Our primary focus is on making our paying customers successful, not forcing sales through. We follow a 100% inbound sales model - our approach to product-led growth means that we do not do cold outreach. Our plan is to put this off for as long as possible - ideally to $50m+ ARR.
While this means working with a smaller number of users than typical B2B SaaS companies, we know that the people we talk to are mostly already pre-qualified and genuinely interested in potentially using PostHog.
The Sales & CS team act as genuine partners with our users. We should feel as motivated to help and delight users as if we were on their team. In practical terms, this means:
No sales-y talk - we are direct, open and honest with customers. We share as much as possible publicly, rather than hiding it behind a mandatory demo call. We are honest when we don't know the answer, or if we're not sure that PostHog is the right solution for a customer.
Speed - we are frighteningly responsive. If a customer is in a rush, we do our best to work at their pace. We are clear about expectations, and do not promise what we cannot deliver to close a deal.
Engineers helping engineers - there is nothing more frustrating than talking to a salesperson who can't give you all the answers. We keep 'let me find out from the team' to an absolute minimum.
We don't use sales-y terminology like 'leads' - we are working with other human beings here. They are not sources of revenue to be 'converted'.
Being power users of PostHog is a must - otherwise we won't be credible. PostHog is a big and growing platform, so this is a challenge to stay on top of!
We prioritize getting people set up on multiple products as early as is feasible, as this makes PostHog far more valuable to them and increases our chances of retaining them.
We don't do margin negative deals in order to win - this doesn't set us up for a successful long term relationship with a paying customer if we're ultimately losing money to land them. Yes, this includes fancy companies whose logos would make us look good.
Sales & CS vision
PostHog's vision is to reach $100m ARR and build a genuinely enduring company. This is what we think CS at PostHog will look like at that point.
Things we want to be great at
Genuinely helpful: We deliver genuinely useful insights about things those customers care about (can be purely PostHog-related, but also general advice). Our ICP are ‘self-servers', so ideally we teach them how to do something, rather than doing it for them. A great support experience is part of this.
Automation: A lot of teams end up getting bloated because they hire additional people to do lots of manual work. Because our team has an engineering mindset, we can automate a lot of our processes and keep hiring to a minimum. Smaller team = higher trust = move faster.
Speed: We want to be highly reactive, low process, and reliant on other teams as little as possible to ship things. We want to get stuff wrong quickly, then iterate.
Internal outreach: We get hundreds of ICP signups to PostHog every week, and we want to make sure we're laser focused on ensuring they have the best possible experience with PostHog by proactively reaching out to them based on certain triggers. Some people call this 'warm outbound'.
Things we might want to be great at but haven't tested yet
Events: These may be a good way for us to reach more of our ICP in future, done in the right way, e.g. by giving talks. However events are not a scalable/automatable channel, and are slightly in the zone of 'outbound sales'.
Managing very large enterprises: Today we generally tend to avoid working with enterprises that have very intensive procurement processes (e.g. multiple docs, dedicated project manager needed.) In the long term, we may need to figure this out.
Things we don't want to spend time on
Building a detailed MQL/SQL funnel: In 99% of cases, our ICP does not buy software in a linear process from 'saw ad' -> 'downloaded gated PDF' -> 'booked demo' -> 'bought PostHog'. Traditional B2B SaaS funnels do not really apply here. Our focus instead should be on helping drive word of mouth by being extremely helpful.
Winning the deal at all costs: We have overall ARR targets at PostHog, but these are not exclusively achieved by the Sales & CS team - the vast majority of our paying customers come in without ever talking to us. This means that revenue isn't the CS team's responsibility alone, so we don't have to close deals where we get a short term bump to revenue in exchange for long term pain/churn (e.g. forcing a non-ICP deal to close with extremely discounted pricing).
Big things we care about in 2024
- Increase new revenue from Large and Extra Large new customers. These are people who come in to book a demo initially, and are taken through a sales-led process. Historically we’ve stayed away from some of these because of platform scaling reasons (especially where they are B2C), but we've now successfully proven that we can give these types of customers a great experience. Getting to $100m ARR will require us to predictably land these larger customers.
