From B2C to PLS and Everything In Between

Superhuman started off it’s a here’s the acronym again. B2C PLG that then became B2B. I guess you could say B2B PLG. And now it’s b to b, b to c, PLG, PLS. And now you’re going upmarket. It actually all flows together, and actually hearing it out loud makes me feel like we’ve got way too many acronyms in this world, but, it is what it is. We will accept everybody. But ideally, we’re targeting people who are inside large five hundred, six hundred person plus companies. And then we can do that same funnel as you go up market and then secure contracts that increase over time. This is revenue makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Saima. So I’m gonna call today’s episode a little bit of acronym soup Oh, gosh. With some really good insights. But you’re familiar with PLS? You know what? Before today’s conversation, I was not. So tell the audience, what is PLS? So when you think about PLG, it’s a self serve motion. People sign up. You know, maybe they’re prompted for additional upgrade pass. Very much self serve. PLS is now taking that a bit further and using product signals and usage and intent to activate a sales team to go sort of do land and expand types of things, bring new use cases and so forth. So it’s it’s sort of an offshoot of PLG, I guess, but it’s interesting because so today we’re talked to Andrew Johnston who’s head of sales at Superhuman, which is a supercharged I almost feel like I’m not doing it justice, a supercharged email client that began in as a b to c product connecting into Gmail and then into Outlook. And now they’re serving enterprise and have a really, really sophisticated PLS motion. It was really fascinating to hear, you know, how they’re solving such a broad problem. Everyone’s feeling overwhelmed, over communicated to struggling to stay on top of everything. But they’re doing it with a really data driven go to market motion from the top of the funnel right through to then actually closing deals. So it’s fascinating just to hear how they’re doing that and how they’re incorporating all of those signals into how they sell, how they market, and how they close. Yeah. And beyond that too, you know, again, we love talking about account based tactics. We love talking about all the things that go into that. Despite being a very different sales motion from, you know, a standard enterprise sales process, we talked about ICP. We talked about being account based. We talked about economic buyer, the buying committee, all the things that we talk about all the time. So you could be selling differently, but the fundamentals are the fundamentals. So let’s dive in and let everyone hear what’s what we got. Let’s do it. So, Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. I was really looking forward to this today because you’ve got something really interesting, exciting happening at Superhuman. And what I wanted to set the stage, right, because we’ve got an audience that we live in a world of acronyms. People hear about PLG, PLS or product led sales, which we’re gonna talk about. I think it’s important actually. How would you define the difference between product led growth and product led sales? Yeah. And I hopefully, I don’t get this wrong. There’s a lot of experts out there that probably know way more than I do, but the way that I define it is product led growth is where you’re using in product signals to drive the growth of the company. So it’s customers who can self serve. It’s purely driven by the product team engineering. There typically is no sales team or very little enrollment from a sales team or a success team. Those customers are able to buy the product, potentially upgrade the product, or have usage that increases the amount they’re spending on the product without some sort of commitment that is led from a contractual deal. And that can be as part of a company strategy or it can be the entire company strategy. And there’s examples of both. Product led sales is a evolution, or I would say, a tack on product led growth. When you decide that we want to use the same signals would be an example of one. And that could indicate a really high intent user, would be an example of one. And that could indicate a really high intent user. And then pairing that to enrichment and understanding who that user is, where they sit in your organization, and then using that to maybe create a selling motion. So using product led signals to create a sales motion. And hopefully that creates higher intent, but it also creates a much warmer experience for the customer. One thing that I like to say for product led sales is you’re earning the right to have a sales conversation because you’re using those signals to say, hey, I know what you’re looking at. I know what you’re using. I’m going to come in and try to help you or try to give you new insight. And then as the flip, I would also like to have a conversation about how maybe we get you and the rest of your team on the product, and potentially that opens the door for a contract. And what is your role at Superhuman, Andrew? I lead the sales and go to market organization. I think interesting about the motion of Superhuman started off it’s a here’s the acronym again, b to c PLG that then became b to b. I guess you could