"We're going PLG" is the hottest phrase in B2B SaaS. Every founder, every VC pitch deck, every product roadmap. Product-led growth is the strategy du jour.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies that claim to be PLG are just offering free trials with bad sales follow-up. And most companies that should be PLG are forcing sales processes onto products users could adopt themselves.
The decision between product-led growth (PLG), sales-led, or hybrid isn't about what's trendy. It's about matching your GTM motion to your product economics, buyer behavior, and organizational strengths.
I've worked at companies across all three models. Let me give you the framework for choosing the right one.
The Three GTM Motions Defined
Before we dive into choosing, let's clarify what we're actually choosing between. The language around these motions gets fuzzy fast, so here's what each one really means in practice.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
In a PLG motion, users discover your product, sign up for free or a trial, experience value, and upgrade to paid—all without ever talking to a sales rep. The product itself is the primary driver of acquisition, activation, and expansion. Think Slack, where someone creates a workspace, invites their team, and the team is messaging within minutes. No demo required. No sales call. The product sells itself by delivering immediate value. The revenue model flows from freemium or free trial through self-serve upgrade and into expansion driven by usage growth. While many PLG companies eventually layer in sales to close enterprise expansions, the core motion is product-first.
Sales-Led
The sales-led motion is traditional enterprise software: sales reps identify prospects through outbound prospecting or inbound lead qualification, run discovery calls, deliver product demos, negotiate terms, and close deals. Buyers cannot purchase without engaging with sales—there's no self-serve path. Companies like Salesforce historically operated this way, as do Workday and ServiceNow today. The revenue model runs from prospecting through qualification, demo, negotiation, and close. The sales rep is the primary selling vehicle, with the product supporting the sale through demos and proof of concepts.
Hybrid (Product-Led Sales)
The hybrid model combines both approaches strategically. Users can self-serve for small deals, experiencing the product and upgrading on their own for low-touch purchases. But when high-value opportunities emerge—users from large companies exhibiting strong engagement and buying signals—sales steps in to accelerate and expand the deal. Companies like Dropbox, Atlassian, HubSpot, and Segment exemplify this model. They generate product-qualified leads through PLG, then route the most promising ones to sales for white-glove expansion. The product sells small deals efficiently while sales captures enterprise revenue that requires customization, security reviews, and relationship building.
The Decision Framework
Here's what actually happens when you choose the wrong motion. I watched a company force a PLG motion onto a complex enterprise platform that required days of configuration. Free trial signups poured in, users got stuck on day one, and 95% churned before ever seeing value. Meanwhile, their competitor stayed sales-led with white-glove onboarding and dominated the market.
Choosing your GTM motion isn't philosophical—it's empirical. Answer these five questions honestly, and the right motion becomes obvious.
Question 1: Can users experience core value in < 15 minutes without help?
This is the fundamental PLG litmus test. Product-led growth requires fast time-to-value with zero human assistance. If your product can't deliver a meaningful "aha moment" within fifteen minutes of signup, PLG will bleed trial users who bounce before experiencing your value.
The test is simple: can someone sign up cold, complete a meaningful workflow, and see tangible value before their patience runs out? Slack passes this test easily—you can create a channel, invite your team, and start messaging within five minutes. The value is immediately obvious. An enterprise data warehouse fails spectacularly—it requires data migration, complex configuration, schema design, and training before anyone can run their first query.
If users can self-serve to value in under fifteen minutes, PLG is viable. If not, you need sales-led or hybrid with hands-on onboarding.
Question 2: Is your ACV < $25K?
PLG economics only work when deal sizes are small enough that self-serve conversion rates justify your customer acquisition cost. Here's the cold math: if your average contract value is ten thousand dollars and you convert 2% of trials to paid, you need fifty trial signups to acquire one customer. That means your CAC to acquire fifty trials must be less than your gross margin on ten thousand dollars. For many products, that math doesn't pencil.
The rule of thumb breaks down like this: If your ACV exceeds twenty-five thousand dollars, you likely need sales involvement through either sales-led or hybrid motions. The deal size justifies the cost of a sales rep, and buyers at this price point expect human guidance through procurement, security reviews, and contract negotiations. If your ACV sits below ten thousand dollars, PLG can work economically—assuming your time-to-value is fast enough to drive meaningful conversion. The danger zone is ten to twenty-five thousand dollars, where hybrid often works best: let small deals self-serve while routing larger opportunities to sales.
