Sales Led or Product Led?

I remember going to the part of the oracle HQ in Redwood City, where there are these nice fancy EBC rooms. It would feel like I’m in a different world, the oracle yacht parked outside providing a feeling of glitz and glamour with an ideal view over the Oracle lake graced by a seemingly birds eye vantage point of the superb Oracle database shaped buildings, and maybe an appropriate?forum in which one would be graced by Larry’s presence.?I once saw him in my favorite car back in 2009, we were neck and neck at the traffic signal, I was in my VW Golf GTi and he was in his .... Nissan GTR . It is still my dream car!

For any company that has made it here - to this level where they can afford and rather justify - a fancy EBC complex - kudos. This is the pinnacle of success for a sales team - to bring their account stakeholders - their valued clients- to listen and soak in their company strategy, roadmap and eventually up-, or cross-, sell them. And the cycle continues. I don't mean this as a disrespect to Oracle. But you will seldom see a happy Oracle user.

However, it makes me think of how overlooked the users of these platforms are, and continue to be. The very notion of a sales organisation, and bridging to executives, and making a strategic sale is so hypocritical to the notion of design thinking which begets the question - is it being implemented in the right spirit? Design for who? For folks in ivory towers trying to?gain?consumers or for those on the ground?serving?users?

Product led growth movement - and I love how Martin Casado truly started to crystallize it for me, by being one of the pioneering thought leaders of this topic - check out this seminal talk he gave in Barcelona a few years back. He talks about the game changer being bottoms up growth - for users, by users - and then sales enters the picture much later. Exactly how it was done for GitHub, Atlassian, Slack, salesforce, Dropbox et al.

So PLG motion is about the user, the human being, and Dheeraj Pandey rightly in such elegant terms spelled it out for me, when I asked him how you know if the product is good: his 1 word answer was: “emotion”. When the user connects to their human emotion, when the product is seeing the humane nature in us eye to eye - that is it. Wow. That’s powerful.?

From my experience at MuleSoft, which was in fact more product-led that one might imagine it to be given it had such an amazing sales org, it had the following characteristics:

1. Super lightweight platform: Mule could run in a JVM, and didn't need any special app server, and therefore was super easy to tinker with. As a result, initial use cases were developer centric - and that's how Mule started, from the developers.
2. Leveraged existing skills: As long as you knew Java, it was possible to work with Mule - and as a result it was easily configurable.
3. Vibrant evangelists: There were plenty of excited community champions, across the world, who would beat the drums of why Mule was the best API-led connectivity platform for their needs.
4. Quick on-ramp: It was extremely easy to start coding with a free version, and when the developer was satisfied, it would lead to a rabid hyena like sales person to close them. That developer would be happy to point the sales person to their manager!
5. Enabled a Knight in Shining Armor: You see, there were plenty of competitors out there, but where MuleSoft clearly created a white space was by combining SaaS integration requirements with APIs - and together that created a genius proposition. It did this by investing into SaaS connectors, and making it easy for a developer to create an API. The developer was the victorious hero / knight in shining armor !

These key points from above are what enable leading SaaS companies to be victorious today. Follow this formula - and you will win. Note - there was no mention of 'marketing' in any of this - and btw - MuleSoft had the world's best Marketing function...