Sales-Led or Product-Led? Harness.io CRO On Why You Need Both (Workshop Wednesday)

We would love to see in the chat how global our SaaS community is. Thank you everyone for joining. Welcome. All right. Welcome everyone to Workshop Wednesday. As you tune in, please add in where you are tuning in from in the chat. Love to see it. I am currently in San Francisco. As you might note, it is very rainy me here. But welcome, welcome, welcome. We have a great session today. I'm really excited to announce, as you know, we are here every 10:00 AM Pacific Wednesday after Wednesday, sharing super exciting content to our SaaS community. Today, we will hear from Jason M. Lemkin. He is CRO at Harness. We are going to make these sessions super interactive. So get your questions ready and place them in the chat throughout the session. All right. With that, I am excited to introduce you to Jason. He will be discussing sales-led versus product-led. Today's startups need both. Hi, Jason. How are you?

Good. How are you?

Good. So great to have you here today. We have a few warm-up questions for you to get to know you a little better, um, if you are ready to answer them.

Absolutely. And by the way, you asked everybody where they're from today. I'm joining you from New York City, so if you hear some background noise, sirens, I promise I'm not, uh, I'm not being hauled out here.

Yeah, one of the beautiful things about, uh, New York, there's always background noise. All right, so to get started, we'll toss you an easy question to start. How do you define what you do at Harness?

Uh, great question. Yeah, so Chief Revenue Officer for us at Harness means that I lead go-to-market, and go-to-market is, is defined by your traditional functions like sales, marketing, services, customer success, etc. I like to think of us as the customer org, so everything that that me and my teams do every day is defined by focusing on the customer interactions. And that's everything from how people find us in the market to how we support them once they're a customer.

Great, great concise answer. Thank you for that. Always good to know what someone does when they're about to lead a 30-minute presentation. What project are you working on today you're most excited about?

Good question. I'd say the one that is very exciting for me and kind of near and dear to my heart is I call it the IDP. So we have an initiative inside of Harness for all of our first-line leaders to have an individual development and coaching plan for every single IC within their team. And the thing that's unique about this and the reason I find it exciting is it's more than just a performance review, right? That's, that's not what I'm talking about here. What we're doing is we're building out, we're a very data-driven organization. We have a lot of analytics around our performance and we take that, those analytics down to an individual level and we marry that together. So the quantitative feeds around how each individual is performing at every stage of the sales execution, for example, for the sales org. And we marry that together with a qualitative analysis from the first line leaders themselves. And the effort here is so that we, you know, you take a lot, you invest a lot in people and really in the backbone of every organization is, it really comes down to people. So we spend a lot of time and money recruiting and hiring and building these teams out, but I feel like the first-line leaders have an incredibly difficult job. And so our effort here is to double down on the development of those, of the people in the org at the first, at the individual level. And then to personalize that development in a way that is meaningful to them and resonates. And it's not just someone sort of, you know, screaming at the scoreboard, as we might, as we might say in a sports analogy, right? And so what we want to do is take a personalized view of someone's performance over the last 6 months. We break it down and show it back to them in the way that they're executing their current book of business. We model that out. And so we show them the trajectory that they're currently on if they continue to do everything exactly the way that they're doing it. And then we show them the benchmark as to how each individual compares in the lens of that execution per sales, sales stage of the process to their peers and to the average of their peers, as well as the best in class of their peers at a regional level, as well as a global level for their role in the organization. And then we give the manager in that, that individual a what-if modeling capability. And that's the part that we're building that's pretty exciting because we then allow them to say, hey, you know, you're doing a great job, at these 5 out of the 7 things that, that compose the sales execution around their job. But in these 2 other areas, you can see that, that your peer class is an average of X percent higher than you here, and maybe the best in class is Y percent higher. And so let's take a look at your current, your current velocity of execution against your current individualized book of business and take those trends and just model up these two areas, if we could together invest in making you best in class in these two areas of execution, what would that mean for you and your income and your family and ultimately your ability maybe to get to a club trip at the end of the year? And so really make it, make it personalized and allow them to visualize what they could, what the outcome would be if they were willing to invest in, in those two areas. And then the leader has to invest also in helping them. And then to go back to the sports analogy, it's kind of like the difference between a coach saying, you know, make, make more shots if you're a basketball player, and really giving you an analysis on what you could do all the way down to the drills to work on, maybe the speed or the quickness of your release or coming off the screen so that you can get open more often, things like that. And if it's, if it's put this way, we want to really, we really want them to personalize it and make it their own plan. Not, not kind of a manager pushing something down on them. Right. And so IDPs that are personalized, they have quantitative, qualitative analysis and what-if modeling so they can see the outcome as they, as they commit to invest in themselves.

Very cool. I feel like I can already hear people typing out questions about this later in the session, but thank you so much. Our last question to kick things off before I hand it over to you. In the last 12 months, what's been the hardest thing you've worked on?

