Product-Led Growth and B2B Sales - Best of Both Worlds - with Tim Geisenheimer, CEO at Correlated

**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 and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Tim Geisenheimer, founder and CEO of Correlated. Today, we will be covering three main topics. First, the evolution of product-led growth from a sales perspective. Second, the opportunity in product-led growth companies for B2B sales. And third, how B2B sales organizations need to prepare for their role in product-led growth era. Tim, please take a moment to give a brief background and overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Tim Geisenheimer** (1:10)
Thanks, Ray. I really appreciate you having me. Yeah, I've spent my career in sales as a sales leader and before that, an individual contributor. I really got my start in this particular product-led growth space a few years ago when I joined an early stage company that had a product-led growth model. And sort of frustration I felt there as a first sales hire building a team was I really didn't have a good feel for what my customers were doing with our product and product-led growth, that's essential. So following my stint there at that company called TimeScale, I ended up starting Correlated to help build this platform to help sales teams at product-like growth companies be successful in doing sales. So yeah, that's my background. I'm excited to be here today.

**Ray Rike** (1:48)
Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us and let's zoom out for a minute because you've been directly involved in leading sales at a product-led growth company. So the first question I have for you, Tim, is how would you describe the evolution of PLG as a customer acquisition and expansion motion from a B2B sales leaders perspective?

**Tim Geisenheimer** (2:10)
Yeah, it's a great question. So when I joined that company, Timescale, I'd started to put in what I had known as a lifelong salesperson and sales leader, sort of a more top-down sales approach where the marketing funnel is well established. You go from MQL to SQL, and you progress sales deals down a pretty linear path towards clothes. And I think the biggest change that PLG and it probably growth represents is that the way customers are buying products is really changing dramatically. And the biggest change is that these products are self-service. And so people at companies and users can start using products like Zoom or Slack or any number of different developer tools products without having to talk to a salesperson. They can get to a ton of value as a result. But all of these products and companies do have sales teams. And the sales teams have to know how those customers are using the products, how the end users are using the products to be effective. And at Timescale, that was sort of the big light bulb that went off for me to realize that we needed to have access to that product data. And I think that's the big change that's happening for sales teams. They realize they have to be more data driven, understand how their customers are using the product, and adjust as a result.

**Ray Rike** (3:19)
Well, let's go a little bit deeper. And from a sales perspective, both the threats and opportunities that they see with product-led growth, because Tim, you mentioned a lot of the initial customer acquisition, even if it's in a freemium or a pretrial, they don't interact with sales. So a lot of sales leaders I've talked to, and especially individual sales reps, are very concerned that their jobs will be changed dramatically in a PLG growth environment. What's your perspective on both the threats and the opportunities for sales?

**Tim Geisenheimer** (3:52)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the good news from my perspective is that sales is actually more needed than ever in these kinds of companies and product-led growth companies. That's what we're seeing in our customers that have this model. Sales is really important. I think the skills and some of the ways that the tactics and strategies that you employ in sales are changing though. So one of the opportunities before maybe I get into threats, one of the opportunities I would say for sales is that being more of a product consultant, understanding what you're selling more intimately than maybe you did before, will really help you get a leg up because your customer already knows a lot about your product since they're typically already using it. As a result, if you have that knowledge, if you're able to really dig in with your customer, understand their use of the product and what they need to get even more value by working with you on the sales side, then you can really be set up for success and be quite successful in one of these types of companies. I think the threats are if you don't adjust to this new reality and you're trying to take the old approach like I initially did at Timescale, I think you could be in for a rooted awakening.