Live from SaaStr Europa 2022: Workshops with Highspot and Notion Capital

Please welcome HiSpot CMO John Pereira. Alrighty, well, it is a delight to be with you all today. This is my very first SaaStr, so welcome to Barcelona, and I'm going to talk today about topic nobody's ever spoken about before, which is sales and marketing alignment. Nothing's ever been said about any of this. Uh, by means of introduction, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Highspot. We are a Seattle-based startup focused on sales enablement, and we essentially do two things. We provide a sales content management platform that's driven by AI. So think about this as Netflix for your sales content, for your sales reps. We also do sales training and coaching. and we serve some of the largest companies in the world. Uh, over the last 13 years, I've had the privilege and the honor of working on a lot of big startup businesses that we help scale from $10 million to over $100 million. And what I'm gonna do this morning is talk about the 5 keys to sales and marketing alignment that I've seen through 2 of those rides. And I'm gonna do it through an interesting lens, which is from a perspective of failure where I did a bad job, where we did it wrong, so that as you're scaling your businesses, you may have— you may not repeat some of the mistakes that I've made in the past. So let's get started. I think it's useful to start with a shared definition of what do we mean when we say sales and marketing alignment? And a useful definition for me is a system that aligns strategy, communication, execution, goals, and communication. And it's useful just to pause on that for a moment and ask ourselves, do we really have that? If you sat down your head of sales and your head of marketing and asked the question, what is your shared system of alignment? You may get a lot of answers between here and there. And what's interesting is that the system of alignment that you have when you have 5 account executives changes dramatically as you scale to 20, 200, or 2,000 sales executives. So whatever system it has that's working today, actually by definition has to change over time. Um, so it's a really useful framework to think about. Now we're all existing moment at this time in very interesting times. Uh, we thought 2020 was interesting. We thought 2021 was interesting, and here we are in June of 2022, and the economy that we have today looks almost nothing like the one we had 4 or 5 months ago. Maybe more so true in North America than in places like Europe and Australia. Um, but very interesting times. And what we are seeing in the United States right now from a venture capital perspective is a premium being placed on driving efficient growth. So as you scale from 0 to 2 million, 2 to 10 million, it's not just growth at any cost, it's the efficiency of that cost, which is absolutely critical. And sales and marketing alignment is a terrific place to go figure out and improve efficient growth over time. And I'll share two interesting data points on this front. Uh, the first is that when sales and marketing teams are aligned, you see two kinds of things happen. First of all, this is from the Alexander Group. In the last 12 months, if you look at US-based B2B tech companies, only 35% of reps are hitting their quota. So that means 65% of the reps aren't hitting their quota. And these are reps that we are trying to enable. Marketing is doing field enablement for them. We're onboarding them. We're doing field marketing campaigns. We're driving MQLs to them. And they're not happy and they're not driving the top line. That's also something that drives very lumpy growth over time. And so we can over-rotate and rely on the top 10, 20, 30% of the sellers that make our number every quarter, make the number for us every year. And so it's a massive source of inefficiency. Now, all the while, marketers, we feel like we have to justify our existence sometimes by creating content, to help these salespeople, and we're thinking very deeply about what's the message, what's the narrative, what's the content at the right stage, the right moment of the buyer's journey that's gonna help move every single deal forward. So we publish all that content out, and guess what? Almost none of it gets used. According to Forrester, 65% of all the content that's created by marketers for sellers is never actually used by those sellers. So what do sellers do? Well, some of the largest companies in the world I've— that I've— we've worked with, they'll say our reps are spending between 4 and 8 hours every single week trying to find the content that they need for their deal to personalize it, to go win. So they're spending a lot of time trying to find it. Oftentimes they're creating content on their own. So if you're in marketing, what you end up with is a message that's diluted. And if you look at these companies and say, you know, what is the root cause of sales and marketing and alignment in these situations? You tend to hear a few things. We're not aligned on the goals. We don't have a clear system of communication and our execution model with each other just isn't there. And we hear this at literally the largest companies in the world. So if you're, you know, 0 to 2 million in ARR or you're 2 billion ARR. This is a very consistent challenge and theme. Getting it right is imperative in terms of efficient growth. When you get it right, you can drive very positive results for the company. And so this just came out from Forrester that in high-growth companies that report where they have a very strong alignment between sales and marketing, you tend to see very positive growth rates in addition to positive, you know, very accretive profitable growth. And again, in this economy, nothing could be more imperative. Okay, with all that said, some lessons learned. And let me just sort of set the stage here a