Yeah, great, great question. I mean, there's— everybody who's going to join our session today has gone through different, I'm sure, trials and tribulations with the economy and everything that's going on around them. So it'd be easy to pick on something like that or shifting, shifting remote and office culture trends. But I'd say one of the things that's been exciting as well as difficult for us that we've, that we've accomplished in the last 12 months that's kind of specific to our session today also is that Harness, we have a modern software delivery platform. And within that modern software delivery platform, there are 8 individual product modules. And the way that we organize the company is that we go to market with a single platform. We also give customers the flexibility of choice of starting with Harness in any individual module, which means we have to market it. Individually, we have to price it individually, we have to sell it individually, we have to support it individually. And in that way, we're kind of— we have 8 startups within a startup, if you want to think about it that way. And that, that was a challenge in making sure that we had a financial plan and operating plan, that we have the right resources, we have the right alignment from product, marketing, and sales and CS that all— that are all focused on making sure that each module that we launch can compete as a standalone product with the peer community in that use case in the industry, but also benefits from being part of a broader company and platform strategy. And so that what we've done here is we've created cross-functional product pods and we have really alignment, shared goals, accountability, everything for every team, for every individual product module. And that starts with the PLG growth team and the product marketing team, the product management team, and the sales team, they all share a common, a common goal across each function, but with specific accountability for their respective alignment to the, to that growth journey. And that might sound intuitive, but it wasn't so easy to put together. And it's one of the ways that we've been able to, you know, to launch a new product, execute with focus, iterate quickly, but also maintain efficiency through the, through a multi-product strategy.

Great. I think with that, we are ready to transition to sales-led versus product-led. Today's startups need both. So thanks so much and take it away.

