Grow Your Customer Base 10x Through the Power of Self-Serve & Direct Sales w/ Asana COO & Figma CCO

Something that we value a lot at Asana is intentionality. Where are we headed? The daily work of employees is deeply connected to that purpose. Have I defined reality well enough? Have I given enough context? In every communication, you're tying, "Hey, what are you doing?" to why it matters. That vision that you have, that purpose, can only happen with a great group of people. Take that same passion for what the product is and apply that to building a team. Good leaders and executives stay really curious. If you had a magic wand, what would you change? I've learned just by asking that question. What does success look like? How do I keep growing as fast as I can and make as big an impact as I can for the organization? The people around us change us. A high, high-functioning team that's very learning and growth-based, just the difference that makes. Not only not only in terms of achieving outcomes, but just to work with and have fun and enjoy. My goal is that whoever joins the team is just super excited to be part of it. So in the metrics, what we wanted to just show in terms of like proof— why do we believe in it? We've seen it in action, but where else has this played out? So if you look at these companies that are all public and you look at their next 12-month revenue growth, super strong revenue growth and super strong enterprise value or market cap in trading, right? So they— all of these 5 awesome companies, many of whom we're customers of, they have that combination. They make it super easy to buy and try, very much like consumer products that we might all love, like Peloton, Spotify, or even crossovers into B2B like LinkedIn, right? You can try it, you can get value, But then they also have invested in sales teams that help companies of larger sizes get more value out of partnering with them. So we wanted to make sure we ground everybody in the metrics before we dive in on, well, what do we actually mean that you should do in self-serve or how to think about self-serve and then when to add sales. So maybe just diving in on how Asana thinks about self-serve and then where we've added sales. So from the very beginning, we really believed that new users coming in should be able to sign up and get value pretty quickly. They should— when they have the pain point, they should come, be able to try out the product, adopt. We believe very much in a free product that delivers a lot of value because there's also learning in work management. So we want teams to be able to have a lot of time to learn, practice, and then grow with us. And then we want to present features and benefits that teams, as they get bigger, can upgrade and see additional value when they've got budget for it, they've already seen the ROI, and they're willing to pay. And then we've added sales over time to really partner with customers to navigate more complex purchasing processes, or as an organization is growing really quickly and they're expanding from team to team. So that's how Asana thinks about our go-to-market motion of both self-serve and sales. And then underlying that is how do we think about every step of the funnel and how we optimize and test and learn. So with the self-serve motion, you can do a lot of optimization in your top of funnel all the way through your buying process and really optimize that through lots of data. And then you can also look at, well, what can you present to free teams, teams that are getting a lot of value out of your free product, But then what can you present and how do you present that in a way that gives them the aha of, oh, hey, maybe I do want to try out the paid product now that I've been an Asana customer for a while. And then that same motion of experimentation comes to adding great salespeople to that process. They benefit from a lot of data already on what teams and organizations are getting value from. So then when they reach out or a customer raises their hand to have an expansion conversation, they can do that in a really value-added way. So that's how we think about our self-serve motion and where we add sales at Asana. All right, Amanda, I would love to hear how you think about it at Figma.

Yes, at Figma, it's actually pretty much exactly the same as Asana. We have a free product that when you sign up for, Figma online. You, you start in the free product and then you can choose to upgrade to a paid plan either on your own with a credit card or via our sales team. I would also add though, I think it's important to think about what you want to have happen at each phase. For Figma, we know that the aha moment that triggers an upgrade is often when people experience the product with others. It's a collaboration experience. So if they can go through a project cycle together as a team, they're much more likely to upgrade to a paid team and repeat that process. So we've done a lot of thinking about how to optimize for that along the whole journey as we improve the flow.

Yeah, I think just identifying those aha moments, right, and being able to have enough data to work with to then test and experiment. I love that. And also it's been fun to see the organic adoption of Figma across Asana. All right. I know we have, we have opinionated points of view on why to start with self-serve. This is a conversation that Amanda and I have had many times together and also many times with founders and teams who've reached out and said, hey, why did you do this at Zendesk? Why did you do this at Asana or Figma? So maybe diving in here, Amanda, why do you think it's key to start with self-serve?

