Shambhavi: Welcome to the GTM Spotlight Podcast. Meet Clara de Lima. She's a seasoned product-led growth and demand generation professional with a remarkable track record in scaling revenue and building new go-to-market strategies for high-growth B2B SaaS companies, including Carta and Included Health. With extensive experience in upsell, cross-sell, expansion, and funnel optimization, Clara has consistently focused on driving business growth through data-driven market strategies and collaboration with sales teams. Thank you for being here, Clara.

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‍Clara: Thanks for having me.

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Shambhavi: So, let's dive right in. Can you walk us through your journey from demand gen to product-led growth and how your experience has shaped your approach to funnel optimization?

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Clara: Yeah, definitely. I actually first started in sales development before demand gen and then moved to product-led growth. That was really helpful to develop expertise and experience from the bottom of the funnel upward. It showed me the importance of having a really airtight funnel given how much prospective buyers are handed off between internal teams. You think about marketing, SDRs, AEs, CSM, implementation support—it can kind of go on and on. For me, it underscored the importance of knowledge sharing between teams. The trick for using knowledge sharing as a funnel optimization and collaboration tool is to decide what's important for your counterparts to know and have a really clear way for them to receive and interpret that information. For example, if you're passing too much information to your sales team, they won't be able to quickly synthesize that and shape it into useful context for their pitch. The same is true if you move up-funnel. A growth product team should be able to slim down what's really important about a user's journey in the product and pass that data to their marketing team in a really crisp way, which can then inform the lifecycle or retargeting strategy for the marketing team. Overall, my experience has taught me to be really considerate about what teams are up next in your funnel, guiding the customer or user's journey, and always making it easy for internal counterparts to be better at their jobs.

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Shambhavi: In your experience speaking of funnel optimization, what are some effective tactics?

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Clara: I always like to think first about where your biggest efficiency gains can be made and start from there. For example, you could make small tweaks on a landing page that increase the number of inbound leads you're getting by two or even 10%. For me, the hard part has always been when these leads change hands between internal teams, kind of what I talked about earlier. I've seen a lot of funnel drop-offs or confusion that can spring up when you're introducing more people, more tools, more variables into the equation of your funnel. It's kind of like that game of telephone when you whisper a word from person to person and you end up with something completely different in the end. One way I've seen that alleviates that is using reporting to create transparency and build accountability. For example, if you're working on a growth product or a PLG team, you really can't know if your PQLs are being picked up by a sales team or marketing team unless you're taking time to sit down with those teams and align cross-functionally on small details like what does this specific field mean, what does this trigger, what does this actually look like for the user, and build context so everybody understands what these things mean, why these specific fields or pieces of information are important, and then work together to form clear next steps from there.

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Shambhavi: Let's talk about the relationship between growth and product teams. How do you ensure a strong partnership between the two?

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Clara: Growth teams are in a really unique position to experiment, find out what's working, and then educate other teams on those findings. It could be something like finding a specific channel that's super effective in reaching your ICP, maybe A/B testing different messaging or different triggers, and then most importantly, sharing these insights with your product teams. That can make them a lot more effective in their job and build trust and partnership between two organizations. For example, if a growth team runs an experiment and learns that their audience loves free tools, they find them super useful and engaging, or maybe a certain keyword resonates with your audience, sharing that with your product team can inform their in-app strategy, shaping the user experience. It can make the overall journey for your users more cohesive from marketing to product and back and forth, strengthening partnerships between growth and product teams when you're being open and transparent and sharing insights.

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Shambhavi: Experimentation has likely driven a lot more lift in conversions and overall metrics. But let's switch gears and talk a little bit more about any advice on building collaboration between sales and growth teams.

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Clara: Having a really close relationship with the sales team is probably one of the most important and impactful things you can do as a growth team. One specific thing that I found helpful is to regularly provide educational or training sessions for sales teams. A lot of people will say, "Oh, but they have enablement teams for that." I feel strongly that growth teams should be leading their own education sessions, building that rapport and relationships with the sales team. These sessions can be a time to share insights, build more context on your inbound lead flow, provide demos of what a user journey looks like in the product—anything that the growth team can do to educate the sales team about what prospects or customers are seeing before that sales conversation kicks off. Over time, these sessions and relationship building form a toolkit for giving sales the best shot they have at winning deals, hitting quota, and appealing to their incentives. It's also important to form relationships with individual salespeople. You have to earn the right to ask them, "Hey, did my presentation make sense? Do you know what to do next? Do you really think these leads I'm sending you are high quality?" and have an open relationship where you can expect honest answers that inform your next experiment, communication, or anything to continue building that relationship with sales teams.

