careful with what I say now, because I also don't want to, you know, stroke the hairs the wrong way on our guest, the person who actually has hair on this, on this episode here. So I need to be really careful what I say, but no, we, uh, we used to work together and it was literally reflecting, like, it's been ages since we spoke.
[00:01:14] You kind of, you know, Abandoned us, went to Unity and then went to, uh, San Francisco working for, you know, Algolia and Figma. I was just seeing those LinkedIn updates from the side. And you know what I remembered? We had an office, basically marketing was put at the worst possible spot in the entire building.
[00:01:32] We could, might as well have been in the basement for all I know. There were no windows.
[00:01:37] Toni: I
[00:01:37] Mikkel: was next to the
[00:01:38] Toni: toilet also, like
[00:01:39] Mikkel: nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you were never there, there anyway, you were hopping around meeting rooms, but we were like stuck in that room. And what I just remember for, I don't know, it's just so weird what to remember sometimes.
[00:01:51] Jesus, you had a desk right by the fire exit. And one day you came back from a meeting and you just went like, so where's my phone and my laptop? And everyone just laughed. It's like, yeah, shut up. And it's like, no, like. And I think it was also because we were pranking each other quite a bit back then, and then you just had it all stolen!
[00:02:10] It's like, as the only person, all your stuff was just swiped.
[00:02:14] Jesus Requena: Yeah, that was funny.
[00:02:16] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:02:16] Jesus Requena: We used to leave the door open thinking, you know, Copenhagen is so safe, like, who will get
[00:02:22] Mikkel: What can happen. What can go wrong. No, exactly.
[00:02:25] Jesus Requena: in San Francisco we have like four gates, so you can't go. Yeah, that's funny.
[00:02:31] Mikkel: get in, but no, I mean, it's been, uh, it's been really awesome to see kind of your journey from afar. Uh, obviously we're, you know, quite a few hours, uh, you know, apart since you're in California and we're still stuck in Copenhagen, Denmark and, um, really happy to have you on the show. You've obviously been working tremendously with PLG and product sales.
[00:02:53] So I think it's a given what we're gonna hop into today
[00:02:56] Toni: yeah, but I mean, the, the, the background background from Jesus also when we, you know, work together, it's kind of a marketing growth perspective, right? Back then, that's what we called it. And I think then you jump to unity. And this is when then the whole PLG, PLS thing.
[00:03:12] Also in the market in general started to lift and that became a thing. Right. And I think, and I don't have the, the history, you know, fully kind of mapped out, but you probably with Unity, we're one of the first ones executing some of that stuff that's like on the intersection between like product led growth and product led sales.
[00:03:29] Right. I mean, that's kind of how, at least I see it. And that's kind of what we want to talk about here today. Welcome Jesus.
[00:03:35] Jesus Requena: Thank you for having me. And that's right, um, I think it was 2016? 17? 16. my Unity journey started, and I think prior to that it was called growth, but there were a few companies in the Bay Area doing proper growth, which was the activation, onboarding, hacking the top of the funnel, the referral virality.
[00:03:59] Um, the main things about PLG and that was Facebook was a really well known one, because they cracked like, what would it take someone to stay in the platform that was inviting 10 people? And then they cracked like, well, we just need to get people to invite all the 10 people, and then they would just stay.
[00:04:15] And I If I recall correctly that was the one, but and then that was called growth and I, and when we, I joined Unity was to do that kind of like onboarding, activation, um, retention of users, conversion to pay. It wasn't even called, my title wasn't even growth, it wasn't, I think it was like pay subscriptions or something like that.
[00:04:35] Um, but yeah, but I think Unity was in a very special place because they had. The prosumer business, which is we sell to individuals that they want to build a game. So that's like Adobe kind of thing. And they will be willing to pay a license. Unity was in a really good position because they had the prosumer business to sell into individuals, but they also have a b2b, um, traditional business where some of those individuals will belong or will in the future belong to teams that they will buy as a team.
[00:05:06] so I think that was my first experience with what it takes to sell to individuals, but some of those individuals actually belong to companies and how do we get from the individual to the company?
[00:05:16] Toni: But let's talk about exactly that journey, right? Because the, the prosumer side, that seems like a, I don't want to say a mass market game, but like this is a, you know, emails and whatever you might have, but on the SMB side, especially if you're someone present already in the product, that seems like, Hey, maybe.
[00:05:34] Kind of a sales motion, if you were to weave this in here, would actually be appropriate, right? To kind of activate them or upsell them or whatsoever. was that, was that the thinking that was going on back then?
[00:05:45] Jesus Requena: Well, you know, I think Unity always had the And I think many of these PLG companies, they actually solve a problem that is a general problem for a large population. And it's a hard problem, and if you name companies that have a great PLG flows, like Dropbox, Atlassian, Grammarly, Figma, all of these have like, consumers of the individuals are the ones that have the problem.
[00:06:10] And they can literally start Using this thing, with little friction, they can see immediate value, and then if they like it, they must swap the credit card, and maybe if they belong to a team, the team might adopt the tool too. So some of them have the multiplayer and the single player. Kind of angle. The multiplayer is when these things go well in companies because all of a sudden it's not just one individual using the tool There's a team using the tool.
[00:06:35] So Unity has some of that like you have like then the artist, the producers in the tool, yada yada yada And then all these things are the same, right? Like some of them stay as a thing, grammarly made their way from individual to teams. They start, then they started building things for teams. But normally these tools start with the individual problem, big TAM, big market, and then they go into the team kind of value prop.
