The best PLG businesses have a dirty secret: They all have sales teams. In fact, they’re doubling down on these teams. But that doesn’t mean their unit economics are going to get any less attractive, or that they’ll build their sales team at the same pace that their lead volume increases. How are the best companies doing this? Focus. We used to want to build a big funnel to give our sales team plenty of leads—but many of the experts Sam Richard spoke with from InVision, Wistia, Hubspot and more told me that they’re “splitting the funnel,” or narrowing it, to keep their teams laser-focused on the leads that make sense for their business. Sam just finished a project with an OpenView portfolio company that wanted help identifying ways to keep their sales team focused on the best accounts coming through their free tool. During the course of the work, Sam consulted with experts and pretended to be a lead in order to shape some findings that she would now like to share with the community. We invite you to check out Sam's findings, best practices and suggestions to rethink how you’re applying sales resources at your own organization. We hope this helps provide some guidance, and we’d love to know how your organization does this or what companies you admire who do this well. Reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn.

1. May 2020
OpenView Growth Team
HOW TO FOCUS SALES
TOUCHPOINTS FOR
MAXIMUM IMPACT

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• Key questions we’ll answer:
• What’s the best way to deploy a sales team in tandem
with a self-service function?
• How should organizations optimize sales resources to keep
acquisition costs low?
• Recommendations are backed by multiple
data sources:
• Conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-functional set
of experts who manage the prospect journey for product
led businesses with team adoption as a requirement.
• Analyzed the onboarding flows of best-in-class product led
businesses.
• Supplemented with secondary research on best practices.
WE INVESTIGATED HOW TO PAIR SALES AND SELF-
SERVICE FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT
Selection of interviewees

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DATA SHOWS THAT SELF-SERVICE AND SALES ARE A
POWERFUL COMBINATION
• Conversion outcomes are the same for no outreach
during a trial vs. CSX performing outreach during a
trial
• When sales performs outreach, conversion
outcomes are 35% higher
• But sales can’t perform outreach to leads where the
ACV doesn’t make sense.
• The most successful teams have tightly defined
scoring systems throughout their funnel to ensure
sales teams are touching the leads that make the
most sense for the business.
Conversion from free to paid by team
providing outreach
Source: OpenView 2020 SaaS Product Benchmarks
7%
10%
6.5%
Median
Success Sales No Touchpoints
While sales outreach is expensive, it can be
valuable in converting the highest potential
ACV customers:

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DATA FROM BENCHMARKS SHOWS COMPANIES AT
SCALE DON’T TOUCH ALL LEADS
5%
48%
5%
42%
No touchpoints 1-30% 31-70% 71%+
What percentage of free users are being
touched? ($1-100m ARR)
• OpenView surveyed 153
B2B product owners and
founders to benchmark
product metrics
• We found that more
touchpoints with sales
correlate with a high free-to-
paid conversion rate.
• In order to achieve this, most
companies focus their sales
team on a small subset of
highly qualified leads.
Insights

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WE DISTILLED LEARNINGS TO THREE
RECOMMENDATIONS
What we learned from our research
Segment leads early. Every onboarding flow had clear
segmentation questions, and different answers led to different
cadences with the sales team. None of the companies we
spoke with interacted with 100% of signups.
Product usage, or lack of product usage, impacts
outreach cadence and further informs whether sales spends
time on each lead. On average, 40% of leads never took any
action in the product, disqualifying them from outreach.
Leverage best practice playbooks. Companies have
different plays that they run with different sized accounts and
levels of salespeople to focus their efforts.
It doesn’t make sense for every lead to
interact with sales, only MQLs. For any
given company we spoke with, less than 30%
of those leads interacted with sales. Leads
were scored with ICP or potential ACV in
mind.
Set up PQL framework to ensure that
sales isn’t wasting their time on leads that
were never going to convert.
Change prospect outreach cadences
Once a lead is qualified to begin receiving
sales outreach, tailor your sales response
based on the potential value of the lead.
1
2
3

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TOP OF FUNNEL BEST PRACTICE: USE LEAD
SCORING FOR SEGMENTATION & NURTURING
• Leads that will not meet ICP are put in nurture campaign, and not in any sales outreach workflow.
• Enterprise-level leads who are VIP stakeholders in your tiger segments can be earmarked for outreach, as can leads that
meet basic qualifications and raise their hand to request a demo
• All other qualified leads must be given time to engage with the product and further qualify themselves.

