Product Analytics + Product Led Growth = A Partnership for Success - with Ken Fine, CEO Heap Analytics

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Ken Fine, CEO of Heap Analytics, and formerly the Chief Customer Officer and Head of Product at Medallia. Today, we will be covering three main topics. First, how product led growth has impacted the priority of product analytics. Second, how to identify the highest priority product metrics for your company. And third, the growing importance of a new metric, Product Qualified Leads. Ken, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Ken Fine** (1:12)
You bet, Ray. Great to see you and great to be here. In terms of my background, my original experience is more technical. I put myself through college on a Navy scholarship, served in the Navy as an engineer and a physicist, then moved out to California and since then went to business school and spent the last 20, closing in on 25 years in high-growth B2B SaaS companies. In one case, as part of a founding team at a company called Financial Engines in the financial technology space. Then after that, really primarily growth stage, you mentioned Medalia as one company, Heap Another, to help companies go from that post-product market fit through the rapid scaling phase through 100 million in revenue. A lot of those businesses were doing interesting things with massive sets of data and building some type of algorithmic intellectual property on top of that data step.

**Ray Rike** (2:00)
Well, that is a great background to be a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. The first topic I'd like to discuss a little bit with you is, with 20, 25 years experience, we've both seen more traditional customer acquisition and expansive motions often referred to as sales led. But product led growth is all the rage today across B2B SaaS with companies such as Twilio and Snowflake, even Slack kind of using that as their primary customer acquisition motion. Where do you think we are in the maturity of product led growth, Ken?

**Ken Fine** (2:34)
It's a good question. I believe we're still early in this cycle. Clearly, product led growth has been around for a while in the B2C world, where all have had experiences with different forms of free trial, freemium experiences, ways to experience the product before we purchase that product or purchase some subscription to a platform or a service. That model has been migrating to B2B SaaS. The way I would think about it is from a framework standpoint, is along a continuum where at one extreme, you could have companies that are truly purely product led, meaning there is no touch from a sales professional at all. Everything from product introduction to trial, to purchase, renewal, expansion, the whole thing is literally run by the product, so very scalable. The other extreme would obviously be the older model, which is purely sales led, which we're all familiar with, which is driven through a traditional sales process.

**Ray Rike** (3:32)
Well, I know I've ran a lot of B2B sales teams in the SaaS industry, and I've been receiving some texts and emails saying, Ray, do you think this PLG, Product Led Growth phenomena is going to impact the future of my sales career? My perspective was, no, I think it may change exactly how you engage, when you engage some of the skill sets. But what do you think, Ken? Do you think that sales led growth and product led growth can coexist or do you have to go one way or the other?

**Ken Fine** (4:03)
That's also a really good question. So I do have a point of view about the natural equilibrium and where this will go. So if you think about sales led and what is often thought of as the gold standard for sales led, and that would be, at least in my perspective, kind of the John McMahon School of Sales leadership from PTC and BMC and blade Logic where MEDIC or MEDPIC was created, which is now everywhere in the sales world where different value selling methodologies were created. That world would be sales led and then product led. You mentioned some companies and others such as Atlassian or Tableau or AppDynamics, Dropbox have started to push more into product led motions. My opinion is that the future, if we were to fast forward to the highest performing go-to-market motions, will be an artful combination of the best of each. I mean, essentially what you're doing with product led is you're trying to remove friction. You're trying to take friction out of the process and get more leverage. But there will be depending on the product or the service, clearly opportunities and places where you're going to want world class, just like we have in the past, world class sales led motions. Essentially, what they'll be doing is picking up, if you will, more qualified leads from customers that have signaled intent and have already gotten through a lot of the self-education.