The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna

**Elena Verna** (0:00)
The most important thing in product-led sales is that there is a different configuration internally of collaboration that needs to occur. In traditional sales world, marketing creates pipeline for sales, sales sells product, product engages with the paid user to drive retention. In the product-led sales, product acquires and activates a customer, and product creates pipeline for sales. So relationship is not that there is a go-to-market org with marketing and sales, and product just kind of throws features across the fence for them to sell. The collaboration here is between product and sales.
But that means the product has to take on accountability over pipeline. The worst thing that you can do is to say, I'm going to do product-led growth, or I'm going to do product-led sales, and I'm going to do it in marketing.
Recipe for disaster, you will be failure-mode within six months, because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:09)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Elena Verna. That name sounds familiar, Elena is a return guest, and you be the judge, but I think this episode is even better than the first, which is a very high bar because that first episode continues to be one of the most popular of the podcast. Elena has worked at or advised companies like Miro, Amplitude, SurveyMonkey, MongoDB, Netlify, and a dozen others. She's also a long-time instructor and EIR at Reforge, where she helped create their experimentation, monetization, growth leadership, and their soon-to-be-released PLG course.
And in this conversation, we go incredibly deep into the emerging space of product-led sales. Elena explains what exactly is product-led sales, how it fits together with product-led growth and sales-led growth, who and when you should consider investing in product-led sales, how product-led sales changes your approach to sales and marketing, what sorts of data, tooling, and people you need in place to do it well, and what common pitfalls you need to avoid. I've said this before and I'll say it again, Elena is possibly the smartest and most experienced growth person in the world, especially when it comes to B2B, and I never get tired of learning from her. Enjoy this episode with Elena Verna after a short word from our sponsors.
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