All right, thanks. So by way of introduction, I'm Jason Eubanks. As you know, you just heard, I'm chief revenue officer at Harness. I mentioned a little bit about what Harness does. I've also been asked to give you a little bit of a brief on my background. So to do it very quickly, you know, I started my career out in two big public software companies, CA and BMC, where each of those companies were sales-led in their own way. And I had the benefit of working with and learning from some of the industry's, you know, best enterprise sales leaders, which was fantastic. And then was really tempted by the startup scene to, to chase more mission-driven engagement and, and decided to go looking for startups and was fortunate enough to find my way into a company called Meraki. It was founded by a few, a few students out of MIT's PhD program, later bought by Cisco, but went on from there, from Meraki to Twilio and now Harness. Along the way, also again been very fortunate to be paired up with very tech-forward and innovative founders. And in that journey, I also have learned a whole new set of— a new appreciation, a new set of skills around product-led growth. And Twilio was one of the first companies to, to really come to market with a PLG strategy that was focusing on developers and was built on the back of a pay-per-drink or pay-per-use business model without committed contracts. So you have two really contrasting experiences here where early in my career it was really large enterprise sales, large deals, very, very, very focused on sales process, prescriptive sales process, sales methodology, operating rhythms, things like that, all the way to the other side of the equation where Twilio really got out of the gates strong through viral adoption of developers. And at the end of it, you know, At the end of my time there, we had about 60,000 inbound leads just coming from the PLG process that we had in place. And so these two models were drastically different, both incredibly effective and great. I found them to be very great learning opportunities. And so that's some of what we're going to talk about today is, you know, I've asked questions or been asked questions many times over, you know, what do we think the right or what do I think the right strategy is for a startup getting out of the gates? Should they go sales-led or should they go product-led? And in the end, my answer is always the same, which is it doesn't really matter. No matter where you start, you're gonna end up needing to do both. And the modern go-to-market model that's gonna de-risk your growth journey through the phases of your company's existence as you grow from $1 million to a billion in ARR is going to require you to have growth levers that you have control over in a sales-led model where you're reaching your buyers. And it's also, you're gonna benefit wildly from a viral adoption that's user-driven and PLG-focused. So the answer is both. Alright, so let's talk about the evolution of these growth models. You know, in the earlier days, we hear— well, I'll back up. So when you look at sales-led methodologies, you'll hear things like Sandler Sales Process, you'll hear things like value-based selling, medpic, opportunity analysis, etc. I am a big believer in all of those things. I have been trained in all of those things, like many of you probably have. And I think they're fantastic. And And they absolutely have their place in today's operating environment as you're building out your companies. This again is not a replacement. It's not sales-led being replaced by product-led. This is, you need to do both. So those are very, very relevant in today. And at Harness, we use a value-based selling framework. We enable every single seller that comes in our organization around it. We invest heavily on making sure that we inspect it and we have our tools built in a way that we drive sales process automation around this methodology. And it's a very— it's a fantastic methodology. And it used to be defined as sort of the golden approach to sales execution. And let's talk about why. Well, before the internet, the vendor had the ability to control the product lifecycle from awareness to education to trials, and ultimately purchase process. So in an environment where you have a great product, and you have 100% control over a way a prospect engages with you and experiencing that product, you can be very high touch. You can have intention in the way you set up customized demos. You can run qualification processes around what we would call POV or proof of value or product trial. You might, you might find yourself primarily investing through outbound pipeline generation efforts combined with marketing digital or enterprise digital efforts. And ultimately, it's a prescriptive sales process, so it's repeatable, you can teach it, you can scale it, so it's great. So what's changed? Why are we talking about, why is the industry talking about PLG? Well, ultimately, with the advent of the internet came access, right? And now, as we all know, you can go out and you can Google a solution, you can Google a problem, you can look at a competitive landscape, there's crowdsourced experiences of these products. Being reported on the internet that the vendor has absolutely no control over. This stuff gets voted out and shared out widely. So one of the predominant things that has changed is simply the buyer's access to information. And with that, the vendor loses some degree of control. So you can either fight it or you can feed it. And I think the right, the right model here is to feed it, right? And so you want to make it easy for people to find you. You want to make it easy for them to have a frictionless, self-service-oriented product experience. You want to build and participate in viral community adoption. And ultimately, if you do these things, you will have an inbound-led funnel that's very efficient. It will require you to have a flexible sales process. And I think that's where the trade-off often gets a little bit sticky for go-to-market teams. And that's what we'll spend some more time talking about today. So when I think about the need for, for executing both a PLG strategy as well as a sales-led growth motion. You know, I also think about the personas that we serve in these environments. And this is where I think it's actually very natural to have investments in both PLG and sales-led motions. Because for Harness, and this may be different for some of our audience today, but for Harness, you know, we're, we're out here building a modern software delivery lifecycle platform that serves the 30 million developers of the world and changes that dev experience. So we will start that PLG motion directly with the developers and the DevOps engineering teams that are working with those developers in software companies today, maybe even the SREs that are focused on quality of the code that's out there in the environment. For, for those of you who are not in this type of company, you know, you might substitute devs just with your, with your target user. And the way to delineate that is the user versus the buyer. Now, when we're, when we're investing in PLG motions and we're presenting people that are coming inbound with the opportunity to get started with a product immediately in a self-service model, it doesn't replace the need to go, go outbound and go find buyers. And the way I would think about this is really when you're going through a sales-led motion, you're going to have enterprise marketing content campaigns digital spend, and your sales team is probably going to spend a certain portion of their time going outbound and pipeline generation campaigns. That's usually focused on a buyer, someone who is waking up thinking about solving a problem, waking up thinking about unleashing new opportunity for revenue growth. If they embed something in their product or company, that is a great alignment for sales-led motions. And we think about that through decision makers like directors, VPs, CXOs. When someone shows up in a community of peers and the, the great word about your product is being spread in a way that they think, let's just try it out, or they, you know, they want to poke around on the weekend and have an experience around the technology, that's a very, very good fit for PLG. At Twilio, we used to say we wanted, uh, we want to have Twilio in the, the tool bag of every developer. And that might mean the developer experience of somebody that's wiring up a doorbell to send them an SMS message on the weekend is just as important as in having a a great product experience as someone from a large financial services institution that we have a sales team engaging with on that Monday morning. Because those developers go to work, and if they have a great, great experience in the product, even on the weekend while they're playing around with the tech, they can embed it into a funded initiative and the organization they work at. And so we focus very heavily on serving both PLG and sales-led motions. In the end, these things come together to boil down to really just discovery. How does your solution get discovered? How do you find those who are out there looking for your solution or problem set? An answer to the problem set? How do they consider you against— as a viable opportunity to solve that problem against the competitive landscape? And then what are they going to move— what gates are they going to move through, through the purchase process once they've made the decision? If you focus on PLG and sales-led, you'll optimize