Yeah, I— this is often what happens is founders come to me and they've already created a product and they have a sales team selling it, and then they think, oh, self-service, that's great, super cost-efficient, I want some of that, which is a very natural feeling to have. And so we talk about it and the pro— there's a couple of problems with starting with sales, I think, uh, first and then wanting to do self-serve later is first of all, you've already, your sales team's already established their motion with, of talking to everyone who comes in your front door. And it's just really hard to take that away later. And so that's problem number one. The second problem is And I'm talking about doing sales and then self-service, right? So the other problem with doing it in that order is you don't have the DNA in your product design and engineering organization on how you, how you build the onboarding of your product without humans involved. And you can't just hire one growth PM and it's done. It's part— it needs to be part of how everyone's thinking about that experience. And if you don't launch your product with that first, it's just really hard to inject later. So I don't think it's impossible, but it takes more than just hiring one person. And I think on top of that, I would say thirdly, if you intuitively started your business with a sales team, there might have been a reason why. You might not have the right product to do it with for self-service. So I would think about what, what led you to start that way. So that's why those, all those reasons are why I think it's great to, if you can, start with self-service and then add sales after.

Yeah, I, I think you hit so many key points that have come up in similar conversations that I've had with founders who are building great businesses and have a sales team and they're having good customer conversations and they'll I'll often hear them say, OK, I'm going to add self-serve, or I'm going to add a product-led motion. And I think that some of the friction points there are definitely resources, and I would say like a mindset, right? Teams that start with self-serve oftentimes have people who built consumer products and really have a mindset of what should be as easy as possible to do. Without that end customer needing to talk to anybody. And also designing in those aha moments instead of relying on, oh, they have to have a conversation to understand the value. There's this mindset of in the product at every moment, we should be delivering value. And I do think oftentimes that design product and even technical skills early on come out of places that are very consumer and very high volume oriented. And the later you delay doing that, the harder it is because you've also built human intervention into your processes, right? So you're more apt as a founder, as you're balancing scarce resources to be like, okay, well, instead of having a whole engineering pod build that, we'll hire a couple of people who can smooth over that gap in the process. But the companies that are really dedicated to self-serve in the beginning, have that mindset of what if they never talk to anybody. And then when you add people, I think that's the benefit of, hey, when should we have people, have our customers talk to somebody, and what's the value of talking to somebody from the company? But maybe let's dive in. Amanda, you brought up a really good point on, well, how can I tell if my product is meant to be sold via self-serve, right? Sounds awesome doing all these things where customers can buy on their own, and you've got high volume, and you're growing. But what kinds of products don't lend themselves to self-serve? Or how could founders and teams sort of think about diagnosing that?

Yeah, I think this is a really good one. I haven't actually talked to that many people about this, so this is just my own thoughts on it. But there's a few things I think about. So first and foremost, implementation. What does the implementation of your product look like today? And what could it look like ideally? So can you imagine a person setting up your product without help or without humans or documentation at all? So the gold standard of this would be like the Apple iPhone. You bring it out of the box and you push on and you go through the flow and you're done. No documentation, no humans. Generally speaking, right? And so I, I think about that. I think at Zendesk, we actually had a big friction point, which was if you wanted to really start using the product, you had to ingest your email. And so we went through a lot of iterations to make that as seamless as possible without needing to require a human to help you. The other thing I would think about is how familiar your users are with your space already. Are you creating a new market or product and category, or is it, are you joining into something that's already established? Figma actually is not a first mover. It's joined into a market where people already were using design tools. So we already had a lot of familiarity and it's very easy to get started. There's really nothing, nothing that you need to do other than sign up and start using the product. So Check and check. Another thing I would think about is just how are you considering your pricing and packaging strategy? Because it's so important that users who are evaluating whether or not to sign up, if they can really easily identify which plan and price works for them fast, then you've eliminated that part of the decision of whether or not it's worth trying out. And I think that's an important precursor step to the implementation. And then finally, I would say, do you already understand what your magic moment is? That aha moment that where people start to experience a lot of value with your product. And can you take the friction out of getting to that moment? So those are sort of the 4 different things I think about to consider this question.

