Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more
Elena Verna, a leading expert in B2B growth strategy, discusses evolving growth models, the benefits of product-led retention, and why freemium often outperforms trials. She also shares insights on product-led sales and strategic hiring for growth roles.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Elena Verna's Career Journey and Growth Expertise
The 'Try Before You Buy' Approach for Leadership Roles
Most Fulfilling and Challenging Career Experiences
Consumerization of B2B Products and User Centricity
Defining Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Bottom-Up Strategies
Prioritizing Product-Led Retention Before Acquisition
Layering Sales-Led and Product-Led Growth Motions
Why PLG Fails When Moving Upmarket
Avoiding the Downfall of Neglecting Product Usage Growth
The Future of Product-Led Sales and its Advantages
Distinguishing Product-Led Sales from Traditional Sales-Led
Freemium vs. Trial Models: The Case for Freemium
Strategic Reasons for Implementing a Freemium Model
Hiring Your First Growth Leader: Internal vs. External
Timing the First Growth Hire for Product-Market Fit
General Advice for Sustainable Growth and Pattern Recognition
5 Key Concepts
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
A growth model where a company leverages its product to drive customer acquisition, retention, and monetization, often by focusing on user experience and value delivery within the product itself.
Bottoms-Up Approach
A strategy where product usage by individual users within an organization generates leads for sales, with the goal of expanding adoption across the entire enterprise.
Product-Led Sales
An emerging sales model that layers a sales team on top of existing self-serve product usage, using product data to identify and qualify high-potential accounts and empower users as internal sales agents.
Freemium Model
A business model offering a free, ongoing version of a product with certain feature or usage limitations, designed to attract a broad user base and drive indirect monetization or future paid conversions.
Trial Model
A business model offering a full or limited version of a product for a specific, time-bound period, primarily intended for users to evaluate the product before making a purchase decision.
10 Questions Answered
Product-led growth is a specific definition of being product-led in your growth model, answering how to acquire, retain, and monetize customers, where the product itself drives these motions.
Bottoms-up fundamentally means leveraging product usage to generate leads for sales, and product-led is a version of bottoms-up that specifically puts pressure on the product to generate qualified leads and pipeline.
No, a company must first focus on product-led retention, ensuring the product can activate and engage users habitually, as this forms the necessary foundation for any product-led acquisition engine.
Yes, successful companies often layer product-led motions on top of existing sales-led approaches to amplify growth, rather than viewing it as a switch or replacement.
PLG motions often get crushed when companies prioritize hiring for enterprise sales and marketing, neglecting continuous investment in user growth, community, and habitual product loops that originally fueled their success.
Product-led sales starts with self-serve product usage, then uses product qualification models (based on usage volume, velocity, features, behavior) to identify and engage accounts for sales, empowering users as sales agents, unlike traditional sales which starts with marketing qualified leads or prospecting.
Freemium is often better because time-bound trials can alienate users, especially in B2B, as the time required to derive value from a product varies significantly, making a usage-based freemium a more flexible and user-centric approach.
Freemium can serve as a proof-of-concept, drive indirect monetization through virality or network effects, allow strategic landing in new segments, differentiate in commoditized markets, or collect data to build new products and discover adjacent use cases.
A startup should hire its first growth person only after achieving strong product-market fit, which means demonstrating consistent retention (at least six months to a year post-launch) and initial ability to acquire and monetize customers.
It is often better to find an internal candidate for a first growth hire because they are already familiar with the product and its authentic growth model, reducing the risk of an external hire simply 'copy-pasting' previous company strategies that may not fit.
14 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Product-Led Retention
Every company must first focus on product-led retention, specifically activation and engagement, because a product cannot sustain product-led acquisition without habitual user usage.
2. Layer Growth Strategies
Do not view sales-led and product-led growth as an either/or decision; instead, treat them as sequential layering, aiming to execute both correctly and together to own the market.
3. Avoid Crushing Product-Led Growth
When expanding upmarket, avoid the common mistake of abandoning product usage growth and product-led tactics in favor of enterprise sales, as this can lead to a slowdown in enterprise pipeline and overall growth.
4. Incentivize PLG Sales Correctly
Understand that product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales are an expansion game, not about landing the highest initial value; incentivize your team to recognize that they are engaging accounts much earlier in the sales cycle.
5. Focus Product Roadmap on Users
If you are rooted in PLG, avoid exclusively focusing your product roadmap on enterprise features, as you must continuously innovate and delight your users to empower them as selling agents within their organizations.
6. Embrace Product-Led Sales
Leverage product-led sales by using self-serve usage to generate leads and qualify accounts based on network effects, usage volume, velocity, and feature breadth, allowing sales to engage when the entire enterprise would benefit.
7. Avoid Time-Bound Trials
Do not use time-bound trials (e.g., 7 days) as they alienate large enterprises that require more time to evaluate products; instead, use usage-based freemium models that allow users to explore at their own pace.
8. Strategize Your Freemium Offering
Define a clear strategic reason for your freemium model beyond just conversion to paid, considering if it drives indirect monetization (virality), serves as a proof-of-concept, creates habit loops, or helps discover new use cases and personas.
9. Make Growth-Promoting Features Free
When deciding what to make free in your freemium model, prioritize features that help indirect monetization, suffice for all users (commoditized), aid the ‘aha’ moment, or create habit loops, while gating features that create friction for your growth model.
10. Hire Internal for First Growth Role
For your first growth hire, look internally (e.g., FP&A analyst, PM, data analyst, engineer) as they are familiar with your product and can achieve quicker wins, rather than risking an external hire who might ‘copy-paste’ previous models with a high failure rate.
11. Hire Growth After Product-Market Fit
Only bring in a full-time growth person after achieving strong product-market fit, which means having proven retention (at least 6-12 months post-launch) and green shoots in customer acquisition and monetization, as growth scales an existing model, it doesn’t create it.
12. Develop Growth Frameworks
To drive repeatable, sustainable, and defensible growth, focus on creating frameworks for solving growth problems rather than approaching each issue individually, which helps minimize context switching and scales success.
13. Optimize for Career Retention
When considering leadership roles, optimize for retention by using a ’try before you buy’ approach, such as starting as an advisor or interim, to ensure a good fit and avoid mismatches that shorten leadership tenures.
14. Embrace B2B Consumerization
Recognize that B2B products are shifting towards consumer-like experiences, focusing on user-centricity, delightful onboarding, and habit-forming design, rather than just enterprise feature checklists, to empower employees and drive adoption.
5 Key Quotes
I think every single company has to first focus on being product-led and retention, period.
Elena Verna
The game is a layering game. It's a sequential game. Which one will you introduce first? And which one, how can you layer the next one on top of it?
Elena Verna
Product-led sales in the future, I'll give it another 10 years, will box out sales-led organizations, or top-down, I should say, organizations.
Elena Verna
I just wish that businesses would never forget the roots that they came from, especially if they started in PLG, and have a sense on when to swing the pendulum to the right direction and correct it when it's the right time.
Elena Verna
My biggest piece of advice is that you need to understand how to find patterns in the problems that you're solving.
Elena Verna
1 Protocols
Framework for Sustainable Growth
Elena Verna- Understand how to find patterns in the problems you're solving.
- Develop a framework for how to solve these problems.
- Localize the framework to your specific product offering and context.
- Minimize context switching to create repeatable, sustainable, and competitively defensible growth.