Today, Together is delighted to share that we, along with our good friends at Sequoia, have partnered with Toplyne to help make product-led sales easy. The concept and philosophy behind product-led growth isn’t new — in fact, it’s the same GTM motion that enabled so many companies to become the poster children of India SaaS. GTM strategies like free minutes, freemium, free-trial, selling to shadow IT, bottoms-up adoption and self-service are fairly common today. Think Gitlab, MongoDB, Github, Zoom, Slack, Stripe, PagerDuty, Plaid, Twilio, Atlassian.

As we write this, product-led GTM motion helped create over 36 public companies and over $700B of value in public markets. Executed well, the benefits of product-led growth are straightforward across almost all metrics — better retention, NRR, NPS among other things. Better still, it empowers sales leaders and product luminaries to help prospective customers experience the product before making a purchase decision.

There are also a host of macro-trends governing how leading SaaS companies use data. Let’s look at them briefly –

1. The incumbent infrastructure: The infrastructure we see today is built for B2B top-down sales. PLG infrastructure requires sheer volumes of data to be processed and converted to actionable advice frequently. The data loops also need to be imagined differently.
2. Lack of operational use cases: Traditionally, the data ending up in dashboards has been considered for analysis of the business. In high volume, high growth businesses, new tools are needed to collect and process data from disparate sources to nudge the sales and marketing teams to be proactive.
3. Data warehouse as the ‘new’ source of truth: The single source of truth is now moving from the CRMs to data warehouses. Modern SaaS companies are increasingly using a number of tools to get their jobs done and all of this data ends up getting dumped in the warehouse.
4. Rise of Reverse ETL: Storing the data in the warehouse allows us to perform transformations on top of it and the then transformed data is sent to different SaaS applications in real-time. Until recently, teams wrote their own API connectors from the data warehouse to SaaS products to pipe the data into operational systems like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, etc.

Obvious benefits aside, it’s very difficult to execute a product-led growth strategy perfectly. Data points generated by customers across their lifecycle of interaction with the product — signups, free trials, feature usage, billing events, support tickets, referrals, and more — already overwhelm teams in companies. With department specific systems of record and workflows, companies end up with data silos. They have a hard time scouting prospective customers and targeting expansion opportunities and need engineering, product, and data science teams to work in tandem to execute strategies for conversions and upsells.

Enter Toplyne. Toplyne helps customer-facing teams in companies identify potential customers early in the sales funnel. Their platform helps you have a unified view of the customers by stitching together data from all the different tools like Product, Sales, Marketing, Support etc. This is a relevant yet difficult problem to solve. Sales teams know that there are millions in potential unrealized ARR. Product and Customer Support teams know that the customers are getting a sub-optimal experience. But it’s extremely difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Adding Toplyne to the GTM stack allows companies to better prioritize which self-serve accounts to pursue for cross and up-selling opportunities — effectively answering the Who, When, and Why.

While much has been said about the need and demand for such a solution, it is no trivial feat to get it right. When Ruchin, Rishen and Rohit first met us, the product was a concept on a Notion document (we love those at Together, by the way). But it was their alacrity, sharp-minded focus and deep empathy for the problem that won us over. Before meeting the team, we had heard great things about Rishen’s empathy from portfolio companies he had helped, Ruchin’s learning agility from his colleagues and Rohit tech prowess from our friends at CleverTap. Their experience in the sector, both as investors and hands-on practitioners, convinced us that they’re the right team to back.

The culmination of a large untapped market, customer obsessed founders, a new category in the making and the team’s vision of making product-led sales easy, helped build our conviction.

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By Manav Garg, Pratyush Choudhury, Dushyant Mishra