How to Scale Sales Without Screwing Up Your PLG Motion

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Apr 16, 2025

Join April Dunford, a product positioning expert and author of 'Obviously Awesome', as she shares her insights on optimizing product-led sales strategies. She discusses the common pitfalls teams encounter, like unclear ideal customer profiles and the dangers of premature sales involvement. April emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between product and economic buyers and leveraging existing customers for better engagement. Learn how to successfully scale sales while maintaining synergy with your product-led growth efforts.

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INSIGHT

Users Are Not Buyers

In product-led growth, users and buyers often differ; economic buyers have different value criteria than end users.
Identifying the real decision maker is essential to successful sales and adoption.

INSIGHT

The Shadow IT Opportunity

Shadow IT represents a hidden opportunity where users adopt products without formal organizational approval.
Many companies miss upsell chances by not identifying economic buyers within their existing user base.

ANECDOTE

Postman's PLG to Sales Shift

Postman evolved from a free open-source API testing tool to a strategic sales-oriented platform covering the full API lifecycle.
They transitioned from focusing on developers to selling to economic buyers with a different product positioning.

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Most teams are messing up their opportunity to scale their product into higher-value deals—without even realizing it.

They’re following someone else’s Product-Led Sales playbook. ICPs are fuzzy. Qualification is weak. Sales motions aren’t landing.

Some teams are stuck in the messy middle: a PLG motion that’s working (sort of), but sales is jumping in too early—or not at all. Customers are confused. Deals stall.

Others know it’s time to evolve beyond pure PLG—but aren’t sure how to layer in sales without breaking what’s already working.

In this episode of The Forget the Funnel Podcast, Georgiana Laudi and April Dunford break down the real meaning of product-led sales, and the common mistakes that keep even experienced teams stuck—like unclear ICPs, poor qualification, and misapplied sales motions. Whether you’re adding sales to a PLG motion, or trying to make your sales-led org more product-led, this episode will help you avoid costly missteps and find clarity fast.

What you'll learn:

Why PLG alone isn’t enough to close bigger deals
The real role of sales in a product-led motion (and how to get it right)
How to identify product-qualified accounts and avoid jumping the gun

What’s in the episode:

(00:00) What is product-led sales, really?
(03:00) Why your users ≠ your buyers—and why that matters
(06:00) The shadow IT opportunity most teams miss
(09:30) Postman’s evolution from PLG to strategic sales
(14:00) The biggest misstep: Sales jumping in too early
(20:00) What smart outbound looks like today
(25:00) Faux freemium and low-risk PLG experiments
(30:00) How to know when your product is ready to support sales

Links & Resources

As always, you can learn more about Forget The Funnel here: