Mobilizing your Champions, Maturing with your PLG Motion, & Being Okay with Friction | By Katie Jane Bailey, Sr. AE at Figma
Product-Led Sales 🌊
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Hey y’all!
We launched the Product-Led Sales newsletter with the goal of showcasing the best salespeople and sales leaders at PLS companies. Each interviewee “passes the baton” to another person at a PLS company who they respect. So, this newsletter is “by the people, for the people.”
Our first featured product-led sales expert is Katie Jane Bailey, Senior Account Executive at Figma. And she is passing the baton for the second installment, to Ryan Patterson, Regional Director, Strategic Sales at Airtable. So tune in next time for that piece.
Let’s get into our first post.
About Katie Jane
Katie Jane has been with Figma for 2.5 years and was the third person on the enterprise team — the week she joined was the week Figma’s enterprise product launched. Since joining, they have grown from 90 employees to over 550 today. What is Figma? Here’s how KJ described it:
Figma is a digital collaboration tool. We started as a design product, so building products and anything digital user interface facing, and now we've expanded to include a whiteboarding tool. So we are a collaboration platform at Figma.
Here is what Katie Jane talks about in today’s piece:
Intro: being an Enterprise AE at a PLG company
Low barrier to entry builds champions
Coaching champions
Building a narrative of individual users for the decision-maker
Leaning into Figma’s community
Using your product as leverage in a sales cycle
How the product-led motion evolves over a company’s lifetime
How prospecting evolves when PQLs dry up
Discovery within PLG
Conclusion: come work with me at Figma!
Now, I’ll pass the mic off to Katie Jane…
Intro: being an Enterprise AE at a PLG company
I love PLG because it means that oftentimes when I'm talking to someone, they are much further down the sales/marketing funnel than the average buyer. Not only have they read about Figma, know our brand from social media, and/or participated in the community, but they're probably already using our platform.
So, by the time I have a conversation with them, I'm helping to translate what they've experienced already, to the rest of their company, and how it could impact their business.
Low barrier to entry builds champions
By having a low barrier to entry (free product), oftentimes a champion emerges without me talking with them — because by using the product, they see the value proposition and become a champion, organically.
Knowing how to guide that champion through a full enterprise buying cycle is really where my expertise lies.
Coaching champions
A lot of my job is coaching champions — translating the impact that individuals have experienced. Also, because Figma is all based around collaboration, the more people that are in it, the more value the company sees.
PLG adds so much complexity to the evaluation stage before getting into a deal.
As the seller, your skillset evolves to not only include finding and solving pain points, or helping them identify the value for their company. But you're also having to identify where they're at in the buying cycle.
Your champion could look like anyone — from a fall intern to your VP of Design. And when you meet with that person—based on where they are within the company, the company itself, and the adoption of Figma—it changes the qualification conversation completely. You could have a tech company that has dozens of people already using Figma, but in little silos all over the company. So you need to talk with the champion and shine a light on what they should value. Ask them: “why don't we bring everyone together? How does that align with your goals?”
I’ll give you an example.
There is a company I'm working with right now: a large, slow-moving institution, not the company you think of for innovation. This company has had multiple people try to get the design leadership to look at Figma, and no one's been successful. But they have some big Figma fans in-house. One designer, in particular, was such a fan that two years ago he wrote a blog post about “Figma for the enterprise.” One day this designer reaches out to me and says, "Katie Jane… I have to bring Figma to our company!" And so I met with him weekly and would ask him questions like, "Okay, what happened this week? Who are you talking to? What are the upcoming opportunities?" And we would practice the narrative of Figma, we would practice the value. And as a result of those conversations, he would constantly bring Figma up to the right people at the right time with the right value statement.
And ultimately he garnered enough influence internally for that slow-moving beast to say, "Okay, we'll take a look at Figma."
Now, especially in a remote world, an individual voice has so much more sway on something like Slack or Teams. And it just took one persistent voice to make it happen.
Building a narrative of individual users for the decision-maker
I talk to everyone at a company I’m selling into. I’m talking to the most active user, the admin on the paid team, the VP of Design (who is the actual decision-maker).
We've been having a lot of success with cold calls recently. So especially when a team's using Figma already, the conversation usually goes something like this… Me: "Hey John, did you know that a lot of your team's using Figma?" John: "No, I didn't know that." Me: "Cool. Should we talk about that?" John: "Yes. Let's talk about that.”
There's so much ammunition to use as a seller to try to get a conversation going. For example, we pull data that shows “last collaboration date,” which means the last time they were in a file with someone. When I see people at a company using Figma but they've never collaborated on a file before, I’ll reach out and say something like, "Collaboration is the main value proposition of Figma. Have you brought your team into your files? What's the collaboration like?"
And you're just sparking ideas.
You're just trying to get them into those “aha moments” of the product—where they start to see the value and experience it without me telling them the value because that's where the magic is.
So it’s both bottoms-up and top-down.
Leaning into Figma’s community
Successful PLG companies have a big community around the product — because it's so heavily based on word of mouth, people are talking about your product, they want to talk about your product.
As a seller, you should use this community to your advantage. So there's no concept of, "are you familiar with Figma?" Instead, it changes to, "I'm sure you've heard of Figma. How can I help you better understand it?" So sellers have to dispel any misconceptions. Leveraging your brand is super important for PLG companies.