[00:06:58] And that's how they go up. And at Unity, it happens that we already had Plenty and plenty of studios using Unity. We have a long tail of individuals, I think they were in the 4 or 5 million when I started, and we had like 20, 000 paying teams. But we already have like 000 non paying teams, all in lower tiers.
[00:07:21] And that was really interesting, so this is the classic PLG example, where all these companies start using it, but in the wrong tier, they're not using it properly, or maybe they're just like a little group using it, but they haven't spread widely. So then you, that's a very Interesting place to be. I didn't know, I think Openview, I wasn't that close to Openview back in the days, but they started talking very openly about these later.
[00:07:44] I think I was at Unity trying to figure it out. How do we sell more of these people? And I'm trying to go through data and figure it out.
[00:07:51] Toni: And tell us, you know, tell us a little bit more about this journey and where you ended, because I think if I remember this correctly, I mean, at some point you basically built a sales team, right? Kind of a, a junior sales team under your wings that actually was helping to, uh, upgrade and expand those accounts.
[00:08:07] Right. So I think, I think that might be, you know, one part of the journey, but how did you go from, you know, this is the setup that you just walked us through and then using data to get to the point, like, wait a minute, why, why aren't we having a couple of junior folks placing some cold calls to the already, you know, pretty warm user base here in order to expand those accounts.
[00:08:28] Jesus Requena: I think there's a, you know, I learned something during these many years. Is that there, there are products where the individual doesn't have to talk to anyone. In fact, they don't want to talk to anyone. Just find the tool, try it. They love it. It's like, this is a no brainer. Let me swap the credit card. My personal one or the company one, we start using it, spread a little bit. But, I don't know. In most cases, it's very rare that you want to get this into a proper team usage, and the team doesn't want to talk to someone to say, Hey, I just want to validate a few things. Like, does it do this? Does it do that? Does it integrate with this thing? How does it work here? How does it work there?
[00:09:05] Normally. So, the, the PLG motion is simple because you don't need sales to pitch, hey, you should get into this. You're already into this. So, it's more the account manager approach. It's like, hey, you're using this thing. Let me tell you a few things that you might want to leverage with this thing. Um, And I think that was our realization with Unity.
[00:09:25] It was similar to the Atlassian. I mean, we talked to other companies, but it was very clear that there was people using the product, knowing the capacity that they should be using it. And they should be in higher tiers with better services and better layers of the product. And they also needed some little push to understand, hey, what's going on here?
[00:09:42] So that's what growth and PLS, I think that was my first experience where I could. Educate some of these teams that they might be leaving things on the table. But then I can use a human to accelerate that conversion. And that, that is exactly what happened. We started with a, it wasn't even a salesperson.
[00:09:58] I think it was like kind of a, we call it success advisor. Um, they were just literally chatting with people on email and chat and people have questions, we'll answer the questions. We generated templates and very FSQs and all that stuff. And then with a little bit of, uh, education, the. The team will get either into a higher tier online, self serve, or they will go into a contract.
[00:10:20] When we saw some of those contracts becoming bigger and bigger, we thought, Oh, wait a second, like, shouldn't we have a sales team like doing this? And then we built like a inside sales team. You can call it, um, SMB commercial. There were small, small deals, like five licenses at a time or whatever. But that was like incredibly transactional, very fast.
[00:10:41] I mean, we, we made a ton of, um, MRR very, very fast, and I, and that was just because of, we, we found those accounts that they were in the low tier or the wrong tier or not leveraging the product correctly. but again, I, I, these companies need to have a pool of users. They already have seen some value large enough for you to create a motion like that.
[00:11:05] You can't do that with, uh, Thin trial, inbound
[00:11:09] Mikkel: Yeah. So I think, I mean, we could just do an episode diving into all the stories because then I was like thinking, Oh, Figma is kind of next on the list. But I think let's also try and turn it into, like some relevant takeaways for the listener. And I think one of the, a couple of the things you dropped just now was around, almost saying, when does PLG lend itself to a business?
[00:11:28] So you mentioned stuff like, well, it has to be. A very simple problem, almost like a calendly. You can book, you know, book me in my calendar. That's very easy. And then, um, almost on an individual usage level, they can see immediate, uh, value and then a big market. Usually when we've discussed, Hey, what motion kind of fits?
[00:11:47] It's been on the basis of, Hey, what's your ACV, right? And it sounds like there's some different nuances to product let sales. So what I'm wondering first off is if, if someone is listening right now and they first off want to understand, is this even right for us? What would be kind of your go to to assess?
[00:12:05] Yep. You can do PLG if you have these five criteria kind of met. Do you have something like that? You, you, you assess?
[00:12:12] Jesus Requena: You know, um, it's funny because most of the companies that I've been, there's always been the discussion, like, is this the right motion for us? All of them. I mean, maybe with the exception of Figma, it was so brutal, the amount of, like, accounts that they had. It was just like, this is it. There's no, this is bigger than whatever we could do.
[00:12:30] But, um, I describe normally this, that the PLG is not, you know, That utopia scenario where you have a product that millions of people will sign up and you have like millions of people sign every month And then from the millions is maybe like a few dozen Thousands that might be your ICP account that you want to put a sales or account management team to upgrade There's not many of those There's not many product like that.
[00:12:56] There's just be, that's the truth. And, um, so there's a grading of this PLG, there's another version of PLG, which is like, you know what? I have a self serve motion that sell may lead to SMBs. So these are your turbo taxes, or like, there's many, many companies out there. So I can start with a trial. Um, it can be a reverse trial, it can be just a freemium.
