The Best of Both Worlds: How to Combine PLG and Sales-Led Growth in B2B
Succeeding with Product-Led Sales
Intro
Product-led growth (PLG) relies on the product to drive adoption and expansion while Sales-Led Growth (SLG) uses a direct sales approach to close and grow deals. Many companies treat these as competing strategies, but the most successful ones don’t choose—they combine both to scale adoption, maximize deal size, and boost retention.
Yet, despite all the discussions about PLG and sales alignment, there’s little practical guidance on how to make this hybrid model work in real-world B2B environments.
This week we are joined by Hans-Jörg Roser, CPO at H&F Solutions and author of Product Preacher. He has been a product leader for the past 16 years and has built agile product organizations across various industries. For the past three years, he successfully developed and implemented a hybrid approach to blend product-led and sales-led strategies.
In this post, Hans-Jörg breaks down how to implement a hybrid model. He’ll share actionable ways to integrate PLG and SLG, offering insights from his experience building and scaling a product that thrives on both.
Hans-Jörg’s Post
"The product opens the door, and sales keeps it open."
A common misconception about Product-Led Growth is that the product alone drives success, eliminating the need for sales. Many envision a business with no limits, full automation, and perpetual exponential scaling—all while maintaining an ever-increasing gross margin. In the B2B SaaS space, 'product-led' has become a buzzword for success.
While the chance of exponential scaling is real, the most successful B2B companies, particularly in complex enterprise environments, blend a product-centric approach with strategic sales efforts. This hybrid model unlocks two key advantages:
Higher deal success and longer retention through the human touch of a skilled sales team.
Stronger alignment between product and sales, ensuring better expectation management, faster feedback loops, and a more adaptive development process.
There are three key ideas to support the hybrid model that we will introduce to you in this article:
Design an integrated Customer Journey with clear handoffs to sales
Shared Sales Playbook and feedback looping
Bridge the Silos between product, marketing, UX, and sales
The hybrid model only works well if product, marketing, and sales teams are aligned. Sales and Marketing need to understand the product journey - how users interact with it, where they get stuck, and what features provide the most value. This helps them tailor their outreach effectively and convert prospects into customers at the right time.
“A combined customer journey has to be the center of gravity for all decisions”
What is the Integrated Customer Journey?
This all leads to one basic measure: A combined Customer Journey has to be part of the product-oriented strategy and the center of gravity for all decisions. It’s essential to make it transparent and to synchronize product and sales discovery in parallel! On the one hand product discovery lays the foundation for your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and the personas to target and at the same time sales discovery holds the chance to find new opportunities for further development.
The first step for product leaders is to review the customer journey through the eyes of your ICP. The focus of the review is the main touchpoints with your ICP. These touchpoints are supported with product assets:
Product Processes - the standard operating procedures that lead to interactions with your ICP without sales contact
Software - the PLG features in your product that gives ICP feedback on your product
Other Resources - hybrid sales tools
Below is an example diagram showing how your ICP and buyer personas are involved in each touchpoint.
→ If you are a Miro user feel free to use the link to copy this example and adapt it.
The integrated customer journey has several key handoffs from the product to sales. These handoffs need the personal touch from sales plus key product materials for the sales teams to use.
PLG to PLS Customer Journey Handoffs
The key handoffs to sales in a PLG Customer Journey are the following (marked green in the example above):
Enterprise Support
Big organizations have custom needs, security concerns, compliance issues, and make specific budget negotiations necessary - these all require a personal touch that sales can provide.
→ This is triggered by support questions that have to be analyzed constantly.Customization Needs
Enterprise B2B clients often need integrations or other custom features that aren't available out of the box. Sales professionals help navigate and negotiate these requirements.
→ The trigger is set by capabilities not covered by the product. This is an important note: Customizations are not exclusively identified and documented by sales. This has to be done with the product strategy in mind! Another trigger is feature adoption and the feedback collected via feedback loops within the product.Onboarding
Even the best onboarding processes can't replace a human touch for some customers. Sales can step in to make sure customers see value quickly and don't get stuck.