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Shambhavi: I agree. Regular educational sessions can really enhance your entire collaboration. At Carta, you successfully scaled high-growth channels through product-led growth and demand generation. What were some of the key lessons you learned during this process?

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Clara: The best thing I've learned is that when you have a strong, supportive exec team, they have a lot of patience and tolerance for growth experiments to fail. A lot of people, when they start a job, are like, "I don't want to make it look like anything I did was unsuccessful." But if you have an open relationship with your cross-functional counterparts and a culture of sharing insights, I've found exec teams are super appreciative of clear explanations about why something fails, especially if you're able to share that with other teams. Some organizations even have Slack channels or dedicated meetings to talk about why things broke or didn't work. Overall, if you're talking about this, it brings up your whole organizational efficiency, and growth teams can really be leaders in fostering that dialogue about what's working and what's not. I've found exec teams are really supportive of that kind of culture.

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Shambhavi: That's awesome that failure is not only accepted but expected in growth experiments, allowing teams to take risks and try unconventional approaches, leading to some really good discoveries.

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Clara: Definitely.

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Shambhavi: Let's dive into some specifics. How do growth KPIs change with a self-serve product versus product-led sales?

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Clara: This depends on the goals of an organization, but in general, for product-led growth and product-led sales motions, it's helpful to have two perspectives. One is a close-up view of conversion rates at each step of the funnel, knowing exactly when and how much users are dropping off at each step and what your conversion rates are. The other is a wider perspective of how you're performing over time, whether that's quarter over quarter or year over year. I personally think revenue is a helpful indicator for how your channels are performing and serves as an overarching KPI. For product-led growth and specifically self-serve, it's important to zoom in on the delta between acquisition, activation, adoption, and expansion. To some extent, the same is true of product-led sales, but you've also got those human variables where information is moving between different teams. What's happening during the sales conversations is also a variable that can complicate things. When you're tracking KPIs, it's not something you can easily fit in a spreadsheet. Overall, having a clear picture of those conversions between each step is fundamental. You also want to be able to zoom out and ask, "Are we getting better at accelerating revenue?" Your KPIs should help you understand if your experiments are working and how you can use those insights to get better and do it faster.

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Shambhavi: I really like that approach to measuring growth KPIs for both self-serve and product-led sales. As a growth marketer, how do you leverage data and analytics tools to measure success and all of these metrics and drivers that you mentioned?

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Clara: First off, you've got to find the right tool for the job. For understanding product-led growth and product interactions, behavioral analytics tools like Amplitude or Snowplow can be really helpful to see what's happening at the top of the funnel. Also, using visualization tools like Looker can bridge the gap between sales conversions and get a picture of that full funnel so you're truly able to measure success from top to bottom. No matter what tools you use, the data is only good if it can help you answer specific questions and if you're able to use those answers to inform your next steps.

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Shambhavi: Let's talk a little bit about using that data to inform upselling and cross-selling as next steps. How do you approach building personalized onboarding flows or in-app education to drive upsell and cross-sell growth?

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Clara: When building onboarding flows or education, the goal is to help users find value in your product quickly and in a way that's relevant to them. Understanding their specific job to be done or task and aligning your onboarding flow with their needs helps them find value quickly. Once you've demonstrated value in the initial interactions, it's time to layer in contextualized in-app education to show how additional offerings or features can enable their other workflows. Adding value before asking the user to engage with upsells builds trust and keeps them engaged without prematurely introducing an upsell journey when they're still figuring out the initial value of your product.

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Shambhavi: Building trust by adding value first is a great approach. Adding these layers will not only drive activation faster but also increase self-service. As we wrap up, I'd love to get your thoughts on the future of self-service and product-led growth. How do you think the shift towards PLG will influence the growth of growth marketers in the coming years?

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Clara: Growth marketing teams need strong data skills to move fast when running experiments. Growth teams should be sharing something cool and useful every quarter, if not more often. You can only achieve that pace if you guide and shape your reporting and draw insights from your data. Having a strong data background will become more important as more companies shift to PLG models and it's going tohelp growth marketers stand out in their careers.

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Shambhavi: Absolutely. Finally, what advice would you give to early-stage startups looking to implement a successful PLG strategy?

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Clara: I'd say if you're taking agrowth approach and you're really early on just focus on finding one channel or one tactic that works really well for your audience and keep testing and iterating and optimize that to make it extremely effective over time. If you find something that's working really well and you're kind of making it 1% better every month, over time that really builds up to a meaningful pipeline and something that is buildinga a really robust plg strategy.

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Shambhavi: If youfind something just double down on it! That's great advice. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the GTM spotlight podcast.

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Clara: Thanks so much for having me.