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.

When entering a new market, you must organizationally separate that team from the core business. The main revenue engine has a powerful "inertia of success" that will distract and pull focus from the fledgling initiative. Vanta's enterprise motion only succeeded after being organizationally separated from its main sales team.

Founders must consider their sales motion (e.g., PLG vs. enterprise sales-led) when designing the product. A product built for one motion won't sell effectively in another, potentially forcing a costly redesign. This concept extends "product-market fit" to "product-market-sales fit."

Don't "stuff the channel" by forcing your existing sales team to sell an acquired product with a different model. At Cisco, a usage-based product was kept separate from the enterprise sales team, who were incentivized by large deals and wouldn't have prioritized it.

In a hybrid model, one PMM group should serve the data-driven needs of PLG (activation, experimentation), while another serves the sales-enablement needs of the enterprise motion (collateral, training). This structure prevents individual PMMs from being spread too thin.

The "PLG Trap" occurs when founders assume moving upmarket is just a pricing change. In reality, shifting from PLG to enterprise sales requires a difficult, company-wide transition across product (e.g., SOC 2 compliance), organization (e.g., sales engineers), and culture.

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.

A common PLG pitfall is assuming the user base will naturally springboard into enterprise deals. Often, the enterprise buyer is a different person with different problems. This oversight can cost companies years, as they have to build a second, separate sales motion from scratch.

While now known as a top-down enterprise sales giant, Salesforce's initial wedge was a product-led growth (PLG) motion. Individual salespeople signed up for accounts to manage their personal pipelines, creating bottoms-up adoption that Salesforce later monetized by selling visibility to sales managers.