[00:13:17] I try, I like it, and then I convert, and then that is a good entry point. The, the SMBs, the small teams will transact by themselves. But the mid market will say, you know what, I'm just using this to check it out. Because if I want to buy it, I might want to talk to my team to see if we want to implement this thing.
[00:13:34] And also, I might have a bunch of questions that it's just not easy to buy myself on this thing. Like, data connection, security, if you integrate any kind of data, that would be a problem. So, that is also another form of PLG, where the entry point, a good portion of your pipeline comes from a trial. Because you're just letting the user explore it for free.
[00:13:57] I think they get the idea, they get the value. You, you cut out the friction of like, I need to go to a webinar to realize what this thing is. It's just like, go there, take a template, understand it. And then from that entry point, you can accelerate that into a contract, through sales or inside sales or whatever it is.
[00:14:16] That is a very valid form of PLG too. Um, and I think the second point of PLG is that if If you, once you contract that they can expand organically, meaning it's easier to add more seats or because it has some virality internally. Those are to me the two main components of PLG. There's an entry point that has no friction, whether it's fully transacting and getting into a pain stage or just value realization trial.
[00:14:43] And then there's a second one, which once we close you with a sell serve or contract sales, you have an organic way to expand that. Increases your NDR or your net net expansion, right? I
[00:14:56] Toni: You, you used one, term that I've only now heard the second or third time. and I think I know what it is. I just want to make sure that everyone else does as well. Reverse trial. Can you just quickly like explain that to everyone? Because, you know, some people might've gotten hung up with like, wait a minute.
[00:15:12] What is that?
[00:15:13] Jesus Requena: think I'm missing if I get it right, but there's a freemium There's two type of entry points. You're gonna start a product with a premium trial, which is I put you immediately into a premium trial meaning hey you You start with the best features you get it for 14 30 days or whatever. And if you love it, this is gonna expire and then either you click to continue or you dump into a freemium version Um, I believe that's the reverse trial and then the The other way around is that you start with the freemium and then you have Limits in what you can do in the freemium. So if you love it and you're like, oh my god, I love this thing Um, then you jump into a trial and then into a pay kind of thing.
[00:15:51] Um, I think the reverse trial is the first Why am I getting this wrong?
[00:15:55] Mikkel: I thought it was like, so you get a demo first and then you can trial. That's right. That's probably what it was.
[00:16:00] Jesus Requena: Yeah, exactly Yeah, you get a pitch deck and then you're gonna try
[00:16:06] Mikkel: No, but I think it's important because, so, you know, you look at a company like Asana, massive success for them having, you know, a freemium version and then a sales touch to expand into it. So I just wonder kind of what has to be true for you to successfully run, you know, a sales assist in that motion, because you kind of talk from the PLG angle.
[00:16:28] And once you add sales, you know, payroll. commissions. There's, there's another cost there. Managing people. Yeah, there's, there's, there's an entirely new world almost that opens up, you know, which brings a lot of, challenges as well, quite frankly. So I'm just wondering kind of what, what are the elements that have the boxes they need to be able to tick in order to, to take that leap almost.
[00:16:49] Jesus Requena: So I don't I don't look at that from what? What is the criteria for sales? It's like, is your product capable to bring in ideal customer profile into a trial or a paying stage? If your product is capable to do that, why not? You, I mean, this is the best source of leads. Like these people are either active in the product or There's three, three layers, either, um, window shopping the product, like what is this?
[00:17:10] Well, how does it work? Either are already using it actively in a freemium or like low pay capacity or are fully paying for this thing. And any of those things are great for sales. If, if, if it's a ideal customer profile that has the potential to become the ACV where sales need to be involved. And I think, I mean, we, we did this at Unity where we were really ruthless that sales shouldn't touch anything that has.
[00:17:35] Less than 25, 000 MRR potential. So we, we draw a line to say humans are not really worth it unless this, this kind of potential in the account, not just to land the deal, but just the overall ACV, like lifetime value of the account.
[00:17:52] Toni: But, but I think he also had like another way to go about, I mean, there's like almost a, um, a lower limit in terms of, um, you know, AR, whatever it might be, but I think he had also another way, which is basically like, well, What is the problem that the user has, or the team has, that they need to overcome, where a human might simply be better suited to help them to overcome that, right?
[00:18:14] Because you mentioned the, Hey, I'm going from a prosumer to, I want to invite a team. And suddenly you have a couple of additional questions that basically come up where it's like, ah, it's too tedious to kind of, you know, figure all of that out myself. Let me just call someone, ask him or her some questions and then, you know, jump over that bar, right?
[00:18:31] Kind of, that's, Um, that's another way to actually look at the, when does PLS make sense in the sense of, uh, here's some barriers someone needs to jump over that would unlock a, you know, massive upgrade in terms of ACV. Sure. That's my other justification, but really the issue wanting to help them over is the first one, right?
[00:18:51] Because if they were to upgrade to that ACV themselves, you would also be like, great. Then we don't need those people actually in the first place, right? Kind of like a, it's really helping them along on this journey.
[00:19:03] Jesus Requena: Yeah, I think you're right. Um, that's what you call assisted motion versus like a set PLS, product led sales motion. And I think it's right. I think, um, If you have a lower ACV, low friction that, um, someone with not the skills of a, you know, well skilled salesperson and the comp and all the complexity can just get them through the self serve checkout or the small contract, you will do that.
