Even successful PLG companies like Figma eventually burn through their early adopter market. To avoid hitting an asymptotic growth curve, they must proactively build a traditional outbound sales team to tackle the enterprise market before the PLG engine stalls. Don't wait until you need it.

Move beyond the traditional sales funnel. The "Bow Tie Funnel" visualizes the post-sale journey with conversion at the center. It forces focus on onboarding, retention, expansion, and advocacy, turning a single sale into a self-perpetuating revenue engine fueled by referrals from happy clients.

At ElevenLabs, closing an inbound deal isn't the end of the sales motion; it's the beginning. Once the initial MSA is signed, the sales team immediately launches an outbound effort, using the internal credibility of the first deal to target every other relevant team within that new customer's organization.

Most B2B SaaS companies stop ABM efforts after the initial sale, despite landing only about 30% of an account's potential revenue. The biggest growth opportunity lies in applying ABM strategies post-sale for customer expansion, which prevents a poor customer experience and captures significant untapped revenue.

A common strategic error is defaulting to ABM solely for new customer acquisition. This overlooks the immense, often untapped, potential for revenue growth within the existing customer base. The highest ROI for ABM frequently lies in driving upsell and cross-sell opportunities with current clients.

StackAI found the bulk of enterprise revenue comes from expansion, not the initial deal. They operationalized this by creating a team of "AI strategists" who work with customers post-sale to proactively identify and build new use cases, driving deep account penetration and growth.

Figma structures its GTM by eliminating traditional CS and SDR roles. Instead, AEs run a proactive "hunting" motion to expand accounts (replacing CS), and a specialized team handles transactional renewals to free up senior AEs (replacing SDRs). This model is built on a principle of extreme focus and specialization.

Don't limit your ABM strategy to acquiring new logos. It's an incredibly effective approach for customer expansion. Target large enterprise customers where you have a small initial footprint, using ABM plays to sell into new departments, business units, or sell more products.

Figma avoids role confusion by assigning its high-velocity, product-led growth (PLG) "upgrade" motion exclusively to its SMB sales team. This allows mid-market and enterprise reps to specialize in a purely strategic, sales-led process without being distracted by transactional deals, ensuring maximum focus.