Question 3: Is the buyer also the end user?
PLG thrives when the person evaluating your product is the same person who'll use it every day. A designer discovering a design tool can immediately assess whether it solves their problem, and if they love it, they can pull out a credit card and buy it that afternoon. No approval chains. No committee decisions. Just individual adoption driven by personal value.
Sales-led motions work better when the economic buyer differs from the end users. Take an HR platform where the CHRO controls the budget but recruiters and managers are the daily users. The CHRO needs business cases, vendor comparisons, security reviews, and contract negotiations. The end users might love the product, but they can't buy it without navigating enterprise procurement. In this scenario, you need sales to manage the buying process.
If your buyer and user are the same person, go PLG or hybrid. If they're different people, expect sales-led or hybrid with strong bottom-up product adoption creating organizational demand that pulls executives into buying conversations.
Question 4: Does procurement require sales involvement?
PLG can work when buyers can pull out a credit card and purchase with minimal friction—maybe a simple click-through agreement or lightweight MSA. A marketing manager buying a marketing tool doesn't need to involve legal, procurement, or security teams. They swipe the corporate card and they're live.
Sales-led becomes necessary when every deal requires security questionnaires, legal redlines, custom contracts, SOWs, vendor insurance reviews, and multi-month procurement cycles. Enterprise buyers demand these processes, and no amount of self-serve UX can bypass a six-month procurement gauntlet that involves three departments and twelve stakeholders.
If your buyers can purchase with simple procurement, PLG or hybrid works. If complex procurement is inevitable at your deal sizes, go sales-led or hybrid where PLG provides the entry point but sales handles expansion into enterprise accounts with all their process overhead.
Question 5: Do you have product-market fit with a clear ICP?
PLG requires strong product-market fit and a crystal-clear understanding of who adopts your product and why. Without this clarity, you'll spend months optimizing conversion funnels for the wrong users—students and hobbyists instead of enterprise buyers, or companies too small to ever pay meaningful amounts.
Sales-led motions can launch earlier in your company lifecycle because sales conversations teach you about your market. Sales reps can experiment across multiple ICPs, run discovery with diverse prospects, and report back what resonates. You learn through conversations which segments convert, what objections matter, and where your product delivers the most value.
If you have strong PMF with a clearly defined ICP, PLG or hybrid is viable. If you're still discovering PMF, sales-led helps you learn faster through high-bandwidth customer conversations before you lock in a self-serve motion.
The Decision Matrix
Now tally your answers. If you answered yes to all five PLG questions—fast time-to-value under fifteen minutes, ACV below ten thousand dollars, buyer equals user, simple procurement, strong PMF with clear ICP—go PLG. You have all the prerequisites for product-led growth to succeed.
If you answered no to most of those questions—time-to-value exceeds an hour, ACV over twenty-five thousand dollars, buyer differs from user, complex procurement, still discovering PMF—go sales-led. Your product characteristics and market dynamics require sales involvement from initial contact through close.
Most companies land in the messy middle with mixed answers. Maybe your ACV sits between ten and twenty-five thousand dollars. Maybe some user segments can self-serve while others need white-glove support. Perhaps you want to start with PLG for efficient acquisition but layer in sales for expansion. This is hybrid territory, and it's where most successful B2B companies eventually land.
Common Mistakes in GTM Motion Selection
I've watched companies make the same mistakes repeatedly, burning millions of dollars on the wrong motion before course-correcting. Here are the ones that hurt the most.
The first mistake is choosing PLG because it's trendy, not because it fits your product. A company I advised forced a self-serve model onto an enterprise platform that required days of configuration, data migration, and custom training. Users signed up enthusiastically, got stuck on the first setup screen, and churned within hours. Meanwhile, their sales-led competitor with white-glove onboarding dominated the market. The reality check: if Gartner analysts need a ninety-minute demo to understand your product, your buyers do too. PLG isn't going to save you.
The opposite mistake is equally damaging—staying sales-led when you should go PLG. I've seen companies with beautifully simple products force buyers through multi-week sales cycles because "that's how enterprise software works." Buyers who could evaluate and purchase the product in ten minutes are forced to sit through discovery calls, demos, and contract negotiations. They abandon in frustration and buy your self-serve competitor instead. The reality check: if users can figure out your product in ten minutes, sales is friction, not value-add.