your customer acquisition costs as well as maximize the breadth of customers that you can reach through small, medium, and large enterprises. And then from there, it's really about focusing on time to value, you know, time to value. The way that we measure time to value in the sign-up to activation to repeated usage in a PLG motion before someone's a customer is what— at what point in that journey do they sign up, use the product, use it repeatedly, and then reach an aha moment of value where they, they continue to engage and then move through some kind of purchase process. For, for a sales-led motion, You know, once you're, once you're out there finding your prospect, you engage in qualification, engage improving the technology out, and ultimately go through a decision purchase process. You get through the customer acquisition, regardless of how you acquire this customer through PLG or sales-led, it's really about focusing on time to value through onboarding and CS, right? Customer success and services and onboarding functions. That's going to open up the door for frictionless renewals, cross-sells, and upsells as you build out your product portfolio to be a multi-product company. And a platform play, which ultimately is going to increase revenue and increase the overall value of every customer over the lifetime of that customer and decrease the, the cost of acquisition through the lifecycle of that customer's journey with you. So how do you do this? Well, you have to serve both the buyer and the user journey in this motion. And that means showing up where they are, right? For, for traditional sales-led models, most people will think about investing in go-to-market as building out marketing and sales functions, and that certainly exists today. We all have to do that. We do that here at Harness, and it's fantastic. You know, you can, you can build out your traditional sort of digital marketing campaigns, build out ABM, your account-based marketing motions, build out your sales teams. We'll talk about how we do some of that here at Harness today. At the same time, though, when you're going to stand up a product-led motion, you have to invest in other, other aspects of sales and marketing. You're going to need to probably build a dev relationship or community relationship team, and that can live in marketing or product typically. You certainly have to have a great product experience. Nothing can— if you're going to have PLG, you're going to be dependent on a frictionless signup process and a frictionless product journey. And then ultimately you want to educate the users slightly different than you might educate a buyer. For buyers, we're going to be using KPIs and keywords that resonate with them that typically will be quantified in pain and metrics and value. For users, the education typically for developers as an example, might be product documentation. And so we will actually, we manage that and I'll talk about it a little bit on the slide here, but we manage that slightly different. We have call to action when we go out and find somebody allow them to educate themselves on Harness. We have call to actions for, you know, talk to a salesperson, get a demo, which will be different for buyers, which will be different than users, which typically will want to get directly into a signup process and support it with product documentation or maybe product videos. So you'll have to invest in both of these things simultaneously. So let's talk about once you've made those investments, how we put it to work. So the modern go-to-market funnel when you're combining sales-led and product-led growth strategies will look slightly different than your typical sales funnel. You know, starting from the user perspective, denoted in purple here, user searches. This is where awareness is really the first stop. We started talking about that in a previous slide. User searches for a solution or a product or a pain. Once they found you in that community or on the website or through an analyst, you know, you have to present the right kind of content that resonates with them. If you present buyer executive version of content to a user, you will have a high abandonment rate and a low conversion on your signups. And ultimately you'll spin cycles and, and likely cost yourself a lot of money chasing that. So one of the ways we've handled that is when, when someone comes in from a very technical source, even if it's a digital or paid ad, let's say they're coming in from Reddit or or Quora, they'll get dropped into— they'll have an option to, as opposed to just signing up for the product right away, they'll have an option to take the action of learn more, and that will route them into what we call a developer hub. That developer hub has all of our product documentation as well as our product education content, and they can— they will be presented through that journey at every stop an opportunity to go sign up for the product. But we're not closing for that in the first interaction with them digitally. We're saying, you know, you're interested, learn more, here's some really helpful documentation, here's some, here's some content that you might find useful. And if they want to punch out of there and go sign up for the product, they can at any given time. Just a side note for us, when we made this change, we tested this out, we run a lot of A/B tests on our inbound funnel. And when we tested this out versus this sort of dropping these technical users into technical hubs or technical documentation repositories versus asking them to take a meeting with a sales rep or get a demo, our conversion rates for signups went up 30%, 38.1% immediately. So this is— I kind of summarize this as, you know, meet the user where they are and speak to them in a way that resonates with the way that they like to learn. And this might be different than maybe a buyer's response where they do want to have a meeting, they're going to respond to that request for meeting gate on your website or, or become a hand raiser if you don't have a gate up and they can go sign up, they might immediately sign up, but then become an early hand raiser in that self-service journey, which is, which is fine. We want to welcome that. And we have an inside sales team that responds to that. So we can have speed to lead metrics. And we make sure that when someone raises their hand, we can immediately get to them and know this chat or live. And we do it in context of that interaction with them. So it's, it's framed properly. And then ultimately, this is going to boil down whether they find you through PLG inbound motions, or you find a prospect through outbound PG, or maybe marketing efforts, this is gonna boil down to them trying your technology out. And this is the area where I slow down a little bit. You know, when we at Harness, we originated as a sales-led culture and when we added a PLG motion powered by a product experience that allowed users to sign up in a frictionless way and have open source versions of the technology out there in the wild, you know, that was a little challenging for some of our sales teams. Sellers who had, who had grown up in enterprise sales-led frameworks. Now, the reason for it is that most of us are taught in a sales-led model, particularly in enterprise selling, that you want to manage the, the proof of value. And one way that we'll typically see people try to manage that is they'll create what's called a business value assessment. And they'll use a business value assessment to quantify and validate the budget with the buyer and maybe quantify the alignment of the value of the problem into the alignment of— and the requirements and the alignment of your solution. And that's fantastic. I mean, in an environment where you have more control over those— that selling— that sales process and the selling interactions that supports that process, go ahead and run your managed POV, whatever that looks like for you. You don't necessarily have to change it, but you do have to adapt to the self-service motions. And the way that we've done that at Harness is we've introduced assisted assisted trials and a full self-service trial. And so I'll give you an example of that. What does an assisted trial mean? Well, usually an assisted trial will be a PLG user that comes in and they sign up for the product, they get started with the product, and at some point between the first product interaction and multiple product interactions, they become a hand raiser. They, they reach out and they say, hey, I'd really like some help on something, or do you have best practices on this use case in the product? Product. Maybe they want to look for reference, maybe they're asking for pricing, whatever the context of the interaction is, they become a hand raiser. At that point, you're going to start a dialogue with that user that you may not have directly had before. Before that, their interactions mostly been with the product. Right now, we're engaging because they've pulled us into that conversation. We want to, we want to engage in context of what they've asked for. So one big mistake that you can make here is, is take an inside sales team and, and create that first interaction in the same way that you would in response to someone coming from the website and asking for a demo or a meeting. And we want to frame it. So what we try to do is teach our inside sales teams, when you're engaged through a hand raiser that's, that's come through the self-service journey, first get an understanding of what problem they're trying to solve and how