say b to b PLG. And now it’s b to b, b to c, PLG, PLS. And now you’re going upmarket. So you’ve got a bunch of different motions going on now. Can you kinda, like, walk us through what that looks like? And, again, that’s fascinating to me because you always hear people like, oh, we’re doing this, but you’re more like this, this, this, and this. It’s pretty interesting. It actually all flows together, and actually hearing it out loud makes me feel like we’ve got way too many acronyms in this world. But, it is it is it is what it is. I would think of it this way. You’ve got the individual user that’s the b to c user. We built a product for high powered individuals, people who send a lot of email, who are sick of the old experience. That’s the idea. That funnels into what we call small teams. We started creating this motion that’s PLG, but you can then consolidate. Maybe it’s five users in different parts of your organization. You can create these, like, small teams of five to maybe ten people. That’s step two. So that’s b to c first, then it moves into a more of a b to b motion, but still individual usage on the product. So it’s users who all love it. They’re not really collaborating back and forth, but they might as well combine usage or combine billing and maybe get some sort of small discount. That, again, is PLG led. Then that moves from small team to team size where we’re able actually to say, let’s have a contract, and let’s have teams based features on the product. So things like multiplier threading. You can see, again, different usage. I won’t get into all the different features set, but you’re able to go back and forth between the product on a larger team. Usually, a contract’s in place that is leveraged from that POS motion. All the while, there are still PLG things like, I’m on that team now. I can invite someone who is my colleague in sales. They will get added to my new team contract that then expands the contract over time. So all the motions funnel. Right? They continue to funnel. And then the the cherry on top is, can you take those motions, small team, medium team, and then expand, hopefully, that’s inside a large organization, to go be a enterprise level account. And that’s where we’re going upmarket. So it’s making sure that the people that enter at that top of funnel as an individual, we will accept everybody. But, ideally, we’re targeting people who are inside large five hundred, six hundred person plus companies, and then we can do that same funnel as you go up market and then secure contracts that increase over time. So I’m going to ask the go to market question then since that is your role. As you think of your motion in terms of developing pipeline, is it truly land and expand where there’s this initial get, but the majority of your plan, for example, is around upsell or cross sell? Or are you really looking to start with those bigger deals? Like, it’s kind of fascinating how you plan for this and forecast? It’s a great question. And we’re still evolving, misthinking. But I think we will very much be for a while in this like seed, land and expand motion where you’re seeding the account with a couple of users that turns into a small contract, and then you’re expanding from there. We use those users that are high intent, typically Director Plus, as land points to open up the conversation for a large enterprise account. What we typically see, to your point, is a couple users at the c suite or director plus level are using the product inside a large organization as individuals. And we’ll reach out to those individuals and say, hey. You are using the product to the best of its ability. We have their stats, their metrics, x PLS motion. Have you ever thought about bringing this throughout your team? Like, clearly, you’re getting a ton of value from this product. What does it look like if everybody was on it or a subset of your team was on it? We try to get the wheels turning. That then opens up the ability to do a pilot, and we can run a pilot. And that’s how we might enter a larger land. But even then, we still might not land the entire organization in one slot. It usually is, let’s get the sales team on the platform, and that might expand from there. So it might be fifty seats. It might be a couple hundred seats. As we go up market, those lands are bigger, but it still is this, like, land and expand or even seed land and expand model. When you think about pipeline, you know, we to sort of talking about Simon’s question about forecasting. But when you’re thinking about building pipeline, do you look at those motions as very distinct and you have very distinct pipeline plans? I mean, again, you said they all certainly do sound like they certainly all flow together. But how do you think about pipeline build between the different motions? It’s a good, great question. We call it It’s a good, great question. We call it velocity as like our mid market segment. And so those are companies that are smaller that you’re going to close anywhere from fifteen to maybe up to hundred, maybe a couple hundred seats at the very high end. That pipeline, we do treat differently. And that is filtered off of the individual pipeline. So, our marketing team has a goal around top of funnel for how many individuals that we can get on