Full-Funnel Product-Led Growth w/ Jenn Steele, VPM at Reprise and Grace Tyson, VPS at Reprise

Good morning, everybody, or good evening. I know we have people joining us from all over the world, so thank you so much. We are excited to kick off SaaS to Scale 2021, so thank you for tuning in. We are excited to have Jen Steele, VP of Marketing at Reprise, and Grace Tyson, VP of Sales at Reprise. They're going to be walking us through product-led growth, how to execute across the full funnel, and also learning from some of their mistakes. Which I know we all love. So we have 40 minutes, and there's going to be plenty of time for Q&A at the end. So be sure to drop your questions throughout the session using the Q&A button at the bottom of the menu bar in Zoom. Join me in welcoming Grace and Jen. Before I let them dive into the content, let's start with why the data matters for this session. So can you both tell us just quickly what results people can expect from the presentation today? Thanks so much for joining us. Go ahead, ladies.

Thanks, Caitlin. I'm Jen Steele. I run marketing here at Reprise, and my pronouns are she and her. I'm here with my partner in crime who started the very same day I did, Grace Tyson.

Hello, I'm Grace Tyson, also pronouns she/her, VP of sales here. And at least from my perspective, you're— if you like learning from mistakes, then you are in for a treat today.

Right. And so the main thing here is that there's a, there's A really interesting thing to take away from these metrics, and that is first, even though you make mistakes, you can actually get signups to your free product, as you can see by when we had our soft launch and official launch. But then there's— I'm gonna just share our first mistake, which is signing up to do one of these sessions 5 weeks after you launch something when it takes 6 weeks to make pipelines. So we don't have as many metrics as we'd love to share, and there's our first mistake, and you can learn from that.

Yes, indeed.

Okay. So just so you can understand and avoid all of our mistakes, we're going to talk about what we looked like before PLG. We're going to talk about kind of looking at each other and saying, holy expletive deleted, PLG. We'll revisit those metrics and some others and then tell you how we could have avoided our mistakes so that you can go on and make new and different mistakes. And before I start, I want to let you know I have the allergies from hell. And so I may be muting to cough. And if I'm Cough too much, then we all get to see how much Grace knows about what happened in marketing.

It's going to be a good little pop quiz for me.

We'll see just how aligned sales and marketing are here. Okay. No pressure. Yeah, not at all. Okay, so let's talk about what we looked at— looked like before PLG. So target market is actually a pretty classic enterprise target market. Enterprise sales and marketing teams. Companies with software and US only. Now, Grace, I think you have a little more color here because, wow, that seems like a lot of people.

Yes, it is. So there's a quote I really love from the CEO of Microsoft, which is that in today's context, all companies are software companies. So yes, we have a very, very large total addressable market here at Represe. But truly, any company with software can and should use Represe. And that's where we're focused, particularly sales and marketing teams. I will say our customers come to us with many other use cases and people involved that get excited once they see the product. But, but yes, that's, that's the, that's the core focus.

And so we were attacking this with a classic, classic— I say classic as if double funnel has become classic in the last 5 years or so, but basically a very simple double funnel model. So effectively inbound funnel. We elected to go no gated content, which A, makes things easier, and B, means that our MQLs, our marketing qualified leads, are demo requests. They go to the AEs, they schedule with Chili Piper. And then the outbound funnel, we do have a target account list, and we have a team of, what is it, Grace, about 10 BDRs who outbound to them?

Yeah, that's right.

Cool. And of course, we combine the outbound strategy with a lot of tailoring. Grace and her team do amazing work. Like, all the sales leaders double down on the BDRs so that they really get outbound And the other piece of our outbound funnel isn't just the BDRs, but Grace, your AEs are actually responsible for some of their own pipe, right?

That's right. Yes. So we take a pretty typical, somewhat volume-based strategy, but a lot of tailoring, a lot of, of course, leading with product, which we'll get into. And a lot of, we call it, show me, show me you know me. So tailoring message, video, social, cold calling, emails, the whole shebang.

All the stuff I don't respond to.

But all the things that Jen— And will never take a meeting with us.

Totally. And then Grace, tell us about enterprise sales.