they're using the product, and then ask them if they'd like help. Have some best practices documentation ready to send to them. Don't, don't go for a close of the next meeting right away, but be helpful first and earn the right to get the next meeting. Once you do that, you're going to probably— for us, we'll set up a Slack channel and we'll maintain interaction through that process. And we'll assist them through their trial journey. And as we find ways to become increasingly more helpful to them, they'll naturally open up with the problems they're trying to solve and the requirements they're testing the product against. And we call that an assisted trial. By the way, we, we measure— we track these and measure the conversion rates differently. And the idea here is that your managed PoVs, where you're going to have more communication, slightly more control, more alignment with the customer and insights into the customer's needs and the requirements that they want to validate the tech against, that's going to be a more resource-intensive engagement for, for you as a vendor. In an assisted trial, they tend to go with higher velocity and, and require frequent but less cumbersome engagement from your, from your SEs and your selling teams. And then a self-service trial is purely what it sounds like. Someone comes in, they might find you through a PLG, they sign up for the product, they engage with the product, they have multiple touchpoints throughout that product usage journey. They are pleased, they reach that aha moment, and then they, they from there will either raise a hand and ask for procurement conversation or pricing, or they might, if your product allows it, which some of ours do, they'll just swipe a credit card and get started and automatically become a paid customer. At that point, it's, it's totally fine to reach out to them and follow up. Again, I do this in context of the engagement and the journey that they've gone on with you. Otherwise, you're gonna alienate some of the, some of those users. Okay, so we run all three of these things in parallel, and our sellers are taught to recognize and manage the interactions differently when engaged in a managed POV versus assisted trial or in a follow-up after-the-fact engagement on after a successful self-service journey. So you might delineate these, these sort of, you know, tech validation events differently by thinking about it through the lens of a sales opportunity and a self-serve opportunity, which you've heard me reference here multiple times. And I've kind of already covered these things. One of the things that's interesting to note, and this can happen in a pre-sales environment or after a self-service journey is successful is that you really are— your goal in this process is to build champions. You're building champions through the sales methodology. That effort typically happens through the sales journey together. If a prospect becomes a customer and converts entirely through self-service, you still want to build an advocate and champion after the fact, and we want to always be helpful for them because what they're going to do is they're going to help drive upsell opportunities for you in a very efficient manner. And by going first within the organization team-wide and secondarily into the communities that they're members of. Right. So that's the idea here is to build champions and advocates through the process. And in the sales journey, we're equipping our champion with business case metrics and business case support so that they can get an executive buyer to make the decision to procure your software. And this only happens typically after as part of a technical and business validation event. In the sales methodology, the sales lab model, those two things can go hand in hand, or your sales process might deem that you want a BVA, a business value assessment, before a full-blown managed POV. Some organizations will run their POV to get the hands in the technology, the technology in the hands of the buyer and the user quickly, and then come in and use that as an event to gather before and after metrics and feed it into a BVA. When we talk about the sales-led approach, I would encourage you to try to build capabilities within your org so that you can do— you can run your BVA process either before a POV, finish it out during the POV, and build it and equip an EB and a champion with that decision criteria and the metrics that support that decision after the fact. And so what we tell our sellers is don't be so rigid to think about it as sort of paint-by-numbers, step 1, step 2, step 3. But be, be so good at the execution of these, uh, of the aspects of this sales process that you can move it around and adapt quickly. In the same way, if we think about it through a sports analogy, um, you know, sometimes a quarterback will read the defense and call an audible, and you have to be consciously competent enough in your sales execution that you can move around where you need to, uh, because you're going to be operating in a blended, a blended model as we just talked about through tech validation, which might shift from a managed POV to assisted trial, or assisted trial becomes managed POV. So You're going to have to move through these tech validation and business validation events pretty fluidly. All right. And ultimately, whether that, that tech validation event occurs with you being part of the journey and engaged, or it's through self-service, that those prospects will become buyers. And so don't forget to document the problems that are being solved and, and the commercials that go along with them. And I'll just tell you what I mean here. When we're, we're coming through a LAN, it could be a multimillion-dollar opportunity that you've spent months on through a sales-led motion, or it could be a user that came into your environment, swiped a credit card to just get started, and then had explosive growth. It was the case often in Twilio's environment. And then later, 6 months or 12 months down that journey, they show up to a call, they ask, that user asks for a call, and they show up with procurement. And all of a sudden procurement's saying, hey, our costs are exploding on this platform, and, you know, we need it for X% lower. And And this is where you, you know, we encourage our sales teams to— in our CS teams to truly understand the alignment between the business problem that a customer is solving or a user is solving with your product and how they're using the technology and the benefit fact and the benefit KPIs of negative consequences of current state and positive business outcomes of the after state, because that documentation can exist even after a user is a paying customer and will still be useful for making sure that you're minimizing churn and renewals and maximizing upsell sell and cross-sell as you're proving value through the, through the partnership with the customer. And that's going to bring us to step 8, which is constantly thinking about making sure that that user buyer journey is well understood, the value is mapped, and it's a pleasant one through the process so that expansions happen frictionlessly. As you add products, your customer, happy customers will buy more. Alright, so I'm going to pick up the pace. I think we're falling behind a little bit. Let's talk about how this comes together in, in Harness. This is how we build our go-to-market, our sales models in Harness. We have a field sales team that serves the large enterprise customers, and we have an inside sales team that operates with higher velocity and serves the SMB markets. They focus on sales-led motions. And again, you know, we're looking at different complexities of these customers, but the sales motion is typically very similar. And they'll go outbound. They'll be talking to directors, VPs, CXOs, and they're going through that buyer journey that's married together at the same time that we're coming bottoms up through the organization with product-led or viral growth that's supported through that self-service journey, becoming hand raisers and engaging with our teams. And really, at the end of the day, we're trying to execute these things simultaneously. The, the way that you can unlock a lot of velocity, even in, in sales opportunities that were initiated through sales-led motions, is to have a strong community where once people start talking about your technology and the organizations that you're selling to, uh, there, there's a lot of positive sentiment that is already out there that you don't have to go build one, one at a time with your sales team. So that's where PLG is actually going to feed and support your sales-led motions, and they're not, they're not mutually exclusive. They're, they're fundamentally operating together. And don't forget about your partners. You don't want to maximize every route to market as you're building out these modern go-to-market methodologies. And so the way we see that for our particular solution set is we have cloud platform partners, we have global systems integrators that we're working with, we have strategic tech alliances like Atlassian and other tech ecosystems that are adjacent to, to the software delivery lifecycle. And then region systems integrators, and this is like the RSIs and the VARs, or value-added resellers, are incredibly important part of the, the go-to-market methodology as well. And, and they are all talking to the same companies that you engaging with via PLG or sales-led. So the fact that you can combine these motions again are all, all complementary.