little bit. I mentioned earlier that I've been part of two really exciting rides, from $10 million to $100 million. The first of these was at Adobe, and this was about 12 years ago. Adobe had acquired a very high-growing fast growth startup called EchoSign in the electronic signature category. It may be familiar to some of you. Uh, it was founded by Jason M. Lemkin, and what Adobe was trying to do was to make themselves cool, hip, build a SaaS model, create the next $100 million SaaS revenue stream for the company. Uh, at the time, Adobe EchoSign was about $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and they were in a competitive dogfight. They were creating this new category around electronic signatures, going head to head with DocuSign. DocuSign did one thing in the world, electronic signatures, extremely well-funded, laser-focused on that workload. Adobe had a broader portfolio of things that they were focused on, Creative Cloud, uh, InDesign, Photoshop, Marketing Cloud, et cetera. So that was an incredible ride. The second one I'll talk about is just Highspot. I started there 3.5 years ago. When I started, we were about 100 employees. Today we're about 1,000 with just as many customers. And so as I go through sort of 5 lessons learned, I'm gonna use these 2 experiences with a whole lot of, uh, open and real around some failures that I've had and some lessons learned in hopes that they're valuable to you. So the first one is around goal alignment or the lack thereof. And here I'll talk about Adobe EchoSign. So going back to 2013, I was in the marketing department at the time. Adobe EchoSign was about $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and we wanted to double the revenue to $20 million in one year. And we had all of the power of Adobe behind us. Now we had about 2,000 account executives with deep relationships with Fortune 1,000 customers that DocuSign didn't have. The head of sales for Adobe had a pretty big quota, $4 billion. And what was interesting right away was there was a mismatch of goals here. The head of sales could hit a $4 billion quota, and if they never doubled the number from 10 million to 20 million for EchoSign, that person's not going to be fired by the board. Uh, and so what happened was, uh, we, we had a hypothesis and and the hypothesis was that by attaching Adobe eCosign to an existing deal with, through the, the broader relationship that we had, that we could massively put DocuSign in the dust. Well, nothing could have been further than truth. You know, the end of that story with DocuSign's IPO, they really ran away from the market. And what I learned was I had a false assumption around the goal that we were all aligned on. And if I could do it over again, there are at least two things that I would've done very differently. The first, and probably the most important, would've been really sit down with the CEO, the board, and the head of sales, and had a very deep, open, and real commitment on, are we really gonna take $10 million and grow it to $20 million, or are we gonna focus on the $4 billion? It's a very, very tough trade-off, and we didn't have the tough discussion around aligning on that goal. The second mistake and thing that I would do differently here would be to really align on, you know, what are the skills that you need to be, to be very successful, to go head to head with DocuSign in the electronic signature space. And a useful thing that I didn't do then, but I do all the time right now, is a seller confidence survey. And so literally, I will sit down now with the head of sales, head of marketing. We sit down together. And we under— we want to do the work to understand, are our reps confident? Do they know our pricing? Do they feel great when it comes to value selling? How effective are they at price negotiation and discovery? And we jointly create a shared understanding of the baseline of where we are at so that we can then use the next 3, 6, 9, 12 months to build up those skills needed to drive seller confidence. And I think as most people in the room know, sales confidence has a direct correlation with quota attainment. So that was a gem that I learned. I do it all the time now, and it's a great thing that brings sales and marketing together. One scorecard, one shared understanding around how our sellers are doing. A second key learning that I've had along the ride was this notion of the relationship and the partnership that you have to have between the head of sales and the head of marketing. And a mistake that I've made over the last few years, and in particular at Adobe, was to not make a proactive investment in that relationship and partnership. You know, with marketing and sales, we speak different languages, we're gold on different targets. There's top of funnel with MQLs, there's bottom of the funnel with converting what's in the pipeline. We sort of do some activities and say at the beginning of the year, hey, we're aligned, we're gonna do a bunch of stuff together, and off we go. But at a deep level, are we talking enough about the hard questions about alignment and what needs to work? So at Adobe, it was fine. I didn't have a bad relationship with the head of sales. We talked, et cetera. We kind of did the business, but I never invested. And so I knew when I came to Highspot that I wanted to do it very differently. So when I joined, it was about November of 2018. We were 100 employees. We're all scrunched in an office that's really pretty small, but the executives had their own offices. And as we grew from about 100 to 140 employees, all of the executives were asked, double up, you gotta be in the same office. So very wisely, I'm like, I'm gonna learn this time and invest proactively in this partnership. I got the head of sales, Matt Weil, pulled him in. I said, you and I are sitting together for the next 6 months in one tiny little