Yes. Okay. So, so as mentioned, our account executive team is divided across commercial and enterprise accounts, as is our BDR org. And so even though we are a company that empowers other companies to do PLG, we've still had a pretty standard, pretty traditional enterprise sales motion, at least up until our our PLG launch, of course we're drinking our own champagne and showing product and letting people experience it. But just to sort of describe a little bit of that typical process that we have historically taken, people come to our website, there's a lot of cool and exciting, you know, jargon and really great stuff from Jen's team. But, you know, then they get on a qualification call, they maybe do multiple qualification calls, they get asked a lot of BANT questions. And then hopefully, they eventually get to see a demo. If anyone has bought software recently, this might align with your experience. But finally see a demo after several conversations. And then in evaluation, maybe if you just play your cards right, you finally get your hands on the product and can finally experience it in your own business context. Woo-hoo. OK, so that's the very typical motion that I have been used to and that I've seen at most orgs I've been part of. But the thing is, for us, as we're thinking, we'll get here in a second with our own Starter launch and how we've taken on PLG by storm. We know that most buyers don't want to buy this way anymore. And so I think about my own experience with B2C and others' experiences with B2C products. It is just instant gratification to the max. We get our hands on the solution immediately. Think about Uber, Airbnb. Amazon Prime, God forbid, you know, one-day shipping if you're in— get your product right away. But that's how— that's how what we've gotten used to. And that's how we want to buy. We want our hands on the solution immediately. And we've really come to expect it. And the large majority of our purchases are tech purchases are B2C driven. So that's defining this trend. So short attention spans, Zoom fatigue is real. People want to experience the product sooner. And so This is the typical motion, what we've just outlined, but we really have realized, and this is why PLG, we realized that we need to flip that on its head, let people experience the product sooner, and let our products take center stage and really tell the story, tell the narrative, tell our why.

So holy expletive deleted, PLG. As Grace said, we really needed to learn to do this. And so Just so to give you some context, we made a free lightweight version of the product. It was offered on the website, but we didn't have a credit card motion. We decided very intentionally not to do that. And you'll see that reappear later in some of our other mistake slides, but basically the vision, and we'll go into a little bit more detail, but basically sign up for Starter, become a product qualified lead, And I throw you over the fence to Grace. So sorry, allergies. Okay. So what we did, step 1, figure out what it is. So, so when Grace and I joined on the same day, this was already in motion. And at my first exec offsite, I was like, I was having some cognitive dissonance. So see, I'm an enterprise marketer, like I come from marketing to Amazon, Oracle, etc. I've marketed to banks, I've marketed to really big companies. I know enterprise. And so I'm like, why are we doing this? We're enterprise. Will there be a credit card? And then when I finally got around to the whole, oh, hey, we should drink our own champagne, you know, realization, I then had to sit down with product and say, okay, well, I know what our enterprise product does. What are you building Starter for? What are you building this to do? And actually, we recorded that conversation and released it as a reality show. If you want to take a look at that and see just how embarrassing I than I can be. Believe me, it's worse here, worse than here. Okay, so step 2, now that I'm like, oh my stars, like I actually know what this is, gotta figure out how to market it. And the big question for me, questions for me was, do we put money behind it and should it be our primary call to action? It's really hard to figure out, should I put money behind a free offering that might eventually lead to a product qualified lead? Or should I keep putting money behind driving bottom-of-the-funnel demo requests? We also had the same question on our website. Should it be our primary call to action? And we actually decided that for now, we're not going to put much money to it— behind it, which also explains why our numbers are a bit low. And it is not the primary call to action on our website. So step 3, figure out how that we're flowing this, right? We know how a demo request flow goes. But when you start getting product involved, A, it's a third team. You know, where before Grace and I could just annoy sales ops and marketing ops to death, now we actually had to put product in the mix. And there was even questions of like, okay, so is it the PM that deals with this? Do we deal with an engineer? What's going on here? And here is basically what we decided to do. Fun fact, you can also see my recorded conversation with Grace on that reality show. Why I let my team talk me into a reality show that's not even on a slide is a mistake, but we're I'm going to move on. So basically, because we have the double funnel and owned accounts, we realized that from a marketing perspective, we need to treat things in two different ways. And that is, if it's an existing customer or an owned account, then we need to give a heads up to the person that owns the account, whether that's the email to the CSM or the email to the AE. And then we have— we, we had to define what a product qualified lead was. We had to say, what actions are they going to take in the product that will allow them— that will allow them to allow us to be like, hey, Grace, your team can have this now. And so basically, from a super high level, you build a thing, and you publish a thing, and we call it a replay. And we decided that if they get far enough in the starter flow, then we can call them a PQL and hand them over to Grace. At which point in time then her team has a few flows here.

