As software purchasing becomes increasingly democratized and complex, there’s often a false narrative that companies need to choose either a self-serve or a sales-driven go-to-market model to drive growth. As Asana COO Anne Raimondi and Figma CCO Amanda Kleha discuss, self-serve and direct sales models actually work better together.

Anne Raimondi:

So in the metrics, what we wanted to just show in terms of proof, why do we believe in it, we’ve seen it in action, but where else has this played out? So if you look at these companies that are all public and you look at their next 12-month revenue growth, super-strong revenue growth, and super strong enterprise value or market cap in trading. So all of these five awesome companies, many of whom were customers of they have that combination, they make it super easy to buy and try very much consumer products that we might all love, like Peloton, Spotify, or even crossovers into B2B like LinkedIn. You can try it, you can get value, but then they also have invested in sales teams that help companies of larger sizes get more value out of partnering with them.

Anne Raimondi:

So we wanted to make sure we ground everybody in the metrics before we dive in on, well, what do we actually mean that you should do in self-serve or how to think about self-serve and then when to add sales. So maybe just diving in on how Asana thinks about self-serve and then where we’ve added sales. So from the very beginning, we really believed that new users coming in should be able to sign up and get value pretty quickly. When they have the pain point, they should come be able to try out the product, adopt. We believe very much in a free product that delivers a lot of value because there’s also learning in work management. So we want teams to be able to have a lot of time to learn, practice, and then grow with us. And then we want to present features and benefits that teams as they get bigger, can upgrade and see additional value when they’ve got budget for it, they’ve already seen the ROI and they’re willing to pay.

Anne Raimondi:

And then we’ve added sales over time to really partner with customers to navigate more complex purchasing processes or as an organization’s growing really quickly and they’re expanding from team to team. So that’s how Asana thinks about our go to market motion of both self-serve and sales and then underlying that is how do we think about every step of the funnel and how we optimize and test and learn? So with the self-serve motion, you can do a lot of optimization in your top of funnel, all the way through your buying process and really optimize that through lots of data. And then you can also look at, well, what can you present to free teams, teams that are getting a lot of value out of your free product, but then what can you present and how do you present that in a way that gives them the aha of, oh, hey, maybe I do want to try out the paid product now that I’ve been an Asana customer for a while.

Anne Raimondi:

And then that same motion of experimentation comes to adding great sales people to that process. They benefit from a lot of data already on what teams and organizations are getting value from. So then when they reach out or a customer raises their hand to have an expansion conversation, they can do that in a really value added way. So that’s how we think about our self-serve motion and where we add sales at Asana. Amanda, I would love to hear how you think about it at Figma.

 Amanda Kleha:

Yes. Figma is actually pretty much exactly the same as Asana. We have a free product that when you sign up for Figma online, you start in the free product and then you can choose to upgrade to a paid plan either on your own with a credit card or via our sales team. I would also add though, I think it’s important to think about what you want to have happen at each phase. For Figma, we know that the aha moment that triggers an upgrade is often when people experience the product with others. It’s a collaboration experience. So if they can go through a project cycle together as a team, they’re much more likely to upgrade to a paid team and repeat that process. So we’ve done a lot of thinking about how to optimize for that along the whole journey as we improve the flow.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. I think just identifying those aha moments and being able to have enough data to work with to then test and experiment. I love that. And also it’s been fun to see the organic adoption of Figma Asana. All right, I know we have opinionated points of view on why to start with self-serve. This is a conversation that Amanda and I have had many times together and also many times with founders and teams who’ve reached out and said, hey, why did you do this at Zendesk, why did you do this at Asana or Figma? So maybe diving in here, Amanda, why do you think it’s key to start with self-serve?

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah, this is often what happens is founders come to me and they’ve already created a product and they have a sales team selling it and then they think, oh, self-service, that’s great, super cost efficient, I want some of that, which is a very natural feeling to have. And so we talk about it and there’s a couple problems with starting with sales I think first and then wanting to do self-serve later, is first of all, your sales team’s already established their motion with of talking to everyone who comes in your front door. And it’s just really hard to take that away later. And so that’s problem number one. The second problem is and I’m talking about doing sales and then self service. So the other problem with doing it in that order is you don’t have the DNA in your product design and engineering organization on how you built the onboarding of your product without humans involved.

