PLG vs. Sales and Marketing: Do You Really Have to Choose?
Why even the best PLG companies rely on sales and marketing to reach full potential
In recent writings, I’ve highlighted the importance of a Growth System Architect. Among the various types of growth systems I’ve seen, Product-Led Growth (PLG) is one of the most powerful. It has been a hot topic in SaaS for years, and with good reason. Done well, PLG can drive extraordinary efficiency and scale. But it rarely stands on its own. Sales and marketing often provide the fuel that unlocks its full potential.
I saw the potential of PLG relatively early. As part of the founding team at LogMeIn, I helped pioneer one of the first Product-Led Growth engines for business software. Later, as the first marketer at Dropbox, joining in 2008, I led go-to-market for what became one of the iconic PLG case studies. PLG was so successful for Dropbox that it reached $1B in ARR faster than any previous SaaS company.
OpenView officially coined the term Product-Led Growth in 2016, citing Slack and Expensify as poster children of the approach. In 2019, Wes Bush codified PLG into a structured discipline with his book, adding additional examples such as Dropbox and Zoom.
But before PLG had a name, many of us were discovering its power through experimenting with innovative approaches to bring new products to market and expand user value over time.
Why PLG Is So Powerful
Founders and investors are drawn to PLG because when it works, it combines three advantages that are hard to match:
Capital efficiency – The product itself drives adoption, reducing dependence on expensive sales and marketing.
Faster growth loops – Users who find value naturally invite teammates, share links, and expand usage. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle.
Perfect marketing context –PLG is a perfect response to the crowded advertising market. It provides you with exclusive access to the ideal context for introducing your next feature or prompting users to invite colleagues and friends.
PLG success relies on many of the same principles that drive success in games. More engagement leads to more opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and drive referrals. This type of expansion improves LTV, which in turn enables more aggressive customer acquisition campaigns. I call this the PLG flywheel: engagement drives expansion, expansion drives LTV, and stronger LTV fuels faster acquisition.
That combination makes PLG one of the most attractive models for both founders and investors.
How I Helped Build One of the First PLG Models
My inclination for PLG dates back to my earlier career in the consumer games industry. Our startup, Uproar, was ad-supported, so engagement was everything. At one point, we had the best average time on site of any of the top 10 websites. That early focus on engagement meant that we thought beyond acquisition to ensure customers got started with an easy experience, and we added challenges and richness over time to keep it interesting.
When I joined the founding team at LogMeIn, I carried that mindset into the business SaaS space. At the time, the remote access market had two fast-growing players: GoToMyPC, which was easy to use but expensive, and VNC, which was free but technical and hard to use. If we could offer something both free and simple, we would attract users to our offering.
That decision became one of the earliest Product-Led Growth models for business software powered by a freemium offering. Remote desktop access was free, helping to onboard new users with a simple and compelling value proposition and creating a powerful word-of-mouth engine once they tried it. The premium tier introduced features like file transfer, which many business users were willing to pay for. What I did not anticipate at first when conceiving of the approach was the high marginal infrastructure cost of serving free users, which grew with every additional account. Fortunately, our engineering team was able to re-architect the product, making those costs negligible.
In hindsight, this was one of the first true PLG growth engines in business software. This was years before the term “Product-Led Growth” was coined.
PLG is such a compelling model that it even drove my best-ever investment in a public company. In their preview for INBOUND 2018, HubSpot stated:
“Our mission… is to create a comprehensive platform that starts free and grows with you over time”
As I dug into the details, I realized HubSpot was shifting to a PLG approach. I had been a pre-IPO shareholder, but soon after they listed on the NASDAQ I sold my shares. However, this shift to PLG prompted me to buy back in. I even sent Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s co-founder, a note expressing my appreciation for the new approach.
Why PLG Is Rarely Pure
A common misconception is that PLG replaces marketing or sales. In reality, the most successful PLG companies operate hybrid models:
Early stage – Marketing and sometimes direct outreach are essential to seed the first wave of users. The product cannot sell itself until people know it exists.
Scaling up – The product becomes the main driver, but marketing accelerates the flywheel.
Enterprise layer – Sales often steps in to close larger deals once usage has already spread within an organization. Users engaged in a trial can also help prioritize sales outreach efforts, giving sales teams a clearer path to high-probability wins.