Yes, which I can— which I'm happy to speak to. So the first, from my perspective, when I came into this flow and figuring this out alongside marketing and product, obviously very cross-functional, so a lot of moving pieces. My recommendation, which we'll talk about more with the mistakes made, is to have a very clear definition of what a PQL, product qualified lead, is. So what is the trigger point at which you should amp up, you should actually involve the sales team and have more of a human touch? And then of course, there are the details like make sure that you have lead routing set up, make sure that you have that email automation to the rep so that they're getting served that information based on actual user data within the free version. So requires very tight alignment with product on the user data visibility, very tight alignment with marketing, of course, as well, and figuring out where are there automated nurture educational drips going out to these, these signups? And then when should a sale— when is it worth a salesperson's attention? Because of course, that's going to drive up the cost to acquire customers, going to get them into the enterprise sales motion and hopefully lead to the results you want. But very much intentionality is required there. And that's something I've learned from this, from this experience.

And what we decided to do is we decided to have product signals pass into marketing automation, and then marketing automation would handle the routing. So just in case anybody was wondering how we finally ended up doing it, and I say finally for reasons you're going to find out later. Hey, Grace, what about training sales?

Super important. Don't overlook this. So everything on, everything on this slide here is, is really crucial. You need to have, if you're going to launch a PLG, product-led growth, or even just product-led sales approach, then it's crucial, of course, to inform the sales team. Don't overlook it. Realize that there will be a natural fear for salespeople when you start talking about selling through rep-free experiences. That's gonna— that might cause a little bit of perturbance, if that is a word. I think I said it wrong, but it's early. So please, yeah, make sure that the sales team is super aware of the need for the change. We realized that we needed to implement this Part one, because we are a company that is supporting other companies doing PLG, but also because we know that that's the buyer experience the world is shifting to. Half of buyers cite demos as the most valuable material during the buying cycle, but almost half of buyers also want a rep-free experience. And that number is going up as we look at millennials taking on leadership roles. Dun dun dun. So that, that's all really important to frame up to the sales team, the why and how this will actually empower them rather than take away their role. Because in fact, PLG and product-led sales approach can, can really go smoothly and be an actual huge benefit to the buyer, creating a frictionless experience, and also to the sellers in terms of creating future pipeline of opportunities at the point in which they're ready to really go on to the full platform. So that all needs to be framed up really clearly in the training. That matters a lot. So I would put a lot of thought into how you frame it and the why for your business and the impact to the sales team and really think through that and make sure it's clear. And then tactically speaking, when we did our live training, we talked about the why, we talked about the flow that, that Jen just showed, but also we packaged everything up with outreach sequences and emails, call scripts, and training on the approach for running a call with someone who has signed up through the starter version versus a cold discovery call that's been sourced by the BDR team. It should be a different approach. It needs to be a more consultative approach, value-added, more of a partner and helping them reach the next level in terms of how they're leveraging the product versus this, this cold, you know, educational approach for someone who hasn't even seen or experienced or know what your product does. So all of that's very important. Package it up with those, those template sequences and call scripts is my Advice, my learning.

Your team kicked butt on the training, Grace.

Thank you. All credit to my team and not to me on that one.

