In the good ol’ days, sales opportunities would arise from leads responding to sales outreach or by requesting information on your website. 

Now prospects have access to your product. Which means there are multiple ways in which they can get to make a purchase decision. 

Whichever path prospects choose to take, they won’t turn to revenue (at least not as often as they could be) if you use the same process for each. 

When engaging with product-qualified leads, sales need a deep understanding of the context surrounding an opportunity, and clear instructions as to how to engage in a way that matches with the ever-changing needs of the customer. 

So that they can: 

• Help users get more value from the product or get to value quicker.
• Help users avoid roadblocks in the customer journey.
• Close revenue while doing so (upgrades, upsell, expansion). 

They don’t have a deep understanding if only work off lead lists.

For a while now, Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs) have been the poster childs of PLG. They act as a great barometer for understanding which leads are worth sales times and which aren’t. Although being the best measure of qualification for Product-Led Sales, they answer WHO should be touched by sales, not HOW. 

Plays answer HOW. 

In order to capture every single revenue opportunity in the customer journey, there should be a separate batch of accounts for each opportunity, and an associated play. 

What is a sales play and what are the benefits? 

Plays operationalize the outreach process based on specific product activity. They tell reps WHAT to do, HOW to do it, and WHO to target at the qualified account. 

Benefits for reps  

No wasted sales time: Reps spend between 6 to 15 hours a week researching prospects. Plays reduce that to minutes by giving reps a roadmap for taking action (less than 1 min per lead for HubSpot).

Speed-to-lead: Not getting to leads fast enough can kill your pipeline. Plays ensure speed-to-lead is the fastest it can be. 

More replies, better close rates: Following Plays lifts prospect tendency to engage in a sales conversation and close, since your approach tailors to what they’ve done and what they care about. 

Focus: Routing leads to the right team and the right sales Play reduces reps workload by 20-40%, making them focused on opportunities to actually have a chance to turn into revenue. 

Benefits for sales leaders

Predictability: Most PLG sales teams are guessing when it comes to pipeline projections, close rates, sales activities needed to reach a certain quota. Plays bring predictability and repeatability to bottom-up sales. 

Happier reps: The worst thing for a rep is being flooded with work and not getting results. Plays minimize the number of leads per rep while drastically increasing close & response rates. 

Better customer experience, less churn risk: Since every human interaction with your team is tailored to the context surrounding the account, users don’t feel like they’re part of a one-size-fits-all experience.

Maximize revenue per user: Plays ensure that every sales opportunity in the user lifecycle is met with a tailored and value-add sales process. 

Components of a sales play

So you’ve determined that you should start running plays. 

Good call. 

Here are the components of the best-performing sales plays, inspired by what we’ve seen at companies like ClickUp, HubSpot and Grammarly: 

💥Trigger event

A trigger event is what defines which conditions need to be true to start executing a play. 

Example: An account that fits your ideal customer profile has had a 50% user growth in the last 7 days. 

🧑‍💻Persona

Product-led sales involved multiple stakeholders. And different stages of the customer lifecycle (evaluation, buying decision, renewal) will also require appropriate stakeholders to be involved. Persona tells you which type of user a Play is aimed at. 

Example: Champion user.

💬 Sales messaging 

Also referred to as context, this part of a Play gives the sales rep an understanding of which angle to take and what to pitch. 

Example: If a qualified account is seeing a sudden growth in users, reach out to decision-makers to offer a discounted seat price when renewing for a year.. 

✔️Actions 

A list of tasks to be performed by reps once a Play is initiated. 

Example: 

• Research the account’s product usage
• Create an opportunity in the CRM 
• Add the decision-maker on LinkedIn
• Add the decision-maker to a sequence

📃Templates & resources

Emails templates and resources at the disposition of reps to help them convert the opportunity. It can range from message templates, marketing snippets, sales engineering FAQs, product tours, etc. 

Example: 

Types of PLG SaaS sales plays

Plays are usually defined by the playbook to which they’re related and some other specificity that’s related to the nature of your business. 

Playbook = a set of plays that aim at achieving a specific business goal. There are 4 main playbooks that we’ve observed with our customers like ClickUp, Netlify and Jasper. 

Sales-assist: Help prospects get to value quicker and convert them into paying customers. 

Enterprise: Enterprise is a bread of its own. It encapsulated sales-assist, expansion and retention playbooks but will require distinct approaches. 

Expansion (includes upsells, cross-sells, consolidation): Increase an account’s revenue by upgrading to a higher-paid plan or fostering wider, more consolidated adoption of your solution.  

Nature of the business = a core aspect of your business that influences how sales must engage. 

For example, seat-based pricing versus usage-based pricing. Or productivity apps versus developer platforms. A usage uptick play will be run in 2 different ways by a salesperson at a seat-based productivity app versus how a salesperson at a usage-based developer platform would run it. 