 Amanda Kleha:

And you can’t just hire one growth PM and it’s done, it needs to be part of how everyone’s thinking about that experience. And if you don’t launch your product with that first, it’s just really hard to inject later. So I don’t think it’s impossible, but it takes more than just hiring one person. And I think on top of that, I would say, thirdly, if you intuitively started your business with a sales team, there might have been a reason why. You might not have the right product to do it with for self-service. So I would think about what led you to start that way. So that’s why all reasons are why I think it’s great to if you can start with self-service and then add sales after.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, I think you hit so many key points that have come up in similar conversations that I’ve had with founders who are building great businesses and have a sales team and they’re having good customer conversations and I’ll often hear them say, okay, I’m going to add self-serve or I’m going to add a product led motion. And I think that some of the friction points there definitely resources. And I would say like a mindset, teams that start with self-serve oftentimes are have people who built consumer products and really have a mindset of what should be as easy as possible to do without that end customer needing to talk to anybody and also designing in those aha moments instead of relying on, oh, they have to have a conversation to understand the value. There’s this mindset of in the product at every moment we should be delivering value.

Anne Raimondi:

And I do think oftentimes that design product and even technical skills early on come out of places that are very consumer and very high volume oriented. And then later you delay doing that the harder it is because you’ve also built human intervention into your processes so you’re more apt as a founder, as you’re balancing scarce resources to be like, oh, okay, well, instead of having a whole engineering pod build that, we’ll hire a couple people who can smooth over that gap in the process. But the companies that are really dedicated to self-serve in the beginning have that mindset of what if they never talk to anybody. And then when you add people, I think that’s the benefit of, hey, when should we have people, have our customers talk to somebody and what’s the value of talking to somebody from the company, but maybe let’s dive in, Amanda, you brought up a really good point on, well, how can I tell if my product is meant to be sold via self-serve? Because it sounds awesome doing all these things where our customers can buy on their own and you’ve got high volume and you’re growing, but what kinds of products don’t lend themselves to self-serve or how could founders and teams sort of think about diagnosing that?

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah, I think this is a really good one. I haven’t actually talked to that many people about this so this is just my own thoughts on it, but there’s a few you things I think about. So first and foremost implementation, what is the implementation of your product look like today? And what could it look like ideally? So can you imagine a person setting up your product without help or without humans or documentation at all? So the gold standard of this would be the Apple iPhone. You bring it out of the box and you push on and you go through the flow and you’re done, no documentation, no humans, generally speaking. And so I think about that, I think at Zendesk, we actually had a big friction point, which was, if you wanted to really start using the product, you had to ingest your email.

 Amanda Kleha:

And so we went through a lot of iterations to make that as seamless as possible without needing to require human to help you. The other thing I would think about is how familiar your users are with your space already. Are you creating a new market or a product and category or is it, are you joining into something that’s already established? Figma actually is not a first mover. It’s joined into a market where people already were using design tools. So we already had lot of familiarity and it’s very easy to get started. There’s really nothing that you need to do other than sign up and start using the product. So check and check.

 Amanda Kleha:

Another thing I would think about is just how are you considering your pricing and packaging strategy because it’s so important that users who are evaluating whether or not to sign up, if they can really easily identify which plan and price works for them fast, then you’ve eliminated that part of the decision of whether or not it’s worth trying out. And I think that’s an important precursor step to the implementation. And then finally I would say, do you already understand what your magic moment is, that aha moment that where people start to experience a lot of value with your product and can you take the friction out of getting to that moment? So those are the four different things I think about to consider this question.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, I love that framework and that list of those questions. It also struck me we’ve worked with founders with products where you talk about onboarding and also where if you think through oh, the team or the person can’t get value unless content is moved over or unless they’re plugged into a lot of other existing apps. If you think about digging into that onboarding load, products where you can’t get to that aha moment unless a lot of other things that might require even someone with that pain point and passion to adopt, to have to go around their organization and get additional buy-in or approval, those might be products that are harder to do self-serve because they’re dependent on other resources and other buy-in and approval.