[00:19:32] And that's more assisted, like this is a success advisor kind of, um, modality. I think Atlassian has been running with account managers for We're running for a manager for many years. They didn't have a sales team. It was all like assisting, assisting, assisting. Um, if you're, if some of those ICP that comes in, you immediately realize, I had the seat potential.
[00:19:53] If it's a subscription business, um, Or if it's a consumption business, the potential of the ACV is big enough to put a sales human, a skilled person, to upgrade them faster, why not? You just want to accelerate revenue. At the end of the day, what you want is to grow as fast as possible without jeopardizing your own motions or future growth or whatever.
[00:20:16] So, I think that's right. I think there's two approaches. A lot of companies do both. I mean, at Unity, we did both. If, if a company that will start coming in and it was a big studio and it will come in with a trial or like a free version or the Self-serve Pro version, uh, Sales team, the Enterprise team will be all over the place to that team and they will build a relationship.
[00:20:37] It will be assisted too. They will try to figure out what you're doing. They will do, like, hackathons internally, they will build a demo for them, they will pull, like, um, sales engineers to work with them, and then all of a sudden that account will turn into a bigger account. Um, if it was, like, low value because the potential seed in the company was only, like, five to ten developers, we'll do the assisted sales and say, well, so I think that defining the, I call them motions, but defining the motions is very important.
[00:21:04] Like, what we don't touch and we let be self serve, what is a self assisted motion, what is a self serve? PLS motion. Um, most likely if you're a B2B business, With some sort of bottoms up trial of freemium you're gonna have the three of them.
[00:21:18] Toni: Yeah. And so maybe this is a technical side question here, but, uh, lots of people that are either running a trial setup and kind of growing up as a company and suddenly attracting different accounts or someone that is already in the mid market enterprise and wanting to add something like this. All of them are afraid of, you know, Goldman Sachs inbounding on the trial.
[00:21:39] And it's like, that's, that's exactly the reason why we shouldn't do it because, you know, they, they started the trial and then they abandoned it. They never come back. If that was a demo, we would have a million dollar deal. What, what, what is your, what is your perspective on that?
[00:21:51] Jesus Requena: That's a very interesting I've seen it actually I've been I've seen that internally. I I say the buying journey today is so messy and convoluted that You should not stop the customers to do whatever they have to do. And I think what you need to figure out is like, what are the signals? If I have one of these blue chip fortune 500 companies show up in a trial, I want to investigate what is happening here.
[00:22:17] Who is it first? So someone worth talking? I guarantee you a lot of this time is like someone in a corner is an intern, student, whatever started. But it's a signal like, is this because something going on internally? So normally like to do this properly, uh, The way is not to panic, to say, it's like, it's to find the signals that makes you, Hey, these people are here, but maybe they're not ready.
[00:22:40] Like, let's figure it out. Have we talked to someone else? Is marketing doing something that someone in a trial, but there's someone also consuming some content? Are they coming to our ecosystem, um, reverse IP enrichment and checking out stuff? What is the intent, uh, signals that we've seen? And is it worth even, you know, Putting human calories on this thing.
[00:23:01] And I think a good marketing team will grab those things for sales and say, actually not yet. Doesn't well show up to you.
[00:23:08] I love the approach of giving sales all the signals on they decide. You know, the old, the old school of like marketing qualified, something like
[00:23:19] Toni: But it's, I mean, this,
[00:23:21] Jesus Requena: doesn't exist anymore.
[00:23:22] Toni: yeah, but the, um, but to actually kind of, before I ask my question, kind of tell us a little bit more about that, right. Kind of, because the, The, uh, the previous approach was kind of the scoring or open up email five times, 10 points, uh, visit the pricing page, 20 points. Um, you know, um, that, that you're saying kind of, that's kind of gone, but what does it, what does it replace it with then?
[00:23:47] Jesus Requena: You know, I learned actually learn this at unity, uh, after we did a lot of trial and error, like product qualify account, they have to do this five things and then we'll pass them to sales. And then, Marketing Qualified Account, and I was like, they have to attend these webinars and whatever, and then we passed them to sales, like, it's just like, and then sales were like, ignoring some of the good ones, and then going after colder ones by themselves, like, what is going on here?
[00:24:13] Like, this doesn't work, stop, stop it right now. So we, uh, there was a person that was, um, very innovative in the sales team called Nish, and we said, like, what, what if we, Just give sales all the information that they will need about an account in one place. And then to the discern, they'll figure it out. Oh my God, this thing is on fire versus that one.
[00:24:35] They will figure it out what accounts to go after and then who to go after in their account. Because this whole thing about NQL too, like, excuse me, but like why, like it has to be normally they buy in a group and you might have part of the group engaging and part of the group might not be even engaging.
[00:24:51] So you want the salesperson to figure out who's the group. So, um, And then a lot of tools. We did this in a funny way at Unity because we were combining 6th Sense signals with our own third party signals, trying to merge them all in Salesforce. It took a lot of work and it was really painful. And then tools like POCUS, Endgame, I mean, Getkoala, these people came up.
[00:25:17] Recently, in recent years, I'm like, this is exactly what we built there, but way better. So the dream scenario is that I'm a salesperson. What do I want to know as a salesperson? One is someone raising their hand that I should be talking to, like immediately. And then second, what are the accounts that are in my territory or my target account list that they are here in order of like hotter to colder.