office, scrunched up together, and we literally spent many months on the same calls, looking at the same scorecards, having a lot of discussions with each other. We actually became really good close friends and had dinner and wine together. And what it has enabled us to do is to have open and real discussion about what the two teams and the two functions are doing and how we win together. It allows us to disagree and commit to give very difficult tough feedback to each other. And I think maybe most importantly, we are modeling the behavior that we wanna see across the entire organization. I've spoken to about 10 or 15 CMOs in the last month or two about sales and marketing alignment, and I've heard over and over again that that relationship you see at the top sets the model for what all of the lieutenants and the people on the field are doing. So proactive investment into the relationship, I think, is absolutely critical. The third area that I've learned and made a lot of mistakes on is this notion of one narrative, one story. And here's the anecdote. Uh, at Highspot, my first 2 years there, I spent a lot of time with the CEO of the company as the head of marketing defining what's our thought leadership narrative, our competitive advantage. Let's put all of that into a PowerPoint and get the CEO on the road and tell these amazing visionary stories to the world. And what I thought was, boy, if we do an amazing job for that with the CEO, we're gonna call that thing our customer overview deck and we're just gonna take it and give it to every one of our SDRs and BDRs and account executives. They're gonna be able to do the same thing and off the run. Well, that was a huge mistake on my part because the thought leadership vision story for the CEO isn't really the same as what an SDR and AE can have on an initial discussion. Discovery call. And so I just made a really big mistake there. And so what landed on the front lines was a different narrative than the one that we were talk— telling about at the top. We were leaving our SDRs and AEs to make up something on their own because they're speaking to different personas. Maybe it's below the line. They're just trying to, you know, think about how to make a business case, et cetera. So it didn't stick, didn't land. So I got a little bit smarter, uh, and One of the things that we did in the last 5 months was we had a messaging workshop that brought together the CEO, the head of sales, the head of marketing, key lieutenants, and most importantly, AEs and SDRs that were on the front line. And we spent 2 full days reimagining one narrative that we could tell from the top all the way to the best, you know, key analysts in the world and thought leadership all the way to what's happening on the front line to initial calls. Couple things happened. One, it was a much better story because it was infused with real-world experiences around what's happening with our AEs and ADRs. Two, we were much more consistent, so we weren't polluting our brand message because it had that degree of buy-in from people in the world. And then finally, we made sure that there was one single source of truth. So if it's that narrative deck and the story itself all the way through to that sales content that we're creating, there's literally only one place that people can go. And we have the ability to track and measure all of that. So it was a key lesson learned around the importance of the narrative, and it has to be co-authored by the people on the frontline and the CEO. That was a huge unlock for us. So the next lesson learned along the way was this notion around scaling winning behaviors. And the anecdote here was, back again to 2013, Adobe EchoSign versus DocuSign. And I mentioned earlier, only 35% of reps actually reach and hit their quota. And if you really look at performance, what you'll often see is that the top 10 or 20% of your account executives carry the number for the entire quarter, for the entire company. Uh, they win against the competition more frequently than the people in the middle. So, you know, I wanted to really beat DocuSign. I was really excited about this. I went to our very best sales rep, a guy named Riley, who beat DocuSign all the time. It's one of our highest performers. I flew up to Seattle with a video crew, and the belief was, I'm going to get Riley on camera giving his pitch about how to beat the competition. And one of the most important things I have to do is to take that video and just seed it across the entire Adobe sales force. Just do what Riley does, and your win rates will be like Riley's. Well, very flawed thinking on any number of levels, overly simplistic, because what I wasn't thinking enough about are the actual behaviors day in, day out that Riley was doing that create a bias for winning deals. He has a very different approach to discovery, a very different approach to RFP follow-up, a very different approach to his tone and manner coming across on email. Email. The list goes on and on and on. So I was— my aperture for scaling his excellence was far too narrow. So the opportunity to really scale dramatic growth, I think, is about understanding what are all of those behaviors that the top 10 or 15% are doing that we now need to spread over what I sometimes call the frozen middle, that middle of the sales force, that if we just increase their quota attainment by 1, 2, or 5 points, that's going to drive much more consistent growth over time. So the new learning, the new approach for me is about infusing analytics and data and deal forensics at every single deal that we do. And so for example, uh, we, I've only recently started doing this in the last 2 years. Um, we'll do win-loss calls by an independent third party. Third party to every single deal that we either win, lose, or close no decision. Uh, almost 100% of them will get a call from an independent third party