Building Blocks for PLG-to-SLG Transition

Johnston identifies five core pillars for successfully layering sales-led motion onto product-led growth:

ICP Refinement: Use PLG data to identify buyers (not just users). Superhuman discovered their ICP shifted from individual power users to "outbound professionals" handling 30-50+ emails daily across sales, customer success, marketing, and executive functions. The persona evolved to consider how champions bring products to their organizations, not just themselves.

Data & Signaling: Surface PLG metrics into sales tools. Superhuman uses Pocus to run "plays" scoring leads based on engagement (e.g., 3-4 users at 50%+ engagement, top percentile for reminders usage, outbound professional role). Signals push into Outreach/SalesLoft for cadences, though reps often manually personalize via Superhuman's team templates.

Product Adaptation: Evolve for both buyers and end users. Add enterprise requirements (SSO, SAML, SCIM) while proving ROI for broad organizational deployment. Biggest challenge: educating buyers that email productivity benefits everyone, not just executives/power users—overcoming perception of Superhuman as a "niche" or "individual" product.

Team Architecture: Hire for SLG motion (hunters with MEDDIC/value-selling skills) while retaining PLG sellers who can adapt. Add sales engineers, GTM ops, commercially-minded CSMs. Balance "product delight" culture with commercial aggression.

Marketing/Positioning: Pre-nurture via content and website to shift market perception from individual to team product before sales outreach begins.

Sales Strategy and Motion

Johnston's go-to-market approach combines:

PLG-driven outbound: Identify companies with 15-20 individual Superhuman users and consolidate them into contracts, then expand

Cold outbound to lookalikes: After winning large deals (e.g., Big Four consulting firm with 4,000 managing director seats), target similar organizations with comparable pain points

Top-down access via champions: Leverage existing executive users (e.g., Fortune 500 co-founder on Superhuman) for economic buyer access, then work down to prove ROI for wider deployment

Key challenges: Converting 100-seat deployments to 75% organizational adoption—requires proving value beyond "keyboard shortcut enthusiasts" to entire workforce

Team Structure and Scaling

When Johnston joined Superhuman in May 2023, the sales team consisted of approximately 3 AEs and 3 customer success reps plus longer-tail support. By mid-2025, the team nearly doubled to approximately 16 total members:

Most of the original PLG-focused AEs transitioned successfully—some moved to account management/expansion roles (leveraging "Superhuman love and delight"), others evolved into SLG hunters with training

New hires brought enterprise "hunter mentality" and commercial skills

Added specialized roles: lead sales engineer, GTM ops, and commercially-minded CSMs

Johnston emphasizes hiring reps who already use and love Superhuman—unofficial advocates who've told friends/teams about the product perform exceptionally well. This screens for product fit and authentic selling.

Sales Culture and Team Development

Johnston's cultural approach prioritizes:

Company-wide buy-in: Entire executive team (M-team) must commit to B2B vision. Involve CTOs, engineers, and product teams in meaningful deals so they feel customer pain and celebrate wins together

Collaboration over competition: First two sales hires should work as a "laboratory" sharing experiments, not racing against each other. Weekly reviews, Slack channels for call lessons, and collective 3x3 call breakdowns build shared playbooks

AI-era skills: Soft skills (persuasion, discovery, feedback loops) plus builder mentality (prompting AI, automating workflows with tools like Gong, Clay, Pocus)

Transparency and trust: Johnston is known for building cultures of trust and transparency (featured in podcasts on the topic)

Predictable Revenue

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