Yeah, I love, I love that framework and that list of those questions. It also struck me like, you know, products, we've worked with founders with products where you talk about like onboarding. And also where if you think through like, oh, the team or the person can't get value unless, you know, content is moved over, or unless they're plugged into a lot of other existing apps. Right? If you think about, you know, digging into that onboarding load, products where you can't get to that aha moment unless a lot of other things that might require even someone with that pain point and passion to adopt to have to go around their organization and get additional buy-in or approval, those might be products that are harder to do self-serve because they're dependent on other resources and other buy-in and approval. On pricing and packaging, I would also really think about that, like, total value delivered. And if you're designing a, you know, security product, heavy analytics product, where you ultimately think, you know, I can build a really successful business with a few thousand customers paying me quite a bit every year, it's probably not a self-serve product, right? And where you say, hey, it's a C-level buying decision, and ultimately, I see my product being something that's in the top 10 spend that an organization has, that's definitely not one where you're like, I'm going to start with something where someone can put down their credit card and get value. So they're not right or wrong choices. But I think just going through that list of questions Amanda shared and really picturing, do I see myself building a business where there's hundreds of thousands of customers, many of them that can do the vast majority on their own, and then maybe I've got a subset of these mid-market enterprise customers, then really think about, OK, what's bought, and then what do I want? What do I intend to sell? Great. All right, so then that kind of leads us to, well, how do— if I'm a founder or a team trying to make this decision, How do I think about my decision tree of what should be self-serve? And then when I do want to add sales, you know, what should be done by sales? What are, what are signals and what are ways, I mean, you within Figma have kind of made those trade-offs and decisions?

Yeah. Well, I think, and we're talking about when to pass things over to sales, namely.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Um, so every people who sign up for Figma, we don't pass all of them to sales. So we have to make a decision on whether or not we think that they are good candidates for sales or not. And a few different things go into that. Um, I think obvious things like the, who do you, if it's a CIO situation, like a Fortune 100 company. Yeah. You're probably going to want your sales team talking to a company of that size. So. Demographics and the profile of the account come into play for sure. The other thing is what is that lead doing inside the product? And as a SaaS application, we have the luxury of being able to use that usage information to our advantage and actually provide a better user experience. So we use that as well. And then we also, we also have a few accounts that we put into our sales team's books of business that we want them to be able to proactively make a play for. And so we will feed them information about whether or not anyone from that account signs up or comes to a webinar or interacts with us in different ways. So their behavior with us as a brand comes into play as well. So pretty standard stuff.

Yeah, no, I think that the sort of the signals from the customer, I think, are worth pausing on and diving into. Because you talk— I mean, I think many of those are feeding how you think about where sales can add the value, right? Even just like hand raisers, do you test out places where customers can tell you that they do want to talk to somebody? And then understand where you can run experiments there of like, well, what is it? What's either the need or the friction point that then someone really wants to know that they can talk to somebody? And oftentimes that can just be, you know, early on, it can very much be, I want to know that this, you know, company and product is going to be around. I want to know the people behind it. That's a very valid reason that a customer may want to interact and relate, see, you know, who's behind this product. And then you can think about, well, how many people raise their hand and test— we ran a lot of these tests at Zendesk as well— tests like when they talk to somebody, do they buy a different tier product? Do they expand faster? Because then you may have those moments to identify the hand raisers earlier because you can see that those value-add conversations are actually delivering more for those customers. You talked a little bit about marquee logos. That's also something, you know, you know, to really think about who's your ideal customer profile, and are you making sure that those customers in the target of your bullseye are getting the love, time, and attention that, you know, especially early on in a company's growth, because many of those can then be references for future customers. So being really thoughtful of where you put your time and talent. Something else I think as companies develop is also just intentional marketing programs that are account-based marketing. So specifically then saying, partnering with your sales team and saying, there's a set of accounts that we're going to go after hand in hand. And those accounts are definitely going to be the ones where from the get-go, we've got people on them making them successful. So those are other ways to think about that decision tree intentionally versus— I think Amanda and I have also both experienced— you don't want sales to cannibalize self-serve, or you don't want confusion internally, let alone confusion externally, you know, for your customers to see the seams between your self-serve and your sales. Anything I missed there? Yeah.

I'll also add one of the things that we did at Zendesk when I was there was because we had so much history of who converted and who didn't into a paid customer, we had a data scientist come up with a model that when a lead was— came to the site and signed up for the trial, they— we could, after day 3, we could determine on a scale of 1 to 5 with which probability they might convert to paid. And what I thought was really interesting was we would feed that information to sales, and then we would, we would help, we would bring them into the fold of data, using data to your advantage, and say, well, you can go talk to the 5s, but they already have a very high propensity to buy. So your effort is going to have a bigger impact if you talk to the 3s and the 4s. And the 1s and the 2s, even though it might look like an interesting lead, you're going to be wasting your time most likely. So I just, I love arming sales with data like that because it really helped prioritize for them.

