187 - Product-Led Growth Meets Agentic Selling - with Channing Ferrer

SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders. We've got a great guest for the show today, Channing Ferrer. He is a revenue guy. He's had an extensive background in sales and finance.

And he is today the chief revenue officer and CEO Americas of Brevo, the CRM suite manifesting tomorrow's success. Channing, welcome to the show. Thank you, Thomas. Excited to be here.

Yeah, excited to have you. So let's talk a little bit first about your role here in just sort of the startup space, the software world. You have an extensive background in revenue. And I always like talking to revenue people because you have a lot to say about sales and how companies sustain themselves.

So opening thoughts on that before I dive into subtopics there. SPEAKER_00: Yes, definitely, definitely. And by means of experience, I've been in and around the revenue world for a long time here. But in a lot of product-led growth businesses.

And I think one of the things that's always interesting is how to balance that sales-led motion with that product-led motion and where those two things come together, where they collide, where they conflict even sometimes. But it's been fun. I think when I look back at some of the experiences beyond Brevo at HubSpot at SEMrush, that were all very product-like growth businesses, there's a lot of really interesting learnings. And there's a big evolution that I'm seeing also.

I think, of course, with automation and AI. There's a lot of things we used to do that we didn't call AI, that today you might call it that. But we just called it automation. And now it's AI.

But uh the fundamentals, I think, have been around for a while. It's just how we execute on those. We've gotten much more efficient. SPEAKER_01: Literally, Channing, I have been thinking about making a list, and I'm sure someone's probably already done it, of things that if they were invented in the past couple of years, we would call AI.

And it would, I think it would include things like cruise control, right? Just anything, um, anything that just kind of on its own has something that's hilarious. Um, and so uh let's let's talk about that the PLG insights there, because PLG, I don't know where you would put the birth date on it of recently. Is it past 12 years?

Is it something something in that range makes sense? Something in that kind of range ish where people started realizing and putting a vocabulary to it. I think people had been doing things around it and realized things, but it got a vocabulary, it got a methodology. Let's start with I I want to end with a I want to do a contrast between PLG of yesteryear and PLG today, but let's first get grounded on sort of what PLG classically is uh from your perspective and then like lead that into today.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely. So I think there's a fundamental definition that I think of as PLG, which I don't always know if everyone agrees up to this, but uh I'll explain it. I think PLG is really having the product lead you down a path to uh realize more value. That value turns into probably buying more products.

PLG in my mind is not a 15-day free trial. That's that's a different motion. Um PLG means you don't need humans involved to to decide to do more, to see more value, to realize you know what you're doing with the product. Uh at times humans can help with PLG, but it really should be a product-led motion, not a not a human-led motion.

And I think sometimes the there's a misconception out there uh that's been around for a while, by the way, that if you put a 15-day, 30-day trial on your website, now you're product-led, that's a very different motion. SPEAKER_01: Right. And you know, and coming from uh the design and UX background myself, I have always viewed the overlap between product strategy and UX as having lots of PLG in it, right? And so, you know, I've always described it to people as make the pro in terms of product work, make the product so good that it has its own gravity and starts pulling in more success to where you're not depending on all of these other channels, but you want one of the main channels, the product itself, to be strong with uh your ability to get revenue.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, one of the things uh that I was interested to chat a little bit about today, Thomas, as we think about these things, is um how PLG is expanding. And it's very specifically now we can automate the human elements of selling, actually. So what what I get at is there's uh a product we're using now, actually, where you have an AI bot that will give you a demo.

And that demo isn't just a uh YouTube recording. That demo is a customized demo. You can engage with it, you can talk to it, it'll show you different things. Is that PLG?

Is that sales led, or is that some new concept that we want to call agent-led maybe uh selling? But there's there's, you know, we created all these automations and leveraging AI, but we can really take that pretty far now in the sales motion. And it's interesting to see where that fits in, if it's categorizes PLG or not. SPEAKER_01: It's kind of in the same spirit of it, right?

Because the whole point of or part of the point of PLG is you're not dumping as many human and financial resources into the selling part as you are as making the product um in better shape. But then it seems like a cousin to that to say, like, hey, we can also put money into these sort of tertiary systems around the product that kind of help like it's sort of like passive income, isn't it? Where you're just you want the the thing to do the selling. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And you know, one of the things at Brevo we look closely at is we think of our uh self-serve, we call it, our self-serve motion. Uh, within that self-serve motion, we have what we call autonomous selling, where you know, customers will buy on their own, but they're buying a product that is otherwise sales-led. And then we have our sales-led motion.