→ This step can be identified by analyzing the lead times in onboarding.Aftersales
Sales teams can help existing customers expand their use of the product. So it is important to think of the customer journey not as something that is processed once, but as something iterative. Sales can help to find new opportunities and increase overall retention and lifetime value. Especially enterprises often won’t do that based on automated aftersales mailing.
→ Important KPIs are production usage, number of users, and feature adoption.
These are critical product-to-sales handoffs that the product team monitors and makes sure that the right sales team is getting engaged with the ICP. Equally critical is giving the sales teams context to the customer journey when handing off from PLG to PLS.
Shared Sales Playbook
One of my teams did a great job in catching the market need, identifying the personas, strategically developing the product, and also defining and communicating a brand & product identity.
The first documents and materials we created were obvious: A customer presentation and a centralized abstract messaging as the essential truth behind our communication. But we learned that this didn’t quite fill the gap we saw. Sales struggled with these materials and needed more concrete support in working with customers.
The solution was a mix of content, that we created, taking the opportunity to work together - which is the best way to come to a common understanding:
We created a more summarized and concrete messaging that could directly be used in customer meetings.
We wrote a Product Paper that covered what we learned in a very structured manner, as a reference book.
In search of a way to focus more on the art of selling and communicate more effectively with sales, we concluded that a common, well-defined Sales Playbook is the way to go.
Who might have thought that something called Sales Playbook is one of the most important common efforts of Product Management, Marketing, and Sales? It isn’t just for Sales—it’s a crucial collaboration between Product, Marketing, and Sales. But why should Product be involved?
This is the essence of Product-Led Sales: Sales must align with the product’s definition and value proposition to ensure they’re selling the real product—not a misinterpreted promise. Without this alignment, customer expectations suffer, and so does long-term success.
The Playbook we created was adapted over time because we learned iteratively what worked and what didn’t. So be aware that you have to design your own which is relevant for your product and ICP. But for a first idea let’s take a look at the content I would recommend including:
General Topics
Aggregated Messaging
→ It works pretty well, to apply the idea of Jobs to be Done to the messaging and include the following aspects:Functional Messaging - What does the product do? What’s the need to be answered? What are the capabilities?
Social - What’s the social impact?
Emotional - What’s the impact on people?
Brand Identity, including the Tone of Voice
Customer
Description of Target Industries
Ideal Customer Profile
Buyer Personas
User Personas
Process
Lead Generation + Handover
Sales Process including Qualification Stages
Content
Target Business + Customer Profiles (incl. ICP)
Personas + care abouts
Typical Sales Meeting & Demo
Objection Handling
Negotiation / Contracting
Toolstack
As you can see, there are a lot of cross-functional topics. How do product leaders coordinate this material?
Bridging the Silos for Sales Playbook Success
In the past, I often heard sentences like ”Sales doesn’t get the product right” or ”The product guys do not understand the customer needs”. It was a mess. Every meeting was almost identical: Long discussion, compromises, but no consensus, and the feeling that everybody was pulling in a different direction. That kind of communication shows that there is an unwanted gap between people building and people selling. As soon as critique is not about operational gaps but about systemic misunderstandings, you have to react.
The hybrid model can bring out disconnects between product and sales. How can a product leader break through this and get the entire product team involved in product-to-sales handoffs?
Bridging the silos in the hybrid model comes from product Centricity across the go-to-market teams. Sales, Marketing, Product Management, UX/Design, and Public Relations have to be deeply integrated. You have to get rid of the borders and walls in between. At the center of that approach lies a Product Centric Vision of what you want to achieve and a deep understanding of everybody in the extended team of the pattern to achieve that.
A lot of collaboration and a lot of storytelling is needed, but also a shared path of knowledge and a joint way of working out the details.
Establish Product-Centric Cross-Functionality
Product-led growth and other product-centered approaches are sometimes misunderstood as blindly following an initial idea of the product. But behind all the buzzwords lies the very valuable idea of product-centered thinking. Product Centricity allows you to iterate and adapt (as we are all used to doing) between opportunity and creation.