Some experts define PLG in very strict terms: the product must be the primary driver of acquisition, retention, and monetization, with little or no help from sales or marketing. I have found that it is rarely the case. I typically see product at the center with sales and marketing playing critical supporting roles. Through podcast interviews with more than 100 leaders of fast-growing startups, we have consistently seen this pattern confirmed: most companies succeed with some form of hybrid model. What matters is not whether you are “pure PLG,” but whether you are leveraging your product as the strongest growth engine available and aligning the rest of your system around it.
That pattern was also clear in my own experience. At LogMeIn, for example, we eventually had several premium products. Some were entirely self-serve, while others required a sales motion that reached six- and seven-figure deals. Ironically, sales teams sometimes complained that the free product made closing harder, but those same free users were usually how the big accounts first discovered us.
Companies that cling to ‘pure PLG’ often leave significant revenue on the table.
From Pure PLG to Hybrid: The Natural Evolution
Even the companies most often held up as “pure PLG” success stories rarely stay that way forever. In their early years, products like Notion and Zoom grew almost entirely through bottom-up adoption.
Notion’s early days were fueled by viral sharing of templates and docs. Anyone could get started for free, and usage limits nudged teams into upgrading. For years, they operated with almost no sales presence. Today, Notion still thrives on product-driven adoption, but it has added a global sales team to manage enterprise rollouts, negotiate contracts, and support security and compliance reviews.
Zoom’s early growth came from the viral nature of meetings. Anyone could join for free, and the 40-minute meeting limit when unexpected guests show up created a clear incentive to upgrade for businesses. That simplicity and viral loop helped Zoom dominate the online meeting space, which saw significant expansion during the COVID pandemic. As the company scaled, however, it built a large enterprise sales force to secure multi-year contracts with corporations, schools, and government institutions, where procurement and compliance processes cannot be solved with self-serve alone.
The pattern is clear: PLG often works well as a standalone approach in the early phases, but as companies move upmarket and expand their product lines, relying solely on the product can leave significant revenue on the table. Self-serve remains the front door, but sales and marketing are essential to capture the full potential of larger accounts.
When PLG Works Best
In my experience, PLG shines when:
Onboarding is simple, so users can find value quickly without help. This addresses one of the biggest barriers to adoption for most technology: complexity.
Expansion paths are built in, whether through feature upgrades, usage tiers, or additional users.
Marginal costs are low, so free entry is sustainable.
When PLG Is Not the Right Fit
PLG is not universal. It struggles when:
The business is driven by one-off, high-ticket purchases rather than ongoing usage.
The product is highly complex and requires significant assistance from a sales team.
Marginal costs are high, making free or low-cost entry unsustainable.
Is PLG Right for You?
When founders ask if they should pursue PLG, my first step is always to validate product–market fit. Without PMF, the motion will not matter.
If PMF exists, then I next figure out who the “must have” users are. For these users I ask the following questions.
Is there a simple, compelling value proposition with a free or low-cost entry point for your ‘must have’ users?
Do your unit economics support a free or low-cost entry point?
Is there a natural path to expand usage and drive additional revenue through upsells or team expansion?
If the answers to these three questions are yes, then you should definitely experiment with a PLG approach.
Closing Thoughts
The truth about PLG is simple. It is powerful, but not universal. The strongest growth engines weave together product, marketing, and sales in a hybrid system, with PLG at the core when the conditions are right.
Having helped pioneer PLG before it had a name, and having since advised countless founders on whether to pursue it, my perspective is straightforward: first, ensure product–market fit. If your product is not a true “must have,” no growth engine will be sustainable. But if you have PMF and can deliver value in a way that is easy to try, quick to adopt, and naturally expands, PLG can transform your growth trajectory.
Your PMF will also help you decide if PLG is the right model. A sticky, must-have product with natural expansion paths is a strong candidate for PLG, while a narrow or one-off solution may be better suited to sales-led or marketing-led growth.
Above all, remember that complexity is the biggest barrier to adoption. PLG works best when you start with something simple and limited, get customers to value quickly, and then layer in more over time. Like games, PLG depends on engagement. Engagement powers the PLG flywheel, which turns adoption into expansion, stronger LTV, and faster growth.
Perfect timing for this post @sean thanks!
This one is so great, Sean! I was shocked to see how many times we have to go with sales-led approaches for AI agents, simply because people do not know or trust them. No GTM motion is too old-school if it works :)) Thanks for another great article & happy Q4 to you and your teams!