saying, hey, tell us from your side what happened. Why did you decide to give this vendor the deal rather than the other one? And they dig really deep into all sorts of things, including the actual rep behaviors, so that the head of sales and the head of marketing are are now hearing not from the AE why we won or lost the deal, we're actually hearing from the customer, from a third party. We're looking at one shared set of data together, the analytics and the forensics on that actual deal that we can then pinpoint those behaviors that we wanna scale up. We're doing that across the board. That could be call recording analysis. I'm sure many of you have that all the way through like digital sales rooms where a rep can personalize an experience, pitch it out, and everybody's looking at a common shared dashboard, the data, not only for one deal, but across 10 deals, hundreds of deals. When we do it the right way, we understand the behaviors that we wanna change that we then can scale up to just get that 4 or 5, 10-point improvement across the core middle of our sales teams. So scaling those up is absolutely key. Uh, the last one is this notion of, uh, just dynamic alignment between sales and marketing. Um, so here's what's easy. It's the beginning of the fiscal year. It's 2 or 3 months before then. Head of sales, head of marketing, CFO, CEO get together. Here's how much we're gonna grow the company. Do we all agree on that? Absolutely. Here's the win rates. We got it. That's perfect. We're gonna beat the competition. We're gonna delight the customers. We're gonna drive adoption. That's all the easy stuff. And you show up at the sales kickoff in front of the entire sales team, and you put the head of sales and marketing together on the same stage, and everybody goes, wow. Those people are really on the same page and they're, they're deeply aligned. The hard part is in month and in quarter when things change and when the market tightens up and how do you have a system to dynamically align in real time. And so I'll give you an anecdote here, um, which was a recent mess up on my part. So literally last quarter, uh, we started off the whole year, the head of sales for, uh, Highspot, myself, totally aligned all those things. and what the head of sales realized is that we weren't as standardized as we needed to be on a consistent sales methodology. And that is a big lift to get everybody to sell with a common shared approach. We also needed to roll out a CPQ tool, which is also gonna be a big change management issue for our sellers to get used to. Now, that same quarter, we were doing the biggest product launch that we've done in over a year. Product launch, if you're a marketer, it's just one of the most important things we do because it's where we tell the world from an innovation perspective, here are all the new things that we've done to increase our win rate on net new. Here's all the innovations that we've done. Here's how we work with the analysts to get them all excited about the new features and capabilities. And for our existing base that we are trying to retain right now, they have to know all of the great new things that we've done for them. And so from a product launch perspective, I have to get every account executive, every SDR, every SE trained on the new demo, the new value prop. I have to get the customer success team totally aligned. And, you know, I sometimes talk about this notion of the four wheels of the car: sales, marketing, enablement, and customer success. And if all four of those wheels aren't pointed in exactly the same direction, that car does not go very quickly. Well, what I realized this quarter was the left wheel was pointing in one direction and the marketing wheel was pointed in the right direction, and we just made a mistake. And the net result of that is we didn't stick the landing, I think, as much as we would've, could've, should've. And so the lesson learned is to have a system, a framework for in-month and in-quarter real-time alignment, and make sure that we're checking in on priorities with each other much more dynamically. And we manifest sort of those changes or those areas we have to align on in that quarter with a notion of sales plays. And everybody has a different vernacular. Sometimes it's a sales kit, sometimes it's a sales play. But the key to this, for example, we, we could have had a sales play around product launch, is to make sure that that sales play has a few components. It has to have a what's in it for you, for the account executive or the account manager. Ideally it's co-authored by somebody sitting on the frontline, so you get that degree of buy-in and real-world results. And if that scorecard has analytics around it so that the head of sales and the head of marketing say, how is this growth initiative tracking? Are we where we need to be? Our opportunity for growth is much higher. So a few ideas for you all, top 5 lessons learned along the way of scaling from 10 to 100 $100 million through a series of mistakes and failures on my part, the business's crew, that I would share with all of you. So making sure that you've got really deep goal alignment. Build trust and proactive partnerships so you're modeling the behaviors that you wanna see across the entire organization. Make sure that there's one single source of truth for your company's thought leadership message. From the very top all the way to the front line, create strong buy-in. Go deeper on the behaviors that are winning most of the deals and figure out how do you scale those across the entire organization and create a system to stay in alignment in quarter, not just over the course of the year. Alrighty, there you have it. So with that, I've saved about 5 or 6 minutes for questions and answers, and Catherine has got a microphone in her hand. And just, uh, raise your hand if you got a question, love to answer it for you.

