👋 Hey there! Welcome back to 🥁 Humans of PLG💥—a space where we bring you insights directly from the OGs - the humans in the drivers’ seat, building your favorite PLG companies.

Since we started this newsletter, our #1 goal has been to get enough folks excited about the product-led world that we so dearly love ❤️; this is yet another extension of this grand effort.

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Today, we’re picking the 🧠 of Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head Of Sales & Expansion at Zapier.

Watch the full version here 👇🏼 or scroll ahead for the TLDR highlights 🔥

If you’re planning to listen this on your treadmill or on your drive to work and would prefer the audio only version, we gotcha covered:

✨ Catch the full episode on Spotify:

Humans of PLG ft. Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales & Expansion at Zapier By Toplyne Podcast episode

…or Apple podcasts, if that’s your thing:

Humans of PLG ft. Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales & Expansion at Zapier Top of the Lyne 35:06

Zapier’s first Sales hire 👊🏼

Zapier's growth from $0-$140 million has been largely driven by their bottom-up self-serve engine. But in early 2021, with Steeve at the helm, Zapier started testing a Sales motion. Over the last year and a half, Steeve has incubated, hired, and built a sales-assist team from scratch.

Catch our in-depth breakdown of Zapier’s growth story here 👇

In January 2022, CEO & Co-founder Wade Foster announced that they are officially hiring for Sales roles.

We cover a lot of ground here with Steeve, including:

• Let’s settle it - Is it Zappier or Zapeier?

• How does someone go from KPMG to Shopify to becoming Zapier’s first Sales hire?

• The cultural challenges of introducing a sales motion in a PLG company

• Differences between traditional sales and the hot new “sales assist role”

• When does a PLG company start thinking about sales?

• Zapier's culture is rather unique

• Building virality for a single-player tool like Zapier

• Levers other than Sales-assist to increase the depth of adoption and expansion

• Zapier's most interesting use case

• East coast or west coast?

• Biggest mistake that PLG companies make

• Tweet Reactions & Rapid Fire

Shownotes 📝

Steeve’s recommendations:

🛠 Tool: Grain

📰 Newsletter: DTC branding by Nik Sharma

Connect with him at :

✉️ hi@steeve.co

🐦 Twitter

🔗 LinkedIn

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