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Growth strategies employed by the hottest product-led SaaS companies! 🚀 For more exciting content and to get added to our mailing list check out our website.

  1. From Product-Led to Sales-Led ft. Jon Widawski, Co-founder & CEO, Maze

    04/06/2023

    From Product-Led to Sales-Led ft. Jon Widawski, Co-founder & CEO, Maze

    Figma did it for design. Slack did it for team comms. Zoom did the same for meetings. Salesforce - CRM. Every once in a while, a tool comes along that pushes the envelope of our imaginations and brings our presumptions crashing to the ground. And reinvents how sh*t gets done. In 2023, user research and testing aren’t quite the same anymore. And for that, we have Maze and Jo Widawski to thank. And if you’re reading this and thinking “What do I need usability testing for?” - you’re not alone. But you probably will be. Jo started up in 2018 with a mission to democratize testing. Within 3 years, Maze had built the foundations of a new category, washed away the demons of complexity it was mired in, and put a new weapon in the hands of - not just researchers, but designers, product managers, marketers, and many others. Today, over 60,000 brands ranging from Uber and HP to McKinsey and GE use Maze for user research and usability testing. Building a new category is no easy feat. Jo will be the first to tell you: “Building a company is a lot about shooting arrows and then during targets around them afterward, and saying it was your vision all along. When we started, we really believed that we just needed to build better research.” With the targets now drawn, we thought it’d be worth getting to the bottom of how the hell Jo and Maze did it. This is the story of how. 00:00 Price against value 00:31 Tweet Reactions 06:33 Verbalizing a category 08:50 Introduction 11:52 Maze's GTM evolution 17:44 Product taking the center stage 19:41 Switching to Enterprise 22:38 Layering sales in PLG 26:42 Early branding investments 29:08 Design pet peeves 31:32 Rapid Fire 34:02 Up next for Maze

    35 min
  2. The 'Enterprise Sales Gene' ft. D'Arcy Doyle, SVP Sales - Productboard

    03/30/2023

    The 'Enterprise Sales Gene' ft. D'Arcy Doyle, SVP Sales - Productboard

    D’Arcy spent 11 years at Oracle, selling database management systems on either side of the dot-com bubble bursting. He is the man you’d get if you wanted to carve out an early advantage in the enterprise sector while going head-to-head with only one of the most viral tools of all time. Box became Dropbox’s worst nightmare in the enterprise sector during D’Arcy’s seven years there. He’s who you’d get when you’ve cracked SMB and mid-market and are now beginning to go from $10M in ARR to $100M. You want a man like him at the helm if you’ve found PMF, just raised a Series B round, and are beginning to set your sights on the Fortune 500. And so late last year, we sat down with the current SVP of Sales at Productboard in an attempt to uncover the building blocks of the enterprise sales gene. We cover a lot of ground here with D'Arcy, including: 00:00 The Dropbox Problem 1:50 Meet D'Arcy 3:23 Early lessons on identifying ICP 5:11 Choosing sales 7:09 Priorities today as SVP Sales, Productboard 8:02 Dealing with a recession as an early-stage company 10:12 Economic headwinds 2008 vs 2023 10:59 Selling during the dotcom bubble 13:44 Selling in times of budget cuts 15:15 Value engineering 17:26 Speaking to the C-suite 18:23 Box vs. Dropbox 23:04 Role of marketing in enterprise sales 24:38 Trade shows 27:25 Where PLG fails 30:15 Setting up a post-sales process 32:31 Does persuasion play a role in enterprise selling? 34:58 Traits he looks for while hiring 36:20 What separates the best from the rest in sales? 39:09 Closing an 8-figure deal 40:39 Differences in selling software in the '90s vs '23 44:22 Differences in software buyers in the'90s vs '23 46:16 How to deal with buyers' preconceived notions 47:21 Next steps for Productboard's GTM 53:14 Building customer-centric products 54:15 Rapid Fire

    1h 2m

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Growth strategies employed by the hottest product-led SaaS companies! 🚀 For more exciting content and to get added to our mailing list check out our website.