So the autonomous selling is this kind of gray area that fits between PLG and our world, PLG and self-serve are kind of the same thing. But the autonomous selling is something that we're seeing kind of pick up. And what's interesting is I'll go back to when I was at HubSpot. One of the things we did at HubSpot is we had this big um chat team.

And of course, now we could automate all this or most of it, but we had this big chat team as over 100 people, and they were chatting with folks who hadn't purchased yet. So they were using either free users or just on the website. We were answering their questions, and it was our best lead source. And we were, they set in sales, they reported to me, but they weren't incentivized like salespeople.

They were incentivized just to answer questions, but we taught them how to answer questions that would lead to leads. You know, so they they kind of learned how to do this. There wasn't a sales incentive there. We don't want them to feel salesy.

Um, now we're able to automate, of course, that with AI. So at Brevo, for example, we have uh a chat tool, an AI chatbot, that we use, our customers use. And it's a lot of what we were doing back at HelpSpot, but again, it's in a very automated way. But the purpose, I think, behind that is to help and provide insights and guidance.

It's not to sell, but in doing that, you can you can teach that tool to be very product-led. Um, Jason Lemkin talks a lot about this actually at Saster. He does a lot of kind of similar stuff even on his website, where he has chatbots all over the place helping support those customers who have questions about conferences and things. And he said it's his best lead source as well.

SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is fascinating. Is this what you guys do at Brevo? Is it's the automated selling piece? SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's one of the things that we do.

You know, we do a whole variety of things when you get into kind of how you engage from a marketing or selling standpoint. But I think this area is really interesting because it overlaps a lot with you know, product led and this idea of how do we help a soon-to-be customer, a prospect, I suppose, to learn more about your product. Yeah, and either they're already using it in some capacity and they might want to buy more, they might want to do more, or they're not using it yet.

But ultimately, the idea of I think doing this through an automated way is really interesting. And that's this, I think the new evolution probably of PLG is this agent support element to it. SPEAKER_01: How uh prevalent and how effective are these kinds of tools? So I've seen a bunch of tools where, you know, it's essentially a chat bot on a website, and there's a bunch of companies that have sprung up kind of doing things that overlap, where you change train the bot.

And I don't know if it's like you say, hey, here's all of our company PDFs. So you can now answer our questions, and here's like an interview with the founder or something like that, right? Um, and you train it up, and then people go to the website and the chat bot somehow surfaces, and the person is able to make an interaction. Then the idea is you lead this uh to where you need it to be to push the pipeline forward.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly. So you can use it a lot of different ways, but I think what you're saying is exactly a very good use case where someone has a question, and that could be they're maybe they're a free user right now and they're using them and they've hit a limit on a feature and they have a question that hey, I've hit this limit. What are my options now? Can I do I this limit reset next month?

You know, what if I want to buy more? Can I pay overage charges? All those sorts of things the bot can answer, obviously, very quickly. You don't need to talk to a human to figure that out.

They figure out, oh, maybe I just need to go to the starter tier, let's call it. Starter tier only cost me$15 a month. Great, I'll upgrade to the starter tier. Now, of course, the bot helped facilitate that.

In the past, they might have had to go look through help content to try to figure that out. They may have called a support number, which uh may or may not have helped them to answer that question. But again, this idea of kind of automating that real time. And in today's day and age, we don't have patience for anything.

So you want to get that answer immediately. And that's what helps you to convert the customer into that, you know, that higher, higher tier uh grade, I think, or higher grade kind of product that you have. So I think that real-time solution to really what they want to hear is I think where the chat bot fits in really well, you know, just one use case, but it fits really nicely to PLG. I think.

SPEAKER_01: So let's dip our toes into the world of Brevo a little bit in, you know, what is the um user experience like for the company? So your target, I assume, is companies that uh are selling things, they need some kind of a sales pipeline. Um, you know, it's the CRM. Is it is it sort of a broad CRM experience where you're trying to give them the functionality they need?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we we fit um mostly for B2C. We do have B2B customers that use us, but we're a little more oriented towards B2C. So you have high volumes of customers. We're an omni-channel marketing platform.

