Product-led growth has a natural ceiling defined by deal size. Self-serve acquisition works beautifully for contracts up to roughly $10-15K ACV. Above that threshold, enterprise procurement expectations kick in — security reviews, vendor assessments, legal negotiations, multi-stakeholder buying committees. None of these processes happen without a human sales engagement.
The PLG ceiling isn't about product quality. It's about procurement reality. You can have the best product in the world and still lose a $100K enterprise deal because you don't have a human to show up to the VP's pre-purchase meeting.
The transition to sales-led (or hybrid) is one of the most operationally complex moves in SaaS, and most teams get it wrong in predictable ways.
Mistake 1: Hiring enterprise sales reps before your product is enterprise-ready. Enterprise AEs can book meetings. They can't deliver the product capabilities, security documentation, and implementation support that close enterprise deals. Don't scale enterprise sales until enterprise product is ready.
Mistake 2: Creating friction in the PLG motion to push users toward sales. Adding artificial gates to force sales conversations with users who would self-serve destroys PLG efficiency. The PLG motion and sales motion should coexist, not compete.
Mistake 3: Treating all enterprise leads as coming from PLG. Many enterprise accounts require top-down selling — identifying executive buyers, running account-based campaigns, doing enterprise demos. A pure product-qualified lead model misses these accounts.
The hybrid that works: PLG for the bottom-up motion (individuals and teams discovering and adopting), sales for the top-down motion (expanding within accounts, hunting enterprise logos, managing complex renewals).
Separate the motions. Resource them both.