Our primary focus is on making our paying customers successful, not forcing sales through. Today, we follow a 100% inbound sales model - our approach to product-led growth means that we do not do cold outbound yet, though we'll probably run some experiments here later in 2025 as we scale.
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 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 BS 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 weirdly 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.
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 team vision
Things we want to be great at
Technically capable: 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.
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.
Cross sell: PostHog gets much more powerful as customers adopt multiple products that all share the underlying data. And they stick around longer. It's a win win.
Warm outbound to product leads: 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're interested in trying out
- Cold outbound: Most companies do this really badly. We're interested in seeing how we could do this the PostHog way.
Things we don't want to spend time on
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'.
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).
How to work with different types of customer
We look after customers who are paying or could pay $20k+/yr. This means sometimes we will work with existing smaller accounts if we see potential to grow them into larger ones.
We've written an internal playbook for how to manage different types of customers - this goes into a lot more detail about company style, how they work, likely PostHog adopters, how to communicate etc.
'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 team are
Our small team page is maintained here. In addition to people who share PostHog's culture, we also value:
- People who have very high empathy with product teams 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
- We would want to buy PostHog from them - this is more important than cool logos