Um, and so people will use us, our customers will use us to help them with their marketing, how they engage with their customers ultimately. Being B2C, you typically have a very large grouping of prospects and customers that you want to think about. So you have big databases of people. And usually it's a lower value product in the sense that they're selling something that's not you know$50,000 a year.

It's gonna be maybe$550,$55. You know, it could be whatever that price point is, but it's gonna be where you're not gonna have humans selling the product. You're gonna have, you know, a retail type or e-commerce type experience. So we're helping them with how they engage with these customers.

And some customers like to engage through email, some customers like to engage through walking into a store and getting maybe a push notification or having a discount available to them or through loyalty elements of what they do. So omni-channel engagement means anything from email to WhatsApp to SMS to other mechanisms. But of course, going back to what I was talking about, the idea of engaging through the website experience, of course, is a part of that. And um, you know, we can we can help with those different types of engagements in different ways.

And I think what's interesting, and I think this is um so prevalent across B2B and B2C today, is that everyone likes to buy a little differently. Everyone educates themselves a little bit differently. We have a lot more information available, but we're not all buying the same way. So the way that we need to um uh sell products needs to be customized, actually.

And one person likes to buy one way, another person likes to buy another. One person is more educating themselves through um Chat GPT, where someone else likes to go walk around the mall to learn about products. And again, I think it's so important to be able to kind of create that tailored customized experience for how you engage with your customer base. So that's a lot of what we ultimately do.

SPEAKER_01: And you're ultimately creating uh two levels of experience, aren't you? Because you have to um there's the direct user who is the company trying to sell. And then I don't know how much thought you guys give or into the final end user who's gonna be the person logging onto your client's website, your customer's website to buy things, but it but it's kind of that multi-tiered thing, isn't it? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Because we're we're selling to businesses, we're selling to retail, e-commerce, whatever it is, businesses, but then they're selling to their end customers. So we need to be thoughtful of both elements. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Is it difficult to make it omnichannel? So let's let's uh double-click on that a little bit. So you've got the website, but in today's world, interacting with a company is so fluid. There's social media campaigns, and who a company is to somebody could be anything.

The the people, you know, a founder or the you know, people who are in the company who's selling, they have a neat view of who they are. They say, Well, we sell X. Here's our website. And by the way, we have some social media channels, but when you look at from the perspective of the buyer or the customer, they their first interaction with you could have been anything, and they have their own weird, twisty-turny, windy path to get to you.

So making that coherent is a challenge. Uh I mean, what's what's kind of the way you guys approach that? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so true. And and that twisty, windy path is getting more twisty and more windy because there's so many ways to engage with with products, whatever you're buying.

Again, I like to be a little generic on this because I do think B2B and B2C is coming closer and closer together. So um, as we as we think about this journey, that journey can be similar if you're buying a software product or if you're buying a retail product, actually. Um, but but ultimately we need to help we help our customers or the the retail companies in many cases, you know, understand how their end customer, the consumer, wants to go through that journey. And to do that effectively, it's really data.

You need to track data at various touch points. So that's the core of ultimately what we help with is if a customer engages on a social media post in some way, now we know there's that point of engagement. Then maybe we send them an email. They engage in that email.

They may not click through it, but they open it up. So we know now they've looked at that email. Then maybe they decide to walk through the mall and sign up for a discount offer. Now we've got a little more information about them.

And so we need to be able to triangulate all of this, first of all. We need to know that this is the same person, which is actually fairly complex. And then once we know that that's the same person, then we need to be able to understand their preferences on what they like to do and how they like to engage. And if they like to walk around the mall and buy things when discounts are available, great, we can do that.

We can send them push notifications when they're out front of the store and they get a 10% coupon code to walk into that store right now. That's cool. People like that. Someone else might not be like me.

I hate going to the mall. So I prefer to buy things online. So maybe I prefer the email offers that come through or you know, SMS uh messaging or whatever it might be. But again, understanding everyone's preferences is so key to it.

And that's a lot of what we do, and that's done through a lot of data aggregation. SPEAKER_01: From a building and design perspective, you know, you have the idea of UX, and that's always been kind of core to PLG. Do you still, in this age of software development, still view UX as an important aspect of differentiation and adding value for your customers? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it definitely is.