Thanks a lot for the presentation. Miguel Cruz from Dexma. So my question is, well, if we— if Elodie and myself— she is the marketing director, I'm the sales director— we had to have a shared dashboard, which are the main KPIs that you will suggest to have there, like number of employees MQLs, things like that?

Yeah, great question. And I think there are— first of all, you're 50% of the way there. Most sales and marketing teams don't have a single dashboard together. There's two different dashboards together, or two different dashboards. That's job one. Job two, I believe, is to focus on pipeline and pipeline conversion. MQLs are absolutely critical. That's top of the funnel, and you're going to have to do it. But at the end of the day, what the boardroom is measuring most of us on is what's the state of our pipeline? And so as head of sales, you can be able to drill into how much pipeline is marketing generating and how is that converting? Marketing can look at how much pipeline is being converted by the sales team and understand how do I accelerate that? How do I do more with field marketing? How do I do more with account-based marketing? That's my quick answer. Thank you.

Hi, in terms of feedback from clients when deals don't work out, how do we get that balance where they don't feel uncomfortable with us reaching out to them all the time? Because as you said, you reach out to every single deal, whether we— they win, you lose, or anything. So what's the best way to do that without the client feeling like you're approaching them too deeply and in every single situation? 'Cause you don't wanna create that environment with the client. You wanna, wouldn't want them to feel comfortable, right? So what do you do to create the balance?

[Speaker] It's a great question and it is hard. We wanna be very respectful of clients that have told us, hey, you know, we ran the RFP process and we're done talking about it. We don't need to tell you again why you lost the deal or why you won the deal. Let's just move on. So couple of keys, having an independent third party do it is one. Being very respectful in approach is 2. And then talking about, you know, the affinity with the buyer. Hey, we're trying to improve a process. The client wants to really know. We know sometimes that the story that you may tell the client, the vendor, is different, and you may not feel comfortable telling the whole truth. And if you can create that level of empathy and buy-in and talk about how they're really trying to improve, people in general want to help if they have time. And frame it. Hey, we're not going to take 2 hours. We want to take 10 minutes. That often creates buy-in. Thank you. Maybe time for one more question.

Thank you. You mentioned that a lot of content is not used by sales, and maybe you have any suggestions of how to align here. Should sales generate any ideas and, uh, sit together with content team, let's say, to align for the next quarter or next half a year? Thank you.

Yeah, so, um, great question. I think it's important to have one story, one narrative, one single set of messages. So I'm not a big fan of teams creating content on their own. Nothing drives misalignment more than that. Uh, I think marketing teams have to have an exceptionally high level of empathy empathy and understanding about what sellers really need. One of the ways you get that is by sitting in on deals together, listening to Gong calls together, really doing root cause analysis by stage. What's the content that actually would've helped move the needle or not? Develop that shared understanding and agreement first, and then develop a content and an editorial calendar that delivers on that over time. It's also really useful to have analytics on content, and so just understanding what content is working and which isn't that drives really positive outcomes is a second thing to go do. Maybe a third area is on the spirit of alignment. We'll have priority sharing meetings between sales and marketing. Sales will say, "We need these 25 pieces of content." Marketing will say, "I can do 5. Let's talk about it." And having that meeting that's open and real together is really key. and then when you do the 5, let's track your actual adoption of those 5. Sometimes marketing will ask for things that never really get used every once in a while. So those are a few things that I think can really help drive that forward. Well, listen, it has been delightful to be with you all to share 5 key best practices to drive improved sales and marketing. One more question in the back. Oh, go ahead.

Sorry, just a quick question. [Speaker:AUDIENCE] In terms of alignment, if we're on a remote team basis, how often and how long would the calls have to be between head of marketing and head of sales? [Speaker:BRIAN CAIRNS] Hmm.