the platform on a monthly basis. And then on top of that, how many self serve teams can be created. And those self serve teams become the basis for those large and small contracts. So it is very different. It’s different emotions. We look at, like, how is that funnel developing? Certainly for that velocity motion, shorter sales cycles, moving a little bit quicker. So we try to look for a pipeline to be generated and closed in quarter or in the next sell to pick a quarter. And we’re looking for like that velocity motion to turn over. When it’s more upmarket and enterprise, we’re looking at that funnel more holistically of like, are we landing the right users on the platform? Are they creating these small teams? Or can we go create these pilot accounts? Very different motion. So we do track them separately, but they’re again, like you said, there’s a lot of crossed wires and a lot of influence that happens across the funnel. So listen, as Adam as I often do, we went into the nuts and bolts and the nerdy side of the business, but let’s just talk about the reason this exists. And as as executives, as leaders, as folks working in the companies that we work in, email is a huge stressor sometimes, right? It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on. Like, can we talk a little bit about what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing from the prospect based, from the customer based, why this product came about? I think it solves a problem that is pretty universal. I tend to agree, and I love the question. It’s one that we actually get a lot because a lot of people are using Outlook or Gmail today. And, like, why would I move to Superhuman? I think taking a step back, what you just said is what we try to hone in on, which is email hasn’t been evolved since really two thousand and five. Like, Gmail looks generally the same. Outlook maybe has improvements. So, if you were to go rebuild those products today, what would they look like? And we like to think Superhuman embodies that vision. But I think a lot of people, the problem they have is they adopt the status quo of email is gonna be a terrible experience. It’s gonna be a phone box. I’m gonna have the ticker on my iPhone that says fourteen thousand. I read emails. Which by the way, it’s either fourteen thousand or zero. Like, I don’t think there’s any in between. I get, like, ticker shamed when I’m on Zoom and I’m sharing my screen and somebody sees like, I’m looking at my Outlook right now. I have seven thousand even. Adam, I have zero. So that tells you right now that we are very Yeah. People. Well, I don’t think I would mess it. I wouldn’t zero shame you, but I’ve gotten multiple I’ve gotten Slacks. I’ve gotten to, like, how? It’s just like with tabs, the same thing. Like, if I have probably thirty tabs open. I mean, again, like, it’s a mentality thing, but people, like, have such such a visceral response to their inbox. It’s wild. Totally. Wait. So I’m gonna have to ask, are you an inbox zero person or do you just clear the notifications? No. No. I am an inbox zero. I would stress. I think I would not be able to sleep at night. It’s a problem. Let’s be honest. I’m I’m not advocating or saying this is the right way, but it’s a problem. But for me, I need to be on top of it, and I need to make sure that I’m cleared it out. That’s fantastic. And you are you are curable. No. Don’t don’t encourage this being here. No. It it it But going back to your answer where we so rudely interrupted you. No. No. You’re totally fine. It’s funny because we try to make the experience you just talked about where it’s stressful to get to inbox zero less stressful. So you’re hitting it every single day. Where whereas it’s like the thought of getting to inbox zero requires a ton of effort, a ton of stress, and then you’re thinking about I’m not at inbox zero. With superhuman, the idea is that it makes that process a lot easier. In fact, almost gamified and fun. And so going back to the answer of most people are just not thinking about email as a result. They change all their tooling, especially in go to market teams, but the thing they’d never change is how they’re interacting with most of their customers, which is email. The other thing that we’re seeing as trends in the market is, again, a lot of these tools are very powerful like a Slack, but it doesn’t do a good job. I’m sure we’re in the same way, we’ve all gotten in threads on Slack where they become too deep. People are copying and pasting email. Adam, your reaction is the same reaction I get. It’s like, if I just had one tool or if I could just correspond an email better, you’d solve a lot of that. And then I could use Slack for really quick rapid fire information. We actually coach teams on how to use Slack and how to use email because we have a powerful email tool. And so I think the threads that you’re seeing are overwhelmed on communication tools. Email is broken. Slack is not perfect. It’s great for some things, not great for others. People use it in a lot of the wrong ways. And then there’s also a hone in on productivity and efficiency and what tools are gonna increase those things. And and we hope to think that Supremia can do so. I mean, this is like a lot I mean, this is a product, but you’re dealing like, you