Article · About 15 min read

The "$20M to $500M" Question: Adding Top Down Sales

Sarah Wang and David George · Andreessen Horowitz Free Advanced

The best source on stopping the two motions fighting, with real penetration triggers and named cases where it went wrong, including GitHub losing a deal and Slack separating product teams.

  • The signal to layer in top-down sales is 20 to 30 million dollars of ARR from the bottom-up motion.
  • Twilio watched for two or three departments using the product; Dropbox's tipping point was 3 to 10 percent employee penetration.
  • Two preconditions before hiring: the bottom-up flywheel works, and the business (not the user) is asking for more.
  • Individuals do not buy enterprise features, businesses do, so the product roadmap has to change too.
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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. It states the anti-conflict thesis directly: bottom up usage is what generates top down pipeline, so the two motions feed each... Bessemer Venture Partners Article · About 14 min read Introducing enterprise sales to a product-led growth organization Janelle Teng and Elliott Robinson
  4. Video · Long-form interview Every Lesson From Scaling Datadog to $40B Olivier Pomel
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