vs. HipChat
Slack
Viral team adoption, with a better free tier
- What it did
- Free tier gated on message history, not users, so whole teams adopted free (2013-14)
- HipChat
- Free capped at five users until May 2014, when Slack launched
Strategy Map›Layer 5 · Go-to-Market Strategy›Sales Motion/The first purchase+ from outside the named canon
Product-Led Sales
What is Product-Led Sales?
Users or teams adopt through a free or self-serve purchase first, and a sales team is added while that base is still growing to turn team accounts into company contracts.
How Product-Led Sales works
Self-serve adoption finds the accounts; a sales team then turns scattered team use into company contracts, earning more from each account than self-serve alone.
How companies won with Product-Led Sales
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. InVision
Figma
Viral adoption, with free collaborators
- What it did
- Pay for editors, everyone else free (2017); sales followed advocates into existing clusters (2018)
- InVision
- Charged $8 a month per commenter (2018)
vs. New Relic
Datadog
Land and expand on per-host pricing
- What it did
- $15 per host, no per-user charge, 14-day trial, month to month (2012-14)
- New Relic
- Free Lite tier plus $200 per server tiers (2008)
vs. Sermo
Doximity
Free daily tools: messaging, fax, Dialer
- What it did
- Secure messaging (2011), eFax used regularly by 25% (2014), Dialer (2016), video at COVID
- Sermo
- A discussion forum for hard cases; about one comment per member per year (2016)
Also tagged: Cloudflare · Confluent · GitLab · HashiCorp · InVision · New Relic · Shopify · Sprout Social · Tableau · Twilio · Zendesk
The question to ask of a company
How did the first purchase happen, when did sales arrive, and which large accounts began as self-serve users?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Pocus + | Product-led sales |
| OpenView + | Product-led sales |
Note. Near miss: A self-serve product that added enterprise sales fourteen years after launch and then cut it. Does not count: Self-serve with no sales layer (Self-Serve Only); a sales-negotiated first contract (Land and Expand).