- Get existing customers to spend more money by adopting additional PostHog products. In the long run, our business model is a bet that we will make more money by getting customers to adopt multiple products, rather than trying to compete commercially on individual products. We're already doing pretty well at this without having put that much effort in, so we have a really big opportunity to do more here.
Target customers for sales-led success
At PostHog, we already have thousands of ICPs using the product, so we need to be even more focused in terms of who we reach out to. Within PostHog's existing ICP definition, we're particularly interested in talking to companies that:
- Need to excel at product-led growth to remain competitive
- Have budget, and savvy engineers are the decision makers
- Have achieved product-market fit
- Have B2B products
Customer sizing
We categorize customer size using a deeply technical and McKinsey-endorsed framework - you may need an MBA to fully understand it:
- Large: $100k+/yr
- Medium: $5k-100k/yr
- Small: $1-5k/yr
The Sales & CS team look after people in the Medium and Large buckets only. Typically this means customers who are paying $20k+/yr, but sometimes we will work with smaller accounts if we see potential to grow them into larger ones.
'Enterprise' customers
As we get bigger, we're getting more inbound demand from larger organizations which have a very different buying process from our smaller customers. If we want to reach our ambitious revenue goals, we'll need to get good at selling to this segment of customer. However, we need to do this without compromising our focus on building a great product for our ICP.
To prevent us going down the wrong path with deals like these, we follow 4 simple principles:
- We don't contract deliverables. Otherwise a single customer could have too much of an impact on team morale and priorities.
- We will build things for a big customer, as long as we are confident they won’t be the only user of that thing.
- Customers need to try PostHog before they ask us to change things. We love feedback from customers. We don't love big requirement documents from people that haven't used our product before.
- We don’t care about losing deals. If we have to walk away from a deal because we'd have to compromise on these principles, we will. We can do this because we have a really strong growth engine with our ICP customers.
We'd typically define a deal as a large deal if it has most of the following:
- The customer puts us through a lengthy procurement process (3+ months)
- The customer wants us to build new features
- There are multiple stakeholders on the customer side, some or all of whom are not engineers
- The deal is larger than $250k/year
Who the Sales & CS team are
Our small team page is maintained here. By 2026, we still want to be a very small but highly effective and responsive team (<20 people), rather than a very large sales team with all the traditional functions and hierarchy. In addition to people who share PostHog's culture, we also value:
- People who have very high empathy with product engineers and their needs
- People who are happy to choose their own objectives if it meets a business goal
- Low ego, and a willingness to turn around even the most disgruntled and unreasonable customer
- Hands-on people not motivated by managing a team
- For anyone sales-focused, we would want to buy PostHog from them - this is more important than cool logos
How we define roles
- Account executive (AE): responsible for selling to qualified leads, getting them properly using the product (ideally annual contract) and being the main point of contact for retaining/upselling to existing customers assigned to them. This is a hybrid role - we don't sell and then throw over the wall to an accounts team to manage.
- RevOps manager: responsible for ensuring all our sales & CS systems are all functioning as they should to support us as we scale to $50m+ ARR and thousands of paying customers. This covers both the tools themselves, and how we read and act on product usage signals.
- Customer success manager (CSM): responsible for the ongoing relationship with customers who are more in a steady state of usage where an ongoing AE relationship doesn't make sense, or where they have more complex ongoing project management-style needs.
- Inbound sales development rep (SDR): responsible for generating and qualifying leads. At PostHog, this would specifically mean looking at high quality leads from new signups. We don’t do outbound.
Team roles
This is how current roles are split - including spaces for the next few hires we want to make!
Sales
- Simon
- Team Lead, AE for a handful of the Largest customers
- Cameron
- AE for Medium & Large customers in the Americas region
- Scott
- AE for Medium & Large customers in the Americas region
- Leon
- AE for Medium & Large customers in the EMEA/Asia region
- Seb
- AE for Medium & Large customers in the EMEA/Asia region
RevOps & Customer Success
- Mine
- Building and leading RevOps
- Future hire - CSM
- Manage steady state/single product customers