Sales-led to product-led

A company that has always sold through demos does not wake up product-led. It happens in a sequence you can watch from the outside.

First the pricing page changes. A "book a demo" button becomes "start free". Sometimes a tier appears with a price on it for the first time.

Then, four to ten weeks later, a job posting: lifecycle marketer, growth engineer, onboarding lead. The title varies. What it means does not. Someone now owns whether strangers succeed without a human.

Then a tool shows up. A CDP, a product analytics script, an in-app messaging tag. That is the new hire buying things.

The window is the gap between the second and third step. Activation is now somebody's job and no one has solved it yet. If you sell anything that touches onboarding, trials, or self-serve conversion, that is the week to write.

The failure mode is reading step one alone. A pricing page change on its own means very little. Plenty of companies add a free tier and nothing else happens for a year. The sequence is the signal.