Great question. I think it always depends. I can tell you personally that I speak with our head of sales, even with just a 2-minute phone call, or a quick Slack almost daily. And sometimes it's the 90-second touchpoint that's more important than the 90-minute meeting with frequency and connection. So that's my perspective, but I think, you know, every company and every personality is gonna be different. Terrific. Well, thank you all so much. Have a great Saastr event. If you've got other questions, I'll be up front. Have a great day. Please welcome Notion Capital partner Itzeyzo del Palacio.

We have a couple of people taking a seat, so I'm going to wait just 30 seconds until everyone is on their chairs. Hi everyone. So in less than 4 years, we've created more than 50 PLG unicorns in Europe. I don't know if you knew that. It is a pretty significant number. I am very positive we will get to 100 very soon as the number of PLGs as unicorns is really growing. My name is Ichazo. Thank you for the pronunciation back there. It's Ichazo. In fact, it's a little bit difficult one. I am a partner at Notion, Notion Capital, based in London. We are a B2B SaaS investor investing mainly in Series A businesses across Europe. We've been investing in SaaS since 2009, so we've been pioneering a little bit the SaaS space here in Europe. Personally, I joined them 3 years and a half ago, and within the team, I'm probably the one more product-led. I really get very excited when I'm talking about product roadmaps and the vision of the founders to build the products that their users and the customers really want. So I join them pretty much to lead many of those investments. And we are investors in companies that probably, you know, like GoCarless, CurrencyCloud, Tradeshift, Paddle, who is, in fact, you've seen around here, and I think Kledara is also in our portfolio, and it's, yeah, and it's also around here. So all of those companies, SaaS companies, are in our portfolio, and you can check some of them out downstairs. But we are, I'm very, very excited about product-led companies because I do know that to be successful, you don't only need a good product. So with a good product, probably you might still need something else to get to your customers. But I do believe that without an amazing product, you are probably not going to be able to be successful. So today, I think employees expect consumer-like experiences in their workplace. And so we really need to pay attention to what are the products that we are providing to them, right? And so related to all of that, obviously the natural transition and the go-to-market strategies, product-led growth, and that is what I'm going to be talking about today. I've been doing a lot of work around this space, and in fact there are a couple of research pieces coming out on specifically European unicorns, unicorns in PLG, because I think a lot has been said about the US producing PLGs as unicorns and companies going public, which is absolutely great, but I think Europe has an amazing opportunity right now because even though it is a very fragmented market, now you can start a company from anywhere you are and target huge markets and ecosystems from Estonia, from Barcelona, Barcelona, from Switzerland, wherever you are, and I think that is very, very unique and important, right? So, one of the research, just I will start, if this moves, it's not moving. Can we move the slide to the next one? Oops, oops, yes. So, here are a little bit, a couple of just an introduction to the research we've been doing on PLG, and if you see this, you can see those are the number of unicorns, PLG unicorns that have been created in the last couple of years. As you see, there are over 50 of them. This is only European unicorns, and this includes not only companies that started as PLG, basically their main go-to-market strategy was PLG, they started, but also companies that are bottom-up, going through developers, and basically they grow in a bottom-up approach, which are also included here, as well as some companies that started product-led and then eventually included or integrated PLG strategies as an additional go-to-market strategy for their companies. And I think it's pretty impressive to see the number of those companies growing. And we don't have 2022, but otherwise we will have Parallel 2, which is in our portfolio. And as you know, it is a PLG business and growing very rapidly, right? So I think this for everyone around the, in this room who is building a PLG business in Europe, it's basically where I would like to see many of your logos in, in a couple of years for sure. But what I'm going to be talking about today is around the 5, 6 main best practices and tips that we collected from the experts and the founders in the industry. So I ran a survey a couple of weeks ago and I've seen some people in the audience, in fact, who contributed to that survey. I posted through my LinkedIn profile. We have a Slack group for PLG experts and businesses across Europe that if you want to join, you just message me and I will send you the link to join. But basically, we posted a survey there and asked the founders and the experts to contribute with tips and best practices on PLG businesses. We basically aggregated all of those and I'm presenting I'm presenting here the 6 that were either more relevant or they were mentioned more times because some of them were really mentioned many, many times and I really wanted to create those in here. So let's go for the first one. Here there are some examples of some of those companies. The first one is in fact here, the last one on the table, There is not a particular order, and that's why I'm going to be jumping around on the table. It's not the most important one or the least important one. But this, the last one, is born, not made. And this is a very interesting one because we right now, we are investors in over 100 companies in SaaS, and many businesses come to us these days who are doing sales-led. Go-to-market