It's one of the things that that actually we talk a lot about right now as our product, Brevo, one of the things that stands out for us is the UX experience. And it's something that we usually do differentiate on. The the debate for us is um very much how long will that last? And as we go and look at things like you know, Salesforce headless, headless Salesforce that they're you know, they're pushing, or other products out there like that, very um, you know, very focused on extensibility.

I do think there's two angles on UX. I think the US experience UX experience is not going away. It's still critical. We are gonna see gradually more and more people focus on um extensibility, I believe.

And extensibility is gonna allow for agents to engage with software and products in different ways. And again, I'll I'll think of this either from the perspective of who we sell to, which are businesses, or from the perspective of our customers when they're selling to consumers. In both cases, there will be agents buying more so than there are today and engaging. And when I think in the future, several years from now, I might have an agent that does all my shopping for me because I trust that agent and it might happen as a consumer.

Similarly, when I'm selling to uh a software product to a business, they might have agents that help. So we have to allow for systems that um that facilitate agent buying, which really the UX experience I think disappears a lot in that case. But humans are still very relevant. We're not going away in the next few years.

I I hope, I hope not. Uh famous last words. unknown: Yeah. SPEAKER_00: Uh UX experience though plays to the human nature of what we're doing.

So I think it is still very relevant. And you know, it's hard to look beyond a few years from now. But in my mind, as we look kind of in in in the next, let's say, three to five years, I think UX is still a very relevant um topic. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think it's I think some people are writing about this now where there's like the split, exactly what you're talking about, where it's agent buyers.

So then there's like a different, it's not really UX, but it's like UX for robots. Like, like how do you facilitate, like if there's a robot whose job it is to procure items, like it it scans the internet maybe in a completely different way from how we do and then finds things. SPEAKER_00: So like it's almost like indexing. You have to index your content information properly so that agent can find it effectively.

And it's something that we do even internally when we we build a lot of agents for for a variety of things for our marketing, for our sales team, and so on. And we actually make sure we index our data effectively. We use Notion for a lot of our content. So we have to actually index all that data in Notion to make sure that the agent can find it effectively.

And I think that's really what ultimately UX kind of becomes over time is this this element of how do we index content information so that agents can find it properly. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so fascinating. And so, okay, so when someone starts getting uh using Brevo, what do they, what's the experience like for them? Is there any kind of a diagnostic stage in the beginning?

Or, you know, how do they sort of get set up and and what does it feel like once they're all set up? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so our customers will use us in a variety of ways. And now I'm talking the um the businesses who we sell to. Again, we're kind of talking multi-layer here.

So the businesses who we sell to, they might decide that they're just gonna want to use us for email distribution. And that's very simple. They can kind of come in and start using us. We can be an email service provider.

Nice and simple. That's the easiest use case. The next tier to that is omni-channel communication. So they want to do omni-channel, which means SMS, WhatsApp, email, push notifications.

Great. We can do that. Those two configurations aren't very difficult to do. They can get up and running very quickly.

We can help them kind of log in, set up if they want to migrate their database in. They might, you know, of course, they're probably going to want to do that. We'll help them with that data migration. But um, it's fairly simple to get up and running in those cases.

They'll build out certain um uh workflows and get up and running. And those can be you know built on their own, or they can leverage agents to help them kind of build those AI agents through our MCP. Um, now the third tier to this is much more sophisticated. Whereas if they say, okay, I want to use uh Brevo for omni-channel communication and I want to use it for a full-blown CDP, I want to use it for my loyalty capabilities, I want to use a wallet, um, the wallet capabilities.

So now you're getting into the full system. And this usually requires integrations with third-party apps and tools that they already have. So it can be a little bit more sophisticated of a solution, but it takes a little longer to get that set up as well. And anything from how we uh set up the CDP, leveraging data that they already have or tools that they already have, we need to make sure the integrations are there.

Again, if they're using loyalty, they might already have some loyalty tools or they might ever have a point of sale solution that we want to integrate with. So there are some integrations in that case. So it depends. It's a it's a longer answer than you expected, but it depends a little bit on the flavor of what they want to from us.

