Esben Friis-Jensen

"When you have time for product... then you kind of bend back into that product space and a bit less than the sales space." - Saurabh Jain of TrialKey. Product Led Growth Leaders Episode 25 features TrialKey's Saurabh Jain and dives deep into the journey of being product-led from the start of your venture. Hear how companies sometimes shift towards a sales-led approach in the middle stages of growth. Discover the challenges of maintaining the right focus, building the right products, and keeping confidence high. Finally, learn how successful organizations strike a balance between sales and product once they've established a strong customer base and cash flow. Tune in now to gain insights on navigating your growth curve and finding the right balance for success! 🎧💡 #ProductLedGrowth #StartupJourney #PodcastEpisode #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #SalesLed #Sales

9

Finsire has recently started its learning series - Ideally by chatting with the best folks in the Industry. Here, with Siddharth Shetty, Co-founder and CTO of Account Aggregator (AA) from DigiSahamati Foundation, we speak about the data exchange's inception, growth, and future in India. - We use AA for various reasons, including pushing boundaries in India's data exchange layer with various use cases. - It's been about three years since it went live, and over 70 million cumulative Indian accounts are linked. - One-of-a-kind data sharing network from India that is not seen anywhere across the globe, baring Singapore with https://lnkd.in/gyrCQtVQ - Different approach to protect consumers as compared to the previous models that existed to attain consumer data by various methods used by Plaid or Salt Edge Onemoney Finvu (Cookiejar Technologies) Protean eGov Technologies Anumati by Perfios AA NADL - Account Aggregator Computer Age Management Services Limited KFin Technologies Ltd. Enjoy - Please click on the link below and watch the video!

96

The OneSignal product team continues to ship fast. Q2 was a record-breaking quarter in many dimensions. Here are just a few of the things we released: Messaging ◦ Rolled out a new email onboarding flow, enabling customers to try OneSignal for email without needing to change their DNS settings ◦ Rolled out an updated SMS onboarding flow, making it easier for customers to get started sending SMS by bringing their own Twilio account or sending directly through OneSignal ◦ Improved the detail and consistency of the analytics shown on message reports ◦ Added “Audience Activity” reporting to In-App Messages and Live Activities to help customers see how each recipient engaged with the message ◦ Made it easier for customers to use personalization tags in email messages ◦ Increased the granularity available to customers when setting frequency capping for push notifications ◦ Improved security with IP-based allowlisting for the OneSignal API ◦ Made it easier to troubleshoot cases where SMS messages couldn’t be sent ◦ Added the ability for customers to buy a domain to send email if they don’t already have one Orchestration ◦ Made Journeys available to free users ◦ Made it easier to see what types of messages are being sent from a Journey ◦ Added “Audience Activity” reporting to Journeys to help customers see which users have received or engaged with each message Integrations ◦ Introduced the next generation of our integrations with Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Segment. These updated integrations make it easier and more powerful for customers to sync data bidirectionally with these platforms Misc ◦ Released brand new website, putting Journeys front and center and better highlighting our product features ◦ Greatly improved nearly all of our documentation pages, and created a new landing page to help find the most important information ◦ Rolled out a completely new pricing model, based on Mobile MAU instead of Subscribers.  ◦ Made it easier to navigate around the OneSignal dashboard, with better information hierarchy, and a collapsible sidebar to better utilize available space And we have a whole lot more coming in the next few weeks!

75

1 Comment

The one metric that I keep hearing markops and revops folks still struggling with to automate - Meeting outcomes. What happened to the qualified lead, and the meeting that was booked with them? I keep hearing this on a regular basis in different forums, and have come across several truly ingenious workarounds. (Gong + Make dot com based on meeting duration, to update the CRM and the likes). This is a solved problem for RevenueHero customers. Fully automated. And sales people willingly press 1 button from time to time, right within Slack, or their calendars, and no one has to ask them to. Here is how it happens - 🤝 Forms, email campaigns, follow up links, are all connected to RevenueHero to book meetings. 🔗 RevenueHero's CRM integration, instantly logs the meeting activity against the contact/lead in the CRM the moment the meeting is booked, and assigns the meeting to the sales rep based on a credit system. ⏱ The moment the scheduled time of the meeting elapses, RevenueHero updates the activity status to completed. (Cancellations and reschedules are automatically updated). Here comes the important part. 💰 A notification is instantly triggered to the owner of the meeting, confirming if the meeting did complete. If it did, no action necessary. If it didn't, they click a single button to confirm the no-show. And sales folks click that button EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a no-show. Why? Because they're credited that meeting back when it actually is a no-show. And all of this data is pushed right back to your CRMs. So at the end of the month, quarter and year, you always have the latest meeting outcome information right within your CRM. Your ops teams need to focus on processes and data to enable clinical GTM execution for your company. Not wrangling together tools for simple admin tasks. Want to learn more about the kind of data RevenueHero helps unearth and automate for your ops folks? Check out the link to the event we recently held, and register. We'll send you the recording and a give away with all the neat dashboard metrics RevenueHero enables. #MakeBuyingSimple