Yeah. And those product signals also make sure that when they have a conversation, they're having a more strategic conversation, right? It's not, uh, I'm explaining all the features to you. If the product itself can provide those aha moments that you were talking about, and that the data that you're gathering can show where there's friction points, or maybe features that a customer is not using that you think they could get value from, then by the time they're having a conversation with your awesome sales team, it really is about, hey, how can you get more out of, and were you aware of, and based on how you're using it, Here's additional things. And it feels just much more like a partnership than trying to sell the customer. And I think people, you know, on both sides enjoy those conversations a lot more. So we're going to put it into action and share a couple of actual experiments that each of our teams have run and why, to, you know, put a little more color on it. All right. We'll start with Figma.

Yes. So one of the big things that we did this year as a company was we launched a second product. We call it FigJam. It's an online whiteboard. We launched it into beta in April. And as a precursor to that, we had to decide how we wanted to price and package it ultimately. And you're looking at how we have our, our plans today. So we have, we actually have 3 plans. I'm just showing you, we have our free tier, it's called Starter, and we've got a Pro tier, which is our first paid tier. And Prior to this launch, the way that the pay gate worked to go up to, to paid was you, if you had, we charge you per editor, viewers are free on Figma. Uh, and so once you add a third editor, you had to upgrade to Pro. Now the problem with that was, uh, with FigJam being an online whiteboard, we knew that the product, even, even more so than Figma, but for really both products, the magic of it is when you collaborate with multiple people. And so we knew that this pay gate was a problem for us because we really wanted people to experience that magic moment in the free plan. And so we wanted to change this for both of our products because we wanted you to be able to experience both products. In the free plan. And so what we did on the next slide, we ran an ex— we ran it as an experiment first, which is kind of tricky to do, but we, our growth team, figured out how to do it. And what we wanted to see was, would we be successful changing the way we had our paygate set up? So that we wanted ultimately the paygate to be more on the amount of files you had rather than the amount of users you had. And so what was great is that through the experiment, we, we saw more people upgrading to paid, which is nice for the company. But more importantly, it was good for users because more people were collaborating, nearly 30%, and we didn't see a regression on new user retention or invites. So that gave us some confidence that we could do this repackage successfully. And I thought it might be fun to share one of the ways that we talked about whether or not this was the right thing to do on the next slide is a metaphor we talked about, which was cake. A lot of internal slides had cake pieces on them. So prior to this refresh, our free tier was thought of as you got one layer of the cake. But ideally what we wanted it to be was like the whole full slice of the cake. And that when you upgrade to paid, you got the whole cake. So if this is a helpful metaphor as you analyze your free tier and whether it's the right one, this was helpful to us. And so you're welcome.

I love that analogy. I think there's so much goodness in that, including I'm sure lots of yummy cake photos internally on lots of things jams and having benefited from FigJam as well as the Figma product, I could, you know, it's sort of seeing all that goodness and experimentation that your team's done in action. But I think that it's such a good point here. And maybe that's a segue into, you know, the Asana example we wanted to share, I think has some of those similar themes of like, how do you make it as easy as possible for customers to see value? In features that you've really invested in and you already see a subset of your customers, your paid customers get value from. So Portfolios is a paid feature of Asana, which provides like a holistic view across all your important projects. And we saw a lot of customers in our paid plan get a ton of value from that, especially as they were scaling with Asana. But we wanted to make sure people who hadn't tried that yet could have a really great experience with it. So it's that aha moment again of seeing the value versus having to have customers work to see it. And so the test that our team ran here was sort of pre-populating portfolios and in a trial, you know, testing the, hey, if you've already got multiple projects going on, see it in action in a portfolio. So we saw an increase in the number of active and engaged users. On the order of 20%, right? That's seeing— and that's such a good learning, not just for this feature, but all other future paid features where it's like, if someone can kind of come in and really easily see it on top of what they're already doing and engage with it, much easier to convince them, hey, at the right moment, upgrade, versus having all those like WeWall experiences versus having all those like You hit a paywall, you hit a paywall, you hit a paywall. Here, you're just— you're showing the value. And so that's a really exciting win in terms of an experiment that the team's running and taking that ethos into other features and other packages in the future. Great. All right. We want to make sure there's enough time for questions, but we thought we would just hit the highlights on lessons. That we've learned by combining self-serve and direct sales. The first is reject false trade-offs, right? Oftentimes there's a narrative of you got to do one or the other because both take a lot of work, and that's true. And I think what Amanda and I have seen, you know, now across 3 companies that have high growth with both models is that done well, one feeds the other. You get a ton of great customer insights and data and a funnel feeding your sales and really then having more value-add conversations with customers. Second point we've made, start with self-serve if you can. The kinds of resources you need and the kind of team and mindset to build that is not something that's easily added on after. Trust us, we've worked with founders who are trying and, you know, and are continuing to invest in that but find it just a much harder thing to add on later. And then the last point, but probably the most important, right, is listen to your customers. What do your customers want to buy and expect to buy? And then what do your customers want to partner with you on to get more value out of? And really think about that intentionally as you design not only your product, but your organization and your team, and your incentives and everything to make both motions work well together. Did I miss anything in the top takeaways, Amanda?