[00:25:41] And hotter means they might have a trial, multiple people in a trial. All of them I have. Attend the webinar, they might have a leader inside, they're visiting the pricing page. Give me all the information so I can figure it out, who I prioritize. And then give me all the contacts and what they're doing so I can cadence whoever I want to cadence.
[00:25:58] I don't just want to spray and pray all of them because you know what one might be a student one be an intern One might be too low or one might be too higher So I want to pick the right ones and you know what? Maybe I'm missing one So give me Apollo, LIDARQ, whatever to figure out the one that I'm missing so I can cross You know reference and say I'm talking to your team here.
[00:26:18] What's going on? I learned that that's the best thing you can do ever and then learn from that and then you can give them more signals or Put thresholds or tell them. Hey, this is actually pretty hot, pretty Pre call based on the signals, but I'm not a fan of filtering out you know what? There might be an account that is only have started a trial and went to the pricing page And they might be worth the the actual profile might be worth their calories to go after them Who knows like I want them to decide What they want to do.
[00:26:51] Toni: Actually, another technical question here, kind of, you talked about marketing qualified accounts, marketing qualified, uh, product qualified accounts, right? Um, I think the majority of the market is still thinking in MQLs and, you know, I don't know, relevant contacts acquired or something like this. Um, is, is there kind of a clear reason why one versus the other or is kind of what's, what's the evolution kind of thinking about this?
[00:27:16] Jesus Requena: Another one that I learned by making a lot of mistakes. If you can sell the product to one individual, because it's transactional, SMB, low friction, you can have an MQL. It's fine. Someone comes, look at demo, I make the decision, I have the budget. Yeah, I'm gonna bring my team to the demo, but you're just talking to one individual, kind of.
[00:27:34] Good. MQLs are good. Meaning that you need an assisted motion sales or inside sales or whatever. If you sell into a buying party where one might be the champion but the budget is held by another one, someone needs to make the decision whether to roll this out into the team or not, there may be even multiple teams involved, MQLs are pointless.
[00:27:54] I mean, it's good that marketing tells you this individual is very warm, but belongs to this account, that is an ICP, it has great potential. And by the way, the account as a whole is on fire. You have four people here, they're visiting this site, they're consuming content. Some people are in the trial, some people are not.
[00:28:11] I think that's what is valuable. So, why? Because the salesperson should be mapping their buying party and say, I need to talk to multiple. Because then I will get more traction. I mean, you know that, Toni, you've been doing sales forever, so you know the story. I don't have to tell you. But the classic, the big pitfall about MQLs or PQLs as individuals, and this is something that I've seen over and over again, is that companies create these flows of individuals that they get cadence by sales, and they're not talking to the group, they're talking to the individual.
[00:28:42] And yeah, they might get to the group when they get after the demo, can you bring someone? But imagine that you can accelerate that. No, no, I know that there's three people here. Can you bring these two people to the demo? And I'm not going to do the demo until you bring your boss, by the way. I think that exchange is what sales like doing versus like, I just pray and pray less than 5 percent reply to my emails.
[00:29:03] Um, 99 percent get deleted. I don't think you don't want that.
[00:29:07] Toni: I think the way you're thinking about this, Jesus, is not how most of the folks thinking about this problem. Maybe there's a Bay Area versus everyone else thing, I'm not sure, but at the same time, it's also, you are, you are as a, as a marketing guy, uh, thinking way further and maybe, maybe it's because you're a growth guy, but you're thinking way further into the sales area than most marketing leaders would, right? There's like, Hey, you know what? I delivered this MQL thing. I give you the, what's hot, what's not hot list.
[00:29:35] And now you take over, you're thinking, wait a minute, what else can we do in order to, you know, have this actually become revenue, right? And, and a salesperson. Wouldn't actually think about, Hey, what could happen before me? You know, which doesn't exist for sales. Like they, they, they don't have any before me in the funnel understanding what could happen before me that would help me close those deals better.
[00:30:01] and I feel like for many companies out there, that's kind of a, it's just simply a no man's land right? CMOs, you know, however you want to say that. Yes, sure. They take revenue responsibility, yada, yada. They stop at the MQL or create an opportunity or something like this and sales can't look back on the funnel. So you basically kind of, uh, in, in your example, you're covering an area that many people are probably not actually seeing.
[00:30:23] Where do you think this is coming from? Do you have like a, Hey, you know, I had this, this experience and kind of that's unlocked it for me or where, where, where is it coming from? Yeah. Mm
[00:30:31] Jesus Requena: you're totally right. And you know, I, I think personally it came because I worked so many years under the CRO or some sort of revenue, go to market. Um, organization, whether it was like online or, um, at unity, all this story happened under the CRO. So the goal was to drive revenue, which, which he was great because he forced us to say, what do we do to not damage the experience, but get as fast as we can to, to grow in the revenue.
[00:31:00] That does not mean that all of the other things that are above that, which is your brand experience, your user experience, your, um, anything that is like big CMO Items are not important because those drive some of this stuff. Um, but I think modern CMOs should be aware of both. Like how do I create a brand experience and content at the top of the funnel and all that stuff that you want to do, but also have a very clear understanding of what it takes them to move that down into sales.
[00:31:31] Because otherwise you, you create a disconnect, which is never healthy, right? And I think to your point, I never seen sales teams more engaged when The mark or the growth team, the managing team you call it, that can be under the CMO, under ana team, come with them with the real signals that actually accelerate the, um, opportunity creation.
