Article · About 14 min read

Introducing enterprise sales to a product-led growth organization

Janelle Teng and Elliott Robinson · Bessemer Venture Partners Free Advanced

It states the anti-conflict thesis directly: bottom up usage is what generates top down pipeline, so the two motions feed each other rather than competing for the same account.

  • Bessemer's threshold: explore a formal enterprise sales engine around 25 million dollars of ARR.
  • PagerDuty's net dollar retention was 139 percent at IPO, with historical cohorts consistently above 130 percent.
  • HashiCorp reached 2,100-plus customers and nearly 14 billion dollars of market cap at IPO in under eight years.
  • It splits prospects into pre-buyers and pre-believers, which are qualified and sold to differently.
Open on bvp.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How does Datadog run bottom up and top down selling at the same time without the two fighting?

Read with it

  1. Datadog's own VP of Marketing describing the dual motion and, more usefully, saying you have to actively reach out to the... OpenView Article · Short read An Inside Look at How Datadog Reached $500M in ARR (and Counting) Kristin Hillery
  2. Seven concrete lessons with the numbers attached, including the 15 minute time to value and net retention above 140 percent.... aakashg.com Article · Long read Datadog: The Archetypal Example for SaaS Product-Led Growth Aakash Gupta
  3. The best source on stopping the two motions fighting, with real penetration triggers and named cases where it went wrong,... Andreessen Horowitz Article · About 15 min read The "$20M to $500M" Question: Adding Top Down Sales Sarah Wang and David George
  4. Video · Long-form interview Every Lesson From Scaling Datadog to $40B Olivier Pomel
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