Anne Raimondi:

On pricing and packaging I would also really think about that total value delivered. And if you’re designing a security product, heavy analytics product, but you ultimately think, I can build a really successful business with a few thousand customers paying me quite a bit every year, it’s probably not a self serve product. And where you say, hey, it’s a C level buying decision and ultimately I see my product being something that’s in the top 10 spend that an organization has, that’s definitely not one where you’re like, I’m going to start with something where someone can put down their credit card and get value. So they’re not right or wrong choices but I think just going through that list of questions Amanda shared and really picturing do I see myself building a business where there’s hundreds of thousands of customers, many of them that can do the vast majority on their own and then maybe I’ve got a subset of these mid-market enterprise customers then really think about, okay, what’s bought and then what do I want, what do I intend to sell?

Anne Raimondi:

Great. All right. So then that kind of leads us to well, if I’m a founder or a team trying to make this decision, how do I think about my decision tree of what should be self-serve? And then when I do want to add sales, what should be done by sales? What are signals and what are ways, I mean that you within Figma have kind of made those trade offs and decisions?

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah. Well, I think, and we’re talking about when to pass things over to sales, namely?

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, exactly.

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah. So people who sign up for Figma, we don’t pass all of them to sales. So we have to make a decision on whether or not we think that they are good candidates for sales or not. And a few different things go into that. I think obvious things like if it’s a CIO situation, like a Fortune 100 company, yeah, you’re probably going to want your sales team talking to a company of that size. So demographics and the profile of the account come into play for sure. The other thing is what is that lead doing inside the product? And as a SaaS application, we have the luxury of being able to use that usage information to our advantage and actually provide a better user experience. So we use that as well. And then we also have a few accounts that we put into our sales teams books of business that we want them to be able to proactively make a play for. And so we will feed them information about whether or not anyone from that account signs up or comes to a webinar or interacts with us in different ways. So their behavior with us as a brand comes into play as well. So pretty standard stuff.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, no, I am. I think the sort of the signals from the customer I think are worth pausing on and diving into because you talk and I think many of those are feeding how you think about where sales can add the value, even just hand raisers, do you test out places where customers can tell you that they do want to talk to somebody and then understand why you can run experiments there of well, what is it? What’s either the need or the friction point that then someone really wants to know that they can talk to somebody. And oftentimes that can just be, early on it can very much be, I want to know that this company and product is going to be around, I want to know the people behind it. That’s a very valid reason that a customer may want to interact and really see who’s behind this product.

Anne Raimondi:

And then you can think about, well, how many people raise their hand and we ran a lot of these tests at Zendesk as well test when they talk to somebody do they buy a different tier product? Do they expand faster? Because then you may have those moments to identify the hand raisers earlier because you can see that those value add conversations are actually delivering more for those customers. You talked a little bit about marquee logos, that’s also something to really think about who’s your ideal customer profile. And are you making sure that those customers in the target of your bullseye are getting the love time and attention that especially early on in a company’s growth because many of those can then be references for future customers. So being really thoughtful of where you put your time and talent. Something else I think as companies develop is also just intentional marketing programs that are account based marketing.

Anne Raimondi:

So specifically then saying partnering with your sales team and saying, there’s a set of accounts that we’re going to go after hand in hand. And those accounts are definitely going to be the ones where from the get go we’ve got people on them making them successful. So those are other ways to think about that decision tree intentionally versus I think Amanda and I have also both experienced, you don’t want sales to cannibalize self-serve or you don’t want confusion internally, let alone confusion externally for your customers to see the seams between your self-serve and your sales. Anything on this there? Yeah.

 Amanda Kleha:

I’ll also add one of the things that we did at Zendesk when I was there was because we had so much history of who converted and who didn’t into a paid customer, we had a data scientist come up with a model that when a lead came to the site and signed up for the trial, after day three, we could determine on a scale of one to five with which probability they might convert to paid. And what I thought was really interesting was we would feed that information to sales and then we would bring them into the fold of data using data to your advantage and say, well, you can go talk to the fives, but they already have a very high propensity to buy. So your effort is going to have a bigger impact if you talk to the threes and the fours and the ones and the twos, even though it might look like an interesting lead, you’re going to be wasting your time most likely. So I just, I loved arming sales with data like that because it really helped prioritize for them.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. And those product signals also make sure that when they have a conversation, they’re having a more strategic conversation. It’s not, I’m explaining all the features to you. If the product itself can provide those aha moments that you were talking about and that the data that you’re gathering can show where there’s friction points or maybe features that a customer is not using that you think they could get value from then by the time they’re having a conversation with your awesome sales team, it really is about, hey, how can you get more out of and were you aware of, and based on how you’re used saying it, here’s additional things and it feels just much more like a partnership than trying to sell the customer. And I think people on both sides enjoy those conversations a lot more. So we’re going to put it into action and share a couple of actual experiments that each of our teams have run and why to put a little more color on it. All right. We’ll start with Figma.