just saw what happened. Like, people react to this stuff. It’s really Adam, I’m just gonna admit this. I’m also zero Slack. Actually, you know what? I’m zero Slack too. I think I’ve just given up on email. I feel like Slack, I still have some control left of it in my life. But I do wanna geek out on something else though. Talking sixth sense, we’ve got a bunch of PLS, PLG customers. I’ve talked to some of them about how they use our platform and so forth. But one of the things that always comes up is the operationalizing those signals, the data, the product usage. And I’ve talked to some really, like, heavy hitters in PLG PLS where, like, you think they would have their stuff together and they’re still trying to figure that out, whether it’s how they do in their tech stack and so forth. So can you talk a little bit about when you’re looking at product signals, and we’d love to, like, you don’t have to get through all of them, but, like, how you look at them and how they are actually, like, you’re operationalizing, your team is using them, and they’re adding the fuel you need to the fire for getting those sales generated. Happy to. And we’re also not perfect. Like, we are still in this evolution too. I think we are better than most, I like to think, but we’re not perfect by any means. We have a tool that ingests all of our product usage data. And that’s one thing. Being a BDC company first, We monitored all that. So everything from keystrokes to how you’re using the features to are you cleaning your inbox, all those things. And we can pipe that into signals. The tool that we use is able to then combine those signals, and we create, like, these recipes. And it could be a recipe of, Adam, you’re a sales user. We just launched the Superhuman for Sales feature set, which, like, connects to your CRM. It does a couple other things. We can monitor if you’ve turned on the feature and then if you’re actually using it. And then also do connect your CRM to the tool. And if you do any one of those different steps, we can insert a different sort of message into that. So let’s say you turn it on and you’re super active, you’ve been using the product for a while, salesperson can reach out and say, love that you’re on Superhuman for sales. Here’s a couple tips to use it. Also, notice that you haven’t connected your CRM. Why? And maybe they’ll be like, it’s an IT blocker. That opens a lot of conversations, and we’re in. Right? And so we’re using these different signals to open sales conversations. We also use them from a success metric standpoint. So are accounts healthy? Are the seats that we have at a company adopting and using the product the right way? If it’s on a contract, is that going to hurt or increase the chance of renewal or expansion? And so we stack these plays to do this motion. The mastery step that we’re trying to get to that we’re just starting to unlock is you have these signals come in, They can hit top of funnel. We call them a PQA, product qualified account. You then can nurture those signals using a marketing automation tool. And then if they take further action, you can monitor those signals and service them to sales. And so you create this really high intent set of accounts or people to give to sales or customer success or product, wherever you wanna reach them. And that’s kind of where we’re going next using the tool suite that we’ve built. I mean, I love to hear that you are using your own product, your data, your signals to inform everything from the top of the funnel through to then actual qualification. I think we have that in common. That’s a lot of what we do at six cents. You’ve talked a little bit about how you use those signals, but how do you ensure that the team is responsive and staying on top of what the data is telling you. We can talk about superhuman, but I think this is just a broader response to everyone who’s listening in marketing or in sales of how do you really start to capitalize on the signals that are out there in a way that is meaningful and intentional and not too disruptive to the existing flow? It’s a great question. Something again, I think that we are just like everyone else trying to hone down, marketing is in the same tool that we use for this product led sales motion, and they can monitor. In fact, it’s really important in my mind that marketing, sales, and product all combined. Like, this has to be it’s not just sales saying, I want a product with sales tool. It’s marketing is nurturing the leads. They’re helping you with the messaging to reach out. They’re monitoring how they are interacting with customers just from a nurture standpoint. And how did the triggers go back and forth once sales takes over an account? And so I think it’s really important that you involve everyone in the process. Buyer’s journey or the customer’s journey in general? If I reach out, am I hitting them at a good moment or a bad moment? And then we try to operate with that value of how am I earning the customers right to have a conversation or just even help them. And so I think that’s really rooted in like this notion delightful moment? It’s hard to do. I think we’ve done a decent job at it. But I think the most notable thing is just being really involved and having a lot of cross functional communication