strategies and they come to us and say, "Hey, we want to implement PLG as a go-to-market strategy." How many of you have tried to do that? So are doing sales-led, some of you, right? And so many of you in fact are in this talk because you are interested in hearing a little bit more how to do that. The reality is that we try to help many of those companies and many of them struggle because of different reasons. There are many reasons for that. One, it might be the onboarding process might not be seamless enough or intuitive enough that customers can self-serve. Or it might be that the time to value is in fact a little bit longer than what people were expecting, right? Because we are very impatient too and we want to see what is going on with the product very, very quickly. Quickly, right? Or in some cases it has happened too that teams are not structured in a way that they have a P&G-like mentality. Think of a product team which doesn't take as a responsibility the revenue generation, right? In a P&G business, product people are thinking, okay, those are my revenue targets, and those are product people. Maybe in a sales-led organization that is not That's not exactly the case. And so when you go to them and you are asking them to generate certain revenue through the product, maybe that might not be what they were expecting from you as a CEO or as a manager, right? So all these sort of things create difficulties for companies to go from sales-led to product-led, basically. And I use here an example, Paddle, and I'm sure we have, I think there are some of the people from Paddle in the audience, and this is one of our portfolio companies. We invested many years ago, 5, 6 years ago in the company, and Paddle was a sales-led organization when they started. As you know, for those who don't know it, Paddle does the subscription and payment transaction for SaaS businesses. So many of you might be also customers of Paddle, right? When Paddle started, the market was not educated enough. They weren't operating in a, what is called a red ocean, where customers knew what Paddle was for. And they had to do a big sales motion to be able to gain that traction and to educate the market. And so it is only now, a year, a year and a half ago, when they have a started to implement that product-led growth strategies. In fact, if you look, Andrew Davis, who was the CEO of one other portfolio company at Notion, we moved him to Paddle now once the company's acquired, and he is leading all the go-to-market on the CMO role and basically taking over also working with the product team on that. And I think it's one of the companies, so it's not impossible to build a PLG motion from SalesLed, but it has challenges. So, this is a good example. If you see people from the company, just reach out to them because I do believe they might have some insights for you on how to do it. The second insight contributed by the experts and the founders was around pricing. How many of you are thinking, what is the best pricing for my company? Am I capturing the right value from my customers, right? And most of the times, the pricing that was mentioned is the value-based pricing. And many people talk about this, but it is a reality that we see many more companies that are trying to go to market with a pricing model that is not the right one for them. They are not capturing the value they are bringing to their customers. And I wanted to use the example of TestGorilla, which is in fact a company that has a big team based in Barcelona. It's also a company in our portfolio, and what they do is they provide tests for enterprises to— for the recruitment process. So you put a job opportunity and so So candidates need to go through several tests before they get to an interview, let's put it this way. And so if they will be charging their customers through seats or people using the product, it will be 2 to 5, maybe 10 people within an organization in the HR team who are basically responsible for recruiting within the company. In this case, what they do is they charge per test, which means that a company goes in, they have 2 people using it, but if they have hundreds of employees applying for the job, then they are charging for hundreds of those potential candidates going through the test. And this is very, very important because in fact, customers realize they are paying for what they get. right? And I think it is very, very important for them to get that pricing right. So I think this is one very, very important point also that the experts mentioned. Let's go to the third one. It is around growth and net retention rate. And this one was contributed by several people, and I used here an example. It was, in fact, I see Vincent here. On the front, who was one of the people who contributed with this idea, because I reach out to people after they contributed to the survey just to talk about some of the points on the survey and elaborate a little bit more. And I wanted to use the example of ULIVE. So when we think of PLG, we obviously— everybody knows that PLG is a way to acquire customers, to engage with them. And to build that loyalty through the product. The reality is that many companies are doing very well the expansion through the products. So they have built product capabilities in which employees, users, are incentivized to involve other people, to collaborate with other people, to buy additional modules within those products. And it is not that you are selling all of those from day one, because people get bombarded with all of those within the product, but rather progressively once they start getting familiar with the product, you start pushing in front of them different modules or ways to use the product and building that net retention rate expansion through the product. I use here the example of ULIFE, which is one of the investments I led 3 years ago. ULIFE is life insurance for businesses. Basically they provide a life insurance for companies so that their employees receive a benefit. And as you