Growth Conversations - Andy Carlson

Welcome to our new series on growth leaders from around the world of B2B Sales. We will be interviewing leaders from our PLG Index—both Public and Private companies—about how they are driving growth in their organizations, with a focus on how their GTM model is changing as they use Variance and Customer Data to accelerate sales. 

Why are we doing these interviews? Because we believe the companies in our PLG Index represent the future for all B2B companies and a blueprint for what selling will look like in the coming years. The numbers back this up: 

1. PLG companies have 23% more ARR
2. PLG companies are growing ARR Y/Y 30% faster
3. PLG companies have 8% higher Net Dollar Retention
4. PLG companies have 22% higher ARR/Headcount
5. PLG companies are 44% off their 52 week high, Non-PLG companies are 58% off their 52 week high

Our first interview is with Andy Carlson, Head of Sales at Avo. Avo is a private company and is ranked 206 on the PLG Index and is growing rapidly. You can check out their profile here. 

What is Avo?

Avo allows you to collaborate on your tracking plan and use generated tracking snippets to instrument your code consistently across all your platforms. Plan, design, collaborate, implement, and validate your analytics implementation 10X faster with Avo.

Founded: 2018

Avo Pricing

Avo Signup 

Questions for Andy Carlson: 

How does Customer Data and PLG drive your revenue motion?

It's our holy grail. Customer data is the backbone of our product, sales, customer success, and marketing teams. We use these insights to improve our product- and sales-led strategies as well as the direction of our roadmap.

What are your favorite tools in your revenue tech stack (you don’t have to name them all, just the ones that are indispensable!)?

Avo, Variance, Mixpanel, ChiliPiper, and Hubspot

What are your biggest challenges to using customer data in your sales motion?

I think the biggest challenge is bringing all the customer data together in harmony, so that it can reliable, actionable, and automated. You think about your CRM, your CDP, your calendar tool, your prospecting tool, and your enrichment tool -- not all of them are structured to integrate with one another. And on top of that, in a PLG function, some of that data input and accuracy is dependent on what the end-user plugs in (ie. fake name, personal email, etc.). So I'd say maintaining the connectivity and trust in our stack, is biggest ongoing challenge today.

Would you say moving to use more product data in the sales motion is mostly a people, process or tools challenge?‍

While maintaining connectivity and trust in our stack is an ongoing effort, I wouldn't say any of those aspects are necessarily a challenge for us. The reason I say that is because we have an incredible data culture, and I think that term, specifically, describes alignment across people, processes, and tools.

 What is your best Customer Data/PLG selling story?

Far too often, most of our Sales-led conversations happen with folks on the data design and analytics teams, but rarely with the end-users required to implement our solution (read: engineers). This is mostly an attempt to shield their technical colleagues' precious time from SaaS pilots.  So, having access to these product-led insights has now enabled us to identify those end-users during the piloting process and better understand their personal goals, challenges, and requirements.

Thank you, Andy, and thanks for the awesome product you have at Avo! If you would like to connect with Andy you can do so here.