across those orgs. If you don’t, it’s gonna break down and you’re gonna piss off customers. You’re also gonna probably piss off each other. The system that you’re talking about, I’m actually just curious to know the one system that’s pulling that everyone’s in at the same time, it’s pulling in the signals. What are you using? The tool called Pocus, it sits on top of our data layer. It’s really just a way to really visualize those signals, interact with them. It’s not putting much in terms of intelligence. It’s not adding to it, but it’s really intelligent the way that it combines, creates, like, signal strength. You’re able to create these playbooks. It’s a powerful tool that we’ve been using for a while now. The thing that still fascinates me the most, though, is the b to c to b to b transition that you’ve made. But even just in terms of being in that individual user or more PLG based and moving up market, like, what are some of your hot tips, key pieces of advice if there’s someone listening right now that’s like, okay. We’ve got this motion going, but we wanna move up. We wanna get those bigger deals. We wanna do that expansion. What would be your advice to where to start or some of the maybe even someone like, oh, don’t do that. We did that, and things went terribly wrong. Yeah. You have to know your ICP and your customer you’re selling to, and it changes. And you have to know all the different people that you’re going to interact with. I can’t stress that enough. When you think of the B2C to B2B transition, people who use Superhuman think of themselves as like high performance individuals. That’s why it works really well with consultants. We’re seeing, like, private equity people use it. They’re like, I have this high bar of how I interact and do everything in my life. And so knowing that ICP, we can then translate that to different types of verticals. So if you’re in sales, like, it’s same sort of threads, it enables us to really target the messaging and then hone those signals that we’re gonna use. So the first step is ICP, product market fit. Do you have the right feature set? Do you understand the company? The next thing is, what signals are important? What are those things that actually are gonna tell you that you’re making traction, that people are getting value to product? And then the third thing is train them into those recipes. And then the fourth thing is leveraging in a way that sales can use it. Right? So is the data actionable? Is it telling them the right story? Is it against the narrative that you want those people to think that they have? It all starts with marketing and identifying in B2B to B2C or B2C to B2B and then enterprise, that changes in B2B to B2C or B2C to B2B and then enterprise, that changes, right? So initially, it might be the power user who’s an individual in IC, then it goes to a director plus person who has power and influence like that champion if you’re a medic fan. Then it goes to, now you need to not only empower that person, but know how to sell to the, in our case, an IT director or a workplace productivity director in these larger organizations who can understand the value and the why of them spending initial X amount over just buying Gmail and Outlook today. So it’s an evolution. And I think if you don’t do that initial work upfront, which can be painful, you’re just gonna keep missing the mark and, like, falling short. The message won’t resonate and you won’t win deals. Does somebody with access to so much user data and, again, informing your go to market motions with it. Do you have any stories of things or hypotheses that you absolutely taught were true, but then actually, you know, you got some data that showed no. Like, it was completely counterintuitive to what you would originally have thought. Like, sometimes data can do that. One thing that we did early on or we identified, and hopefully this answers it, is we thought we had the right people who are using the platform, and we would frequently get stuck in these upmarket deals. We’ve got three or four seats. We clearly have the right person or the EB involved. Like, our problem is actually opposite than most companies. We get to be often, to, like, the C suite first. I can reach out cold to a C suite person, and they’ll respond and be like, love your product. And it’s like, okay. Why don’t you buy it for your entire org? I’ll be like, not so fast. You go convince everyone below me to to use the product, and then I’ll buy it. But I’m a champion. I love it. And so what we often thought is that we had that the right economic buyer or the right champion, and we didn’t. We just have the end state EV. And so what we had to figure out was, how do we get unstuck? And the data told us that we had these really good people who are highly engaged, but what we needed to use is use that leverage to find the person that actually makes the decision or that can champion the product a little bit earlier on and use, like, pilots and things to to operate with them and give them the right success metrics that will tell them that this actually is a product worthwhile, and it’s not just, your CEO who loves this weird nascent product. It actually is a product that can be impactful for the organization. So I think the data was telling us right in