And step 5, of course, was launching it. So what we basically did is we put a banner on the site. It wasn't our primary call to action, as I mentioned. We released a video. A week later, we released the infamous reality show that I might have referenced a few times. We announced it at a conference. That targets one of our primary personas, in fact, the persona most likely to play with it. And so launch. And metrics so far, as I said, these come with a disclaimer of it's only been about 5 weeks and Thanksgiving was one of those weeks, just saying. This one looks familiar. We've had— now it's above 300 signups for Starter. And then I call this the sales-ish metric slide because we've had 34% conversion from product signup to PQL. Remember I said they had to take a sequence of steps. We're TBD on pipeline generation, as I mentioned. Now what's interesting is, Grace, you might not— you're like, 34%, that should mean I have 100 PQLs. Where are my PQLs? Fun fact, a lot of them are small business. And so we need to change our version of PQL a bit. And Yeah. So Grace, do you have any color here?

Yes. So I agreed and not totally surprising that a lot of Starter signups would be from emerging segments. I will say we actually did win our first deal already in just a matter of weeks from that started on Signer, which— or Startup— can't talk— that started on Starter, which is amazing. So we're seeing good early signal there. But yes. A lot of emerging businesses, as expected, and actually as we want, because we want— part of our mission here is to fuel full funnel product-led growth for all organizations. And so to us, it's important that those smaller and emerging businesses can leverage the product. And hopefully when they're ready, we'll be waiting. Sales team will be waiting to talk to them.

So, okay. So now the reason that you all are here, let's tell the people how many times we messed up. Shall we?

Let's do it.

Beware of product delays. There was a hard deadline that we set because we were doing marketing motions of a lightning strike. And we set this date, it was November 8th. The lightning strike being combined marketing motions. We set it for November 8th. We started buying billboards. We started doing like all this crazy stuff. And the thing was that it was supposed to soft launch in like August. And then September and then October. And oh, and then our founders came to us and said, oh, by the way, we can also announce funding at the same time.

Surprise.

So when you're going to launch your free product, avoid our mistake. And honestly, I really thought that a few months was enough of a delay, but it's a new product. And when you're launching a brand new product, even if it's just a cutdown version of your current one, even if it's just kind of a free trial, build in more delay than you would for like a major feature launch. Because, and even then, it'll probably surprise you. Number 2, stand your ground. This was a very big mistake that I made. And that is that, and Grace can probably attest to this, fundamentally, we had a lot of should we or shouldn't we. Should we launch this November 8th, right, with the lightning strike, or shouldn't we? And this was especially salient 'Cause when we rolled the funding in, the marketing team, and there were all of like 4 of us at the time, kind of lost our minds, right? I mean, we're, here we are thinking we're launching a product and now we have to shift our resources to funding. We had some product fear. What if we get thousands and thousands and thousands of signups, right? We need to shard this out. We need to do a lot of things on the backend to make this happen. But where I really messed up here was that I didn't, pick a direction and go. And as the kind of like the person launching this, as the team lead launching this, I really should have just said, we are or we're not, as opposed to having discussion after discussion after discussion. Sometimes you just need to say, eff it and go, is one thing that I kind of live my life by. And I failed to do that here. So yes, you obviously, those of you who might be in marketing or who work on go-to-market motions, obviously, the product team has to govern things. But you need to make those direct, those decisions decisions together. We also decided that because of the product fear, we would actually introduce a lot of friction to the process. And so not only is it not our primary call to, call to action, not only did we not put money behind it, but then the signup was to a HubSpot form that then the product manager gated before he'd sent out the invites so that we made sure that we didn't have a flood. Basically. And actually, as of this Monday, now that we have the new shard up and running, we are now actually sending out the real invite. Now we're still putting in a little bit of friction in the process. You fill out the marketing automation platform form and then we send you the link to sign up for the product. Maybe someday you'll go straight to the product, but we're taking baby steps here. Leave time for ops. I think Grace and I both kind of messed this up there. Introducing product, I mean, to me, I was just like, oh, it's just another signal, we can pipe it in via the HubSpot API and have done. That wasn't the case. And I managed to— I have a senior director of marketing starting full-time in January who, God bless him, decided to— we managed to bring him in for 5 weeks before he had his kid to really unmess up the ops. I used a cruder term, I'm not gonna lie. There were so many gotchas. There, there were more systems, there's more complexity. While you're leaving all that time for product to slip, you should start ops way earlier than you think. And then Grace, I don't even know what it looked like from your side.

