Playbook to Product-Led Sales: A Step-by-Step Guide to Accelerating Growth with LiveSession
What bring us to product-led-sales?
Like many growth leaders, you may have experienced the frustration of misaligned sales and product teams. Sales reps are struggling to articulate the true value of your solution, often relying on generic pitches that failed to resonate with prospects. Meanwhile, your product team is pouring their hearts into building a powerful platform, only to see it underutilized due to ineffective sales efforts.
Accelerating the sales cycles
For sales leaders struggling to equip reps with compelling product narratives, or product managers seeking deeper insights into customer usage, our playbook breaks down product-led sales. By unlocking real-time product analytics, session replays, and in-app engagement, you craft personalized sales motions resonating with buyers. No generic pitches or disjointed handoffs - authentic conversations guiding buyers toward “aha” moments, accelerating sales cycles.
This guide walks through our proven product-led sales framework, sharing strategies for activating your product across the customer journey. I hope you are ready for this growth strategy with the playbook we are going over today.
The steps to launching product-led sales are:
- Defining success metrics
- Identify key account signals in your product
- Create segments and metrics
- Connect notifications with email or slack
- Measure success and iterate
The “why” behind launching product-led-sales
We’ve all heard about all of the new growth tactics. Product-led-sales is a GTM motion that intents to equip your sales team with the highest quality data. By using product data to uncover qualified pipeline, accelerate deal cycles, and maximize expansion.
Product data unveils the highest intent for you
Data-driven selling is advancing quickly, and product data stands out as the highest intent data available to revenue teams. Product data offers several key advantages:
- First-party: It provides context on what your users are trying to achieve and their pain points based on their actual interactions with your product.
- Real-time: It updates dynamically as users engage, adopt, or disengage with your product, ensuring you have the most current information.
- Adaptive: Over time, analyzing product data reveals stronger correlations to user intent, unlike static firmographic data (e.g., Zoominfo) or sporadic marketing engagement behavior.
Setting up for success
Success metrics form the foundation of an effective product-led sales strategy. Counting unique events unveils critical insights - which features drive activation, adoption, and expansion. Identify key users through firmographic and behavioral data analysis.
Score accounts holistically by mapping event streams to the buyer journey. Track leading indicators like product consumption to anticipate churn risks or upsell opportunities. Stay focused on value metrics over vanity counts.
One account worth more than a thousand words
An account with a few passionate champions outperforms one with 10-second long sessions. Align your success criteria with the desired outcomes, whether boosting conversions, reducing churn, or accelerating expansions. The right metrics illuminate your product’s impact and your customers’ evolving needs. Leverage this intelligence to tailor messaging, product roadmaps, and go-to-market strategies for maximum relevance and results.
Playbook example for LiveSession
At LiveSession we join the party of product-led-sales because there’s nothing better than using your own tool in new situations. Here are a few of examples of our take on data driven sales. Follow the steps along:
Segments
We need segments for 2 things when starting our data-driven sales journey: 1) To identify and segment best users and sessions for quick insights retrieval 2) to filter out relevant sessions in different places
Segments are part of sessions tab. First go there and play around with adding filters to your search. We will save them so they act as groups of filters reusable across LiveSession.
Trial accounts or New users
Trial users is one of the best leads you can find in your product-led sales funnel. Let’s create a segment for them. You can also set up a custom property which will show their current plan.
More info on technical setup for custom properties here
ICPs
If your company is not just starting out you will have the best customers which you want more. So learn from the ICP group how they behave. We will blur out the email substrings of our clients but example would be google.com or meta.com
MAU
If you want to get straight to sessions where a lot of stuff happen create a segment for MAU which stands for (Monthly Active Users)
Exclude your team
Most likely you will find a lot of sessions in your search results from your colleagues so it’s better to create a segment that will exclude all of them.
Metrics
Track metrics that matter, such as time-to-value, feature adoption rates, and retention rates. Analyze how users interact with your product, identifying pain points and opportunities for growth.
The goal of product-led sales is always increasing revenue for the company so let’s choose a revenue-focused KPI.
Focus on one revenue KPI to start
While it may be tempting to see all the above and say, “I want it all!”, make sure to pause and be selective. Each revenue KPI below will drive towards different plays, tap into different product signals, be operationalized with different teams, and have different success KPIs.
Focusing on one key area will allow you to rapidly build and launch without getting slowed down.
Our goal at LiveSession would be converting free to paid users so I’ll set up a metric like this. This will be my north star.
Do you see “New users” segment I just applied for this metric? That’s why we wanted to create segments. For quicker creation of your metrics and dashboards with their own segments.
Building dashboards
The more time you spend on adding new metrics you should add them on your dashboard for product-led-sales team. Let’s face it some of the sales folks won’t navigate seamlessly across the platform. Why not make it easy for teamwork and transparency?
Okay but what metrics should I also add?
- Unique Trials Users
- MAU
- Users who used key feature
- Users who viewed key feature
- New users
Also each metric can be viewed in 3 different ways
Signals
Signals should be automated and you get notified instead of monitoring your dashboards 24/7. At LiveSession we often use dedicated channels to notify us about certain events
Signal 1. New signups
When a new user signs up, we trigger a notification to our sales team, providing essential information about the user, such as their company, role, and current plan. This enables our team to respond promptly and personalize their outreach.
Signal 2. Team expansion
When a customer’s team expands, we send a signal to our sales team, highlighting the growth opportunity. This enables our team to pro with the customer, understanding their evolving needs and identifying potential upsell opportunities.
Signal 3. Key feature used
When a user engages with a key feature, we trigger a signal to our sales team, providing context about their progress in user activation. These are the best kind of leads because they have shown active engagement in your product and might be more open to discover what the pro plan has to offer for them.
Note:
To create these alerts you might need to create custom or defined events.
Measure success
To see how we progress there are a few options
Level 1. See how many deals you have opened and won in your CRM
Level 2. Split the team in half for those using product data and those who don’t. Then track these metrics for 2 groups: Activities to opp rate, Opps created, Win Rate, Revenue.
Feedback loops
You want to make sure your sales team is crushing it with product-led sales, right? To do that, you gotta check in with them and see how it’s going. Ask them some super simple questions, like:
- Are you using the product data in your sales workflow? If not, what’s the holdup?
- Do you fully get how to use the product data? Do you need more help or training?
- Are you using the right data points? Which ones are actually working, and which ones need a tweak?
Next steps:
If you haven’t, go try LiveSession now