 Amanda Kleha:

Yes. So one of the big things that we did this year as a company was we launched a second product. We call it FigJam. It’s an online whiteboard. We launched it into beta in April. And as a precursor to that, we had to decide how we wanted to price and package it ultimately. And you’re looking at how we have our plans today. So we actually have three plans. I’m just showing you, we have our free tier it’s called starter, and we’ve got a pro tier which is our first paid tier. And prior to this launch, the way that the pay gate worked to go up to paid was if you had, we charge you per editor, viewers are free on Figma and so once you add a third editor, you had to upgrade to pro. Now the problem with that was with FigJam being an online whiteboard, we knew that the product, even more so than Figma, but for really both products, the magic of it is when you collaborate with multiple people.

 Amanda Kleha:

And so we knew that this pay gate was a problem for us because we really wanted people to experience that magic moment in the free plan. And so we wanted to change this for both of our products, because we wanted you to be able to experience both products in the free plan and so what we did on the next slide, we ran it as an experiment first, which is kind of tricky to do, but our growth team figured out how to do it. And what we wanted to see was would we be successful changing the way we had our pay gates set up so that we wanted ultimately the pay gate to be more on the amount of files you had rather than the amount of users you had.

 Amanda Kleha:

And so what was great is that through the experiment, we saw more people upgrading to paid, which is nice for the company, but more importantly, it was good for users because more people were collaborating, nearly 30% and we didn’t see a regression on new user retention or invites. So that gave us some confidence that we could do this repackage successfully. And I thought it might be fun to share one of the ways that we talked about out whether or not this was the right thing to do on the next slide is a metaphor we talked about which was cake. A lot of internal slides had cake pieces on them. So prior to this refresh, our free tier was thought of as you got one layer of the cake, but ideally what we wanted it to be was like of the whole full slice of the cake and that when you upgrade to paid, you got the whole cake. So if this is a helpful metaphor as you analyze your free tier, and whether it’s the right one, this was helpful to us. And so you’re welcome.

Anne Raimondi:

I love that analogy. I think there’s so much goodness in that, including I’m sure lots of yummy cake photos internally on lots of FigJams and having benefited from FigJam as well as the Figma product. I could, it’s sort of seeing all that goodness and experimentation that your team’s done in action. But I think that it’s such a good point here and maybe that’s a segue into the Asana example we wanted to share, I think has some of those similar themes of how do you make it as easy as possible for customers to see value in features that you’ve really invested in and you’ve already see a subset of your paid customers get value from. So portfolios is a paid feature of Asana, which provides a holistic view across all your important projects.

Anne Raimondi:

And we saw a lot of customers in our pay plan get a ton of value from that especially as they were scaling with Asana but we wanted to make sure people who hadn’t tried that yet could have a really great experience with it. So it’s that aha moment again of seeing the value versus having to have customers work to see it. And so the test that our team ran here was sort of pre-populating portfolios and in a trial, testing the, hey, if you’ve already got multiple projects going on, see it in action in a portfolio. So we saw an increase in the number of active engaged users on the order of 20%, that seeing and that’s such a good learning not just for this feature, but all other future paid features where it’s like if someone can kind of come in and really easily see it on top of what they’re already doing and engage with it much easier to convince them, hey, at the right moment upgrade versus having all those we’ve all experiences versus having all those you hit a paywall, you hit a paywall, you hit a paywall. Here, you’re just, you’re showing the value and so that’s a really exciting win in terms of an experiment that the team’s running and taking that ethos into other features and other packages in the future.

