How to Lead the Shift from Sales-Led to Product-Led

Before I start: I saw a post recently suggesting we stop using the term "product-led" because it’s “exclusionary” - that it sidelines sales, marketing, customer success, and the rest of the org. That we should rather call it customer-centric growth.

Now, I’m all for clarity and collaboration, but let’s not get too precious about the labels. We didn’t seem to mind calling things sales-led for years, and let’s be honest, that wasn’t “sales function”-led either. It was “follow the loudest customer and do whatever it takes to close the deal”-led.

Product-led doesn’t mean "product team"-led. It means your growth motion is anchored in the product and everyone in the org, from sales to customer success to marketing to product, aligns around that. The product becomes the common ground - the thing that scales, delivers value, and creates repeatable growth.

So yes, call it customer-centric if you want. But done properly, product-led is one of the most collaborative models there is. Now, let’s talk about how to actually get there - without blowing up what’s already working.

When a company tells me, “We want to be more product-led,” it’s often said with the same energy as, “We really should exercise more.” They know the current way isn’t sustainable and are tired of being reactive. But changing how the whole organisation thinks and moves? That’s another story.

This post is for product leaders, founders, and GTM teams who are starting to feel the limits of a sales-led model and want a practical way forward that doesn’t involve burning the whole thing down.

What Sales-Led Growth Feels Like (And Why It Breaks)

Sales-led isn’t a dirty word (and this isn’t about hating on the sales function). It’s how most B2B companies get off the ground. You win a few key customers, land some big logos, and grow by selling - one deal at a time. And to close those deals? You do whatever it takes. You adapt the pitch, tweak the onboarding, build custom features, shift the roadmap - all in service of getting the customer live and keeping them happy.

In that world, product strategy becomes: “What do we need to build to close the next deal?” And success is measured by how fast you can respond to customer asks, not by how well those solutions scale.

The problem is when that becomes the default growth model, long after it stops working.

Here’s what that tends to look like:

• Your roadmap shifts often to support a new opportunity

• Sales sells features that don’t exist (yet)

• Product ends up chasing delivery, not strategy

• The team is stuck building for one client at a time

• The backlog becomes a wish list of promises, not a product vision

At first, this works. You land big clients and you make your revenue targets. But slowly, the cracks start to show: poor retention, time consuming onboarding, struggling to get new sales, and a product that no longer knows what it is, because it’s trying to be everything to everyone.

And the real cost? You can’t scale what you can’t repeat.

Sales-led growth often prioritises closing deals over creating repeatable value. This isn’t about blame. It is about recognising that a different stage of growth needs a different way of working.

What Product-Led Growth Really Means

Let’s be clear: product-led growth is not about removing Sales, or becoming some “self-serve only” startup. It’s about putting the product at the centre of how you acquire, activate, retain, and expand customers. It means you grow by delivering value in a way that’s scalable, measurable, and consistent.

That means:

• Clear ICP and segmentation - not selling to anyone who’ll buy

• Scalable onboarding - so customers get value without needing hand-holding

• A roadmap driven by strategy - not just the loudest request

• Cross-functional alignment around the product as the engine of growth

And most of all: collaboration between Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing - anchored in a clear strategy.

Why This Shift Is Harder Than It Looks

You don’t just “go product-led,” you grow into it. And that growth means change, not just in process, but in mindset and structure.

Here’s where teams get stuck:

1. Sales and Product Pull in Opposite Directions

Sales is still selling features that don’t exist, sometimes to prospects outside your ICP and then handing it to product to “just deliver it.”

Meanwhile, product is trying to focus the roadmap, set clearer boundaries, and drive repeatable value, but without a shared understanding or backing from the rest of the business, it becomes an internal tug-of-war.

The fix: This isn’t about shutting down sales. It’s about shared principles:

• A clear product strategy that defines where the product is going - and what we don’t do.

  Without this, everything feels up for negotiation. With it, conversations become more focused and disagreements easier to resolve. Instead of debating every feature request from scratch, sales and product have an agreed foundation: “Here’s the direction we’re heading, and here’s what we’re not building - at least not now.”

  
  

  For example, if your strategy is to focus on mid-market customers with plug-and-play integrations, a request to build a bespoke ERP module for a single enterprise deal becomes easier to assess and to decline.

  
  

• Pre-agreed guardrails around custom work and roadmap exceptions.

  This doesn’t mean you never make exceptions, but when you do it is intentional, not reactive.