SPEAKER_01: Gotcha. And so, I mean, kind of like HubSpot and some of the other ones, it's just a you know, a broad tool. It's a lot of capability and and just the CRMs, they've been around for so long, they've developed in so many ways. You you kind of have to build a giant platform if you're in that space.

SPEAKER_00: Exactly. Exactly. You have to give the flexibility for people who want who want that flexibility. SPEAKER_01: Right.

And then so what do you say to folks who are thinking about, you know, we're in an age where I think a lot of people, when they look at SaaS products that they could potentially have, they're we're now thinking, okay, should I get a SAS product or should I just try to vibe something up this weekend and with a few MD files and a few hours talking to Claude, I guess something. So what what would you what would you say to someone who's kind of on the fence about that in thinking about getting Brevo?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think um there's a lot of opportunity to vibe code apps. Apps are going to be extremely valuable to solve for unique use cases. The thing that, unless if you want to be a CRM or a customer platform uh or really a system of record, that's your goal as a business. Then if you're not, if that's not part of your business goals, I don't think it's a good idea to build a product yourself that's a system of record product.

And you can build apps that sit around a system of record to help ensure that system is working as effectively as possible, but you still need Something that's going to be that system of record and that'll help with the orchestration layer of all this data and content. But then your apps can sit outside of that. So I think it's extremely important to buy a system of record tool that has extensibility. So you can connect to a variety of apps.

So you can vibe code on the weekend some new app that you want to set up and run and it and it works very quickly. But I wouldn't recommend it unless if your business truly is, your business plan truly is to be a system of record or CRM type of product. SPEAKER_01: Right. It's kind of that whole stick to your core competency when you're uh really building anything.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're speaking with Channing Ferrer of Brevo, and it's brevo.com. I'm on the website right now, looks like a beautiful product. Um, so hopefully people check that out.

What do people have to look forward to from just sort of near-term roadmap items from Brevo? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure. I'll I'll um maybe I'll speak a little bit for a minute about some of the uh AI stuff that we're doing. So that's always top of mind for everyone.

Um, you know, I was just actually working on a slide deck right before this for a customer meeting coming up. And one of the things that uh I'll answer your question in a moment, but one of the things that I was working on is where are we going when I think two or three years from now, not even just today. So we've got our list of features that are coming out, you know, here in Q2 and beyond. Um, but I think one of the things that we've really spent a lot of time thinking about and looking at is how do you create that truly agentic experience where if you want to, not everyone's ready for that today, but I think in the future state, we'll see a lot more interest in the idea of saying, hey, I want to run a um win back campaign.

Here's$10,000. Can you go figure it out for me, bro? And they would. And it comes back to you saying, all right, here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna do hyper-personalized targeting to these customers that left us over the past 12 months. And, you know, three weeks later, you kind of get your results from it. So I think that's the future state opportunity. We want to, of course, bridge where we are today to that sort of a scenario.

Um, the first thing, which we were just talking about, is extensibility, you know, fully extensible product. We have APIs already in place. We have our NCP MCP servers out there, but we do want to make sure that we're fully extensible. We have a marketplace that we're launching as well with pre-built integrations, but also the ability for people to build their own integrations either outside of Brevo or inside of Brevo.

So you can build kind of custom features within Brevo. Um, we have further data management tools. Again, we are a CDP, so we're extending kind of what we do on the CDP side. Our uh AI tool we call Aura is um fairly robust today, but again, building workflows that kind of sync between, I'm keeping it high level here, but sync between different features within within Brevo.

Our smart loyalty capabilities, I think, are really cool actually. Um, what we allow for is just not a simple loyalty solution, but it allows to um really bridge the basic loyalty point system with the idea of creating advocates. And what you can do is have an advocate who's a speaker on your behalf, and they earn credits in a sense to be that sort of uh uh an advocate. That can be as simple as posting an Instagram you know, post or something to earn those credits.

So, again, some interesting things there that all tie back into a lot of retail-oriented capabilities, but uh tie back into our core competencies. SPEAKER_01: That's awesome. And I love that you had the opportunity just then to take the work you've been working on with your deck and to be able to top of mind flow all that fresh information for us. Great stuff.

So, brevo.com, ladies and gentlemen, uh please check that out. And uh Channing, thanks for being with us today. SPEAKER_00: Definitely.

Thomas, my pleasure. Thanks for the time.