We re-launched our website with a brand new look and feel today — a new face that represents the magic behind our product, our customers, our community, and our team. So this felt like a good time to formally introduce Pocus as the first Product-Led Sales platform, and explain a bit about what we do and why we do it. 

This blog post is going to be a little different than our usual content.

This is not an AMA recap or interview with one of our amazing Product-Led Sales community members...

This is partially a break-up letter to the old way of selling.

Partially a love letter to the new way of selling. 

And finally, a call to action for you to join the cause. 

Goodbye old school sales

After speaking with hundreds of sales leaders, product-led growth experts, and people in every GTM role at the most exciting SaaS businesses, one thing became abundantly clear: the way software is sold has changed for good. If you’ve been keeping up with the Pocus blog, this isn’t a new idea.

TL;DR: Customers want faster time to value. They want to get their hands on the product and experience the value before they are willing to entertain a sales conversation. 

Those that have made the shift to this new way of selling have seen the rewards (👋Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian, MongoDB, and many others). Those that haven’t made the shift have struggled to acquire, retain, and delight customers (slow growth, missing ARR targets, long sales cycles, high CAC).

Product-Led Sales is happening now

This new model of selling is called Product-Led Sales (PLS). 

Product-Led Sales is all about finding your highest value customers from right under your nose — the people who already use your product.  

Find the needle in the haystack opportunities by combining powerful product usage signals with customer data for a complete picture of your next best opportunities. No more cold, uninformed outreach — now, you can send a personalized message to the right user at the right time.

So what’s holding everyone back?‍

The go-to-market tech stack has not kept up. The CRM is no longer the only source of truth. Sales teams at product-led companies need access to product data so they can prioritize opportunities and reach out to customers with the right message. 

Product-led companies spend hours, weeks, and months cobbling together DIY solutions to bring together their product and CRM data to drive insights for their sales teams… and that’s only if they’re lucky enough to get technical resources to help. 

Existing DIY solutions quite frankly suck at enabling PLS because: 

1. CRMs (eg. Salesforce & Hubspot) are not designed to ingest times series data, which is the type of product data that you need to generate meaningful insights about your users (eg. DAU increased by 30%).
2. It is extremely costly to pipe all of your users and their usage data into the CRM, so you will inevitably miss that needle in the haystack opportunity.
3. CRM data is rigid and inflexible and can’t accommodate the experimental nature of running a Product-Led Sales motion.
   

Pocus: The Product-Led Sales Platform‍

Pocus is the first Product-Led Sales platform that turns product data into revenue. Pocus equips sales teams with the data they need to convert their best users into high-value customers — all without ongoing engineering support. 

We bring together product usage, customer fit, and buying intent data into one view, with insights tailored to your business — whether the VP of Engineering is actively engaged, the product went viral within a specific team, or an account hit a paywall — so you can take the right action at the right time. ‍

Pocus' perspective is that there are 4 necessary building blocks for a Product-Led Sales platform

#1 Data‍

Combine data on product usage, customer fit, and buying intent into a complete and unified view of the customer... without relying on engineering support. Connect directly to the CRM and data warehouse (not just a CDP!) so that you can tap into all customer and product usage data.

‍#2 Signals‍

Enable sales teams to build, test, and iterate signals such as product-qualified leads (PQL) and customer segmentation with no-code functionality. Receive feedback on the quality of the PQLs and plug the feedback back into the model.

Signals are never “set it and forget it”. You need an easy to use interface to experiment with signals like PQLs and customer segmentation. ‍

#3 Insights‍

Identify and categorize opportunities for the sales team in a prioritized list, with the ability to drill down into why those opportunities are worth pursuing.” Sales reps want context about WHY (not just a lead score) so they trust the model and use the data as a driver to action. Insights must be available on any object —account, lead, or more specific product features like “API calls”, “Workspace”, or “Videos”.

#4 Actions

Allow sales teams to act on the data the way they choose: a Slack alert, a one-click contact via Outreach.io, a customized in-app experience triggered, or a simple update to a Salesforce field. Don’t just create pretty dashboards. Make it easy for sales reps to action insights with a few clicks. ‍

Bonus: Experimentation (underlies everything else)‍

Deliver a configurable platform that enables experimentation in a no-code interface. Equip sales reps with drag & drop functionality so they never have to rely on an engineer to build dashboards and integrations.There is no one-size fits all model for PLS, so give sales reps the keys to experiment so they can identify their perfect model to accelerate revenue. 

‍Our progress 

Here’s what we’ve been up to since we started Pocus a little over 6 months ago:‍

🔮Community: The Pocus community is 400+ strong with Product-Led Sales experts from Slack, Atlassian, MongoDB, Airtable, Notion, Loom, Zapier, and more. Together, we are building the category of Product-Led Sales by swapping advice, developing frameworks, and establishing best practices. The PLS Community is a private invite-only Slack (we’re optimizing for quality over quantity). Request an invite to join here.‍

🔮Product: We built the first Product-Led Sales platform (in record speed!) based on the many conversations we had with the community. ‍

🔮Customers: We’re live with our first beta customers and are humbled that hundreds of PLG companies have already signed up for our waitlist. We love hearing feedback like, “the UI is so clean and accessible to sales teams,” “I love how configurable this is to our specific workflow,” “the ability to control the data I want to see is very impactful,” “you have 100% captured our Product-Led Sales pain-point.”

🔮Team: We’ve assembled a kick-ass team that's obsessing over customer feedback daily. Shout out to my incredible co-founder, Isaac, our Product team (Todd, Suhaas, Julian, Sam, and Claire), and last but not least, our Head of Marketing, Sandy. 

Building the future...together

Thank you to the early community members and beta customers who have helped us define the Product-Led Sales category and platform. 

We’re listening to all of your feedback and collecting advice from every customer call, PLS AMA, community workshop, and Slack message. Your insights have led to integral decisions for our product and company.

Let’s continue to build the future of sales together.‍

Interested in joining the Product-Led Sales movement? 

🔮Sign up for our waitlist - we’re adding more beta customers every week.

🔮Join our team - help us build the future of sales.