No, I think that's great. Maybe one point I'd add too, at the end, I added this sentence, don't be surprised that many people want to speak to sales. We often say like, oh, you have a developer tool that you're selling, the developers don't want to talk to sales. Well, actually, some do, and you might be surprised. So make sure you give that opportunity to your users because you might be surprised.

Yeah, definitely. The humans behind the product are sometimes the most important part of having customers see value and see sort of why you're building what you're building. All right, I am going to stop sharing and we are going to see— we've got some questions already.

I like, I like this one from John. Uh, it's common, common to have post-sales customer success for onboarding and adoption, but do you also provide this customer success in the pre-sales phase during an online trial period, which would increase the likelihood for free-to-paid conversion? Um, 100%. In fact, at Figma, we have a specialized role called a designer advocate. These are people that were full-time designers prior to coming to Figma, and they work across both marketing and sales. They actually report into marketing, but they are product experts and they assist in the sales process in much like a sales engineer would. But they, but they also do things like live streams and content creation and social interactions that help in the the pre-sales process. So they're very key to the success and valued quite a bit at the company.

Yeah. So I would also say, like, at Asana— and we did this at Zendesk— is also thinking about scaled customer success in the pre-sales process, right? Providing lots of what we would call, like, one-to-many enabling customers to join webinars, to access a library of how-tos that go, you know, hand in hand, either as they have a free product that they're using or they're in a trial of a paid product. So really, again, thinking about all that goodness that you can invest in customer success, but how might you do that earlier in a customer's journey, but in a scaled fashion as well? And part of that is also meeting the customer where they are, right? Then they don't They're not dependent on waiting for a meeting. They can access it when they have the pain point and want help. And then you can also use those signals to direct, like, when one-to-one interaction might add value. All right. Is there another one? Oh, Jason's got a question for us.

I saw one I liked too. What are some qualities you look for when hiring strong sales leaders? Seems hiring is a challenge for everyone. How should they focus their time, energy, attention? I hired our, our GM in Europe, and one of the things that I was looking for was had they sold previously to people other than the CIO. I wanted, I wanted someone with the mindset that was beyond one buyer like that. And so that was one criteria I was looking for, just to test for how creative they might be in thinking about who they, who they're selling to. And I, I say that because the IT buyer is a professional software buyer. And so they have a very particular expect— set of expectations when it comes to the sales process. And for Figma, our, our main initial buyer for Figma Design is, is the head of design. And so they're not buying software every day. And they're a very creative persona in the company. And so I, it was important to me that I could picture a sales leader talking to our buyer. That was first and foremost. But then I also had a lot of conversations about what it meant to be a sales leader in a, in a company that had a self-service motion and how that played out for them in their head and how how the partnership with marketing could work in ways that maybe they hadn't experienced before, or maybe they had. So those were some of the lines of questions that I asked.

