#471 – Building Our Sales-Led Motion

This week we doubled down on building the foundations of a true sales-led growth function at Parabol. The idea is to build a motion that complements our strong self-serve engine and opens new pathways for serving the teams who need this product most.

Parabol has always been a product-led company. People discover us, sign up, run their retros and planning, and invite teammates. When they need more teams, better security, or enterprise features they talk to our sales team to upgrade. Our strongest lead source has always been the product itself.

But over the past several months, we’ve been increasingly convinced that this alone underserves the market. The number of companies that would genuinely benefit from Parabol is far larger than the number of people who find it for themselves.

To that end, we’ve begun the work of standing up a repeatable, intentional sales-led growth motion alongside our tried-and-true PLG engine.

Much of our recent effort has centered on Pages, especially the self-hosted version. It solves a clear problem: teams need a secure, centralized place to capture knowledge from their workflows and meetings, and many organizations cannot put that information in the cloud.

So far we have defined our:

This work helps us build targeted outreach programs. The goal isn’t to sell to people who aren’t looking for a solution, but to help people who are already feeling the pain that Parabol naturally solves. Knowledge sprawl, scattered retros, inconsistent planning, poor follow-through…these challenges are common across product orgs. Our data proves this pain exists and now it’s our job to bring the solution to the people experiencing it.

With ICP and personas clarified, we’ve begun establishing the sales systems, processes, and repeatable motions to take Parabol to market more proactively. That includes:

The goal is to equip our sales team with the ability to walk into a room (or a Zoom, or a phone call) and introduce Parabol not because someone found us, but because we found them—and because we believe they will benefit materially from what we’ve built.

This is a new muscle for Parabol, but also an energizing one. The market pain is real, widespread, and often unaddressed. We’re stepping forward to help.

Even while Parabol continues to grow through PLG, we see enormous whitespace ahead of us. Many companies don’t yet know they could run more efficient retros, plan their sprints smoothly, and tame even their wildest recurring ceremonies. Many have never considered a unified way to connect meeting insights to a persistent knowledge base. Many don’t know that a secure, self-hosted alternative to Confluence Data Center exists.

By pairing a strong inbound motion with a thoughtful, respectful outbound one, we open more doors for teams who would otherwise keep struggling with these problems.

In short: we have the product. Now we’re building the engine to bring it to the world.

All signals suggest we’re in the slow period at the end of the year, who would’ve thought?! We’ll check back next week for the last time in 2025.

…developed a new OAuth 2 provider implementation. This should enable users to connect to more applications in a variety of ways including making use of MCP to work with AI agents and other tools.

…explored a new search backend in the app. We’re looking at developing a search functionality that would both serve the UX and how other tools might integrate with Parabol using MCP.

…prototyped multiplayer ranking UX. We’re looking at the first ranking UX we will introduce as a standalone activity. This time around we’ve been giving Figma Make a try, and it has been pretty useful so far!

…began planning out the cadence for next year. We tend to look at how our different rhythms intersect (strategic trimesters, quarterly reporting, 6-week product cycles) with an eye toward potential team workshops and retreats. We also look for congruency between our product roadmap and the opportunities that are developing with customers.

…take on our last week for the year. We are planning for Product Cycle 12 kicking off in January. We have a social activity on the calendar. We look forward to time to recharge and reconnect with family and friends.