[00:31:55] It's actually can be very s scientific, you can actually do models to say no. If they do these 10 things, they're very likely to convert. So marketing is going to focus on those and they're going to serve them to you. So you know which ones are there or ones that are about to get there. And I think those are the best, um, you know, the worst thing for a sales team is that Here's the worst scenario.
[00:32:18] The classic MQL scoring. But then when you unpack the MQL scoring, it's like BS. And the sales team is like, I don't believe in this thing. Day two of the MQL scoring rollout, three months building it, the sales team look at it and it's like, what is this? Like, I don't believe in this thing.
[00:32:30] Mikkel: Why do you give a hundred points for a non Gmail email domain? It just, you know, so I'm kind of, I'm kind of curious because we've talked a little bit about what's changed and what's different, let's say in the top funnel almost, but you know, this experience from the, for the user is so different. At some point you're going to have a PQL or PQA, and sales is going to get involved. Has the process also changed there?
[00:32:57] Like we've, in my head, we grew up with all this BANT stuff first, now it's MEDDICC and SPICED. And I'm just curious, are there any kind of tectonic shifts you're seeing when you're running PLS in terms of how sales is then working those accounts or those, those contacts?
[00:33:14] Jesus Requena: I think it's the same. I think the qualification is the same. The qualification is based, the complexity of the qualification will be based on the ACV, the value of the account. So the larger solution selling, you have like more MEDDICC, there's new ones out there. If it's simpler, you just need to validate, you have the budget, it's the right time kind of thing, right?
[00:33:33] And I'm sorry, speaking to the right person, but, um, I think what has changed is, um, there's two main things that I try to shift in any company that I work with. One is like, let's make sure that we align on who we're targeting. Like if, if, if sales have to give a call right now, imagine cold calling to a list of accounts, I want to target those.
[00:33:57] The ones that say like, if I want to put my personal calories on calling someone and convincing them to talk to me, I want the same list for marketing. Why? Because then we have to be aligned. I'm going to do my stuff, we're going to get awareness and, you know, lead magnets and whatever. We're going to get account engagement.
[00:34:13] Trials, whatever, and you're gonna love it because every single one of those domains you're gonna say yep Oh my god That's the one that I want to talk to and then on the other side you might do some outbounding or build some relationship on The side and they both things are gonna complement each other So at the end of the day, we're just fighting for the same kind of trying to get the same pull inside I think that's number one that Takes like a ton of lift out of like MQL, that lead is not good.
[00:34:40] Like this is the classic 30 years ago thing. Um, the second one is like, well, you know, the accounts that I'm targeting. Can you give me more insights? What are these people doing? Are they coming to my ecosystem? Are they visiting the pricing page? Are they consuming content? Are they in a trial? Can you give me all the contacts that you have?
[00:34:56] What are these contacts doing? I mean, if you're more advanced, can you give me third party information? Like are they Publishing some news at Unity. We, we scrape news to tell the AE this account is on fire and these are three things that they published recently. So you have an excuse and an angle to them putting your cadence to say you recently published blah, blah, blah.
[00:35:17] So we scrape google news to put them in there. I mean, there's tools now that they do that, you don't have to scrape it, but, um, that's, that's how you, I think that's what has changed Mikkel, it changed like how informed they should be, right?
[00:35:31] Toni: And the, just to kind of clarify this for people, right? When, when. When people hear, ah, okay, so there was an account list for marketing. That's not ABM. That's account based marketing. Now, now, now I know, right? But that's actually not what you're talking about. You're literally meaning. Hey, this is the, and this can be thousands of accounts that, you know, the sales team says like, those are ICP for us.
[00:35:53] Those are the ones that, you know, I want to call, I have 20 SDRs. I need to feed them somehow. And this is then, I don't know how many you need, like 20, 000 accounts or something like this. And you as a marketing leader would then say, okay, very much. That list. I please want to have that over on my side as well, and then try and dissect, okay, what are the things, you know, in, in that, in that account pool, um, that might attract them to reach out to us versus us only, you know, placing out, uh, outbound, uh, calls or emails, for example, right?
[00:36:23] Is that what you're talking about, basically? And again, I don't want to slap those labels on it, but just for people to understand how that, and actuality works, is, is that kind of, uh, in the right direction?
[00:36:32] Jesus Requena: This is, uh, it's a very interesting topic because, um, I think the term ABM has been misused,
[00:36:38] Toni: Yes.
[00:36:39] Jesus Requena: GROWTH and PLG, whatever, like totally misused. It, it, and I've been doing this for years, but to me, ABM is when you have a A small set of accounts that you're going to put like thousands of dollars on each account.
[00:36:51] Each account is going to have a plan on a page. I mean, some companies have a team dedicated to one account. That's an extreme, but you can have like a team dedicated to a group of accounts. That's true of ABM. And then all you want to do is build a relationship with these accounts. They won't be in the seven figure accounts.
[00:37:06] Great. ABM works like a charm. It's beautiful. The rest, it's just proper marketing. I mean, this whole whole ABM, lite, programmatic, ABM, whatever. No, excuse me. It's just like good, good marketing practices, which is who is our ICP. And don't tell me they're just like industry and revenue size and geo, because that's like not going to work unless you're only targeting fortune 500, which is very simple.
[00:37:33] Again, that might be ABM. But if you're in mid market or commercial, like, you know, accounts from 500 employees to like, whatever, 5, 000 or in the below 10 million revenue, 100 million revenue, 500 million revenue, whatever, um, you're going to have thousands upon thousands of accounts. And I think marketing and sales need to sit down in the table and say, it's not just firmographic, what are the signals that we could ring this person today, give them the elevator pitch, and they will say, yes, I have that problem.