Same, very much so. Yes, start the conversation with ops early and often. I massively underestimated the complexity here. And I admit that I left my ops team somewhat scrambling. So don't be like me. Don't do that to poor Phoebe or your corresponding sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops folks. They need a heads up and they need time to get that all together. It was more complex than I had envisioned originally.

It felt so simple when we were laying it out, Grace, didn't it?

Oh, there it is. It did.

If it's here, we route it here. If it's there, we route it there. Easy peasy. So easy. Yeah, no, it's not really not just in case you were wondering.

Any ops people who are listening are shaking their heads at us at this moment. Yeah.

And another big whoops was demand gen. And in demand gen, I'm like looking at all of the kind of demand motions. So we didn't think through our target accounts as thoroughly as we should have. And when Grace and I laid it out, we actually had signups going to the wrong team. And so my head of demand gen was like, that doesn't actually make sense. Why do we have the AEs following up here and the BDRs following up there? It should be the reverse. And then we discovered 3 weeks in that we forgot to turn on the how-to nurture, which probably didn't lead to a lot of product qualified leads either. This, I think, was very much a symptom of starting all of this stuff too late. Basically because I didn't stand my ground, we didn't think through these things enough. And so things fell through the cracks, like not turning on the how-to nurture. And embarrassingly, nobody in marketing was the one that discovered that. It was the product manager who discovered that. And he's like, hey, Jen, why isn't this on? And I went back to my team and I said, hey team, is there a reason we don't have this on? And they're like, nope, I'll go turn it on. So there's a— there's all of this. Grace, any color here?

I just completely echo that. I was thinking, as you were talking, Jen, I was thinking, what could we have done? What should we have done? And could we have done differently? Just to give some really tactical advice for anyone thinking about product-led growth at their own organization. And it's the, it's the timing, it's the timeline piece, I would say as well, I think we it was a mad rush at the end. And so as soon as you get wind of this as a strategic initiative, it's really important to sit down and probably jot down these different items of consideration and stage it out. Startup life, right? Scale-up life. So it is what it is. But yes, I wish we had gotten ahead of this more in advance and really staged it out timeline-wise. It was a rush.

Yes. And now that you know all of these mistakes, you don't have to make them.

Okay, exactly. Make your own.

Okay, Grace, this one's all you.

Yes. Okay. I spoke about this a bit earlier. But anytime we're talking about this sort of sales rep-free or less sales involvement on potential pipeline, potential opportunities, there, there can be a natural fear with salespeople. We fear change quite often as people. Salespeople are no different. So there's, there's this natural tension and this fear of becoming obsolete from the sales side, and also a fear of cannibalizing the potential opportunities that you can sell to on the sales side if they're able to use this, this free version of the product. So I would say my advice is, again, get ahead of this really early. Talk about this early and often. So why is PLG additive, and rather than something— and why will it make them more effective at their jobs and set them up for greater success with less work than the alternative. And then, I mean, that, and that's super important, because for us, it's, we believe that buyers should have a really amazing experience with our organization, and that it should be frictionless. And there's this misalignment between buyers and sales reps. Buyers want to see the product, they want to experience it, they want fewer sales interactions. And then of course, in sales, we have, we have our discovery questions, we need to get med pic, we have, we have information we need to get. Gosh darn it. So training them on this early and often and talking through it is really important. Say what you're going to say, say it, say what you said, rinse and repeat when it comes to messaging this to the sales team and making sure that they know how to best leverage this amazing, you know, time and time investment from that the executive team is making in terms of PLG.

And I didn't help with this because I would go up in an all-hands and talk about the starter or in the sales announcement meeting and be like, starter soft launch. And it was before Grace and her team our sales team had a chance to message it. And thank goodness we sell PLG, because a PLG platform, because at least our sales team had the messaging they were giving our buyers to fall back on as like, they're there, it'll be okay. But there was still some nerves there that I did absolutely nothing to help by freaking them out.

Thank God we sell what we sell and believe in it.

Ready, fire, aim.

