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Isford: Sales teams in PLG companies require a distinct team composition

Lauryn Isford · Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 19, 2023 · at 9:50

Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth at Notion, explains how layering sales onto a product-led growth engine changes the sales team's primary role.

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“If you decide that something like a product-led motion makes sense and that users should be able to experience your product and learn its value by being inside the product and becoming a user, then developing a sales team later on takes on a very different flavor because your reps will be working with existing customers who might even be paying customers And selling additional value on top of what they've already experienced, which of course is very different than emailing outbound and trying to find people who haven't been exposed to your product yet and teaching them that both of course should be done together if you ultimately want to build that upmarket motion, but the composition of your sales team will actually look and feel very different because of the nature of how you find and qualify And convert leads.”

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