Below is a list of common plays by categories ⬇️

When should you run a sales play? 

A sales play should be run when the trigger event occurs AND the account is product-qualified (PQA). 

Engaging unqualified accounts when the trigger event happens can waste your reps’ time on accounts that would otherwise have converted on their own or don’t have enough revenue potential. 

While engaging accounts that are solely product-qualified can result in low connect rates because of irrelevant sales outreach. 

6 essential sales plays you should be using 

1. Usage uptick (Expansion)

A qualified account is showing great momentum in your product. Openness to sales outreach will be high. Engage active users to understand how the spike can be tied to a business goal. Take advantage of this opportunity to present decision-makers with a business case. Offer more advantageous unit costs.

✉️ Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: Twilio unit costs

Sarah, 

Great to see the business growing so fast. Your team has created 81 journeys on the platform! 

At this rate, it’d be wise to get you on a committed-usage plan. You’ll get a much lower unit cost and predictable billing. 

That’s what we did with Doordash. With the current economic climate, the executive team wanted better cost prediction. 

Does it align with your priorities? 

Jacob

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

2. Tending-out-of-compliance (Sales-assist)

One of your top accounts is approaching the limit of the free plan. Proactively engage active users to convert them to your paid plan. If account usage is healthy, users are getting value from your product. Mention how hitting the paywall can have negative impacts on their business. If account usage is below expectations, offer a call with a product expert to help them become more successful.

✉️ Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: Interruption to customer SMS

Hey Sarah - Looks like your getting close to your monthly SMS limit. Great to see the boost in reply rates since you guys activated automatic content encoding! 

I suppose that you don’t want to see any interruptions to your customer communications. Happy to extend your plan if needed. 

Heard from your David that automating WhatsApp responses was on his mind. You can cut costs by consolidating your Twilio products. 

Worth exploring? 

Jacob

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

3. Named account sign up (Sales-assist)

A decision maker just signed up to one of your workspaces. They might have different expectations when signing up, and will likely not use the same features as the end users in that account. Reach out and ask about their business priorities as it relates to your tool. Pitch them alignment between their priorities and the benefits of a paid plan. Share case studies to back up your claims.

✉️Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: Non-authorized access in ClickUp

Stephen - Great to see you join the team in ClickUp. 

Seeing how many docs your team has created and shared (350 docs this month), security must be top of mind. 

Same things happened at Netflix. We deployed our access management capabilities and roles. They saw a 90% decrease in non-authorized access to internal docs. 

Does that align with your priorities? 

Best, 

Jacob

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

4. Account champion engagement (Sales-assist)

You identify a champion at one of your top accounts. This person gets the value of your product and is trying to spread adoption. Help them by providing resources and offering discounted seats with an annual subscription. Communicate the collaboration benefits of your paid plan and ask for an intro to the decision-maker if their champion doesn’t have buying influence.

✉️ Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: Spotify’s move in ClickUp

Sarah, 

Looks like you and the team have been getting things done in Whiteboards! With this amount of users, we typically see teams struggle with task routing. 

Spotify’s marketing team upped their time savings by 25% when they started using Automations. Here’s how 👈

I assumed it’d be top of mind. Worth exploring? 

Jacob

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

5. Trial conversion (Sales-assist)

Across all of your timeboxed free trials, some accounts should be engaged by sales. Either because the account has great revenue potential or sales can intervene to guarantee quick and latest success with your product. Proper sales touches are all about understanding what success means for your prospect and helping them get there faster.

✉️ Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: Tasks

Sarah, love the project you and your team just created in ClickUp. 

Put together a few resources (in this folder) to help you get the best out of projects and examples from folks like Netflix, Spotify. 

If all goes well, what does success look like with ClickUp? 

Jacob 

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

6. New user velocity (Sales-assist)

You’re notified of an uptick in users at an account that has revenue potential (fits your ICP). The value of your product is spreading, indicating a potential to convert to paid plans. Engage end users to understand how they perceive your product’s value and objectives. Offer help. Then, identify a decision-maker and discuss how their team’s objectives can be supported by upgrading to a paid plan.

✉️ Example of an email that will generate replies from prospects: 

Subject line: User Growth in ClickUp

Jenn, I see that you’re team has reached 25 users in ClickUp and keeps growing, that’s awesome! 

Considering your team’s growth and the feedback I received from Tom, you can save another 5 hours per week with our team-sharing feature. We’ve seen that outcome with Netflix and Spotify. 

I have the green light to give you discounted seats if that’s top of mind for you. 

Worth a chat? 

Jacob

🏈 View the full details of this play here. 

🚨Get free access to all plays and copy-pastable templates. 

How to prioritize sales plays 

I might happen that accounts is qualified for multiple plays. 