Anne Raimondi:

Great. All right. Well, you want to make sure there’s enough time for questions, but we thought we would just hit the highlights on lessons that we’ve learned by combining self serve and direct sales. The first is reject false trade-offs. Oftentimes there’s a narrative of, you got to do one or the other because both take a lot of work and that’s true. And I think what Amanda and I have seen now across three companies that have high growth with both models is that done well, one feeds the other, you get a ton of great customer insights and data and a funnel feeding your sales. And really then having more value add conversations with customers. Second point we’ve made start with self serve if you can. The kinds of resources you need and the kind of team and mindset to build that is not something that’s easily added on after, trust us, we’ve worked with founders who are trying and are continuing to invest in that, but find it just a much harder thing to add on later.

Anne Raimondi:

And then the last point, but probably the most important is listen to your customers, what do your customers want to buy and expect to buy? And then what do your customers want to partner with you on to get more value out of, and really think about that intentionally as you design, not only your product, but your organization and your team and your incentives and everything to make both motions work well together. Did I miss anything in the top takeaways, Amanda?

 Amanda Kleha:

No, I think that’s great. Maybe one point I’d add to at the end, I added this sentence, don’t be surprised that many people want to speak to sales. We often say oh, you have a developer tool that you’re selling that developers don’t want to talk to sales. Well, actually some do, and you might be surprised. So make sure you give that opportunity to your users because you might be surprised.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, definitely, the humans behind the product are sometimes the most important part of having customers see value and see sort of why you’re building what you’re building. All right. I am going to stop sharing and we are going to see, we’ve got some questions already.

 Amanda Kleha:

I like this one from John. It’s common to have post sales customer success for onboarding and adoption but do you also provide this customer success in the pre sales phase during an online trial period which would increase the likelihood for free to paid conversion? 100%, in fact at Figma, we have a specialized role called a designer advocate. These are people that were full-time designers prior to coming to Figma, and they work across both marketing and sales. They actually report into marketing, but they are product experts and they assist in the sales process in much like a sales engineer would, but they also do things like live streams and content creation and social interactions that help in the pre-sales process. So they’re very key to the success and valued quite a bit at the company.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. And if this is the John Goble that I know, hey, John Goble, great to see your question. So I would also say at Asana and we did this at Zendesk is also thinking about scaled customer success in the pre sales process, providing lots of what we would call one to many, enabling customers to join webinars, to access a library of howtos that go hand in hand either as they have a free product that they’re using, or they’re in a trial of a paid product. So really again, thinking about all that goodness that you can invest in customer success, but how might you do that earlier in a customer’s journey, but in a scaled fashion as well. And part of that is also meeting the customer where they are then they’re not dependent on waiting for a meeting, they can access it when they have the pain point and want help. And then you can also use those signals to direct when one to one interaction might add value. All right. Is there another one? Oh, Jason’s got a question for us, yeah.

 Amanda Kleha:

I saw one I like too. What are some qualities you look for when hiring strong sales leaders? Seems hiring is a challenge for everyone, how should they focus their time, energy, attention? I hired our GM in Europe. And one of the things that I was looking for was had they sold previously to people other than the CIO. I wanted someone with the mindset that was beyond one buyer like that. And so that was one criteria I was looking for just to test for how creative they might be in thinking about who they’re selling to. And I say that because the IT buyer is a professional software buyer. And so they have a very particular set of expectations when it comes to the sales process. And for Figma, our main initial buyer for Figma design is the head of design.

 Amanda Kleha:

And so they’re not buying software every day and they are a very creative persona in the company. And so it was important to me that I could picture a sales leader talking to our buyer, that was first and foremost, but then I also had a lot of conversations about what it meant to be a sales leader in a company that had a self-service motion and how that played out for them in their head and how the partnership with marketing could work in ways that maybe they hadn’t experienced before or maybe they had. So those were some of the lines of questions that I asked.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, I love those, the picturing, are they going to develop a partnership with your customers and really develop that deep empathy. I think we have a similar ethos here at Asana in terms of bringing on great sales leaders is really beginning with they’re passionate about the mission. They really want to enable teams to work better together. And that’s evident in the teams that they’ve built and the places that they’ve been. And so they’re an incredibly credible partner to our customers as they’re navigating, hey, how do we do this well? Not just the, how do we adopt the product well, but how do we think about strategic work management? What’s the order of adoption? And then just people that really again, see the customer’s success and growth as their own success. And so that’s been a key criteria at Asana and then in this market also people who are great talent magnets and see the value of building strong teams around the world. All right. Is there another one that, they’re coming in? So is there another one that you want to take Amanda, that you think would be good for the audience?

