Insight
Product-led free trials should offer the full product, not diluted versions
“Give folks the full product. Let them experience the whole thing instead of limiting your trials. That's what I'd always tell folks is don't limit your trials to some diluted version of your product. Cause then your customer is going to get a diluted experienc…”
Insight
Product marketers should actively deliver sales pitches to prospects on calls
“Another thing I'd call out there is they should partner with sales to pitch a prospect. So what that means is product marketing should be on almost, I wouldn't say every call, but could be almost every call actually doing the pitch and seeing how that resonate…”
Insight
Companies mistakenly rely on contractors as band-aids instead of full-time hires
“When you're under resourced, this happens internally at Zapier and it's happened virtually everywhere else I've been at. You try to find a temporary solution. Contractors, consultants, these band-aids for things that seemingly that you would describe as one of…”
Insight
Define an anti-charter when hiring for broad or ambiguous roles
“In my, one of my first principles is focus on the anti-charter of that hiring. So oftentimes when you're hiring a role, a lot of this happens in marketing. You mentioned customer success. So that's another one as well, where you have clarity on what you think …”
Insight
Early-stage startups should hire generalists rather than highly specialized GTM roles
“As best you can do not specialize early, like focusing on hiring top-down that can navigate challenges and not just fill a role. That's the key thing here.”
Disclosure
Zapier ideates marketing campaigns by reverse-engineering its competitors' failures
“The recommendation in something we have been doing internally a little bit is oftentimes you could look at competitors or, and you look at things that work, you try to do the thing that they did that worked, but we try to reverse engineer competitors' failures…”
Insight
Base human sales engagement on problem complexity, not customer journey stage
“Really what the way I encourage folks to think about PLG and sales is you want to add human engagement and it shouldn't be segmented by stage of customer journey, but really the complexity of the problem to solve across the customer journey.”
Insight
PLG companies should use their first sales reps to gather funnel insights
“Anybody introducing a human into a PLG motion, use the humans to learn. That's what I'll, like, that's what I'll leave you with is, like, wherever you inject a human in a PLG motion, PLG is the most efficient model. You actually aren't using humans in there, r…”
Disclosure
Zapier added a sales-led motion to handle complex enterprise deals
“Over the past few years, we've started to integrate a sales or human touch motion, and this really caters to these higher complexity problems and use cases to solve for businesses, which in turn introduces all these things, different stakeholders buying proces…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier had only two salespeople and one CSM when its CRO joined
“When I arrived here, we actually had two salespeople and one customer success person, but we were still trying to prove out that model. We were not ready to scale.”
Disclosure
Zapier's sales hiring rubric requires support and customer success mindsets
“If you look at our rubric, even as we're hiring for sales, It has a little bit of that support and customer success mentality behind it. Partially because the nature of our product and the PLG motion where like customers have started already experiencing the p…”