[00:38:00] So in most of the companies that I work with, I've gone one layer deeper to that and figure it out. What are the signals to take that list of accounts from hundreds of thousands or like 50, 000 to maybe a few thousand. Big enough that marketing can do their stuff. Cause if it's too small, the. Pay Networks, wouldn't work, and yada, yada, yada, but, and normally comes down I'm going to give you an example.
[00:38:23] At Algolia, we, we knew that we could sell to companies that had a search bar that had more than 50, 000 or 100, 000 visits a month to the site and have more than 50, 000 products. Why? Because that's when the search was actually very needed. And items in the website could be e commerce or it could be news, like entry point, whatever, right?
[00:38:46] Because then is when the search is valuable. So we reduced the ICP from like 40, 000 accounts to like, I think it was like 12 or 10, 000 or whatever. It just narrowed down and then sales and market knew any of these people have the problem, 100 percent guaranteed. our conversion went up, our ICP went up, the whole thing went up.
[00:39:06] so I think that's the level of sophistication that if you want to get good at this, you need to get. And I have plenty of examples of that, but is that what is it that they have to have for us to sell this? Um,
[00:39:16] Toni: give us, give us one example on the marketing side, how we then started to activate, activate those 10 K. Because I think on the sales side, everyone kind of gets it, you know, you do some prospecting, other email, LinkedIn, you know, phone calls and so forth, right. Kind of that makes sense on the marketing side.
[00:39:32] Make it a little bit more tangible. What, what you then did with those 10,000 accounts.
[00:39:36] Jesus Requena: But some of them, first of all, some, most of them in the companies that I work with, they have the end user that I could target with either trials or coming to the product. So it will be a lot of technical content to say, um, and I will angle the technical content on problems that the, um, true professional user is facing. So this is where I will build SEO for use cases that are professional use cases, or I will build SEM targeting keywords that only professionals will search. It's not like, uh, Golia for example, we are a data science tool. I'm not going to do all sorts of keywords on Python or SQL writing, because that's going to be a long tail of students wrong.
[00:40:18] What are the things that these people are typing? Like, how to create a churn model in Python and Snowflake. Great, I want to search for people. There might be entry points, low level, but I want those people in the tool. So you, you angle everything that you do in marketing to Try to fit with the ICP definition.
[00:40:37] And then, and then on the more demand gen side, which is educating. Normally I use demand gen for educating more the decision makers. So you have a layer always, there's gonna be a manager above, manager, director, head of. Now these people are not gonna be in the tool all the time. They might go if they want to, but they might just want to understand what is this for my team?
[00:40:57] Right? I mean, you and I have been buying software to say someone comes to a tool, Hey, I like this tool, but what does this do? And how does it fit in this thing? Like, do we need to invest in this right now? You want to educate the decision maker. And that's where, um, this demand gen really targeted, um, work.
[00:41:13] So I'm going to take those 8, 000 accounts, take the right titles, and create content on the pains that these leaders are facing and how we solve them and then educate them and get them in. So what ends up happening is that I have a bunch of accounts that have been exposed to impressions on paid, social, organic, some brand content, a bunch of individual users that have been in the product through trials, some decision makers or managers that have been consuming webinars or other type of content, and then the sales rep can say, okay, traffic, people consuming, um, They start looking at things as a whole and say is this account on fire or not?
[00:41:53] There's a lot of activity coming here, right? So these tools like Pocus or Endgame, they will give you a total engagement level of the account. It's not even a score. It's like, hey, this is on fire. And then they will click on the account and see this is all the things that happened. And I think that's what sales want to, and then they will figure it out.
[00:42:11] What is the threshold, right? I mean, some companies will put a threshold and say if, you know, These things don't happen, don't go after them, but, um, that's the way I think about building a funnel.
[00:42:21] Toni: Hey there, sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to take a second and say that this show is hosted by Groblowblocks. This episode simply wouldn't exist otherwise.
[00:42:29] That's why I wanted to tell you in 15 seconds why a company like SuperSight use Groblox to run their go to market at 50 million ARR. It's really three things.
[00:42:40] Full, final, visibility. See the entire bow tie and monitor performance, a common language, Shared metrics, definitions, and no more data objections, and better go to market meetings, being able to spend the time discussing problems, testing solutions, and assessing next steps. That's it. Back to the episode.
[00:42:59] Mikkel: So, I mean, we've, we've covered quite a few things around the whole PLS realm now, I'm just wondering, like, let's say there's a listener now, they started, you know, surfacing intent signals, they provide a list to sales, hot to cold, all the things we've covered by now, at some point, they're going to start executing and actually running this motion.
[00:43:20] And so. How, you know, how do they know that this is going to work at scale, right? Because initially, when you start, there's going to be maybe a smaller volume you, you know, dip your toe in, and at some point you want to go a bit more full throttle. And I'm, I'm sure you've kind of experienced going, you know, from, you know, 10 to 20 to 60 miles per hour, whatever.
[00:43:39] So what, what would you look at here in terms of whether it's, uh, potentially successful for, for the teams doing this?
[00:43:46] Jesus Requena: You should go always 100 miles an hour, but, uh, to start with. Um, I think the, the, you know, I've been in many situations where, you want to invest in a Go to market motion that is not built, and you're gonna ask for a bunch of cash in advance Say I want to do all this stuff and the CFO is gonna look at you and say well What is the return of this thing?
