I spent three months building comprehensive sales enablement for our new product. Pitch decks, battlecards, demo scripts, objection handlers, discovery frameworks. Everything a sales team would need to drive adoption.
Launch day came. Signups started flowing. Conversions started happening. I checked the sales dashboard to see how reps were using my enablement materials.
Nobody was using them. Because we didn't have sales reps involved in the buyer journey. The product sold itself through free trials. Prospects signed up, experienced value in the first session, and converted to paid without talking to anyone. My three months of work sat unused in a Notion workspace.
That's when I realized product-led growth doesn't just change GTM strategy—it fundamentally breaks traditional product marketing. Everything I'd learned about messaging, sales enablement, launch planning, and positioning assumed humans were selling to humans. PLG eliminates that assumption entirely.
The product becomes the primary salesperson. The first-run experience becomes the pitch. The activation flow becomes the demo. Pricing tiers become the conversation. And the PMM role has to completely transform or become irrelevant.
When Your Product Sells Better Than Your Sales Team
The shift to PLG started subtly. We added a free trial alongside our enterprise sales motion as a way to help prospects evaluate the product before talking to sales. Within six months, 40% of new revenue came through self-serve signups that never requested sales contact.
I analyzed what was happening. Prospects were signing up for trials, experiencing value quickly, and choosing to buy without sales involvement. The self-serve conversion rate was 8%—higher than our sales-assisted close rate of 6%.
The product was literally selling better without sales than with sales.
This created an identity crisis for product marketing. My entire role was built around enabling sales to sell effectively. But our data showed the product sold itself more effectively than sales could sell it. What was my role when the best sales strategy was getting out of the way and letting prospects experience the product?
I started tracking what drove self-serve conversions. It wasn't messaging quality or competitive positioning—it was product experience. Prospects who activated core features in their first session had 12x higher conversion rates than those who didn't. Prospects who reached their "aha moment" within 10 minutes had 8x higher conversion than those who took an hour.
The drivers of conversion weren't marketing activities—they were product experience milestones. Traditional product marketing couldn't influence those. I needed completely different skills to matter in a PLG world.
The Uncomfortable Shift from Persuasion to Facilitation
Traditional product marketing is about persuasion. Craft compelling messages that convince buyers your product solves their problems. Create sales narratives that build trust and urgency. Enable reps to overcome objections and close deals.
PLG product marketing is about facilitation. Remove friction from the self-serve journey. Help prospects discover value quickly. Optimize for activation and time-to-value. Make the product experience so clear that persuasion is unnecessary.
These are fundamentally different skill sets. Persuasion requires storytelling, messaging craft, and sales psychology. Facilitation requires user experience optimization, behavioral analytics, and funnel analysis.
I started studying self-serve buyer journeys instead of sales conversations. What caused signups to activate versus abandon? Where did trial users get stuck? Which features drove conversion versus which were distractions? What messaging appeared in-app versus in sales conversations?
The insights were uncomfortable. All the competitive positioning I'd crafted for sales conversations was invisible to self-serve users. All the objection handling I'd developed was irrelevant when prospects never talked to sales. All the sales enablement was unused when the product sold itself.
The work that mattered was completely different: optimizing signup flows to reduce friction, improving onboarding to accelerate activation, clarifying in-product messaging to guide feature discovery, and structuring pricing to make upgrade decisions obvious.
These felt like product management tasks, not product marketing tasks. But they were the activities that actually drove PLG conversion. Traditional product marketing work had become decorative—it looked like work but didn't influence outcomes.
What PLG Actually Requires from PMMs
I spent six months figuring out what product marketing looks like in a PLG world. The role exists, but it requires completely different capabilities:
First, in-product messaging becomes more important than external marketing. What appears in the product interface—onboarding flows, feature announcements, upgrade prompts, empty states—matters more than landing pages or sales decks. I shifted from writing website copy to writing micro-copy for in-product experiences.
This required understanding user psychology, behavioral design, and how messaging influences product usage patterns. The traditional PMM skill of "write compelling marketing copy" was less useful than "write clear interface copy that guides action."
Second, activation metrics become more important than awareness metrics. Traditional PMM focuses on driving top-of-funnel awareness and qualified leads. PLG PMM focuses on getting signups to activation milestones that predict conversion.
I started tracking activation rates, time-to-value, feature adoption, and aha-moment metrics instead of traditional marketing metrics like website traffic and MQL volume. The goal shifted from "get more people to talk to sales" to "get more signups to experience value quickly."
Third, product experience drives positioning more than messaging does. In sales-led motions, your messaging shapes perception before prospects see the product. In PLG motions, prospects experience the product before forming opinions. The product experience is the primary positioning vehicle.