Using your product as leverage in a sales cycle
As a seller, you want to be accommodating to your buyers. And anything that your buyer asks of you, you want to be able to say yes to them, and you want to be able to accommodate and please them.
However, at a PLG company, or any company really, but especially when your product is so sticky and people love it so much, it feels counterintuitive to intentionally put up barriers to drive the kind of action that you need. Let's say, turning off a trial or putting a barrier to entry to a certain feature. But, if you have this mega champion that can't actually get the deal done, no matter how frustrated they are, at a certain point you may have to tell them that you have to put up that barrier, to get what you as the seller need. And with PLG you're going to get super passionate champions that you want to mobilize.
Sometimes saying no is actually mobilizing them, which feels very counterintuitive to a salesperson, but it's something that you have to adapt to be successful. And you can still be kind about it but you have to learn how to say, no.
How the product-led motion evolves over a company’s lifetime
Product-led looks different depending on which stage you’re at in the company — depending on where your company is at on the maturity curve.
Early-stage
When I first joined Figma, there were four of us in sales and there was so much inbound that you're just trying to survive. So at that time, our discovery wasn’t “what are your pain points,” but instead, "Is this a deal that's going to happen? And if it is, how do we get this done? And how do we get this done as quickly as possible?" So that's your early-stage PLG motion.
So, if you're reading this right now and you're like, "Okay, we're probably in that early stage. So I need some tools in terms of ‘get this done.’" then product leverage is everything.
Middle/late-stage
For reference, Figma’s first product launched in 2015. We didn't have a paid product until 2017 — and that was only self-serve (put in your credit card, pay-to-play). And then we didn't have a sales team until 2019.
So we had all this built-up demand of people who wanted to have the enterprise version of Figma. And so (as a sales rep) your discovery in those days was just, "how do I just get this done as soon as possible?"
Then, as you're maturing as a company, you scale and add more to the sales team, and your internal sales support (ie: sales ops, sales enablement) needs to grow at the same rate as your reps, even though that might be hard to justify internally to executive leadership. You can always justify a new sales rep, but what is the ROI on sales ops? But trust me, you need sales ops and need enablement, especially when scaling fast.
As you start to mature, your discovery process changes significantly because it's not just how to get the deal done, but instead, "How do I get a deal?" And "Of the people that I've got, how do I turn this into a deal?"
If you're starting into that middle/late stage and you're fully PLG, then your discovery and triangulation skills are everything.
Discovery within PLG
There's a temptation to not go deep on accounts because you have heavy inbound, people using your product. But really you have some users over there, some users that used to use Figma, some new hires — you’ve got this mess of information. So you should still go deep on that account and triangulate the usage with what you know about the company to be successful.
So discovery is a matter of understanding where they're at in their Figma journey.
So for me, at Figma, that's a range, starting with “What is Figma?” Then there are misconceptions of Figma. Then there’s “I've used Figma as an individual before, I love it” to “I've used Figma as a team” all the way to, "I onboarded Figma at my last company.”
With PLG, who you talk to could be anywhere on that spectrum.
You no longer have the simplicity of, “What is Figma?” There are all kinds of knowledge that as a seller, you have to sort through and figure out in real-time. Some examples could be: "I think they get the value proposition. So now I can talk about: let's get more people into it." Or "I don't think they truly get the value proposition yet. So we need to get them into the product."
There's so much more diagnosis and prescription in the discovery process because there's just more information.
It's no longer just, "I downloaded a white paper” or “I requested a demo."
Instead, your discovery and genuine curiosity need to become your best friends.
How prospecting evolves when PQLs dry up
At Figma, we are definitely in the stage now where we're doing a heavy combination of outbound and fielding inbounds, but more and more it's turning outbound.
Here is how I leverage our brand recognition for outbound prospecting.
We're pretty lucky at Figma because people know a lot about us and there's a lot of buzz around our product. We’ve also been super lucky to hire incredible people who are well connected. And we have clients who are really happy with Figma. It’s important to leverage these champions. I’ll walk through an interesting example of this.
I'm trying to get into a large telecom company right now. And I’m working with one of their subsidiaries and they asked for more resources from Figma—I proposed giving some extra resources in exchange for a direct introduction to the design leadership at their parent company. And he did! But when he gave this introduction, it was not only like, "Hey, you should talk to Figma." But instead, it was this glowing introduction of how it's changed their workflow — it was basically a personalized case study for this company.
The people who are obsessed with your product, mobilize them, help them help you.
Conclusion: come work with me at Figma
Selling at a PLG company is awesome. And Figma is hiring. For basically everything. Enterprise Sales, Mid-market Sales, Director of Enterprise. Next year we’re opening offices in Paris, Berlin, and more. Lots of opportunities.
Come work with me! :)
Thank you for having me on Product-Led Sales. I am passing the baton to my friend, Ryan Patterson, Regional Director, Strategic Sales at Airtable. He’s awesome — I know you’re going to enjoy the insights he’s learned from within another world-class product-led sales company.
Thank you, Katie Jane! (Go follow her on LinkedIn!) I continue to learn so much from your empathy and creativity as a seller. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me on this episode of Product-Led Sales 🌊.
Thanks for reading and see you next time with Ryan from Airtable!
-Brendan