For example. You can have an account that has both a sudden uptick in users and a whitespace opportunity. 

How do you pick which plays reps should run (which usually is assigned automatically. Looking at you Rev Ops 👀)? 

Use a lead-to-opportunity ratio to prioritize which Play to assign. That’s what I get into next 👇

How to track if your plays are working

You will see healthier pipeline metrics as a result of introducing plays to guide your Product-Led Sales motion. 

Since seeing is believing, you need to track their performance. In my opinion, simple wins over complicated dashboards. Therefore, you can implement 2 north star metrics to keep track of: 

1. Lead-to-opportunity (%)

Out of X product-qualified leads that have been assigned to a given Play, how many turned into an opportunity in your CRM? 

To facilitate tracking the metric, the best PLS teams sync custom values from their Product-Led Sales platform (where they run plays) to their CRM.  

2. Closed-won rate (%)

Out of Y opportunities created from a given Play, how many closed? 

Looking at lead-to-opportunity and closed-won rate should give you a good indication of which plays are outperforming others, and which need some adjustments (details in the next section).

Note that speed-to-lead is crucial if you want plays to work. A common mistake is to put all of the responsibility on sales. When in fact, 99% of the work comes from Rev Ops. 

It is Rev Ops’ job to make sure you have real-time lead tracking, that your criteria for scoring are on point and that reps receive a notification to act as quick as possible and get assigned the right play. 

When to revisit your playbook

According to David Barron at Hubspot, sales leadership should reassess plays’ performance quarterly, depending on the size of your business and your sales cycle. 

A few scenarios would demand updates to your playbook (book of plays): 

Some plays are not performing

As mentioned above, some plays will outperform others. It’s tempting to get the false-impression that a Play is simply not needed for a given product trigger event. 

It is needed. You can never tailor your prospect’s experience too much. 

Your Data or Product team finds new usage insights

It’s not sales job to understand where in your product journey do people fall in love with the product. When those kinds of insights rise to the surface, it’s sales job, however, to adjust plays to match it. 

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re Asana. For years you’ve thought that the aha moment of your platform was after a workspace has created and completed 50 tasks. 

A few months back, the Data team discovers that the willingness to buy is at an all time high after only 25 tasks, which happens 3x faster in the lifecycle than 50. 

If that’s the case, your plays that depend on usage milestone events all need to be updated 🔄

Major changes in your product experience

In the same vein, if a major product update has impact on moments at which your users become activated, fall in love with your product, realize it’s business value, etc., you need to update Play to reflect those impacts. 

Updates to your pricing structure 

You don’t want to reach out offering a seat discount if Finance & Product have decided to introduce usage-based pricing. Some plays work great with both, but some are specific to the method your business uses to capture value from customers. 

Update plays that are tied to a specific pricing model when pricing changes happen. 

Changes to your conversion points 

Sometimes forces outside of your control will dictate the timing at which reps need to engage qualified users. 

A great example is CoderPad. Amanda Richardson, CoderPad CEO, realized that their 7-day trial wasn’t giving users enough time to become activated in the product AND have to make a buying decision. 

They increased to 14 days and conversions went up! 

Same concept applies to sales plays. If you observe changes in conversion points across your customer lifecycle, plays need to be updated. 

How do you improve plays? Thought you’d never ask ⤵️

How to improve plays

There are 4 major levers to work with when improving plays: 

Timing

Are you reaching out at the right moment? There’s a fine line between reaching out before prospects have a willingness to buy and after they’ve lost interest in a sales conversation 

Tip: Work with Rev Ops to optimize your speed-to-lead. 

Message/Sales angle

Is the value prop of your toubound resonating with prospects? 

Tip: If your messages aren’t getting replies, try to take a different approach. Use different product usage data to personalize. Share guides versus case studies. Templates versus new use cases, etc. 

Target persona

Are you reaching out to the right person?

Tip: You may need to nurture end-users before getting to decision-makers, or engage leads that have not signed up to your product yet. 

Cadence

Are you running your Play in the right steps? In order to convince executives to take your expansion, consolidation or enterprise conversion pitch seriously, you often need to build a business case through interactions with end-users. That’s how Grammarly closes enterprise contracts. 

Made it to the end 🥳

Final thoughts

Customer journeys are complex. As users progress through your product, their needs change and what they care about shifts. 

These distinct shifts in customer needs require nuanced approaches from sales. Relying on a single score won't provide the necessary guidance for your team to determine the next steps or when to take action. To truly operationalize a product-led sales motion, your go-to-market teams need comprehensive insights into the customer journey stage, specific goals for each customer cohort, and precise instructions for the optimal course of action tailored to each buyer persona. 

Aka plays 🏈

By adding plays to your sales processes, you alignment with the principles of product-led growth and real revenue gains 💰.

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