Another common trap is building PLG features without PLG fundamentals. You slap a free trial on your existing product, update the pricing page, and declare "we're PLG now!" But your product still has sixty-minute time-to-value, requires sales handholding for setup, and has zero self-serve activation. Signups pour in and immediately churn. PLG is product strategy—fast time-to-value, intuitive onboarding, clear activation moments. It's not a pricing page change.
Finally, companies claim they're hybrid but never define when sales should engage. Sales calls every trial signup within twenty-four hours, annoying users who wanted to self-serve and causing negative brand sentiment on social media. The reality check: hybrid requires clear product-qualified lead criteria. Sales engages when usage signals buying intent—high engagement, team expansion, hitting limits—not at signup.
How to Transition Between Motions
Most companies don't stay in one motion forever. Product evolution, market maturity, and competitive dynamics force transitions. Here's what actually works when you need to shift gears.
Transitioning from Sales-Led to PLG
The most common transition happens when you've simplified your product enough to reduce time-to-value dramatically and now want to scale customer acquisition more efficiently than sales-led allows. Atlassian is the canonical example, transitioning from sales-led to PLG over several years.
The mechanics take six to twelve months minimum. First, you rebuild self-serve onboarding so users can activate without sales assistance—eliminating required demos, configuration calls, and training sessions. Then you add self-serve pricing and checkout so buyers can purchase with a credit card without talking to anyone. Next, you create product-qualified lead scoring to identify when usage patterns signal genuine expansion opportunities worth sales engagement. Then comes the hard part: transitioning your existing sales team from acquisition focus to expansion focus, which often means letting go of sales reps who can't adapt. Finally, you shift your metrics from sales pipeline and close rates to activation rates, time-to-value, and trial-to-paid conversion.
Transitioning from PLG to Hybrid
The opposite transition happens when you're winning SMB through self-serve but watching enterprise opportunities slip through your fingers. Slack exemplifies this transition, starting pure PLG and strategically adding sales for enterprise expansion.
The timeline runs six to nine months. You keep the self-serve path intact for small customers—never force existing self-serve users through sales, or you'll create backlash. Then you build a sales motion specifically for product-qualified leads showing high usage from large companies. You create an enterprise tier with features that demand sales conversations—SSO, SAML, custom SLAs, dedicated support, security reviews. You hire sales reps focused on expansion and enterprise, not cold prospecting—different skill set entirely. Finally, you measure both PLG funnel metrics and sales metrics, tracking how the motions interact rather than treating them as separate businesses.
The trigger for adding sales to pure PLG is clear: your self-serve motion works beautifully for SMB, but you're leaving enterprise money on the table. The signs are unmistakable—users from Fortune 500 companies signing up but not expanding beyond small teams, feature requests pouring in for enterprise capabilities like SSO and audit logs, competitors winning enterprise deals with sales-assisted motions while you can't compete. When you see these patterns, hire two to three sales reps focused exclusively on inbound product-qualified leads from enterprise accounts, create an enterprise tier with features requiring sales conversations, and whatever you do, keep the self-serve path open for SMB. Don't force everyone through sales just because you hired salespeople.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most "PLG" companies are really hybrid but don't want to admit it because pure PLG sounds sexier to investors.
Look at the companies everyone calls PLG:
- Slack: Has enterprise sales team
- Zoom: Has enterprise sales team
- Calendly: Has sales team for enterprise
- Figma: Has enterprise sales motion
True pure-PLG at scale is rare. Most successful "PLG" companies are actually hybrid with strong product-led acquisition and sales-assisted expansion.
That's not a failure—it's smart GTM design. Use product to acquire efficiently, use sales to expand strategically.
The companies that fail are the ones that pick the wrong motion for their product reality:
- Enterprise software that requires configuration pretending to be PLG
- Simple tools forcing users through sales because "enterprise buyers expect it"
- Hybrid companies that never define when sales should engage
The right GTM motion isn't the one that sounds best in your deck. It's the one that matches how your product delivers value and how your buyers want to buy.
If you're honest about those two things, the decision is obvious.