Yes. Okay. So I'll start and pass to you, Jen. Do it. If this is an important— this is an important investment to make, and if your company believes it, there will be surprises. So I— so it is important to, as Jen said, stand your ground, be clear on what matters for the first iteration, and know that it's iterative, and know that this investment is worth it. Because ultimately, and this is where I'd say another learning is, if you're really clear on what your goals are from this initiative, it's a no-brainer. PLG drives down the cost of acquisition. It increases your customer NPS score. It allows you to expand your customers faster. We're already seeing those results with one business from our starter launch, which is super exciting. But go make new mistakes. Don't make the mistakes that we made. What would you add, Jen?

Well, it's interesting because I had mentioned before that free and then enterprise, and then Grace and I had chatted offline about, hmm, maybe we should have this middle product for the SMBs. I mean, We think we have a kickback platform, and maybe we should actually let smaller companies use it at a price point that's more attractive to them. But Grace and I didn't necessarily bubble that all the way up to, I don't know, ops that would have needed to know it, finance, things like that. And so we were very much ready, fire, aim. But that's OK. Like, yes, we are able to do this now without a credit card. So yes, we have more friction before people can give us money, which is never a good idea. But we're okay with that because we do still have people using Starter. We are landing deals with Starter, and it's okay that you're gonna have to evolve and you're gonna have to change and you're not going to do things perfectly, although I really hope you make different mistakes now that you've heard ours.

Agreed.

In conclusion. Go ahead, Grace.

Yeah, so, so just to sum it all up before we bounce over to Q&A. There's a lot of planning and change management outlined here. These are some of the things that you should think about early and be realistic about how long it takes to put some of these things together. So you're not scrambling a few days ahead of time with the sales training, for example. Not that I would ever do that. But, you know, learn from our mistakes, make, make different ones. And also, the other takeaway is this, this is achievable. And this is important, because this is ultimately, we obviously firmly believe this is the future, that product-led growth is is the way that buyers want to buy. It's the way we expect to be able to buy. We want to be able to experience products earlier without necessarily talking to sales 10 times before getting to experience the product. And so in order to beat out competition, in my opinion, this is crucial. And it's something that is in the future not going to even be— it's not going to be optional. So start thinking about it now is my firm advice.

And go do it. And make different mistakes. Okay, now let's take a look at Q&A. How do you avoid high churn rates from free trials like the starter plan? We don't. We don't avoid high churn rates because we kind of use the starter as you kind of self-qualify, like either you need this product or you don't, either it works with your system or you don't. And that's actually part of the reason we've like put it on a different shard than our production product is so that we can kind of do that. Now, that doesn't mean we're not going to try to improve the experience. You know, there are plans for the marketing team to make a walkthrough of the free trial, for example, which we hear helps people understand how to use it. But yeah. Grace, anything here you want to attack?

No, I agree. Yeah, just the goal is not to avoid high churn rates from that free product. So I would just echo what you said. We're not, we're not.

Right. Grace, this one's for you. Are most of your free trial users the ultimate decision maker on keeping the product? And if not, how do you broaden engagement? And I'm going to say no, they're usually the user and not the buyer. So Grace, how do you attack that?

Correct. Yes. Well, that's, that's we. Use Reprise to attack that personally, which is very specific to us and any customers of Reprise. But ultimately, what we enable is we can take product tours and share them around with other stakeholders so that they can experience the product too, even without going through the starter signup. So for us, it's, it's using a demo creation platform, i.e., Reprise, to do that, because most of it, most of the time, it is, it's individual users. So our flow is once it becomes a PQL or product qualified lead specifically, then the sales team is engaged. Or if it's a customer and it's a new point of contact at a customer, then our customer outcomes team is engaged automatically through that beautiful diagram that Jen and her team helped us get together. And so it's two ways. With us, we use reprise. We share the product tours with different decision makers so they can also experience the product. And then it's also once they're a PQL, getting them on a conversation, talking through the use case, teasing out the business value, and then widening the audience in the good old-fashioned sales way. Yes.

