🗓 Unlocking revenue ama: March 13 with Amy hsuan (Mixpanel)

4 Things we learned from the 2021 Product-Led Sales Benchmark Report

In 2021 we set the foundation for understanding how revenue engines are built in a product-led world. In 2022 we're curious to see how things have evolved.

Sandy Mangat
October 18, 2022
4 Things we learned from the 2021 Product-Led Sales Benchmark Report

Following the success of last year’s PLS Benchmark Report, we’re back again. This time we partnered with our friends at OpenView, RevOps Co-op, and RevGenius to learn more about how sales teams are structured at PLG companies. 

In 2021 we set the foundation for understanding how revenue engines are built in a product-led world. In 2022 we're curious to see how things have evolved. We'll be paying close attention to the big questions...

  1. How does a product-led organization structure their sales team?
  2. What types of tools are teams using to built the ultimate GTM tech stack
  3. How do teams split their customer segments?

Whether you’ve only dipped your toes in PLG or are a well oiled Product-Led Sales machine - we want to hear about your experiences.

Take the survey.

Building on the foundation of a new category: Product-Led Sales

We’ve seen that the most successful and high growth SaaS businesses are Product-Led Growth (PLG) companies. While the healthy self-serve growth of PLG companies is impressive, the real breakthrough happens when these teams pair their self-serve products with a robust sales motion. 

This new sales motion at PLG companies is called Product-Led Sales (PLS). Product-Led Sales (PLS) is a go-to-market approach that relies on existing users of the product to drive revenue, including conversion, upsell, cross-sell and expansion.

Product-Led Sales is still in its infancy but gaining popularity quickly. We created the PLS benchmark report as a way to create a baseline for every revenue team or sales leader. .The insights we gleaned from last year’s survey helped us understand the basics, like how teams are measuring PQLs and how they are structured.

This year we’re going to go deeper, as the category matures, so do the types of questions, concepts, and playbooks teams need to succeed. 

Take the survey.

4 things we learned from the 2021 PLS Benchmark Report

1. PLG companies don’t do sales = myth

97% of all companies surveyed have sales or plan to add sales on top of their PLG motion. However, last year respondents were still split, some sales teams are still conducting cold outbound (44%) while other are experimenting with PQLs (47%).   

It’s clear that most companies are still in the exploration phases.

2. Product-Led Sales team still do outbound

While a majority of respondents (72%) have sales conducting outreach to inbound leads and many have started to conduct outreach to PQLs (47%), 50% are still relying on MQLs to inform outreach and 44% are still conducting cold outbound, both of which are more traditional enterprise sales tactics.

We suspect that we’ll learn more about how teams have evolved traditional cold outbound approaches to complement PLS, with tactics that take in product usage data for key messaging and multithreading based on PLS results, in this year’s survey!

‍More on combining PLS with Outbound here.

3. Sales-Assist is becoming an important (and recognized) part of the team

Turns out the sales team structure at PLG companies is not too different from any other SaaS company, with the first hire normally being a Head of Sales, VP of Sales, or a CRO. 

48% of respondents made their first hire between $500K and $1M in ARR and that hire typically reported directly to the CEO/Founder. Compensation also looked as it did in the traditional enterprise sales world. We’re looking forward to getting some data around this for the 2022 Benchmark report.

For some insights on newer comp models check out Ben Sabrin’s AMA.

Where things got interesting in last years report was with the role of sales-assist, an emerging function within a PLS team. Sales-assist is exactly what it sounds like
helping/assisting a user in their journey, whether that means they are ready to purchase or have hit a point of friction, and everything in between. In 2021 ~29% of companies had this role, but we expect to see adoption of the sales-assist role has accelerated this year. 

4. CRMs were still dominating over the data warehouse

Most respondents either used Salesforce or Hubspot as their CRM with a few smaller companies opting for a Google sheet, Notion page, or Airtable base.

When it comes to the data warehouse, 24% of respondents didn’t have one. We feel pretty strongly that this number has increased over the past 12 months, as more PLG companies recognize the power of leveraging the data warehouse as the system of record for their company. 

You can read more about our thoughts on CRMs and why we believe the data warehouse is a better backend for your GTM tech stack here.

Take the PLS Benchmark Survey

Help us chart the evolution of Product-Led Sales with real data and find out how you stack up against your peers.

The survey should take you ~5-7 minutes to complete and all of the results are anonymized (we won’t reveal your secrets), but if you want to receive the results you have the option of giving us your email. 

‍👉 Take the survey 

Sandy Mangat
Head of Marketing at Pocus
Keep Reading
Warm up your pipe gen efforts with signals

What is the antidote to the cold outbound, high volume model? Focusing on warm, hyper-relevant outbound instead.

Alexa Grabell
March 12, 2024
Scaling Go-to-Market: Lessons from Building a Revenue Engine at Ramp

How did Megan "figure out how to double revenue in 3 months" at Ramp? It was all about experimentation.

Megan Yen
February 27, 2024
Unlocking Growth and Retention with Tessa Thorburn (Loom)

Learn how Tessa's scaled and strategic CS org creates delight for Loom customers.

Tessa Thorburn
February 1, 2024
Building your signal-based GTM tech stack

What are “signal-based playbooks” and how is this strategy shaping the GTM 5.0 era. What new processes, tools, and playbooks are emerging?

Alexa Grabell
January 30, 2024
Introducing Pocus Enrichment

Customers can now access data from 700 million user profiles and 20 million companies in Pocus. No more context switching between tools to find data and enrich leads.

Sandy Mangat
January 23, 2024
‘Athletic Nerds’: A new profile for the modern seller with Sam Werboff

How the 'Athletic Nerd' sales profile shaped the early GTM organization at Airtable.

Sam Werboff
January 16, 2024
Product-led insights delivered.

Get best practices, frameworks, and advice from top GTM leaders in your inbox every week.

The Revenue Data Platform for go-to-market teams
Schedule a call with a GTM specialist to talk about your GTM motion, goals, and how Pocus can help turn product data into revenue.
Join the #1 place to learn about PLS and modern go-to-market strategy
Join our invite-only Slack community to learn firsthand from experts who have built and scaled hybrid revenue engines and connect with peers who are just figuring things out.
See how Pocus combines product usage and customer data to get a 360° view of your hottest opportunities.
Take the product tour