19

1 Comment

MyPOV: BT150 zeitgeist: Dear SaaS vendors: Your customers are pissed https://bit.ly/4eAOdCJ Enterprise customers are miffed about SaaS vendors trying to double and sometimes triple prices, layering AI-services that may not deliver returns and prioritizing revenue quotas over value.

2

Salesforce is getting pummeled in the markets (-5%) on the announcement of late-stage acquisition discussions with Informatica, a cloud data management platform with a market cap of about $11B. With $1.6B of revenue at a 77% gross margin growing 12% YoY (ARR growing 30%+ YoY), Informatica is a very healthy business that seems well positioned from a market perspective with a product focus on Data and AI, two of the biggest buzzwords in tech today. In the last year, Salesforce has been pushing its Data Cloud product, repositioning the company away from traditional CRM and towards the data layer at the foundation of an enterprise's entire business. Informatica definitely adds to this narrative, focused on the ETL side of data movement and processing and comes with tight relationships with data warehouse players like Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the large cloud providers. Data Cloud is Salesforce's fastest-growing segment by far, up 90% YoY. It's surprising to see the stock getting beat up this bad on the news. Informatica seems like a solid acquisition consistent with company strategy and at a current trading price 7.2x revenue, not overly expensive given the solid margin profile of the business. We'll see if these two move towards a deal and where the price lands, but overall this seems like a good get for #CRM

39

6 Comments

Composability extends beyond just CDPs. It's fundamental to categorizing a large majority of MarTech today. (Kudos to Scott Brinker for helping us see how big this ecosystem is and also Kudos to Tejas Manohar for making this term a mainstay in MarTech 😁 ). We are just used to calling it "Best of Breed" this whole time. But that never really helped us understand how this large bucket of solutions can work together. Some of these solutions may integrate, some may overlap, and others should probably not be used together. But how do we know how to best utilize this large ecosystem of tools? I am excited to take on this focus area of MarTech and help educate on how to tackle composability within your solution architectures.

26

4 Comments

"Sometimes you have to take a step back, smaller role, company, comp, to amass learnings and growth so that you can move ahead with greater momentum." This advice comes from Amit Fulay, VP of Product at Microsoft. In a Fireside PM interview, he shared how his own step back to join a startup, though it involved a pay cut and losing his team, armed him with invaluable experience that ultimately fast-tracked his career. Amit's insight on "catapult opportunities" is just one of 10 powerful lessons he offered on navigating product management careers. Read the full blog post for more of his counterintuitive yet transformative advice, covering everything from focusing on customer problems to finding sponsors to enjoying the journey. Read the entire post here: https://lnkd.in/gdy2dn6D #ProductManagement #CareerAdvice #Microsoft

77

3 Comments

🎙️The latest episode of Arta Finance "Live Long and Prosper," features the incredible Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, CEO of Grammarly! In this episode, we cover topics that resonate deeply with me: AI in business, investing on a personal level, and hard-earned career wisdom. Here are three key takeaways: AI Innovations and Business Impact: Rahul shares how AI stands as the most disruptive technological force of our time, highlighting its immense potential to revolutionize productivity and interaction. He offers insights from the front lines on leveraging AI to enhance human communication, business operations and the critical need to stay adaptable in a fast-evolving tech landscape. Personal Finance and Investing: Rahul shares his financial journey, underscoring the importance of simplifying investment strategies. He advocates for consistent investing, preferring index funds over stock picking, and maintaining a disciplined, long-term approach to wealth building. Career Lessons: One of Rahul's most profound pieces of advice is the importance of tuning out external noise when making significant life decisions. He emphasizes the need to trust your inner voice, align your choices with your core values, and embrace the support of loved ones in your professional journey. This conversation is brimming with wisdom and inspiration. Thank you Rahul Roy-Chowdhury for doing this. I’m so lucky to host these conversations - and even more so to share it with the world. I hope you enjoy it! 🖖🎧