I learned I couldn't position our product as "simple and intuitive" if the actual product experience was complex and confusing. The positioning needed to match reality because prospects would discover the truth in their first session. This forced more honest, experience-based positioning instead of aspirational marketing positioning.
I started using platforms like Segment8 to track how product experience connected to competitive win rates. The insight wasn't traditional competitive messaging—it was understanding which in-product experiences helped users see our differentiation versus competitors they'd also tried.
The Death of Sales-First Product Marketing
PLG doesn't just add self-serve alongside sales—it fundamentally changes where PMM effort should focus.
Before PLG, I spent 60% of my time on sales enablement, 30% on marketing campaigns, and 10% on product experience. After PLG became our primary growth motion, that allocation became inverted: 10% on sales enablement for enterprise deals that still required human touch, 20% on marketing campaigns to drive top-of-funnel signups, and 70% on product experience optimization.
The shift felt wrong initially. Wasn't I abandoning my core responsibilities? But when I looked at revenue impact, optimizing product experience drove 5x more incremental revenue than sales enablement work because product experience influenced every self-serve deal while sales enablement only influenced the minority of deals that involved sales conversations.
The uncomfortable truth: in PLG companies, traditional sales-first product marketing is low leverage. The highest-leverage PMM work is cross-functional with product, design, and growth—optimizing the self-serve experience that drives the majority of revenue.
This requires different collaborators, different skill sets, and different success metrics. I found myself in more meetings with product designers discussing onboarding flows than with sales discussing competitive positioning. I spent more time analyzing in-product feature discovery than crafting sales narratives.
Why Many PMMs Will Struggle with PLG
The shift to PLG exposes a hard truth: many traditional PMM skills don't transfer to product-led growth.
Writing compelling sales narratives doesn't help if prospects never talk to sales. Creating battlecards doesn't matter if buying decisions happen through product trials. Building sales enablement programs is irrelevant if self-serve conversion drives growth.
The PMMs I know who've successfully transitioned to PLG companies had to completely relearn their craft. They had strong marketing foundations but needed to develop product management skills, user experience design thinking, behavioral analytics capability, and growth experimentation mindset.
The PMMs who struggled were those who tried to apply traditional sales-enablement product marketing to PLG contexts. They'd create beautiful messaging that had no impact on self-serve conversion. They'd build sales plays for a motion that drove 15% of revenue while ignoring the self-serve motion driving 85%.
The gap isn't that PLG companies don't need product marketing—it's that they need fundamentally different product marketing that many traditional PMMs aren't equipped to deliver.
What This Means for Your Career
If you're a traditional sales-enablement PMM and you're considering a role at a PLG company, you need to honestly assess whether you can make the transition. The job title might be the same, but the work is fundamentally different.
Do you have product experience optimization skills, or just messaging creation skills? Can you analyze funnel conversion data and design experiments, or just write compelling copy? Are you comfortable working closely with product and design on in-product experiences, or do you prefer working with sales on external positioning?
If your skill set is purely traditional product marketing—sales enablement, competitive positioning, messaging frameworks, launch planning—you'll struggle in PLG environments where those activities are secondary to product experience work.
The good news: the skills are learnable. I had zero product growth experience when I started. I learned by studying PLG companies, reading growth experimentation literature, taking product analytics courses, and working closely with product and design teams who knew PLG better than I did.
But it required acknowledging that my traditional PMM expertise wasn't sufficient and actively developing new capabilities. Many PMMs aren't willing to do that—they want PLG companies to value traditional PMM skills instead of adapting to what PLG actually requires.
The Future Is Product-Led
PLG isn't a passing trend—it's becoming the default GTM motion for B2B SaaS. Even companies with enterprise sales are adding PLG motions to complement human sales. The percentage of revenue coming through self-serve is increasing across the market.
This means product marketing as a discipline is evolving whether individual PMMs evolve or not. Companies will hire for the skills they need—product experience optimization, activation analytics, in-product messaging, growth experimentation. If traditional PMMs don't develop those skills, companies will hire from product management and growth teams instead.
I'm watching this play out in hiring. PLG companies increasingly prefer candidates with product or growth backgrounds over traditional marketing backgrounds because the skills they need are closer to product than to marketing.
The PMMs who thrive in the next decade will be those who embrace product-led growth as the future and develop the skills it requires. The PMMs who insist traditional sales-enablement skills should be enough will find their opportunities narrowing as more companies go product-led.
PLG isn't forcing PMMs to die—it's forcing PMMs to evolve from sales enablers to product experience optimizers. The ones who make that evolution will define what product marketing looks like in 2030. The ones who don't will be displaced by people who have.