The LEAP Method for PLG Sales

Personally, I think selling a product with a strong self-serve / PLG motion is the easiest - but you need the right approach. As Kyle Poyer discovered in his interview with Dave Barron, an early PLG GTM hire at Hubspot, successful AEs need to be “AE-ish” - meaning part AE, part CSM.

I learned this at Branch. We started as a free open-source product focused on SDK installations in mobile apps. Even after we scaled past $50M ARR and shifted to enterprise sales, our CRM still held hidden gems - companies using our free SDK with large upsell potential.

I made President’s Club early in my sales career, in part, because I created a repeatable process called the LEAP Method (Locate, Engage, Assess, Propose) for identifying and converting these hidden gems into paid contracts.

LEAP Case Study: Converting $5B+ CPG brand from $0 to ~$75K contract

L - Locate

The key is identifying the right prospects among hundreds of free users. Below are the signals I used to assess prioritization of a large CPG brand:

E - Engage

Instead of traditional prospecting, I reached out to a user in their dashboard as a “Partner Growth Manager” focused on driving product adoption. They had been using our core deep-linking platform on auto-pilot for years, but were not fully utilizing the capabilities. I came with a PoV on how they could use the core platform for other use cases (still $0 cost) like driving app traffic from social posts.

A - Assess

While helping them maximize the free product, I learned that the app was a key initiative from the CEO. He wanted to promote product-specific recipes in the app to drive more sales online/in-store, with a goal of driving 50K+ app installs before Thanksgiving. The team was considering expensive paid app campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Google to meet the goal.

P - Propose

Rather than pushing our Paid Ads measurement product, I suggested our Web-to-App conversion tool called Journeys. My pitch: Go for the lower CAC option - why pay for expensive mobile ads, when you already have high intent visitors on your mobile website? We put together a business case and secured the budget originally meant for paid ads, and launched the Thanksgiving campaign. Months later, after proving the app’s potential, the buying team purchased our Paid Ads attribution product, bringing the contract total to ~$75K.

Conclusion

The LEAP method requires the AE to act more as a “Partner Growth Manager” and when used correctly can win you a much larger pie by playing the long game and truly understanding your customer’s needs

Bisous,

Julian