Product-led growth can help in security when it’s treated as a feeder to sales, not a substitute. Security buyers face trust, data access, and procurement constraints that self-serve alone rarely overcomes. The practical goal: use the product to attract practitioners, prove value quickly, and create informed, higher-intent sales conversations.
Incorporating the Hamburger GTM strategy, the product acts as the core ‘meat’ of the growth model, supported by a bottom-up approach to attract users and a top-down sales strategy to engage larger enterprises. This dual approach ensures that the product not only attracts individual users but also scales to meet the needs of larger organizations, as discussed in The Hamburger GTM: The Winning Go-To-Market Strategy.
It fits best where value appears without risky permissions—developer-adjacent tooling, agentless inventory, API-first posture checks. Build evaluations that are safe and fast: sandboxed demos with synthetic or scrubbed data, progressive permissions starting read-only, least-privilege scopes, and a guided path to first meaningful result in under 30 minutes. Publish the security basics up front (SSO/RBAC, audit logs, data handling) to keep reviews moving.
Operationalize this as product-led sales. Define PQL events that actually indicate value (first source connected, coverage threshold hit, first detection/query result) and set clean PQL→sales handoffs with SLAs. Run structured POVs with success criteria and a clear post-win expansion path to enterprise controls. If you share pricing, leave room for partner margin or deal-reg credits to avoid channel friction.
Layer in concierge onboarding to compress time-to-value. Pre-collect environment details (clouds, SIEM/EDR, IdP/SSO, data residency, compliance must-haves) and success criteria; pre-generate least-privilege policies and a POV plan; schedule a short integration window. The bottoms-up product should carry users to a conversation-worthy milestone (validated detection, surfaced coverage gap, measurable cost/MTTD improvement) and then nudge a talk. Track time to initial value, first-integration latency, and other metrics that indicate the user is successfully exploring and operationalizing the product.
And above all, keep iterating if there’s no clear activation, and it’s not converting.