We've got a question about percentage of customers do we win back. We don't know yet. Stay tuned. Maybe next year we'll tell you about new and different mistakes we've made in scaling as opposed to launching. Marketing strategies to use to raise awareness of the free trial in the first place. This one's interesting because we decided not to put dollars behind it. When we do have the freemium, the credit card motion in, then I can justify putting marketing dollars behind it. And then we're going to do LinkedIn advertising and SEM. Don't freak out, Grace, I promise this will get you more PQLs eventually. But right now, it just kind of, it's almost if you build it, they will come. We've done a lot of brand plays, like we made sure it was on the site when we did the fundraising announcement, for example. But until we have— we make it easy for people to give us money, we're not going to put marketing, a lot of marketing strategy behind it. And then we'll honestly use some traditional demand motions, especially those that tend to work with more emerging or SMB companies. Let's see, how do you define what PQL stage is reached? I think we just addressed this during the talk. But I think there's two halves of this. I'm going to address the product half, and then Grace, you can address the qualification piece. That means we don't have 300 PQLs right now. And that is that there's basically a 3-phase process in our product. And that is capture, edit, publish, effectively. And so basically, when they hit the publish state is when we— marketing has defined it as a PQL. But wait, there's more. Then what happens, Grace?

So yeah, from our, from our side, exactly like you said, what we thought about what is the trigger in product that a a user, what user action triggers this to be someone who is highly engaged in the product and worth engaging from a sales perspective. That's the PQL. That's publishing a replay in our particular case. So something to think through if you're implementing this type of approach. From there, it is— I mean, we're kind of learning, to be completely honest, on exactly what happens next and whether that is the right trigger point. So more to come in our next talk on scaling this next year. Of course. But, but currently, from there, it's the AE will actually reach out and get, get involved and offer support. We have very specific outreach that we, that we provide to help educate them based on what they've done in the product. So they start getting user insights after they reach PQL, and then they go out and they're outreaching to those folks. Not sure if I answered the question, but more to come.

I think we're figuring it out is a perfectly reasonable answer. Um, somebody asked how soon after someone signs up for the free trial do your salespeople contact them? They— we don't contact them until they take the PQL motion, and then also I believe if they're qualified and are out, right? If they're a one-person company, it's probably not worth enterprise sales, right?

Yes, correct.

Um, do inbound PQL and outbound leads all funnel to the same AEs, or do you have different AE teams for each funnel? Go ahead, Grace.

Good question. Currently they all funnel to the same AEs. Uh, we have just shy of 20 account executives, 10 business development reps on the team right now. So we're a bit early in our growth to actually have dedicated teams depending on the type of lead. So yes, it's, it's across the board. But the— what— where we do have a difference is, you know, if it— again, if it's a customer versus a net new account, and if it's a named owned account already, it will go to that account executive that owns the account. And if it's not owned, it will round robin within the segment, either commercial or enterprise. We did toss around the idea of whether we wanted these, these different leads depending to go to business development reps versus the AEs. So for PQLs, and particularly folks that have signed up for Starter and then PQL, those go right to AEs because we see that as a really strong signal for getting into our sales funnel and bypassing the biz dev function as a note.

So in our last 3 minutes, I'm going to try to do a few quick hits. Do the BDRs reach out during the trial, or are they only nurtured with emails? Only nurtured with emails right now. Let's see, service limits you can find on our website. Timing, what was the full timeline like? I don't know about building the product because Grace and I started while it was in flight, but I would say probably 2, 2 months, and it should have been 3.

Yep, exactly, per our previous learnings.

Yeah, yeah. And then what were some of our goals for the shift to PLG besides responding to emerging buying trends? Domination. Really, it was domination. And I'm not actually kidding. It was two things. One is that obviously, we believe in the mission of our company. We wouldn't be execs here otherwise, just like I'm sure all of you believe in the mission of your company, right? And so going, you know, truth, justice, and the product-led way, or whatever you'd like to call it, We wanted to do that. But we also believe that we can help a lot of people. And the beautiful thing about Starter is that in 5 minutes, they can kind of accomplish their goal with our product, which I love. So I think those are the quick hits. Do we have a checklist on things to plan? No, and we should have. So, and I think those are the Quick hits. Do we have a— I answered those a little faster than I expected to, but—

That was great.

But seriously, we hope that you will learn from our mistakes. We're around if you want to chat. You can find us on Twitter and all of the social medias. And thanks, everybody, for attending this very early, at least for me in Seattle, session.

Yes, thank you all so much.

Thank you, Jen and Grace.

Thank you all.

Be sure to check out the rest of the sessions today.