Leah Tharin on Why Your Salespeople Are Killing Your PLG Motion

Nobody Wants to Talk to Gary the Sales Guy

The shift away from sales-led motions isn't just preference. It's economics and psychology combined.

Leah Tharin has seen it from both sides—two hypergrowth companies, one scaling from $2M to $30M in revenue in two years at smallpdf. She's watched commoditized markets force companies into product-led growth whether they're ready or not.

If you have 10 companies who offer the same, 2 of them are sales-led and 8 of them are product-led, you can test the 8 without having to talk to the other 2, and therefore you're going to win on every corner.

— Leah Tharin

The distrust runs deeper than convenience. When customers know a salesperson's incentive—usually 10-30% of contract value—every recommendation gets filtered. Lawyers bill by the hour, so they're incentivized to prevent risk, not find compromise. Car salespeople make more when you pay more. The higher the information asymmetry, the stronger the aversion.

Show Value, Don't Talk About It

The core principle of PLG is deceptively simple: demonstrate value before demanding payment. But what about products that need heavy integration, regulated industries, or API-first companies?

Tharin worked at Jua, a weather prediction API that required weeks to validate accuracy. You couldn't just hand out full API access—customers could build competing products. The solution? A demo API with specific test locations, just enough to prove the forecast quality without exposing the crown jewels.

Zendesk evolved the same way. A decade ago, testing meant grabbing a code snippet, calling the webmaster, deploying to production. Now they offer interactive demos from four perspectives: support agent, admin, end customer, and salesperson. Each tour is fully tracked, tied to work emails, and connected to HubSpot.

It is very rare to me, and I talk to heavy, heavy integration companies, it's very rare that we cannot at least give some kind of interactive demo in some way of your product.

— Leah Tharin

Seon.io broke the fraud prevention market wide open with a self-serve integration for financial institutions—one of the most regulated, complex use cases imaginable. They knew their buyers were sophisticated developers who didn't want sales calls. The cost to serve was high, but the friction removal was worth it.

The Three Ways to Show Value Without Payment

Freemium works when no integration is required. Trials work when setup is light. Interactive demos bridge the gap when neither is feasible. Pick based on your time-to-value, not your competitor's model.

Your First Sale Doesn't Matter (Expansion Does)

Most B2B PLG companies misunderstand their own business model. The land isn't the prize. The expand is.

Tharin's framework: in freemium, onboard users to the aha moment. In trials, onboard them to the payment process. At first purchase, take as little money as possible. Then focus everything on expansion.

Here's why that matters. A product manager at Microsoft has budget authority for their team—say, $10K. They buy your tool for one squad. You're now a vendor in the system. When that PM gets promoted or another team hears about the tool, the enterprise deal doesn't start from scratch. Due diligence is done. Procurement knows you. You're already inside.

We try to get into companies and we try to grab enterprise value before it comes enterprise value. We're still fine if just the product team itself is using the product.

— Leah Tharin

This is where traditional sales comp breaks everything. If your rep gets 20-30% of the contract value at close, they're gone after signature. Customer success picks up the account. There's no incentive to land small and expand—only to close big, fast, and move on.

Culture Is a Result of Incentives, Not the Other Way Around

Tharin is blunt: wrong incentives create wrong behavior. Reward salespeople for big contracts, they'll oversell. Reward product teams for features shipped instead of customer success, you get a feature factory. Celebrate people who work weekends while preaching work-life balance, and your culture statement is fiction.

For mature PLG companies—anything past $5M in revenue—you need both self-serve and sales running in parallel. The question isn't whether to have salespeople. It's how to pay them so they don't kill the motion.

The incentive shift: tie comp to expansion and retention, not just close. Make land deals low-friction and low-commission. Pay on the second and third sale, not the first. If your AE can't make quota by landing enterprise logos on day one, they'll start thinking like a PLG company—get in fast, prove value, expand over time.

This applies beyond sales. If product managers aren't measured on activation, retention, or revenue per user, they'll default to shipping. If growth teams are judged on sign-ups instead of activated users, you'll get volume without value. Incentives shape behavior faster than any mission statement ever will.