 Amanda Kleha:

Let’s see, there’s a lot of good questions here. We’re not going to be able to do all of them. What is a good marketing team org structure supporting both self-service and sales teams? I can say for at Figma one of the things that I think is important for our marketing team is that they feel connected to both the top of funnel metric which is signups, but also the metric that connects to sales which is MQLs. So we track both of those, we have goals against both of those. We have people that feel directly responsible for each of those. And I think it’s important that you celebrate both so that the whole team feels like they’re part of both because they at Figma our self service business is very important and a big driver of revenue. Sales certainly outnumber it overall in the pie chart, which is great. And I love that, but they both play a big role in the overall picture.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. That’s great. All right. There’s some pricing questions. You answered that one so well, so I’m going to make sure we get through other questions. Jason has a number of awesome pricing questions for us. So any pricing mistakes we’ve seen going from self serve to sales and maybe a co layer to that also then internally, credit and commission. How do we think about that? And then free users, too good of a deal. Should we tackle a couple of these? Because I think we’ve seen this across all three of the companies we work with, yeah.

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah. Pricing mistakes. Well, this is one from 12 years ago so we can talk about it now. But one of the ones at Zendesk that we made was at the end of the day what happened was we wanted to increase prices. And the way we did it was we thought, oh, we could ask, we could have people keep their old price, but just upgrade to an annual plan. And they, customers just rejected that big time. And so so many mistakes we made, first of all, we didn’t really talk to customers before we rolled it out. We should have done that, that would’ve probably solved or at least had our expectations changed of what was going to happen when we launched it. Second thing that I took out of that is that people don’t necessarily mind in a SaaS world.

 Amanda Kleha:

They recognize that you’re adding more value to the product all the time. So they don’t necessarily mind that you’re going to increase prices, but they just don’t want to be, they want to have some choice in the matter. And if you kind of force them into something that’s where they get twitchy. So if you can make them feel like they’re in control of the decision, because maybe you bundle all your new features into a higher price plan that they can decide if they upgrade into or not. I think that’s ideal. It’s not always what you’re able to do, but that’s giving customers the choice I think was a big lesson I learned.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it resulted in some pretty amazing t-shirts at Zendesk with the angry tickets. So that was the way we celebrated the painful lessons of, hey, we should have paid attention to the customers ahead of time. There were some classic t-shirts with large quotes from customers to remind us. So that’s a good way pro tip for everybody out there, everybody makes mistakes. Then if you wear it proudly on a t-shirt, you’ll de-risk it the next time around. So maybe I’ll tackle the one Jason asked about is it okay to give your free users sort of too good of a deal? What’s the line? And I think this is a really great question and there’s probably not a universal answer. It depends on the product, but I think at Asana, we have a deep belief that providing a robust free product is good for so many reasons.

Anne Raimondi:

The first and foremost is we want to help teams of every size realize value and be able to get their work done better together. And so if that means they get a ton of value from the free product and they’re loyal Asana customers, and then they share that with others, there’s just a ton of value there. And we often see that free customers, it may not be that straight upgrade process of okay, I’m free. And then I upgrade to paid and then I expand. But what we also see a really lovely dynamic is sometimes they’re free customers for a specific use, maybe that’s a personal use or a smaller team, but then they’ll actually adopt a paid product when they move into another organization or they start a company. So we see that dynamic which is really powerful.

Anne Raimondi:

So not thinking about it as linear of free is just something that you market to upgrade to pay. But these sort of multiple vectors of value that you’re delivering for customers over time and then again, with data, you can do just a lot of testing on what are those trigger points and when do your free customers pick their head up and say, yeah, I’ve got budget for this. And these are the things I’m willing to pay for because I know I’ll get a lot of value and I’ve built trust over time with the company that it’s not just a, hey, we’re trying to upgrade you at every moment.