terms of these people are using it. They’re adopting it. They’re loving it. But it was telling us wrong that that’s the person that we should be selling to. Interesting on that in terms of the right people. Because I would imagine when you get pockets of users, it could be teams based. Like, you might suddenly get ten salespeople or you might get people in the marketing team and so forth. So at what point do they say, like, okay. We’re just gonna buy it for our group or we’re gonna buy it for all of sales. Or at what point do they say, okay, you gotta go talk to IT now. I mean, again, there’s so many IT products out there and you would think traditionally you’re selling email clients to IT, but this is kinda different because it’s so user centric, they can set it up. I don’t even know if IT could even block your product in terms of connecting in. I’m just curious about that. Another layer of interesting challenge. If we with IT, we lost the deal. Or not lost the deal, we’re stuck. And I’ll tell you why. So it’s interesting. What often happens is, especially in upmarket organizations, Adam, you’d be using it. Let’s say, Simon, you’d be using it too. All of a sudden, IT’s like, What the heck is superhuman? They block it. And then you freak out. And you’re like, this is the one tool. I’ve had people say that they would leave organizations at the c suite if they don’t get the tool back. So IT comes begrudgingly to me and is like, hey, I need to figure out what superhuman is. I need to run through an infosec process, and that’s the wrong motion. It’s the motion we have to run to unblock, but we also have to run a payload motion to connect with those people or find another team that would expand. Hey. Let’s go talk to your CRO and see if there’s a use case on sales and make this more worthwhile your time. Because otherwise, you land with a deal where it’s like ten seats, five seats, and it’s just a c suite wanting to be unblocked on the product. So that happens quite often. And the smattering of usage is actually different than you would think. It’s actually pretty rare because we come from this B2C angle, and we’re getting better at this B2B angle where you see, like, a sales leader say, like, I’m signing up like they would for, I don’t know, outreach. I’m gonna buy it for my sales team. Often, it’s them signing up, and then you see, like, a director of product marketing sign up, and we’ve gotta correlate that usage and then figure out which those two people is gonna be the right champion to go after. But if we go to IT first, we’re stuck. I love that we’re still talking about account based selling and marketing principles for a PLG product. Love it. And ICP. I mean, again, every place, ICP. And one more acronym. Oh, I don’t think there’s an episode of this where we haven’t talked about ICP. Like, literally that. We should just call this the ideal customer podcast because it’s just sort of like that stuff. I know. So Andrew, we have a question that we ask every single person on the show. What is the most ridiculous thing thing that you have been asked to do in your career? Ridiculous good, ridiculous bad. So out of college, I wanted to be which is somewhat of a sales role, but I wanted to be a talent agent. So I actually lived in Los Angeles. I worked at one of the big agencies, and I was Lloyd for about a year and a half. And if you don’t know who Lloyd is, for the people listening to the podcast, assistant to a talent agent to this crazy individual named Ari Gold. Ari is actually a real person in real life, and the stories are actually somewhat pretty relevant and true. I think a client wanted a pizza on set. And I think the most crazy thing was, like, my entire day of one day was spent trying to find where this after was with a pizza that ended up being cold because they kept moving locations. And I just was like, this is the most useless waste of time. And then I got the pizza. They’re like, oh, it’s cold. Can you go get me another one? And I think I just called my boss, and I was like, I’m going home. Like, this has spent all day, nothing related to work. And I think what it taught me was that the customer always comes first. It was like There you go. The customer value was the big thing. And in hindsight, you hate it in the moment. You’re getting, like, pencil thrown at you. But the idea is that you’re learning how to think of whatever they need or want. That’s gonna help them come back to the agency or work with you longer to, again, sell more deals, but really package them in more movies or TV shows or whatever it may be. And that was an important lesson, but the actual, like, day to day things that I had to do sometimes were pretty wild. I could go down a rabbit hole with entourage, but nobody on listening would probably appreciate that at all. Right. Love that show. Yeah. Well, Andrew, thanks so much. This was really I mean, I learned a lot. I thought it was really we got to the heart of matter and, you know, I mean, I learned a lot. I thought it was really we got to the heart of matter and really interesting stuff. I’m actually gonna go and fire up Superhuman now too because I have not done yet. Thank you both. It was a pleasure. Great speaking with you. Thank you. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.