29

Hiring a Founding AE with 2-3 years of experience? Without clarity, face a great honeymoon but miserable marriage.  In a recent discussion with a coach of B2B sellers, she shared that the boom of 2020-2023 saw many sellers become order takers and lose their skills. The need to prospect went down and sellers working with eager buyers forgot how to create the momentum early in the sales process. Another trend is job openings for Founding AEs looking for 2-3 years of experience. This seems to be motivated by investor instructions to “keep things lean.” I’m all for lean, but make sure to look for some key AE traits to make sure you’re getting full value out of your precious cash. Simple things to look for: -Startup experience. Be extremely cautious of hiring sales reps who have only worked in enterprise companies. I hired a rep once who fit this profile who was talented at getting people on the phone but couldn’t build his own prospecting lists in salesforce given he was use to having someone do it for him. Not a good match. Ask for details around how they would setup their day to prospect, have they created their own decks, how would they run a POC, etc. Listen for the details and ask for examples. -Domain knowledge. Look for AEs who have sold to the ICPs you are targeting. If you have a product for developers, find someone who’s sold into that persona. If you have a RevOps tool, Marketing, etc. Ask for them to explain what’s unique about the persona they have experience with. -Company size experience. Early stage startups buy from each other. That’s part of the fun of a startup - the community and supporting each other. It’s a fast-paced transactional selling environment easily managed through PLG or an SMB sales motion. If you want to sell to enterprise, you need someone with that experience. It’s totally different momentum and skillset of navigating enterprise. Examples are powerful here. Ask them to describe a deal from start to finish and highlight what actions they took and who on their team was involved. Founders are busy. This list is simple and obvious but it will help you quickly screen for the skillset you need before you interview. I’d suggest even including questions on your job application. Looking at LinkedIn it seems each open role is getting hundreds of applicants within days so to save your sanity take an extra 10 min and include some open ended questions about this stuff on the submission form. Too many founders hire inexperienced sellers who are the wrong fit in terms of skillset -  prioritizing budget over effectiveness. As a result they hire someone who is cheap but does not perform. Think about other creative ways to hire an experienced sales executive or GTM leader and compensate more on commission percentage and equity than base salary. Al Rey and I are talking about this topic and other GTM challenges faced by Seed Founders at our event in June. Check it out here:

9

Tiering in OpenSearch is not an answer to scale observability and should be avoided as the immediate first step to cutting down your observability bill. Jumping on the tiering bandwagon leads to upfront investment in UltraWarm and Cold storage, which quickly leads to underutilization. Tiering in OpenSearch usually makes sense for stable systems where resources could be allotted statically and not many spikes or deviations are expected. We at CtrlB strongly believe that for rapidly evolving systems, tiering should be used as the last line of defense against high costs. #OpenSearch #Observability #ElasticSearch #LogManagement #Loki

24

Two frequently requested improvements are landing in Plain today: Conditional autoresponses, and thread discussions, which make it easier to discuss Plain threads with your team. The thread discussions feature in particular exemplifies one of the things I'm the most proud of about our culture: speed and end to end ownership. We went from our team discussing the feature request with customers, to planned, scoped, and in customers' hands for feedback in a matter of days. The way it works is also pretty magical: Paste a link to a Plain thread in Slack, and watch Plain automatically create a reference to that discussion in the thread. 😍 Go try it!

19

2 Comments

There are some interesting thoughts from Esben Friis-Jensen on PLG company org design in this article. Simple is almost always better. We’ve been thinking a lot about the VP GTM role and recently hired one for one of our portfolio companies to lead marketing and sales. Revenue leaders traditionally come out of the sales discipline. In PLG companies, which rely more heavily on inbound demand generation, self-service, and a sales-assist motion, I expect we’ll see more young PLG companies consolidate revenue teams under leaders from a marketing background. https://lnkd.in/gjhgYNuF