All right.

I think we're about to the point where you wanted to turn it over to the audience. I tried to rush through the last couple of slides, so I hope the audience, if you have any clarifying questions, please don't hold back. We can revisit content too.

Yeah, perfect. If you want to stop sharing your screen. Perfect timing. Thank you so much. That was great. I am going to kick things off with a question from the audience. The question was clarifying the definition between user versus buyer in that diagram.

Great, great question. You know, by the way, some of that content you can find additional details on Unusual Ventures website. They have field market guides out there and a modern go-to-market methodology and the way that they think about it. There's slight adaptations in what you saw me present today and the way that we've consumed that and then personalized it for how we execute and harness. But generally speaking, you know, the definition that delineates users versus buyers in context, what I presented today would be users of the product versus buyers or consumers of the benefits of the solution. So for us, users of the product would be developers, DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, versus, you know, sitting with an executive who cares about, you know, capital, capital cost savings, reduction in cloud spend, and overall velocity increases in software delivery lifecycle, increases in reliability. And so you're going to, you're going to communicate with these two audiences differently. Although you're talking about your same solution set, you're going to be doing it in context of the things that resonate most directly with the user versus a buyer.

Great. If there's any follow-up on that, please let me know in the chat, but thank you so much for the explanation. As a reminder, feel free to put questions in the chat. Also feel free to unmute yourself. I will be asking you if you would like to ask ask your question live. For our next question, how does your sales and product team work together internally? Do you have combined meetings, Slack groups? How do they communicate?

Uh, great, great question. You know, of course they, they communicate on Slack. I think everybody does. We do have meetings, though we try to have meetings with purpose. We are a very customer-focused organization, and so I'll give you a few examples. One of the ways that they work together is through the pods that I mentioned earlier when we kicked the session off and you asked me about those, those 3 opening questions. And I mentioned the way that we, we go to market in a startup, in a startup model. In that scenario, our product manager is married at the hip with a product marketing manager and a sales specialist. And so this, in this scenario, we'd have someone on the sales team that comes from within, has deep experience in the industry, and the competitive landscape that that particular product module maps to. They have meetings, they may, they may meet multiple times a day, because they're on a shared journey to launch that product into the market, find initial customer traction, document reference stories, feed all that into content that's being released by the product marketing team, that's then being handed over to the integrated demand gen and marketing functions that are that are operating at a platform level. And then those teams are working together to build sales enablement that is taken then to the broader sales teams that operate within the regions globally. And then this is one of the ways that our product and sales organization works together in complete alignment. More broadly speaking, when we think about our platform sales teams that live within the geos, they're very vocal in feedback. And we work, you know, whether it's sales-oriented feedback or customer feedback coming from the customer success functions. We pull all that together, we capture it in a system, and then we get— we synthesize it for our product teams. And so we capture, like, for example, maybe feedback from customers and prospects around product gaps, whether that's functionality or, you know, product, product usage, whatever it might be. We capture it in a system, then we assign that— that system then is mapped to an opportunity on the presale side or an existing customer value on the post-sale side. And then we, through that, we can look at dashboards with the product team and we do that weekly to see, you know, how do they prioritize the, how does product prioritize that feedback back into engineering? And within engineering, how do we prioritize what the engineering teams are working on so we have the most impact of supporting our current customers as well as our prospects for growth? In this way, it allows us to really organize and align the product and engineering teams to the business versus the product and engineering teams having to hear from, you know, 100 sellers and try to make sense of it.

Thank you for the tangible example on that one. A lot more clear than just Slack. We have a lot of questions coming in through the chat, so I'm going to toss it over to Claire to ask her question.

Hello.

So my question was about a systems perspective, and the context on this is that in general, Um, wherever I've worked, if a customer goes through the assisted sales journey, they are then not able to take advantage of any PLG opportunities because everything has to be done via their AE. So I'm just wondering if you have any advice on how to weave PLG into the customer journey, like once they've already purchased through an assisted sale, how they can manage their own upgrades, added features, and all of that.

Yeah, great, great question. And by the way, hi Claire, and thank you for joining today. So I would say that for my first response is just don't restrict it. I mean, that's the simplest answer, right? And that's the— and that's how we handle it. The reason that we do that is because again, it kind of goes back to one of the comments I made on the slides. If you think about that customer adoption funnel and then moving all the way through your growth lifecycle post-customer acquisition, what you want to do is marry together you know, your, your, the resources that you have and your human capital and your people, which is fantastic. But you also want to systematically support that journey. And, and to the degree that you can educate customers live in the product, you'll reduce the drag on your, on your resources internally, as well as unlock velocity for, for your purchase decision or, or, you know, further adoption once the customer has landed initially, there's going to be that adoption journey where they're ramping up on your product and going, you know, enterprise-wide. And if you don't support that through a product-led motion, even post-sale, you'll find yourself building large sets of teams to sort of push customers through it. And I would— the other reason you want to not restrict it in that way is, is things can change in companies, you know, you don't have control over a customer's internal politics, you don't even have visibility to that most of the time. And people change jobs and the champion that was a champion for your solution might go somewhere else and be replaced by somebody that, that likes one of your competitors, right. And so the quicker you, you systematically push adoption and, you know, decrease that time to value for your customer, whether that's with your CS teams, services, partners, or even through, you know, self-service learning journeys, in the product, you want to bring all of those resources together so you get the quickest time to value because that's going to minimize your risk of replacement in the account. It's also going to maximize your opportunity for expansion.

Thank you.

Yeah, great. Our next question comes from Ryan, if you would like to unmute yourself.

Hi, Jason.

Hi, Ryan.

I'm curious, you know, as you evolved into and evolved this at Harness, you obviously you showed the normalization of the bowtie, so to speak, from the recurring perspective. And you got your unit economics flowing, all that kind of stuff. And I'm curious, how do you, as you're building this growth formula, growth model, are you enabling the people executing on the, at the user buyer level, or are you actually executing via your go-to, you know, go-to-market motion, meaning inbound enterprise, you know, via partner? How exactly are you enabling it so that you can do the audible and, and hit people live when it's in the moment, so to speak?