Focusing on the product means focusing on functionality, market, and customer as a whole construct. Thereby it’s about cross-functionality.
The basics of aligned Product and Sales Teams are shared messaging, content, vision, and strategy. People must make small decisions toward a common goal while communicating based on the same system of values and messages.
Meetings are important, but to get all parties involved just by setting up common meetings, reviews, and retrospectives is not possible. Functional leaders have to tell the stories behind problems, solutions, markets, and customers, anecdotes from customer meetings and events. This way you give everybody the chance to truly understand the purpose and the target.
Looping Feedback
There are four essential and recurring ways to get the right feedback at the right time.
Product Review in the Development Process
Don’t laugh. I know that the good old scrum review or any equivalent is not well-accepted in sales and marketing, but most of the time, that’s due to a misdesign of the meeting. Focusing on delivered value and outcome and relating to solved use cases, the Product Review gives you the chance to align expectations and product functionality.Go To Market / Launch Phase of New Products and Features
Go To Market is not the single act of doing some marketing. Instead, it’s about reaching out to the market with a new or at least updated value proposition. So make sure you plan and execute it with sales and marketing.Product Qualification Stage in the Lead Qualification of the Sales Process
Unfortunately, the product qualification stage is an essential step that is missing from many sales processes executed in sales-led companies and also in product-led companies. This stage allows you to qualify a new prospect, which is obvious, but it also allows you to find holes in your messaging and sales process or identify new opportunities the market presents.Customer Relationship Management in Aftersales
While in Product Management you do not necessarily keep track of single customers continuously, you should never lose track of those key customers that give you very valuable feedback directly or via the Account Managers (Sales). Customer needs and product/feature adoption change over time!
When you are using the hybrid model with those product-to-sales handoffs, these reviews generate crucial feedback that you can use. By pausing to review the customer feedback, we get additional insights to improve the Sales Playbook.
The customer journey shows the data points that come into the feedback reviews. Feedback reviews are key to optimizing product-to-sales handoffs.
The Hybrid Model: Why Product and Sales Are Stronger Together
For years, PLG and SLG have been framed as competing approaches. But as we’ve seen, the most successful B2B companies don’t pick sides—they combine the strengths of both.
Sometimes, the product is the first touchpoint, drawing in users through a free trial or freemium model, and sales steps in later to drive enterprise adoption. Other times, sales and marketing lay the groundwork, and the product takes over with automated onboarding and expansion. Either way, the key is knowing when to let the product do the work—and when to bring in sales to close the deal. Or, as we say in Germany, sometimes you have to carry the dog to hunt.
Take Slack, for example. It started with product-led adoption, but sales became essential for landing enterprise deals and expanding usage within organizations. HubSpot followed a similar path—starting as a PLG-first company before layering in a strong sales function.
Make Deals, Retain Customers & Manage Expectations
Sales becomes even more critical as products grow more complex. AI and automation can scale onboarding, but they don’t replace the need for human insight, relationship-building, and strategic positioning within an organization. The best companies create a feedback loop between sales and product, ensuring that customer conversations shape product strategy.
Customer Conversations: The Missing Ingredient in PLG-Only Models
Scaling through product-led adoption doesn’t mean replacing human interactions with dashboards and adoption metrics. Serendipity happens in conversations. The best sales teams don’t just close deals—they surface new opportunities, uncover unmet needs, and provide real-world feedback that shapes product decisions.
Selling Is Already Part of Product Management
Even if your product is simple, and most acquisition and onboarding steps are automated, selling is happening somewhere. You’ve sold your product to investors, your internal marketing team, customer support, or even your leadership to justify continued investment.
The best B2B companies recognize this truth: Product opens the door, but sales keeps it open. The real growth unlock comes when both work in sync.
🙏Thank You to Hans-Jörg
Thank you to Hans-Jörg for his insights on the hybrid model of product-led growth with direct sales. If you want to explore his Miro templates on the Integrated Customer Journey, he has provided his Miro board for you to adapt to your product.
Hans-Jörg is the author of Product Preacher. Subscribe to his Substack, Product Preacher, or follow him on LinkedIn
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