Leah Tharin - The Death of Classical Sales in B2B SaaS

Takeaways

📘 Sales teams built around short-term incentives create long-term drag. Here’s what’s happening inside most B2B SaaS companies. Sales reps like “Gary” overpromise because they’re incentivised to close deals, not build sustainable value. Product and support teams get blindsided. Customers churn. Internal trust crumbles. Gary’s just doing what he's paid for—but the cost to the business is compounding.

📘 The future isn’t no-sales. It’s product-led sales. Let the product drive intent. Let data tell you when an account is ready. Then—and only then—sales steps in.

📘 Sales-led growth relies on converting intent with people and pitches. Product-led growth earns trust through usage and value—before a conversation ever happens. Both have value, but they need to be integrated, not opposed.

📘 Product-led sales takes the best of both worlds. You let users explore and activate inside the product. Behavioural signals define when an account is sales-ready. Not before. The result: shorter sales cycles, higher close rates, and lower CAC.

📘 Product needs to know how their features connect to revenue. Not fluffy OKRs—real metrics. Can you quantify retention impact? Expansion value? Use that in your roadmap.

📘 Fix Sales Incentives. Tie comp to long-term value. Add clawbacks. Penalise selling phantom features. Fire serial offenders.

📘 Shift from MQLs to Aha-qualified leads. How much does it cost to get one ideal customer to value? That’s your new north star.

📘 Build Growth Teams. Growth teams own the messy middle: onboarding, activation, paywalls, upsells. Their job is to turn traffic into monetisation, inside the product.

📘 Start With One Question. What’s your product’s aha moment? Define it. Measure it. Build around it. Until you understand that, your sales will stay messy—and Gary will keep winning.

Top Quotes

💬 We are punishing you on selling on promises for stuff that is not in the product; we do not want you to trick our customer — first time you lose your bonus, second time you’re fired.

💬 Wait for your B2B accounts to reach out to you or to be activated — there’s no two ways about it because salespeople will go into your funnel with their dirty little fingers and then they're just like, you know, marketing.

💬 Modern product-led sales in this form is about putting the customer success front and center by showing and not talking

💬 The main problem that we have is that we think that someone that does not want to buy our product is not valuable — but someone that loves your free product could recommend it to someone that has the money and the buyer intent.