Figma’s Early Days: Product-Led Sales Lessons
Unlocking how to sell to enterprise customers is one of the most important drivers to bottom-up SaaS success. It requires building a killer sales team and creating processes from scratch. PLG startups must graduate from founder/network-driven sales to entrusting talented sales leaders to build a high-functioning team that fits the culture of the company and hits on performance goals.
For the second chat in my conversation series with early Figma team members I sat down with Kyle Parrish, Figma’s first sales leader, to talk about the early days of scaling the team. Check out some of Kyle’s key insights below.
1. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS
When Kyle joined Figma he was excited to get into the nitty gritty enterprise sales conversations, but he attributes his early success to spending time with customers in a different setting: support.
“When I joined Figma I was eager to build out the sales org and bolster the revenue arm of the business.” But Figma’s CEO Dylan Field gave Kyle different orders: to spend a month in the support queue. This was a great way to learn a complex product and Kyle quickly got a sense for new features users wanted, pain points with the product, and the early implications of an enterprise tier sales process.
In addition to learning the product straight from Figma’s users, Kyle forged a strong relationship with the support team which extended naturally into engineering, product, and design. “I wasn’t doing anything sales related. I was just trying to solve tickets and work through bug bashes — poorly, might I add. But they could see how dedicated I was.”
After the support stint that equipped him with foundational product knowledge, Kyle navigated the balance of building process versus executing on sales. The enterprise tier wasn’t live and the sales motion didn’t exist when Kyle joined Figma, so there were endless possibilities for how he might spend his time. “You could lock yourself in a room and create process docs — and we did a lot of that in the early days, but I made sure it was time-bound.” While establishing foundational processes was important, what really mattered was building a sales-led product feedback loop. For Kyle, the North Star was always having a strong pulse on customer needs, which he could trace back to his time in support.
2. BUILD A PRODUCT-OBSESSED SALES ORG
As the sales team grew, Kyle and Dylan worked to build a product-obsessed culture by ensuring new sales reps were passionate about the product — a necessity for an effective product-led sales org. Obsessing over the product and the voice of the user was integral to Kyle’s previous role at Dropbox, and he wanted to instill this into the culture of the Figma sales team too. On top of that, Kyle wanted to make sure the sales team didn’t get a “suits” stigma at Figma.
In an ideal world every sales hire for Figma is a talented product designer, but this isn’t realistic. The overlap of experienced salespeople and UI/UX design experts is small, especially in those early days. Despite this, Kyle and the team focused on hiring people who showed they were passionate about the product and willing to learn. New sales candidates went through a stringent requirement of live Figma demos, which included Dylan (CEO) and Amanda Kleha (CCO) in attendance — a lot of pressure for an interview process! By doing this, Kyle hired candidates who were willing to put in the time to learn the product and who were excited to present to the leadership team.
This selective hiring process paid off in the long run. It created a downstream effect of respect between R&D and GTM functions because the sales team was passionate about the product and cared about the voice of the customer. The original dozen or so sales reps who joined Figma are now in senior sales or leadership roles. Figma still has elements of product demos in its hiring process today — product obsession remains core to the candidate experience and culture of the sales organization.
3. CREATE A CULTURE OF SUCCESS
Building a sales team and culture that could harness Figma’s product-market fit was critical to their success. Figma was in the fortunate position of having a large base of self-serve usage among large enterprise customers. After building the enterprise tier with select design partners, it was Kyle and the team’s job to efficiently sell the enterprise product into these organizations.
Setting quotas for a new sales team is always an early challenge, but Figma’s exec team recognized that “it’s near impossible to set the right quota early on.” Instead of spending cycles trying to land on the perfect quota, they took a simple approach: put reps in a position to succeed, communicate clearly how leadership is examining performance, and adjust goals early and often. Kyle had a maniacal focus on setting a positive tone, encouraging learning, and fostering commitment to get results.
Figma leadership reviewed quota every quarter for 2+ years after launching the enterprise tier. Changing quotas can be a point of contention, but the early sales team trusted that leadership was focused on the success of both individuals and the company. Early out-performers in sales were celebrated at Figma: “They were charting a path of what was possible, and they were helping to enable the rest of the team on how they were doing it — work ethic, product knowledge, and efficiency in how they managed their time.”
Figma’s first sales managers were the most important element in fostering a culture of success. When hiring his first sales managers, Kyle looked for people who were comfortable with a wide scope of work and constant context switching. They needed to be able to help with sales enablement, coach reps, partner with finance teams, and work with product leaders. Kyle credits three talented sales leaders he hired early on with establishing the sales culture that enabled Figma to scale to $100M+ in ARR.
For other great insights from Kyle — including leaning on reliable data and how to shoulder process building — please reach out to me @sean__whit on Twitter or whit@craftventures.com and I’ll share the full recording.
Next up in my conversation series is Figma’s CFO Praveer Melwani. We’ll talk about his rise from first IC finance hire to CFO, what to focus on in the earliest days of building a team, pricing & packaging, and much more. RSVP here.