Yeah, that's a great question. If I could echo back and just make sure that I completely understand the heart of your question, if you help me out with that, that'd be good. I think what you're asking is how do we enable this modern go-to-market motion that serves both a PLG or self-service journey as well as a sales-led motion? Is that—

Yeah. So, you know, did you build your playbooks internally to support the actions when you want, you know, at the moment of truth, so to speak? Did you, how did you build those? Was it by function or was it more by go-to-market motion? Because you're squeezing in the middle, right? You're getting PLG and you're getting enterprise outreach and then you're focused on different segments and you don't want your people stepping on toes and undoing. You want things to happen a certain way, but then you also want to empower your organization to say, well, hey, I'm a good quarterback and I'm going to go, you know, Utah, Utah, right? You know, and dump it to the tight end.

So yeah, I actually— to be 100% transparent here, this wasn't entirely seamless in the beginning when we introduced PLG. We had some starts and stops in that process because, you know, we're all human. We all have previous experiences and you bring those experiences and your trainings to that interaction and the way they execute your job. And of course, we train them, but— there were— we had a portion of our enterprise sellers in particular that had, you know, further along in their career that had prior trainings that really wanted to stick to a BVA before they engage in a trial or a POV. And to some degree, you know, the leadership team just had to kind of repeat that it's just not up to us, right? Like, of course, We train, we have a, we build our own BVA tool. We train everybody on that process. We, we, I was just with a CIO of a major financial institution this morning, having those conversations, and they're running a managed POV, which is fantastic. But they may at the same time, they're, there could be dozens. And you know, in this organization, that organization, there's probably 20, 30 other self-service journeys that are being served through PLG simultaneously while we're in in that sales-led cycle, PLG is existing in that account. In fact, when you see those two things happening simultaneously, it's a positive intent signal for your buyer's journey, right? And so you want to, again, you want to enable both of them. And the key to that is just you're going to have to train your sales team with intention. You're going to have to help them understand why, have to help them understand how it's good for them. And then at some point, you'll probably have to revisit that multiple times, like we have and we do. As the teams grow. But the idea here is if you're, if you're, if you understand how to, if you're comfortable executing your sales-led sales process, you should be comfortable the way that that quarterback is in shifting audible plays to be able to recognize the customer's intent in that, in that interaction. Right. And so if, if they come inbound, if you, if you find them outbound, that's, you know, if you go outbound through PG, you know, cold calling, emailing, etc. PG, pipeline generation efforts. You're engaged in a conversation from the get-go. You're gonna have alignment and communication. You're gonna be running discovery. You're gonna get the requirements. They're gonna get the current state. All it's just naturally unfolds into that sales-led motion. When it's inbound, you know, that's where it can, it can vary quite a bit. And the way that we try to teach our teams is is if an inbound solution or an inbound prospect doesn't mean that you, you abandon a business value assessment or abandon a managed POV. It just means that you might get to it in a different sequence, right? Versus a full self-service journey, you know, you might actually talk to that successful prospect who becomes a customer and runs a credit card after a great product experience. You might never talk to them in the process, in the process of being a prospect. And that happens often. And I'll give you some real examples real quick and we'll wrap it up in the next one. But, you know, at Harness, we have an all-hands every 2 weeks. As part of that all-hands, we highlight a couple of new, new wins, you know, customer acquisitions, expansions, etc. Just this last week, we highlighted a big, you know, multimillion-dollar, multiyear win. That took, that took over a year to run this big sales-led campaign. At the same time, you know, we have examples of high velocity, 2 calls, total time invested is an hour and 45 minutes. And that's because it's off the back of PLG converted to a positive product experience, converted to self-service, swiped a credit card for a couple grand, and then came back and said, hey, I want to use this widely. Hey, let's negotiate some terms, or I want to understand your architecture, and we get through that, we can negotiate some terms. And we give a couple calls, invested in it, and the sales rep, you know, signs them up on an annual contract. So you have to be able to support these things simultaneously. And in the end, the thing that we remind ourselves, teams, of is that, like, just run the math out. If you can, as an individual— Ryan, if you're a seller as an individual and you have, uh, your resources around you, maybe an SE, you know, a partner person, the, the 2 or 3 of you together as in running that territory for your company, you only have so much throughput. There's only so many opportunities that you can handle in a given period of time. But if you are willing and flexible enough to, to execute in your sales-led motion, but also benefit from product-led, you can, you can reach many more people, you know, you can reach a factor of 10x or more, more prospects simultaneously. You can get through those, those, those POVs might actually come in the way of credit card purchases. And you're just running half of your sales cycle instead of all of it. And you're going to get a lot more done. And so you have to paint the picture of how it benefits the rep individually to get them to buy in, to be adaptable and flexible against their processes.

Appreciate it. Thanks.

Yeah.

Great. I am going to toss it over to Michelle, who has a question in the chat.

Thank you. Hey, Jason, thanks for your time today. Quick question for you. You had mentioned at the beginning of the call that from a product-led perspective, product-led growth perspective, that's where the education comes in. And you had noted that marketing does their digital campaigns, maybe some ABM. I wanted to get some clarity on that comment and better understand where you think marketing sits from an education perspective, right? I assume education is content, making sure that there's something to read, watch, listen for prospective buyers, or users, as you call them. So how do you differentiate between sales and product-led growth and the role that marketing plays in educating the market in order to create that demand?