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COMPANIES FIND MANY WAYS TO SEGMENT
USERS, BUT ALL OF THEM ASK UP FRONT
When would you
like to launch your
store?
The way this question
was answered
triggered sales
activity when a new
lead signed up for the
product.
11+ teammates
Number of
teammates is asked in
signup flow.
This $300+ MRR sized
account typically
grows by 200% in 1
year, so they’ve
deemed it worth their
resources.
MadKudu Score
Leverages information
like title, number of
employees, pricing
page views and fit to
tier customers into 4
tiers.
Sales only reaches
out to top 2 tiers.
Fit with Ideal
Customer Profile
New product signups
are tiered from 1-6
based on fit. Sales is
compensated on
conversion based on
that score.
For small best fit
customers, they’re
assigned a CSX rep.
Urgency ICP ScoreACV Potential
A Growth Stage
Company
An Expansion Stage
Company
A Large Public CompanyA Large Public Company

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Segmentation starts in
chat
Frictionless sign up and
email verification
HUBSPOT ONBOARDING
Form seems simple to fill
out, not a chore

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Form segments visitors
conversationally
SHOPIFY ONBOARDING
High ROI for answering questions in
form, changes onboarding

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MID FUNNEL BEST PRACTICE: PQLS TRIGGER SALES
OUTREACH PLAYBOOKS
• Once a lead becomes a PQL, they receive immediate outreach and then are assigned two different outreach playbooks
based on the expected ACV.
• Leads that do not engage with sales are added to a marketing cadence after their sales outreach cadence is complete.
Some best-in-class companies tagged these leads for the support team to send back to sales if they raised their hand for
help.

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PQLS
Creating PQLs
What is a PQL? A PQL is a product-qualified-lead,
meaning that actions taken in the product by a free user
help to qualify that user for outreach by the sales team.
For Sales: PQLs are valuable because they focus the
sales team and help them prioritize the most valuable
leads.
For the Growth Team: Identifying which behaviors and
metrics generate a PQL help give the Growth team KPIs to
better understand if their experiments are successful with
a leading indicator (ex: percent of cohort that gets to an
activation point), rather than a lagging one (ex:
conversion rate).Image Source: Hubspot

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55%
43%
70%
65%
70%
50%
Retention: >1 visit Retention: 1 week
Company A Company B Company C
PRODUCT USAGE IS OFTEN A KEY INDICATOR OF
HOW READY THE LEAD IS TO BUY
Percentage of trailers who return to the
product
• One of the biggest
challenges of companies that
we interviewed was getting
leads back into the product
after signup.
• Based on benchmarks from
companies surveyed, expect
to see ~50% of leads return.
• This means sales shouldn’t be
engaging any of those leads
who never return.
Insights

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PRODUCT USAGE EXAMPLES
PQL
Lead’s first session is
longer than 30
minutes, and they
return to the product
within 24 hours.
Evidence of finding
product value
This team
automatically puts
signups into an
outreach flow after
they’ve met a
threshold of rows of
data added into the
tool.
PQL Triggers
Hubspot creates PQLs
based on 3 criteria:
• Hand raisers (ask
for help from sales)
• Usage PQLs that
trip a usage limit in
the product
• Feature PQLs that
use a high-value
feature like an
integration
Health Scores
Trial Score
We track simple
behavior like visits
and session length,
then assign a score
from 1-5.
5s have an 80%
chance of converting
on their own, so sales
reaches out to 3s and
4s.
Value-Driven Product BehaviorSession Data
A Growth Stage
Company
A Growth Stage
Company
An Expansion Stage
Company
A Large Public Company

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WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO ENGAGE WITH A PQL?
Best Practices for
Enterprise
Best Practices for
Middle Market
Recommended
additions
Put leads into call queue
as they become a PQL.
Zendesk has found that
that if they call leads
within 24 hours of the
“aha moment”, the win
rate is 83%
Day 1 BDR call to set demo
Day 3 Morning email for demo, voicemail
Day 5 Afternoon email
Day 7 Reply to last email
Day 10 Morning email for demo, voicemail
Day 14 Morning call, afternoon call voicemail
Day 17 Email and call in morning
Day 20 Breakup email, voicemail
Day 1 BDR call to set demo
Day 3 Morning email for demo, voicemail
Day 5 Afternoon email
Day 7 Email and call in morning
Day 10 Breakup email, voicemail

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RECOMMENDATIONS

16. Proprietary and Confidential ©2020 OpenView Advisors, LLC. All Rights Reserved 16
WE DISTILLED LEARNINGS TO THREE
RECOMMENDATIONS
What we learned from our research
Segment leads early. Every onboarding flow had clear
segmentation questions, and different answers led to different
cadences with the sales team. None of the companies we
spoke with interacted with 100% of signups.
Product usage, or lack of product usage, impacts
outreach cadence and further informs whether sales spends
time on each lead. On average, 40% of leads never took any
action in the product, disqualifying them from outreach.
Leverage best practice playbooks. Companies have
different plays that they run with different sized accounts and
levels of salespeople to focus their efforts.
It doesn’t make sense for every lead to
interact with sales, only MQLs. For any
given company we spoke with, less than 30%
of those leads interacted with sales. Leads
were scored with ICP or potential ACV in
mind.
Set up PQL framework to ensure that
sales isn’t wasting their time on leads that
were never going to convert.
Change prospect outreach cadences
Once a lead is qualified to begin receiving
sales outreach, tailor your sales response
based on the potential value of the lead.
1
2
3

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FULL FUNNEL WORKFLOW

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Your Product Sells Itself, Now Hire Sales by Kyle Poyar, OpenView
Selling in a PLG Company by Leadra Fishman, Twilio
6 Steps to building out a PQL Model by Ashley Murphy, OpenView
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

19. Sam Richard
Sam@ov.vc
THANK YOU