Mar 03 2025 69 mins 11
Elena Verna is a renowned growth consultant who has worked at and with a glittering array of well-known tech companies. She's a strong advocate of career optionality and solopreneurship, as well as the author of a popular growth newsletter, Reforge instructor and popular LinkedIn content creator with her insightful posts and searing memes. Just don't call her an influencer.
Episode highlights:
1. Solopreneurship is about having optionality; it doesn't mean you never take a full-time job again.
You can build a portfolio career with a variety of different offerings, and get involved in the types of problems that excite you. This feels risky, but people get laid off from "real" jobs all the time. The most important thing is to optimise for what you're passionate about, and it may well be that you move between full-time employment and advisory or fractional roles. It's not a one-way street, and you're in control.
2. Humour disarms people, so memes are a great way to talk about difficult topics and build empathy
Content creators should not be scared of poking fun at meaningful topics. Using humour is a great way to help build connections with people around potentially sensitive areas. That doesn't mean you should make everything a joke, but you can certainly mix it up. You might think it's risky for a solopreneur, needing to build credibility, to be seen as an unserious clown. But, do you really want to work with people who can't take a joke?
3. Product-Led Sales is all about using self-service as a lever to fill up your sales pipeline with healthy, qualified leads
Speaking of knowledge (nice segue!), Elena has written a lot about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Product-Led Sales (PLS). PLG is the strategy of using your product as its own acquisition channel through enabling a great self-service experience, quick time-to-value and all the other things that B2C apps have had to worry about for years. PLS, on the other hand, is about filling your sales team's pipeline with high-quality leads that have already experienced your product through PLG, and demonstrated enough usage to make it worth having a data-backed conversation with the buyers at that organisation.
4. There are signals that it's time to try out Product-Led Sales
Don't adopt PLS for the sake of it; instead, look for signals that it's appropriate for you. Traditional sales-led motions focus on the buyer but, if you solve a problem that matters more to end users than buyers, you should consider Product-Led Sales as a method for building internal champions and advocacy for your product. You should also be conscious of competitive threats; your traditional, top-down buyer-led sales motion may work today, but keep your eyes open for new PLG players attacking your underbelly.
5. You probably need new capabilities (and talent) within your organisation if you want to get started with Product-Led Sales.
Let's face it, most sales-led organisations are terrified of giving sales prospects access to their product without supervision. The user experience is almost certainly terrible and there's no "Aha!" moment to speak of, just a pile of features that got added to satisfy procurement teams. You need to get a good product manager in to overhaul the experience, good product marketers to work on optimising acquisition, and great data analytics so you can make sure you aren't just sending garbage to the sales team. If you don't send them high-quality leads, they'll stop trying to sell to them.
6. Product-Led Sales is not an on/off switch but a dial.
Traditional sales-led organisations that are crushing their quotas don't need to go down the product-led growth or product-led sales route if it doesn't work for them. Similarly, product-led companies shouldn't have to go upmarket to succeed. The most important thing to consider is how to build on your existing strengths and complement them, and getting the mix right. You can run both at the same time, and this is better than throwing all-in on a go-to-market motion where you have no credibility, experience or right to win.
Contact Elena
- Check out Elena's newsletter and other work: ElenaVerna.com
- Follow Elena on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/