[00:44:10] So normally what you will do is with your best educated, most educated guess, create a waterfall demand Kind of model and say you know what we think these accounts are gonna take Roughly three months to go through this education period. And you look for the signals that tell you whether you're in the right path to deliver the pipeline.
[00:44:30] So, let's take the sample that we did before. You have 8, 000 accounts, the best ICPs ever, and you're going to start trying to get some of those people trial in or demand gen. You're going to start from the top of the funnel. Am I reaching to these accounts? So I want in the first 30 days to reach to 75 of these accounts.
[00:44:46] And I want 35 of those accounts percent or 15 percent to have at least a trial and a manager lead. And you put that as a milestone. In the second month, I want, um, whatever, 15 percent of those to be a meeting booked. And then in the, you know, and a portion will be first stage opportunity kind of thing.
[00:45:06] And then you start seeing whether those things are going down the funnel. And normally you're going to get this wrong, probably timing wise you're going to get it wrong, but At least you will run this for a month and say, okay, well, some assumptions were wrong. The velocity from reach to NQL or to NQA, whatever, like whatever you're doing there, like I need to adjust it.
[00:45:26] But the most important thing is that you set a milestone for yourself to understand, are things moving the way I wanted them to move in down, downwards the funnel? Because I mean, you've seen scenarios where you spend a bunch of money on like, whatever, demand gen, leads, travel, whatever. And then you say like, yeah, to your point, like I've done the leads, but.
[00:45:46] You don't have a full view of that. So I, I spent a lot of time trying to map that funnel and figure it out. What is the time that we require for accounts to go from. The top to the bottom and then monitor that very closely. And if we've seen the right signals, meaning, yeah, we started with an investment of X and we've seen some of that trickle down the funnel, just double it down and double it down.
[00:46:06] Stop when it's not working, double on what is working until you, you get it right. You know, have I gotten this right a hundred percent of the time? No, absolutely not whatsoever. But, um, have it taken me to where I wanted to be in a decent period of time, like 6 months to 12 months, 100%. Because you become good at it.
[00:46:24] There's no other way to go around this, yeah.
[00:46:26] Toni: So you have been, we've been throwing a couple of really big companies around like Unity, Algolia, Figma, Hex. I mean the first three definitely above a hundred million, Hex kind of, you know, on its, on its way rapidly, I'm sure.
[00:46:38] What were some like hard learned lessons from, you know, scaling these other ones past the 25, 50 million mark?
[00:46:46] Jesus Requena: You know it's funny because both Unity and Figma I joined when they were like, um, about to cross the hundred million. I think it was like 80 something and Figma was just above the a hundred mil. I think the, the, investments that you do in that funnel, they change it dramatically, um, in each of those stages.
[00:47:06] Cause the reach, Um, it's different. At least in the companies that have a big TAM like Unity and Algolia. Because we have millions of potential accounts that we could sell to. Algolia and Hex were different. The TAM wasn't that big. So it was about, about maturing the activities that you were doing.
[00:47:21] So your investment will become better and better as you penetrate more than addressable market. So I think it's different, but I, I, I, maybe what is common in both of them is your, Investment will mature in the depth of the investment. So you might start with some content at the top of the funnel and SEM and trials and then you end up having like way more in depth experiences.
[00:47:44] You might do a Developer conference, because you learn that, you know, engaging developer might work. You might do a, um, Figma has their own, two conference, actually one for end users and one for leaders. So you end up picking like big rocks or big investments that will take you, I think it will elevate your reach and your engagement like dramatically.
[00:48:06] You kind of do that when you were small, you kind of spend like 5 million bucks on a conference. You just can't afford that, but
[00:48:12] Toni: so the thing is, right, we started out talking PLG, PLS, uh, then we talked a little bit, um, you know, some people listening was like, you know, I think this sounds like ABM. I think we're calling it more modern marketing or kind of how marketing should be done.
[00:48:25] But ultimately, right, especially, especially thinking about PLS and kind of the sales piece to it here. It is about, you know, the boring pieces, it's about targeting ICP. Okay, cool. Yeah. We all know that. But also by, you know, forcing those signals, um, you know, collecting them and then also giving them to the sales team to figure out how to deal with that best.
[00:48:45] And those signals that could be, You know, third party intent. There could be, I don't know, whatever email opens, but there could also be, Hey, wait a minute. This is the stuff that they did in the trial. This is the stuff that they did in the product. This is, this is how far they went in the, in the product journey.
[00:49:03] Hey, they invited a couple of other folks. Those are also, you know, just other signals basically. Right. And then making sure That, that handover to the sales team, this is not the end, you know, the end all be all of that story, but basically kind of, this is just, Hey, you know, we're now layering another role in, which is going to make this whole thing way more complex, way more expensive, by the way, but the journey still doesn't end here, kind of what are other things we can still support while that basically happens.
[00:49:30] And I think this is at least, um, you know, Jesus, thank you so much for your time, but that's kind of a little bit, my, my takeaway actually from the session here.
[00:49:38] Jesus Requena: you got it. That's exactly right. And, you know, there's no a given formula. You should experiment and learn yourself. What you do in one place, you kind of do it in another. So,
[00:49:47] Toni: That's it. Thanks. Thanks a bunch, everyone for listening. Thanks Jesus for being here.
[00:49:52] Jesus Requena: thank you all.
[00:49:53] Mikkel: Bye.