Eric, thanks, Michelle. It's a great question. And, you know, I had to deliver that content in about 15 minutes or less. So a lot of it was very high level. But the, the, the marketing team is, is supporting both. And so the way that we execute that here at Harness is we have a product marketing organization that I mentioned is part of those product module pods, and they are working with the rest of the integrated demand services that are, that are part of the platform marketing and company-level marketing, or what we would call enterprise-level marketing. Execution. And so, you know, there we have event— we have strategic and field events teams that work hand in hand with the PMMs to understand, you know, per product module, what events do we want to show up at versus the what we're doing for a company level. Same is digital, true for digital. As you look at, you know, the digital investments we make at a company level, at a platform level, and then we drive some of that input coming out of the PMMs, which is at a specific product level. So the, my more, more broad response to your question is that marketing is, yes, marketing is involved. And the answer is yes, marketing is involved in both sales-led and product-led motions. And the way that we try to do that is, is we support the sales team with content, and to enable them to go outbound on the PG campaigns, we support the sales team with inbound coverage from the, the targeted buyer personas that we expect to click, you know, meeting requests and, and demo requests for, which is your typical, more typical sort of inbound marketing actions. And the marketing team is involved in, in working with the product team and generating content that then gets fed into a developer hub that is part of that learning journey as well, which is going to feed the PLG signups. And in that way, our marketing, you know, our marketing team, depending on the marketing subfunction within marketing, they have goals that align to different parts of that pipeline process. And so that's how we, you know, marketing is involved in all of it. It's not either or, and they're a critical part of all of it. The key is, is driving, defining alignment and then driving accountability through goal setting. And then that's going to, once you do that, it's going to put a lot of pressure on your organization also to be crisp in your data analysis, so that attribution is properly accounted for. And that's gonna open up a whole nother marketing conversation, which is multi-touch attribution. And what if they come in one channel or, you know, they come in PLG and become sales-led, you know. And so the way that we're currently, and that has been a challenge for us as we stood some of these things up and it puts pressure on us to build multi-touch attribution, which is a whole nother marketing conversation. But we're going down the path of really trying to seek to understand accept the fact that it's gonna be omnichannel, right? And so if we're doing this right, marketing will have investment and influence over the PLG journey and working hand in hand with the PLG growth team and product teams at the same time that they're gonna be critical to sales-led motions and all the traditional enterprise marketing methodologies that supports that. And so what we wanna do is try to understand, you know, the difference between these personas and buyers in users and what combination of support, you know, supporting content, supporting omnichannel experiences and human support can we give them that maximizes conversions and decreases the time it takes to get there. So increases velocity. And by going to a multi-touch attribution goal system, you can, you know, there doesn't have to be trade-offs and then you can constantly pull the levers.

Thank you.

Jason, we have maybe 2 more minutes left. We do have more questions in the chat. I'm going to hand it over to Jamie to ask the last one. Um, if we did not get to your question, we could sit here for another 3 hours, it sounds like. So please reach out to Jason M. Lemkin on LinkedIn. But Jamie, if you want to close us out with your question.

Well, I'm honored to get the last one in. So, hey, Jason, lots of great content today, and I really enjoyed your discussion around the IDPs to open up the conversation today. In addition to that, like, how are you building great culture over at Harness? I know a couple of people over there and I hear a lot of great things.

Thanks.

Thanks again for joining today, Jamie. Appreciate it. And thank you for the compliments. You know, I guess it's a— it's an interesting question. If you were asking that question a year ago, I'd say we throw great parties. But, you know, we do less of that now with, with fewer people in offices and on a consistent basis. And then, of course, the economic challenges environment, we're trying to be fiscally responsible like everybody is these days. And so I think it really just comes down to having a great set of principles that power the culture and then trying to do your best to live by them and support the people that you've put in these positions, because ultimately that's the investment that's going to make or break a company. I'd say that's the general answer. If you were to ask an OpenAI bot that question, they'd probably sound a lot like me in that response. So apologies for that. Generic sentiment there, but I believe it's the truth. And, and, you know, and to be, to be real, I mean, I, I give you, I'll give you an example. So I speak at all of our incoming boot camps when new hires join the company. And the last slide, the last two slides that I present, one is the company culture slide, which I'm sure all of you have a version of. But our company culture slide, we use it in backgrounds. I use it with customers. I use it at the new hire boot camp. And I try to remind them that, you know, as we're growing, we're over 800 people now, about 850 people now here growing really quickly. And, and every new hire class represents the future of your, your culture, right? So that slide is great. I've been here 4 and a half years at Harness, and I can have my own idea around what the culture is, but ultimately it's defined by every new hire class that comes in, because 6 months from then, 12 months from then, they're defining that culture for everybody that's interacting with them, and so on and so forth. And, and so the effort to, to really make it front and center and be mindful of it and not have culture rot is real. And the second thing I try to do is to remind people, like put up a slide that has kind of some fun moments that we've celebrated throughout the journey so far at Harness and just remind them that we have a unique opportunity here. You know, it's, if you're on this session and you're building a technology company, you're participating in, you know, some of the fastest enterprise value creation that humanity's ever seen in the way that you can start a company, solve a problem, build a product, and then exponentially grow value around that. It just is unmatched in technology and software. And so just remind them that that is a unique and special opportunity for all of us, but it's not dependent on any of us answering our phones at 3:00 AM and saving somebody's life. So don't take yourselves too seriously, and we'll all enjoy the journey together.

Together, right?

And so, uh, there's a lot that goes into it. You know, we have every other Friday is a TGIF Friday, or, you know, sorry, every other month we have a TGIF Friday, encourage people to not work and spend time with their families. There's all these other program elements that go into the culture, but in the end it comes down to the people and, and, uh, trying to be present and mindful about it all the time.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jason M. Lemkin. I wish every session ended with throw great parties. Um, that should be every key takeaway. Um, but thank you. This is amazing. I know We did not answer every question in the chat. Please reach out over LinkedIn. The recording will go out. Thank you so much for joining us, and please join us again next week where we will look at a session on Focus on the Fundamentals: How to Scale for Profitability. All right. Thank you so much again, Jason M. Lemkin, and goodbye everyone.