While sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones.

Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.

Very interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?

Stack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable..

Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress

atlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.

They did it by one simple trick - becoming the first ones who offered free license for open-sourcers. They invented this idea. After that, they needed to do nothing more, almost automatically becoming a monopoly. I was there working for one of the early competitors who was thrown in the dust by that decision of Atlassian and was too late to realise they had to do the same - and folded two years later.

This is also the stated rationale for Cloudflare’s generous free tier. They build loyalty with hobby and side projects, and engineers take that familiarity to work with them.

DigitalOcean also had a strategy of going after the little guys/early phases of companies with their 5$ offering and lots of good free material/tutorials.

yes, Slack and github strategy. After Slack got big, it shrunk what it provides for open-source communities though. So, expect Cloudflare eventually switch.

Being able to use company email on your personal devices and Mac laptops come to mind

That wasn't true for the first spreadsheet apps or database apps. Or Autodesk back when it first appeared.

The world has changed since then. A lot.

> Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.

PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.