26

4 Comments

Thanks to Dave Rigotti and team for a wonderful #PLGTM conference in SF. I had great discussions with sales and marketing leaders and here are some observations on how PLG has evolved. Part 1: Time to rethink PLG practice ✔ While the core idea of PLG revolves around self-service adoption and user-driven growth, the practice has evolved, and companies are recognizing the need for a hybrid approach. ✔ For a lot of practitioners, PLG means self-service and users adopt the product without sales support. In practice, PLG leads to increases S&M costs increasing CAC. So, it no more just about building a product but putting the marketing $ behind it. ✔ Enterprise buyers are researching on their own and have good information before they come to the call. Huge number of prospects want sales help in navigating the value prop but want to try out themselves. ✔ PLG does lead to execution speed driving the awareness, showing the value, decreasing sales cycles and enabling simple and faster expansion. ✔ There is a myth that only startups or B2C companies use PLG and has to be bottom-up approach. While many of the companies we know and products we use might be B2C, lot of enterprise B2B companies are PLG as well. e.g. users can simply signup and start using Calendly, Canva or Airtable. teams can start using the products like loom, figma and datadog. ✔ Bringing customers need a hybrid approach in 2024. You need to provide user value created by the product and buyer value created by sales teams. Think about product market fit and product customer fit - leading to greater number of happy customers ✔ Every KPI you are measuring should drive an outcome. If you collect data, ask "what is it used for? " and "how does it help customer or adoption?" ✔ As the PLG model continues to evolve, companies must adapt and embrace a balanced approach that leverages the power of self-service adoption while providing sales support to drive customer success and long-term growth. Thanks to David Yockelson and Dave Boyce for providing engaging discussion on the core of PLG. #productledgrowth #productledsales #salesledgrowth #startups #salesleadership #productmanagement

62

8 Comments

Many don't understand how fast sales is changing. On the frontier, 1 growth ops pro is doing the job of 10+. They're using: ✅ Mailforge - Cold Email Infrastructure 📈 for infrastructure ✅ Smartlead for sending ✅ Clay (or OpenAI) for customization ✅ Apollo.io or BlueAcquire for company lists ✅ BetterContact for emails + verification And they have it automated with Make, n8n, etc. This leaves: SDRs to focus on warm-ups and cold calls. AEs to what they do best: closing. Scarcity drives innovation. #gotomarket #sales #data

74

23 Comments

We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

104

6 Comments

SaaStock just wrapped up an amazing conference in USA.... & Saastock's first-ever India event is happening right after, coincidence? Well, I can't comment on that 🤐 😉 So as they say: "Gear up for an exclusive evening with your fellow leaders and founders" ( Okay, not using ChatGPT for this one ) But yes, if you know SaaStock, you know what we are upto. ⚡ One of the brightest minds in Indian SaaS ecosystem are gathering to discuss: 1. How to setup a GTM Engine and scale it? - The Whatfix Story by Prakhar Jain ( hear from Whatfix's first ever hire ) 2. What is the right way and time to pivot? - The Locale.ai Pivot Theory by Aditi Sinha ( Forbes 30U30 Asia 🤠 ) 3. Bootstrapping Micro-SaaS - The Supermeme Journey by Sanjeev NC ( still struggling to explain what a PM does, while raking in $600K ARR by 0 marketing spend 😛 ) I want to thank Whatfix and Salesgear for supporting us and making this happen. ( Premsanth & Prakhar, much thanks! ) Alexander Theuma, you have created something huge, thanks to Jovi Pinon for trusting me with the responsibility. ❤️ Half of the "Early Bird" tickets are already sold, so get yours now! Link in comments 🔗 PS: Oh look, Sales101 is a community partner 😁 #saastock #saastocklocal #india

183

28 Comments

Yes!!! You 100% get it. The most challenging part of creating a new category in business is that the disruptive new entrant and market innovator (Loxo) has to literally “push the proverbial boulder up the hill for a decade” as the category moves through the Product Adoption Lifecycle. Every new category goes through the Product Adoption Lifecycle where the market begins to adopt the new category in the following order: 1st - "Innovators" 2nd - "Early Adopters" 3rd - "Early Majority" 4th - "Late Majority" 5th - "Laggards" Nobody likes change.  It’s human nature to resist change. Leaders fear change, because there is risk in the unknown so it is easier to do nothing.  However, as soon as the "Early Majority" realize the new way is so much better than the old way, the market begins to rapidly adopt the new way of doing things. We are now entering the "Late Majority" which is why I predict within 3 years, over 85% of recruiting agencies and executive search firms will be using this new category of software. (Link to post is in the 1st comment)

41

4 Comments