 Amanda Kleha:

I’ll add to that. I think at Figma because our vision is to make design accessible to all, there’s a huge value in us having a really strong, free plan. We’ve got 80% of our active users outside the US, sometimes NGOs where we know they’re just, they’re not going to be able to afford to pay for the product. So it’s important to us as a business and what we value that we have a strong free plan and I think that we rely so much on word of mouth marketing that a lot of our free users are part of that marketing motion and help bring visibility and brand awareness around the world to Figma. So I believe in it, I believe it’s important to not be afraid to put a lot of value in your free plan.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, definitely. All right. We’ve got some, there’s quite a few questions around incentives. How do we align incentives or otherwise reduce friction between kind of self-serve or product led growth and sales teams to make sure they’re working well together especially as the company grows. So do you want to kick that off? And I know we’ve spent a lot of time on that. How do you have it be as productive as possible? Where do you draw the line and how do you draw the line, but then how do you also evolve that? Because it’s not a fixed line.

 Amanda Kleha:

Yeah. I think both at Zendesk and Figma, one of the things that helped to drive the right kind of incentives was just how do you segment your sales team? So for example, if you’ve got an enterprise segment, they’re not going to usually be at odds with your self-service motion because they’re talking to the biggest companies. So it’s okay if Walmart comes and wants to buy a couple seats because I know that that’s going to be a big deal ultimately for example. So I want sales talking to that kind of customer, but I think where you have to be a little bit more intentional is just on the lower end, do you want a sales team helping create a bigger deal in those SMB kind of customers? Or do you want a self service motion bringing them in the door and then maybe sales trying to expand it afterwards. And I think there’s no wrong or right answer to that. It’s just a choice you make and it has to do with how you segment your sales team and what you have them work on.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah. And I think the way we thought about it Asana is we’ve intentionally known that that’s going to evolve over time as our business grows because as we’ve increasingly gone up market, we have more and more customers that, yes, they’re still starting out with this bottoms up and teams adopting. But the earlier that our sales team can partner with them, the faster that they can get value across their organization. And so even if they are starting smaller with a team, just like a startup might, it’s valuable for us to ensure that they’re getting sort of the right level of support as they grow. And so, but we know that that’s going to evolve kind of year over year. And so I think part of it is also just managing expectations across the team of this is something that we’re going to do intentionally and look at where that line can and should be drawn ultimately back to giving each customer as much value as possible.

Anne Raimondi:

So that segmentation you talked about is really important, but also helping people understand that that segmentation again is not fixed. It’s going to evolve as your business evolves and you learn more from your customers. And then maybe touching on incentives, I think then it means really designing incentive structures so that they’re not creating, I mean, and I call these unnatural acts, you don’t want the friction to be between teams internally. You really do want to think about, hey, when are we in learning mode? And we do want to make sure that we have more flexibility and room in these programs because we want everybody locked arms and learning. And then when do you design incentives sort of more intentionally of, hey, this is rewarding behavior that we know repeatedly creates more value. So I think having that mindset is really important. All right. We probably have time, I mean, there’s so many questions. I wish we had more time. Is there one more that you feel like we should, we’ve got enough time to tackle before we wrap up?

 Amanda Kleha:

Well, there’s as sales leaders of extremely high growth companies, how do you enable new hires to get off to fast starts? Good one. Definitely. I think for us, we have a ramp period for new reps, so there’s that. We celebrate their wins as they ramp. So there’s that. I think that’s important. We have a whole, we’ve invested in ops and enablement so we’ve got a whole enablement process to onboard them into the product. We have them go through a demo certification so they really feel comfortable demoing the product. They get a chance to shadow other reps. We record sales calls so they get to listen to sales calls and understand how the conversations work. And for many of their conversations, their managers will jump in early on to help advise along the way. So there’s both human intervention, there’s documentation, there’s set agendas in their first few weeks. So it’s very structured. And I think that celebrating their wins along the way is an important part too.

Anne Raimondi:

Yeah, the celebration part, I just I can’t emphasize enough of. We have celebration channels in Slack and then we run Asana on Asana. So that helps with onboarding. So as new employees are ramping within the company, especially on the sales team, they get to see all the different possible use cases across teams, across functions. And so that’s also part of onboarding them successfully into the company, but also giving them ideas that they can talk to customers about.

 

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