Yeah, I love those, like the picturing— are, are they going to develop a partnership with your customers, right? And really develop that deep empathy. And I think we have a similar ethos here at Asana in terms of bringing on great sales leaders is really Beginning with, like, they're passionate about the mission. They really want to enable teams to work better together. And that's evident in the teams that they've built, in the places that they've been. And so they're an incredibly credible partner to our customers as they're navigating, hey, how do we do this well? Not just the, how do we adopt the product well, but how do we think about strategic work management? What's the order of adoption. And then just people that really, again, see the customer's success and growth as their own success. And so that's been a key criteria at Asana. And then in this market, also people who are great talent magnets and see the value of building strong teams around the world. All right, is there another one that there's— They're coming in. So is there another one that you want to take, Amanda, that you think would be good for the audience?

Let's see. There's a lot of good questions here. We're not going to be able to do all of them. What is a good marketing team org structure supporting both self-service and sales teams? I can say for our— at Figma, one of the things that I think is important for, for our marketing team is that they feel connected to both the top of funnel metric, which is signups, but also the metric that connects to sales, which is MQLs. So we track both of those. We have goals against both of those. Uh, we have people that feel directly responsible for each of those. And I think it's important that you celebrate both so that the whole team feels like they're part of both because they at Figma, our self-service business is very important and a big driver of revenue. Sales certainly outnumbers it overall in the pie chart, which is great. And I love that, but they both play a big role in the overall picture.

Yeah, that's great. All right. There's some pricing questions. You answered that one so well. So I'm going to make sure we get through other questions. There's a Jason has a number of awesome pricing questions for us. So any pricing mistakes we've seen going from self-serve to sales? And maybe a corollary to that also, then, like internally, like credit and commission, how do we think about that? And then free users, too good of a deal. Should we tackle a couple of these? Because I think we've seen this across all 3 of the companies we work with.

Yeah. Pricing mistakes. Well, this is one from like 12 years ago, so we can talk about it now. But one of the ones at Zendesk that we made was, at the end of the day, what happened was we wanted, we wanted to increase prices. And the way we did it was we thought, oh, we could, we could ask, we could have people keep their old price but just upgrade to an annual plan. And the customers just rejected that big time. And so, so many mistakes we made. First of all, we didn't really talk to customers before we rolled it out. We should have done that. That would have probably solved, or at least had our expectations changed of what was going to happen when we launched it. Second thing that I took out of that is that people don't necessarily mind in a SaaS world. They recognize that you're adding more value to the product all the time. So they, they don't necessarily mind that you're going to increase prices, but they just don't want to be— they want to have some choice in the matter. And if you kind of force them into something, that's where they get twitchy. So if you can make them feel like they're in control of the decision, because maybe you bundle all your new features into like a higher price plan that they can decide if they upgrade into or not. I think that's ideal. It's not always what you're able to do, but that's giving, giving customers the choice, I think, was a big lesson I learned.

Yeah. Well, it resulted in some pretty amazing t-shirts at Zendesk with angry tickets. So that was the way we celebrated the painful lessons of, hey, we should have paid attention to the customers ahead of time. There are some classic t-shirts with large, you know, quotes from customers to remind us. So that's a good way— pro tip for everybody out there— we— everybody makes mistakes. Then if you wear it proudly on a t-shirt, you'll de-risk it the next time around. So maybe the— I'll tackle the one Jason M. Lemkin asked about, you know, is it okay to give your free users sort of too good of a deal? What's the line? And I think this is a really great question. And it— and there's probably not a universal answer. It depends on the product. But I think at Asana, we have a deep belief that providing a robust free product is good for so many reasons. Like, you know, the first, first and foremost is, like, we want to help teams of every size realize value and be able to get their work done better together. And so if if that means they get a ton of value from the free product and they're loyal Asana customers, and then they share that with others, there's just a ton of value there. And we often see that free customers, it may not be that straight upgrade process of, okay, I'm free and then I upgrade to paid and then I expand. But what we also see, a really lovely dynamic, is sometimes they're free customers for a specific use. Maybe that's a personal use or a smaller team. But then they'll actually adopt a paid product when they move into another organization or they start a company. So we see that dynamic, which is really powerful. So not thinking about it as linear of like free is just something that you market to, to upgrade to pay, but these sort of multiple vectors of value that you're delivering for customers over time. And then again, with data, you can do just a lot of testing. On, you know, what are those trigger points and when do your free customers pick their head up and say, yeah, I've got budget for this and these are the things I'm willing to pay for because I know I'll get a lot of value. And I've built trust over time with the company that it's not just a, hey, we're trying to upgrade you at every moment.

