bottoms-up sales

The talk compares top-down sales, which starts with an executive decision-maker, with bottoms-up sales, which starts with individual users adopting a self-serve product. Top-down can offer a reliable sales playbook and strong early retention, but enterprise sales teams are expensive and can pull startups into custom work. Bottoms-up can make sales more efficient when users already love the product, but viral growth is hard to achieve and still requires salespeople. The best motion depends on whose problem the startup solves: executives tend to call for top-down sales, while individual contributors and small teams tend to call for bottoms-up.