Adam Gross (Founder of CloudConnect & Personify, ex-CEO of Heroku) on Entrepreneurship, Product-Led Growth, and Culture
I've already listened to this talk twice and still will listen many more times
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of having a discussion with Adam Gross for the CMU (Carnegie Mellon) Tech & Entrepreneurship community. We talked about starting companies, tying product to go-to-market, how to preserve and change culture through acquisitions, and tactics around product-led growth.
Adam has an extensive bio but my best summary would be that he has been around the SaaS ecosystem for 20+ years as a founder of Personify and CloudConnect, CEO of Heroku, and VP of Sales & Marketing for companies like Salesforce and Dropbox. Every experience chatting with him is a new download on go-to-market and product approaches to problems that have continued to exist over the years.
The video above is 50 min and well worth the time as Adam has a ton of great anecdotes alongside the learnings.
For those who don’t have time to listen to the video fully now, I have summarized some of the high level learnings below. There’s much more detail in the video so I couldn’t fully do it justice. But this newsletter is all about Snack Bites so cliff notes below :)
Startups must innovate GTM (go-to-market) alongside tech & product. When Salesforce introduced the idea of being able to sign up and do a free trial, that was completely new. This enabled Google ads to drive enterprise software customers to the product and increased the surface area of potential customer discovery. Because of this, Salesforce was existing in an entirely different context driven by product and GTM.
Salesforce succeeded even though it had plenty of competitors. There were hundreds of other contact management solutions out there. Salesforce became the dominant one because of messaging & marketing combined with innovative software delivery. So easy to forget about the importance of pricing & packaging.
Founders should nail their industry transformation message. Salesforce used “No Software” which was bold and memorable. It got press, industry, and customers all talking about the company constantly. Datadog has “Cloud monitoring as a service”, an opinionated bet on “cloud”. It helps to shift the conversation from a competitor discussion to a product outcome.
Transforming Culture is Hard but Needs to Embodied by Leadership to Proliferate Org. Enterprise was a 4-letter word at Heroku in the early days. The team had to learn to view enterprise use cases as a natural extension of serving individual developers. Not an either or. However, once you do move upmarket, you have to fight not just serving the largest and loudest enterprise customers. Otherwise, you may lose empathy and usability in the product.
3 Modes of Selling: Oracle Model, Salesforce Model, End User Adopted. Oracle Model - relationship selling. Salesforce Model - teams are using the product and getting collaborative multi-player value. End User Adopted - individual users adopt the product and spread the product around the customer.
Successful Product Led Growth companies have all three of these models working together at scale. Need to move the customer along these 3 models. The timing behind when you engage in each motion is important. Need to make sure balancing each when serving individual users but also prioritizing features for the enterprise. More on this topic can be found in this excellent hour long talk by Adam here.
Internal Communication is Key in Setting up Culture. Doing so helps align the mission and value of the product delivered. 30-40% of time spent on internal comms for execs is a good use of time. Documented communication (written, audio, visual, videos, etc) is important to accomplish this. What many don’t realize about Salesforce marketing and even events like Dreamforce is that this is not just to communicate to customers but also to communicate back to the org and reinforce the culture.