Bringing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth Together For Go-To-Market Success with Zapier

In this latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Zapier, Giancarlo Lionetti (GC), to chat about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Go-To-Market (GTM).

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. 

Before joining Zapier, Giancarlo was at Atlassian as a technical sales lead before moving to DropBox as a Senior Director of Growth and Monetization, and was CMO at Confluent – so he has a wealth of knowledge from Zapier’s Go-To-Market history as well as these successful SaaS companies to pull from. While we use Zapier here at SaaStr and are super familiar with it, for those who don’t use the tool, it’s a workflow automation platform that connects your data sources and apps to help maximize the efficiency of your teams, tools, and processes without relying on a developer team. 

From a Go-To-Market perspective, Zapier uses a hybrid model that involves a combination of freemium offerings, subscription plans, and partnerships. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful.

Founder CEOs are better, all things being equal. 

• They go the distance.
• They care the most.
• They know it cold.

And in fact, about 90% of SaaS companies that IPO still have their founder as CEO.

Ultimately I see only one problem with founder CEOs:

If they can’t constantly recruit, and recruit again, and recruit again, a world class management team.

Experienced CEOs usually if nothing else are good at recruiting.

It’s OK you haven’t done it before. You’ll figure out how to sell your product in the early days — after all, you know it better than anyone else. You’ll figure out how to manage a small team of engineers. You’ll figure out how to do initial content marketing. The early phase 1 stuff you’ll be terrible at, but you’ll figure it out, albeit painfully.

After that you have to recruit the best of the best to win. It doesn’t matter how good an individual contributor, how good of a hacker, how good of a small team lead you are/were. That’s not enough to scale.

Recruiting is hard. Constantly recruiting is even harder. Getting great engineers, great VPs, great anythings … to pick you over Uber, over Google, over Stripe is hard.

And you have to recruit in parallel. You can’t recruit one VP here, then another. Not after $5m-$6m in ARR or so. You have to be constantly recruiting multiple senior positions at the same time. This often means 20+ interviews a week!

Founder CEOs of almost any background can almost always go the distance if they can >constantly and continuously< recruit great VPs under them. You will learn the rest, how to hack it, and then when you are big enough, you can hire great VPs to take you to the next level.

But if you can’t recruit those leaders under you, really great ones … you can’t scale.

So times aren’t tougher for everyone in B2B and SaaS, but they’re tougher for many. And the playbook has mostly been as follows for those with tougher times:

• Cut the burn
• Freeze hiring
• If growth is really slow, look at layoffs if necessary

and

• Cut marketing to almost zero

To some extent, this makes sense. Marketing is a variable cost with generally medium-term benefits in SaaS and B2B. Most marketing spend builds pipeline that you are lucky to close in 4-12 months. So cutting that spend may limit future growth, but it rarely impacts the current month.

So marketing gets cut.

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Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance. They don’t solve bigger problems, but they usually work — and work quickly.

• Concentrate leads in those who can close. If you have a rep or two that just can’t close, that doesn’t work in the early days. Leads are too precious. Let them go. Not to save money, but to concentrate the leads you do have in those that can close them.  After 10 reps or so, it often becomes a bodies / numbers game on some level.  You do need “quota capacity” as you scale.  But at least until then, you’re better off with 5 reps that can hit and exceed quota than 10 reps where half or more are struggling.  Once you have a great VP of Sales, you can let her own the whole number and figure it out.  Decide who to hire, when, and how.  But fewer, better reps is the way to go for almost all of us at least until we have a strong VP of Sales.  Because the best reps close 2x-9x more than “ordinary reps”.  They really do.
• Be more involved as the CEO with sales. Prospects and customers love to talk to the CEO.  They love it.  If you get more involved, at least in bigger deals, you will close more. A top mistake I see CEOs make is to scale back the amount of time they spend in sales once they hire a few reps. It doesn’t work that way. You never get that time back.  It’s just, the reps now do more of the grunt work. But you still have to be out there. Zooming with prospects and customers, at least the bigger ones.  And visit as many in person as you can.
• Build them better collateral and get them more air cover. Most sales reps are pretty bad at building sales decks, tear sheets, etc. They can do it, but it’s pretty awful.  Most sales reps don’t know how to put on a webinar for prospects and customers. Do more marketing for them.  Help them on more deals.  A lot of reps sort of panic when deals get harder to close, as they have recently for many.  Give them more support.

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