This article is based on Mike’s appearance at the Product-Led Summit in London, 2024.

Organizations often struggle to reconcile competing go-to-market strategies, leaving product leaders caught between incompatible expectations, misaligned incentives, and conflicting priorities.

If you're navigating the tension between product-led growth and sales-driven approaches, you're likely facing resistance to your ideas, difficulty demonstrating value, and pressure to build features that don't truly serve customer needs.

Through my experience spanning product-led startups, sales-driven organizations, and partner-led enterprises – including managing multiple acquisitions where these worlds collided – I've developed four key strategies that can help product leaders thrive in hybrid environments:

  1. Selling your ideas internally with techniques that resonate in a sales-driven culture, not just with data and product logic.
  2. Realigning your jobs-to-be-done framework to satisfy both product-led and sales-led priorities.
  3. Maintaining strategic control of the marketing funnel by integrating product education at every stage.
  4. Avoiding the feature factory trap through strategic pilot programs and validated learning.

I'm Mike Jones, Senior Director of Product & Engineering at Sage, and in this article, I'll share practical approaches to harmonize these seemingly contradictory GTM strategies.

The 3 key players in this story

The story I want to share revolves around three key players: Inventory Planner by Sage, Brightpearl by Sage, and Sage itself. Each represents a different approach to go-to-market strategies – one product-led, one sales-led, and one partner-led.

Sage is a publicly traded company with ÂŁ2 billion in annual sales. It has a presence in major financial hubs. On the other end of the spectrum is Brightpearl, a scrappy retail startup founded by an entrepreneur who originally just wanted to sell hats but ended up writing software for i – â€”very much like the Shopify story, minus the trillion-dollar valuation.

Then there’s Inventory Planner, which has an entirely different origin. It was started by a Russian entrepreneur in Paris who was simply trying to get better insights from his retail data. When he couldn’t get his Shopify store to function the way he needed, he built a small, highly specialized product to help retailers forecast stock levels. 

The goal was simple but powerful: ensure businesses don’t overstock warehouses while also preventing inventory shortages when demand spikes.

Three years ago, Sage acquired Brightpearl. Just four months before that, Brightpearl had acquired Inventory Planner. My role in this story started when Brightpearl brought me in as CEO of Inventory Planner. 

My job was to transition the company from being founder-led to a scalable, high-growth business. At the time, Inventory Planner’s sales were in the low single-digit millions. Since then, we’ve seen growth of 300–400% in just three years.

  • Inventory Planner: A product-led company with a marketplace-driven, low-touch sales model.
  • Brightpearl: A high-involvement, assisted sales model with a strong sales-led approach.
  • Sage: A legacy player in the industry, historically selling through accountants and trusted networks.

In the following sections, I’ll dive deeper into the challenges, strategies, and lessons learned from navigating these vastly different GTM models.

1. Learn to sell your position and experience

If you come from a product-led growth (PLG) background and find yourself working alongside experienced sales leaders, one thing will become very clear: they are better at selling than you are. It’s what they do. 

They know how to lead sales teams, close deals, and drive revenue through relationships and persuasion.

That means that even if you have the best data, proof points, and logical reasoning to support a PLG approach, none of it matters if you can’t sell your ideas effectively. 

If you assume that evidence alone will convince decision-makers – that the data, an insightful article, or a case study will naturally lead to the right conclusion – you’re in for a harsh reality check.

I learned this lesson the hard way.

When I first stepped into my role, I was stubbornly committed to PLG. I believed in the model, had seen it work before, and was convinced it was the right approach for our product moving forward. 

So when my sales colleagues raised concerns about scalability, I took a passive stance. My response was essentially, “We’ll see.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that while I was waiting for my results to prove me right, decisions were being made without me. Budgets were being allocated, targets were being set, and strategies were being put in place that were misaligned with the product-led initiatives I was working on. 

By the time I was ready to say, “Look, the data proves this works,” the game had already changed. The structures and priorities had shifted in ways that made it harder for my approach to succeed.