I'll add to that. I think at Figma, because our vision is to make design accessible to all, there's a huge value in us having a really strong free plan. We've got 80% of our active users outside the US, sometimes in geos where we know they're just, they're not going to be able to afford to pay for the product. So it's important to us as a business and what we value that we have a strong free plan. And, and I think that We rely so much on word-of-mouth marketing that a lot of our free users are part of that, that marketing motion and help bring visibility and brand awareness around the world to Figma. So I believe in it. I believe it's important to not be afraid to put a lot of value in your free plan.

Yeah, definitely. All right, we've got some— there's quite a few questions around incentives. How do we align incentives or otherwise reduce friction between kind of self-serve or product-led growth and sales teams to make sure they're working well together, especially as the company grows? So do you want to kick that off? And I know we've spent a lot of time on that, like, How do you have it be as productive as possible? Where do you, you know, where do you draw the line and how do you draw the line? But then how do you also evolve that? Because it's not a fixed line.

Yeah, I think both at Zendesk and Figma, one of the things that helped to drive the right kind of incentives was just how do you segment your sales team? So for example, if you've got an enterprise segment, they're not going to usually be at odds with your self-service motion because they're talking to the biggest companies. So it's, it's okay if Walmart comes and wants to buy a couple seats because I know that that's going to be a big deal ultimately, for example. So, so I want sales talking to that kind of customer. But I think where you have to be a little bit more intentional is just on the lower end. Do you, do you want a sales team helping create a bigger deal in those SMB kind of customers? Or do you want a self-service motion bringing them in the door and then maybe sales trying to expand it afterwards? And I think there's no wrong or right answer to that. It's just a choice you make, and it has to do with how you segment your sales team and, and what you have them work on.

Yeah, and I think, you know, the way we thought about it at Asana is we've intentionally known that that's going to evolve over time, you know, as our business grows. Because, you know, as we've increasingly gone upmarket, we have more and more customers that, yes, they're still starting out with this bottoms-up and teams adopting, but the earlier that our sales team can partner with them the faster that they can get value across their organization. And so even if they are starting smaller, you know, with a team just like a startup might, it's valuable for us to ensure that they're getting sort of the right level of support, you know, as they grow. And so, but we know that that's going to evolve kind of year over year. And so I think part of it is also just managing expectations across the team of This is something that we're going to do intentionally and look at where that line can and should be drawn, ultimately back to giving each customer as much value as possible. So that segmentation you talked about is, is really important, but also helping people understand that that segmentation again is not fixed. It's going to evolve as your business evolves and you learn more from your customers. And then maybe touching on incentives, I think then it means like really designing incentive structures so that they're not creating, you know, Amanda and I call these like unnatural acts, right? You don't want the friction to, you know, be between teams internally. You really do want to think about, hey, when are we in learning mode? And we do want to make sure that we have more flexibility and room in these programs because we want everybody locked arms in learning. And then when do you design, you know, incentives sort of more intentionally of Hey, this is rewarding. Like, this is rewarding behavior that we know repeatedly creates more value. So I think having that mindset is really important. All right, we probably have time. I mean, there's so many questions. I wish we had more time. Is there one more that you feel like we should— we've got enough time to tackle before we wrap up?

Oh, gosh. Well, there's, as sales leaders of extremely high-growth companies, how do you enable new hires to get off to fast starts? Good one, definitely. I think for us, we have, we have a ramp period for new reps. So there's that. We celebrate their wins as they ramp. So there's that. I think that's important. We have a whole— we've invested in ops and enablement. So we've got a whole enablement process to onboard them into the product. We have them go through a demo certification. So they really feel comfortable demoing the product. They get a chance to shadow other reps. We record sales calls, so they get to listen to sales calls and understand how the conversations work. And for many of their conversations, their managers will jump in early on to help, you know, advise along the way. So there's both human intervention, there's documentation, there's set agendas in their first few weeks. So it's, it's very structured. And I think that celebrating their wins along the way is, is an important part too.

Yeah, we, the celebration part, I can't, you know, just can't emphasize enough of, you know, we have celebration channels in Slack, and then we run Asana on Asana. So that helps with onboarding. So as new employees are ramping, you know, within the company, especially on the sales team, they, they get to see all the different possible use cases, you know, across teams, across functions. And so that's also part of, you know, onboarding them successfully into the company, but also giving them, you know, ideas that they can talk to customers about.