know, before in fact, like, ULife existed, probably we didn't know we had life insurance until we die, and then we don't know it anyway. So what they do is they give, they give an app to the employees so that they can be healthier and more active. And so through that app, The employees can only not get tracked what they do, but they can also onboard their family members on the life insurance provider, or they can buy additional insurance products like a dental insurance or PMI. And in that way, the company is able to expand, build the net retention rate through the product, through the employees, without having to go through a sales mode to, through the top of the organization, right? So that's a good example of that. Let's go for the fourth point mentioned by the experts and the founders, and this is around the stickiness. In the same way that product-led growth is easy to adopt, those products are easy to adopt, churn is also pretty high because you can also basically unsubscribe pretty easy, right? Unless you build stickiness. I'm pretty sure that many of you are trying to figure out how to present to investors a pretty high churn within your numbers without making them think that in fact people don't like your product. So I think there are many companies that have done very, very well this stickiness building within the product. And that can be done with, for example, Airtable, with collaboration opportunities as well as becoming a system of record. When you are a company like Airtable or Notion— Notion, the note-taking app, not the investor, they have taken our brand but it's not the same thing, we are not related to each other, we were earlier in But Airtable or, or, or Notion, right? When you have a bunch of people who are sharing some information, it is much more difficult to get out of the product because obviously those collaboration opportunities and the fact that you've become a system of record creates that stickiness to the product. And so thinking of those features that can make those products longstanding within the organizations is very, very, very important. And I think that's something that we need to take into consideration. One more here, which is around personalization. And I don't know if Martí, the founder of Gretel, is here, but personalization refers to the fact that we not only want to give very short and very quick value to our customers, customers, but we also want to make them feel that this product is just for them. So when I log in, in a product, and it's pre-populated with information that belongs to me, that is an incredible way to feel that that product is specifically made for organizations like me. The way that Gretel is doing it, Gretel is a company that is creating an information layer in such a way that everyone within the company can access information that other people have created and therefore gives you the opportunity to be much more productive, much quicker in our small organizations, right? Like an information layer. So Gretel, the way they are doing this is by scraping your website. In the moment you put your email address and and the name of your company, they scribe your website and they pre-populate the product before the first screen of the product is launched in such a way that you have already a logo, you have some names, you have some pricing, and that is a very, very interesting way to make people feel that in fact that product is going to serve their needs, okay? And last but not least is around real PLG. And I always talk about this point with many of my founders because I always tell them that eventually, if you want to build a PLG business, you gotta let it go. Basically, you need to let your users and customers use it by themselves. Don't be afraid, just let it go, let them use it. And the reality is that there are many things that pressure you. In many cases, we are investors too, which push you to onboard all these customers one by one so you get that short-term revenue. In reality, that is the short-term revenue and you are worried that churn will be there. And I put the example of Folk here. I don't know if anybody from Folk is in the audience, but basically they are building the next generation of a CRM. So today many companies, we are using Slack and Notion and many other tools that are— or WhatsApp— that are not in fact included in a traditional Salesforce, for example, CRM, and we lose a lot of the communication that we have with our customers. So, Fold allows you to gather that data too. And I'm super impressed with the team because they've been incredibly good at letting the customers, in fact, use the product even though they are having certain churn at the very beginning, but they learn so much very quickly and they haven't been able to get to where they are unless they have let it go a couple of months ago or 6 6 or 8 months ago, and they are now letting everyone go through the onboarding process by themselves. So those are 6 of the points. I just want to conclude very, very quickly with 3 takeaways from this talk. The first one is basically that these are just 6 points that I wanted to mention that have been the most cited or contributed to this survey. I think we will continue to do many more. As I said, and related to the second point, there is a massive opportunity to build a PLG business in Europe. We will continue to contribute with research, with data around PLG unicorns in Europe, and we do have a community of PLG experts in Europe. So let us know, you can join and, and And let's stay— let's keep the discussion open because I'm a true believer of building 100 P&G unicorns in Europe very, very soon. Thank you. That was it.

Us, building castles in the sky, just the two of us, you and I. We look for love, no time for tears. Wasted water's all that is, and it don't make no flowers grow. Good things might comes to those who wait, not for those who wait too late. We gotta go for all we know. Just the two of us, we can make it if we try. Just the two of us. Just the two of me.