This is about content marketing but Fio’s post What is strategy—explained with a useful puzzle metaphor is very relevant to product people as well:

At its core, that’s what strategy is: taking a problem, discovering what makes it hard, and finding the right way(s) to solve it. The concept is super obvious when applied to a puzzle: you intuitively know that picking random pieces from the pile and expecting them to slot right into place is not a sensible approach…

…and yet, that’s often how content folks expect marketing programmes to work: we bypass the diagnosis and guiding policy phases, jump straight into picking tactics, and expect that all the pieces will automagically fit together in the end.

Another reminder (which I think we need to hear almost every day) not to jump into implementation too quickly. Take time to understand the problem and the opportunity first.

Great post by April Dunford on how marketing teams and sales teams need to tell different stories about a product:

Our goals in marketing are very different from our goals in a sales situation. Often in marketing, we are simply trying to capture an audience’s attention and get their permission to continue marketing to them. […] Sales, on the other hand, is generally dealing with the folks who have already raised their hand in some form and are in a purchase process. Our primary job in sales is to help guide prospects through the purchase process.

However, both approaches to storytelling need to come from the same positioning source:

Sales and marketing should use the same inputs for whatever storytelling structure they choose, and those inputs should come from our positioning. Both marketing and sales communicate the value that the product delivers that no other solutions can. Both have a common definition of what a good-fit prospect looks like. Both teams need to understand the alternative approaches, including the status quo and more direct short-list competitors. Our positioning defines the inputs for marketing and sales content—we ultimately need commonality across marketing and sales because our positioning defines where we win and why.

Oliver Jay wrote a 3-part essay about what he calls “The PLG Trap”, where product-led growth companies grow to a certain point and then suddenly sees that growth slow with no obvious ways through the slowdown. From the introduction to the essays, Oliver says this usually happens after an initial (and initially successful!) expansion into the enterprise market:

Quite simply, despite the complex security and administrative features you’ve launched, your product has not evolved to becoming broadly “enterprise-ready” for the majority of your enterprise prospects.

At this point, you may feel trapped–the PLG Trap. You’ve set growth expectations externally and internally based on how revenue (in particular, from the upmarket segments) has grown in the past few years.

However, what drove revenue in the past, in terms of your product offering as well as your sales and marketing motions, is unsustainable. There is no more bottoms-up, low-hanging fruit to feed the larger sales and marketing engine you’ve built. To pursue sustained revenue growth, you must tolerate a lower efficiency…only to now be punished by the public markets in what appears to be the beginning of a recession.

The essays go through several reasons why companies fall into this trap, and also how to avoid it by making smarter decision about sales, marketing, and product roadmaps early on.

Elena Verna presents a great guide to product-led sales for B2B products here here:

In a traditional top-down sales approach, the sales team is motivated to close the largest and newest deals to account for the high acquisition cost and ensure profitability.

In contrast, in a product-led sales approach, the sales team gets involved with the account much earlier in the problem lifecycle, and the initial contract value is smaller. It’s important to note that in top-down sales, the buyer is typically captured during the high maturity stage of the problem. In contrast, in product-led sales, the account is acquired earlier in the lifecycle. Therefore, the landed annual recurring revenue (land ARR) is not comparable between the two channels. Product-led sales’ primary goal is to expand by continuously growing with the account, which is where most of the revenue is generated. Overselling the account during the initial contract can be detrimental as it may disrupt the expansion journey.

There are a couple of other recent posts on product-led sales that I found useful:

• What is product-led sales? The future of selling software by Wes Bush.
• Your guide to product-led sales with Figma and Hex’s Jesus Requena (from Kyle Poyar’s newsletter).
• The PLGeek Guide to Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs) by Ben Williams.

Why Do Developers (Actually) Hate Marketing? The Heavybit team has some good advice in this post:

• Don’t: Create product-led content that shoves the product into your reader’s face.
• Do: create a transparent guide to what your product can and can’t do. But make sure you don’t over-promise (or even sound like you’re overpromising).
• Don’t: Write thought leadership content that relies on cheesy trend predictions.
• Do: Create thoughtful, technical essays based on experiences from engineers and founders. But make sure your claims are authentic as well as relevant and well-supported as well as novel.
• Don’t: Produce hollow, manicured case studies.
• Do: Create technical case studies that describe, in detail, what a customer’s experience was really like – including the gains, the stresses, and the adoption and integration processes. But make sure the focus remains on the customer’s problem and not on your solution.