  
  

  For example: You might agree that any custom request that requires more than 2 weeks of development effort, or touches core infrastructure, needs cross-functional sign-off. No more last-minute “just this once” escalations that derail the team for months.

• Joint prioritisation: revenue can influence roadmap but not dominate it.

  Sales has a critical voice, but product owns the frame. A strong partnership means revenue-driving features are considered alongside user impact, scalability, and alignment to long-term goals.

  
  

  At one company I worked with, sales kept pushing urgent feature requests tied to big deals. So we introduced a simple intake form: potential revenue, alignment to product strategy, and whether other customers had asked for it.

  Requests were reviewed monthly by sales, product, and customer success to decide together. The volume of one-off escalations dropped, and roadmap decisions got easier.

2. You Have No Consistent Narrative Across the Org

Marketing talks about speed. Sales sells flexibility. Product talks about simplicity. And the customer? They hear a different story every time.

This usually happens when the teams aren’t aligned around a shared definition of value or what success looks like across the customer lifecycle.

The fix: Create a unified narrative that threads through product, marketing and sales:

• What’s the core value we deliver?

• Who do we serve best?

• What use cases are we focused on?

• What’s the product’s current maturity and what’s coming next?

When GTM teams are part of shaping this, it gets used. When they’re handed a product pitch to memorise, it gets ignored.

3. There’s No Process for Saying No, So Everything Becomes a Yes

You know the moment: ARR lags and there is pressure to hit a number, a big deal is on the line, and someone says, “It’s just one feature. Can’t we just...?”

And so you do it. Again. And again.

Before long, you’ve built a one-off version of your product for every customer segment and no-one internally knows what “good” looks like anymore.

The fix: Don’t remove exceptions. Structure them.

• Define your ICP and remind everyone of who they are regularly.

  If you can’t describe your ideal customer clearly, you’ll end up building for everyone and pleasing no one. Document it and use it internally, from presenting it at the sales kickoff to using it as a filter in product reviews.

• Create a process for evaluating exceptions.

  If a deal needs something off-roadmap, bring everyone into the room and make the trade-offs clear before saying yes.

  
  

• Make the cost visible.

  Every “quick win” has a price. That might be tech debt, delays to core features, or support headaches six months later. Get those costs on the table when you make the call.

  
  

• Hold a quarterly exception review.

  What did we say yes to? Did it pay off? What did it delay? This isn’t a blame session, it is how you spot patterns, refine your criteria, and stop the same exceptions creeping in again and again.

4. Product Is Trying to Lead Without Organisational Backing

It’s easy to say “product should lead,” but unless the rest of the org supports that motion, you’ll always default back to sales-led, especially under pressure.

The most common example? Product tries to hold the roadmap, but leadership continues to reward hero sales deals that bypass process and priority.

The fix: For product to lead, there has to be:

• A strong product strategy that’s visible and understood

• Executive alignment on how decisions are made and evaluated

• Organisational commitment to scalability over short-term wins

That doesn’t mean you never have exceptions, but it means you manage those exceptions within a shared framework.

Shifting to Product-Led Doesn’t Mean Burning Down Sales

This isn’t about product suddenly taking over. It’s about building better collaboration with structure behind it.

Product needs a clear strategy the entire organisation can align to - one that helps sales know what to sell, gives marketing the right story to tell, and gives leadership the confidence to stand behind it when pressure hits. Without that alignment, PLG ends up being just another buzzword.

Becoming product-led doesn’t mean cutting sales out. It means building a bridge between customer insight and scalable strategy.

Where to Start

Here’s how I recommend kicking off the shift without trying to fix everything at once:

1. Get clear on strategy.

   What’s the product’s focus? What’s our ICP? What are we not doing?

   
   

2. Bring GTM teams into product conversations.

   Co-create messaging. Involve them in roadmap decisions and build shared ownership.

   
   

3. Define your exception process.

   Make custom work visible. Create a path for when and how exceptions happen.

   
   

4. Align on metrics.

   Are we tracking usage and activation, or just revenue? What does product success look like?

   
   

5. Communicate, often.

   The shift to product-led takes time. If you don’t remind people where you are going, they fall back into old habits.

You don’t need to tear everything down to become more product-led. But you do need to change how the organisation works day to day. That means being more intentional about how decisions get made, building trust across teams, and choosing clarity even when there’s pressure to move fast. And most importantly, this isn’t something one person can drive alone. It takes real buy-in across the business to make the shift stick.

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If your team is navigating this shift  or getting stuck somewhere in the middle, I can help. Book a free call and let’s figure out what a practical path forward looks like.