The Pocus Unlocking Revenue Podcast

Emily Kramer, former marketer at Asana and Carta, shares insights on building high-growth B2B companies. Topics include different GTM motions, hiring strategies, challenges of a hybrid startup, role of product marketers, and the importance of conversion rates in marketing strategies.

We partnered with Kyle and the folks at OpenView on our second annual Product-Led Sales Benchmark survey. In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Kyle and Alexa dissect the survey results and share their SaaS trend predictions for 2023. Listen in for insights on topics like: 👉 How are customers buying products? 👉 PQAs vs. PQLs 👉 Pros and cons of reverse trials 👉 The art and science of ICP definitions and lead scoring 👉 What PLS metrics should you be tracking? 👉 What sales roles are a PLG companies prioritizing? ... and more! 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Kyle: Kyle Poyar is Operating Partner at OpenView, the expansion stage VC. He helps OpenView’s portfolio companies fuel growth and become market leaders. ​In his past life, Kyle was a Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners, the leading consulting firm specializing in monetization. When he's not writing about growth for his Growth Unhinged Newsletter, you can find him playing tennis 🎾, cooking Mediterranean food 🍳, hiking 🥾, attempting to finish a Barry’s workout 💪, or hanging out in Boston.

Kenneth Vincent, former Director of Sales at ClickUp, shares the stories of ClickUp’s transition from PLG to Product-Led Sales. What it took to get PLG buy-in, the process behind defining and operationalizing PQLs at ClickUp, balancing automation and customization when it comes to sales outreach, and the details of ClickUp’s self-serve and land-and-expand motions. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Kenneth: Kenneth, former Global Director of Sales at ClickUp has been an early employee at 3 unicorns helping those early teams build a business and GTM strategy. Prior to ClickUp, Kenneth held senior enterprise sales roles at Goodera, App Annie, and Yammer.

Clearbit's Julie Beynon and Colin White discuss the maturity and operationalization of Clearbit's lead qualification engine, the importance of buy-in from GTM teams, and their failsafe to prevent quality leads from slipping away. They also touch on lead qualification process, challenges in automation, the role of intuition in sales, and the technical aspects of their lead qualification engine.

Tune in to hear Eleanor Dorfman’s, Sales Leader at Retool, playbook on building Retool’s sales process (using DoorDash as a real case study), defining Retool’s primary sales channels, and how she structured the sales organization. Eleanor also shares her tips on when to start an outbound sales motion, how to find expansion opportunities, and handling sales compensation. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Eleanor: Eleanor Dorfman has been Sales Leader at Retool since November 2020. At that point, there were only about three account executives, one sales engineer, and just a few sales development reps. Today, the sales org has grown to include around 30 AEs, many SEs, and an entire SDR team. Previously, at the customer data platform Segment, she also worked to build out the company’s customer success operations team before pivoting to creating an expansion sales team, renewals team, and a new business sales team.

In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, AJ Bruno, CEO and Co-Founder of QuotaPath, delves into topics like: sales comp at QuotaPath, sales comp trends, guiding business metrics, how to develop sales comp plans around usage-based pricing, and company cultures that incentivize value. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About AJ: AJ Bruno is the co-founder and CEO for sales compensation management platform QuotaPath, the host of an exciting series called Value Props where he interviews sales professionals while flying his Beechcraft Baron 58 (with his commercial pilot’s license, of course!), and an experienced leader in all things go to market — with a special focus on sales compensation.

In this episode of Unlocking Revenue, Allison Pickens from dbt Labs dives into the role of Customer Success within self-serve models with topics like: the overlap between customers success, sales-assist, and sales, how the role of customer success is not only present but expanding within product-led growth organizations, choosing the right level of simplicity vs. complexity when building your product adoption and expansion journey, and scalable, self-serve tactics that help supplement customer success. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About Allison: Allison Pickens, former COO of Gainsight, is current solo GP, and independent board director at dbt Labs, a product-led, high-growth startup. Allison is also a prolific writer and speaker about customer success and all things related to scaling operations (download the first-ever PLS playbook to see Allison’s awesome insights!)

Tune in to learn about Ramli John’s — Director of Content at Appcues — three-step onboarding formula that drives retention, his thoughts on who owns and who informs onboarding in a modern product-led company, how to deliver the best onboarding experience per customer segment, and how to convince your sales-led organization to adopt product-led onboarding. 🪄 Read episode takeaways here. About⁠ Ramli John⁠: Ramli is Director of Content at Appcues, PLG coach at ProductLed, and "Product-Led Onboarding" author. He uses his multidisciplinary skills in marketing, design, and software development to help product-led SaaS companies analyze their whole customer's journey and funnel to identify growth opportunities to 2-3X their MRR. Often, that means designing and implementing experiments to increase activation rate (trial-to-paid or free-to-paid conversions), decrease churn rate or increase average revenue per user (ARPU) On the side, he’s the creator, producer, and host of the Growth Marketing Today podcast.

Pete Prowitt, Head of Revenue at Stytch, formerly VP of Revenue at Rewatch, discusses challenges and opportunities as the first sales hire at a PLG company, tailoring sales models to unique company needs, hiring first high sales hires, transitioning from user growth to revenue growth, and defining enterprise and market segments.