How DigitalOcean built a sales-led motion alongside product-led growth, on the road from $400m
DigitalOcean reached IPO with no sales team. Growth had come from product and community, but the next stage needed something the company had never built. This is the story of the DigitalOcean playbook, and the thinking that later became 021 Playbook.
DigitalOcean ($DOCN) – a Cloud infrastructure company – hit two inflection points at once. The company announced its IPO, and it arrived there with no sales team at all. DigitalOcean had gone from zero to roughly $400m on the strength of a product the developers loved and a community around it. Engineers, product managers and marketers had carried it the whole way. But the path from $400m to $4bn needed a motion the company had never run.
Kejal joined as the first sales hire in EMEA. Unlike the other case studies here, this was an in-house role rather than a 021 Playbook engagement, and it is where much of the Framework was worked out in practice.
The EMEA playbook
EMEA already had users. What it did not have were customers. Average revenue per user sat in double digits per month, which is a community, not a business line.
The strategy came from combining DigitalOcean’s own user data with third-party data on cloud spend by country. That showed where the money actually was, and the sales team was built and assigned around it. Each rep owned a region and wrote their own plan.
The first motion was mining: find users with large total cloud spend who were spending very little with DigitalOcean, and grow the share of wallet. It was the fastest route to ARPU, and it worked. In parallel, the seeds of a net-new outbound motion were sown.
Prabhakar Jayakumar
VP Sales EMEA, Payoneer (ex-DigitalOcean)
“Kejal joined DO at a time when we were looking to scale our Sales Led motion, to complement our Product-Led Growth motion. He used his experience to not only help build the EMEA sales team but also used his first-principles approach to decode the target customer segment, their needs and create an effective sales playbook for the market.”
The Outbound Playbook
By 2022, with mining running smoothly, the focus shifted to net-new customers. That needed a BDR and SDR team, a new tool stack, and a change of mindset across field sales, marketing, customer success, IT, and investors.
The plan started from the revenue goal and worked backwards. Revenue into MRR, MRR into signed customers, customers into opportunities, opportunities into leads, leads into daily activity for the BDR team. Every layer carried assumptions, and the job was to validate them while running.
Tooling took time, particularly integration with Salesforce as the CRM. The team evaluated each tool, fed back, and executed. It was because of the good people in the team that not only the tools, but also the processes fell in place. By 2023-24, net-new customers were coming onto the platform, being activated, and handed to account management.
These two playbooks are where 021 Playbook started.
Jeff Lattomus
Global DGX Cloud Sales Leader, NVIDIA (ex-DigitalOcean)
“At DigitalOcean, we made a major push for focusing on net new business. This needed a fresh approach, a new playbook. Kejal built out his team and ran with the playbook to bring in new logos and new revenue.”
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