Marketing and Sales Are Rewiring GTM by Getting Back to PLG Fundamentals

In the SaaS space, it's hardly uncommon for marketing and product professionals to come in with visions of cornering their respective market, only to find themselves in a constant battle with churn. Growth leaders are increasingly pulled into diagnosing and fixing foundational system issues, with turnover as the first and most telling signal of deeper product and retention gaps. The mandate may say "grow," but the first task is almost always to stop the bleeding, which leads to a seemingly endless hole of managing cancellations.

Joel Eilat has watched that trap catch companies for over a decade. Now running the product-led growth consultancy Everything Product after leading product and growth teams at WalkMe, Powtoon, and D-ID, he sees it as the defining anti-pattern of modern B2B SaaS and the driving force for why companies should consider leaning into product-led growth strategies and focusing on activation, rather than just sales. "What I've been seeing is that growth leaders are brought in to help companies grow. But the first thing they're actually asked to do is stop churn," Eilat says.

Combating churn vs. building retention

Combating churn and increasing retention are two sides of the same coin, Eilat explains, but they call for very different strategies. Combating churn often means short-term tactics: discounts, promotions, and three-month extensions designed to keep cancellations off the dashboard for one more reporting cycle. Focusing on actual retention, on the other hand, means structurally fixing the product, pricing, and onboarding so users never want to leave in the first place.

In Eilat's view, short-term tactics are a tell that the product is treading water. "In a way, the company is admitting to weak retention. They just want to drag it out," he says. The numbers look better for investors, but the underlying value gap stays untouched. In PLG companies, that gap shows up as canceled self-serve subscriptions; in sales-led models, it shows up as non-renewals at the end of an annual contract. Either way, the diagnosis is the same: customers aren't getting enough value to justify staying.

Rewiring the go-to-market engine

Pivoting toward PLG is a complete rewire of the go-to-market engine, shifting from short-term churn prevention to long-term retention. In traditional sales-led models, marketing has one goal: book the demo. The tactics vary — white papers, gated landing pages, MQL enrichment, outbound triggers — but every motion is engineered to push a qualified visitor into a sales conversation. In a product-led model, growth teams take on activation, educating users and helping them self-serve through email campaigns, comparison pages, pricing pages, and content that supports in-product onboarding. The former is all about converting a lead into a customer, while the latter focuses on ensuring customers find value within minutes of first use — not months into a contract. 

Alongside their growth colleagues, sales teams also need to evolve into an activation-focused strategy. Tell a commissioned sales representative that a $20 self-serve tier is coming, and they might picture their commission checks evaporating. Considering how revenue and commission are structured, that's a completely reasonable reaction, but successful PLG companies treat it as a practical operational hurdle, retraining teams to use PQLs and rewarding expansion over net-new logos.

"When sales teams work at a company that also leverages a product-led growth strategy, they need to be open-minded to speaking with prospects, knowing they might not land the deal," Eilat says. "Some sales reps find that it cannibalizes their commission, of course. On the other hand, other sales representatives see that as an opportunity to help that type of client grow on their own and then scoop that up and realize that value for a larger commission down the road."

What a PQL actually looks like

The mechanics of PLG hinge on the PQL. A PQL, Eilat explains, is when a user signs up, starts using the product, reaches a certain threshold, and signals in the data that they've crossed it. Essentially, PQLs measure customer engagement: they use the product, invite their teammates, and return every week. That, Eilat says, is the moment where someone in sales can reach out and say, "Hey, I see that you're using the product, let's jump on a call."

The payoff is structural. PQLs convert to closed deals at higher rates, with shorter cycles and larger ACVs, because sales is closing an expansion on a customer who has already proven the value. Sales cycles still happen in PLG companies, Eilat notes. They just run on two parallel tracks: traditional outbound motion and supported, self-service engagement from prospects.

Free tools and self-serve access are high-octane pipeline generation, and they aren't just a PLG tactic. Eilat points to his time at CyberArk, a sales-led enterprise security company, where he ran a free on-premise audit tool that reps took directly to prospects to expose the sprawl of their attack surface. Even in a deeply SLG motion, the wedge worked because it collapsed time-to-value: prospects saw the problem in their own environment instead of hearing a pitch about it. Many SLG companies can borrow this play, because a value-first artifact that demonstrates the product in a hyperfast cycle, without rewiring the whole GTM.

"What can we take out of our core value, minimize that in a sense, and package that up as a free tool, so that our target audience and ICPs really understand and feel what we do rather than just hear about it?" Eilat says. "Rather than just hear about it from a salesperson or read about it on their screen, they need to see what it does."

But PLG isn't a magic bullet. Eilat suggests using a four-parameter framework (product, market, channel, and model) to assess whether a company is actually suited for self-serve. The market needs to be willing and able to self-serve in the first place. A product aimed at offline, non-technical dental offices that rely on in-person vendor visits, for example, might struggle with PLG because the buyers don't naturally discover and try tools on their own.

Crickets in the inbox

Assessing that fit has become a top priority for SaaS leaders. While the post-COVID market correction led some teams to declare PLG dead, Eilat says the proliferation of AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor is sparking renewed interest. Building software has never been cheaper, but getting anyone to pay attention has never been harder. At a recent SaaS conference in Austin, he saw just how crowded categories like sales tools have become, with vendors competing for the same limited time across revenue teams and AI-enabled stacks. Even with AI, the human adoption problem remains the ultimate barrier.

"How does a human choose and then adopt a new product for sales?" Eilat asks. "It's hard to even get in front of people, tell them that you have a new startup that's worth their time, and then get them to sign up and try that product, and then adopt it and really understand it. As long as humans are around, we still have an adoption problem and a distribution problem. And that's why PLG is all the more relevant."

Meanwhile, traditional outbound is dying a slow death. As inboxes flood with automated outreach, many revenue teams report that performance has softened. "We all know that reply rates to outreach have decreased substantially," Eilat says. "They're just about at 3% now when they were double that a year or two ago."

Because inboxes are flooded and outbound is failing, letting users test-drive the product themselves is the most realistic way to cut through the static. Self-serve experiences and free tools turn anonymous visitors into engaged users, creating the PQL signals that sales teams can prioritize. On the sales side, leaders now look for reps who are comfortable working with product usage data, handling a mix of self-serve and sales-led journeys, and not insisting that every opportunity close through their own pipeline—a perspective that mirrors emerging trait-based hiring approaches in revenue organizations, where adaptability and curiosity are weighted more heavily.

On the strategy side, companies that succeed with PLG often expand their addressable market by lowering barriers to entry, then use data to identify which users and accounts are ready for deeper engagement. That pattern lines up with how some companies are using AI to broaden their customer base and with the product-led playbooks shared by operators at firms like Atlassian.

A foot in the door

Many executives still think PLG is just for startups with shoestring budgets. Eilat argues it can actually be the ultimate enterprise entry point. But, beyond the mechanics of pricing tiers and pipeline math, Eilat warns that the AI rush is tempting teams to skip the fundamentals altogether. "At the end of the day, we're here to deliver value to our users," he says. "Whether it's an SLG company or a PLG company, we need to make sure that we are in touch with our users. We don't synthesize user data or speak with synthetic agents that represent our users. Get out of the building and speak with people. That's the only way that you'll know what you need to build and how fast."