Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai, joined Common Room's Will Taylor to break down the exact plays that turned first-party product usage into a sales-led motion, and a 2x jump in outbound pipeline.

Most product-led companies hit the same ceiling. The self-serve motion works, usage climbs, and then the mandate changes: diversify revenue, move upmarket, build a sales-led motion. And the first tool most teams reach for, traditional lead scoring, quietly stops working.

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The reason, as Colin Netal put it in our recent webinar, is that demographic and firmographic scoring identifies fit, not the buying trigger. It tells you someone looks right on paper. It says nothing about whether they're ready to buy. Worse, the "modern" alternatives (website visits, keyword intent, third-party signals) are commoditized. Everyone buys the same data and runs the same play on top of it. As Colin put it:

"The one bit of first-party data you have that your competitors will never have is your own product usage. That's the next frontier."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

About Colin Netal

Colin is Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai, where he's building the enterprise and sales-led motion on top of Otter's product-led growth engine. His focus: giving reps a prioritization system they'll actually trust, grounded in first-party product usage rather than commoditized intent.

Colin leads demand generation at Otter.ai, where he built a sales-led motion on top of Otter's product-led base after the company crossed $100M ARR. The engine behind it: Otter connected its product usage into Common Room, then analyzed closed-won enterprise deals to understand why people buy. That analysis became a small set of usage-based plays, five to start, that reps run inside Common Room. Here they are.

Why usage, not demographics

Before the plays, the principle underneath them. Otter's scoring model runs in Common Room at both the account and contact level, fed by product usage piped in from Otter itself, and it's deliberately weighted toward behavior. It's roughly an 80/20 split, with only about 20 to 30% coming from demographics and firmographics (geography, target industries, company size) and the rest from real product usage.

The behavioral levers are refreshingly plain: how many meetings an account is recording, how many meeting minutes, how many users were added in the last seven days, and whether those users are actually engaged (clicking around in the Otter web or mobile app). As Colin put it:

"You could get super fancy, are they using MCP, are they using chat? You don't really need to get too crazy with it. It's a matter of getting access to those behavioral data points, factoring them into your scoring, and then it's off to the races with the sales team."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

That usage feeds every play below. And it's what lets reps open with credibility instead of a cold pitch, what Colin, borrowing Sam McKenna's phrase, calls "show me you know me." Bring a buyer's actual usage into the conversation and you prove you understand them before you ask for anything.

The 5 plays

Each play maps a specific usage signal to a specific, timely action. Otter builds each one as a signal-based segment in Common Room, so qualifying accounts and contacts surface to reps automatically, because a signal only counts if it changes what a rep does next.

1. Senior sign-up

When an executive or a very senior person signs up for the product directly, that's your clearest hand-raise. Rather than let them sit in the self-serve base, the play is simple: get a rep in front of them fast, while intent is highest. In a sales-led motion, a senior title creating an account is often the first sign a company-wide conversation is possible.

2. Workplace consolidation

This is the play Colin flagged as most interesting. At a large enterprise, think a JPMorgan Chase, you might have hundreds of users spread across dozens of separate, satellite workspaces that grew bottoms-up.

That fragmentation is the opening. The play is to reach out to IT and make the consolidation case: bring the satellite workspaces into one enterprise workspace so the whole organization can search, query, and share meetings and transcripts in one place.

"You've got a lot of these satellite workspaces, which is great. Why not conjoin them into one large enterprise workspace?

There's a compounding effect of having all of the meetings and transcripts in one area, so the broader organization can query them and see that much more value."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

It's expansion and enterprise pipeline hiding inside usage data most teams never look at.

3. High-scoring contacts

The everyday workhorse. When a contact's combined fit-plus-behavior score crosses the threshold, the right profile and meaningful product usage stacking up, they surface for outreach automatically. Because the score leans on behavior, a "high-scoring contact" is someone showing real momentum, not just someone who looks right on paper.

4. Power users

Some accounts light up on sustained, heavy usage: lots of meetings recorded, lots of minutes, multiple engaged users. Power users are prime targets for both expansion and executive conversations, because the value is already proven inside the account. The rep's job is to connect that daily usage to a broader deployment.

5. Recent surge sign-ups

When a cluster of new users from the same account signs up in a short window, that surge is a momentum signal. Something is spreading inside the company. The play is to catch it while it's live and reach in before a competitor, or inertia, cools it off.

"We rolled out these five plays to start, just to keep things simple. This all funnels into our scoring mechanism, balancing firmographic, but really leaning heavily on behavior to drive up the contact and account scores."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

Match the play to the buying committee

The plays surface the account. Winning it means talking to the right people the right way, and that changes as deals move upmarket.

In SMB, Colin notes, the power user is often a head of or VP who owns the budget and the decision. But as deals move upmarket into thousand-seat contracts, IT usually runs the cycle, because they own the Zoom or Microsoft Teams contract, and the champion or power user isn't the one who signs. Reps have to know how to speak to each of those stakeholders appropriately.

Colin's point on where that gets solved:

"The wonderful thing with a tool like Common Room is you can see the related usage of each of these individuals in the buying committee, and make a determination as to the type of messaging and language you lead in with."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

That visibility is the unlock. Common Room surfaces each person's usage across the buying committee, so reps can read the room and adjust. If the head of IT has never personally used the product, you lead with different language than you would with a daily power user: sometimes a value story, sometimes a security story.

The result: a 2x jump in outbound pipeline

The payoff showed up fast.

"We saw at least a 2x jump in outbound pipe gen pretty much overnight once we started running these plays. You're outbounding based on usage and what you know about the user or the workspace, as opposed to keyword intent or whether they're poking around your website."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

The gain didn't come from more leads. It came from prioritizing the right ones, and from outreach grounded in signals competitors simply don't have.

Colin's rule: keep it simple

Otter runs only about 10 to 12 usage-based plays in total, with these five as the foundation. That restraint is the strategy, not a limitation.

"Don't overcook the thing. When you've got so many tools and data points, it's easy to overcomplicate. Keep it super simple at first, isolate what's actually moving the needle, then expand."

- Colin Netal, Head of Demand Generation at Otter.ai

His tactical takeaway for any team starting out: mine your call transcripts to understand why people actually buy in a sales-led motion, then distill that into usage data points that act as a proxy for pain or momentum.

See what's possible with Common Room

Otter's motion comes down to three moves any PLG team can borrow:

• Score behavior, not just leads. Weight real first-party product usage over commoditized fit data, at both the account and contact level.
• Build a handful of plays, not a hundred. Five well-run, usage-based plays beat a sprawling model no rep can keep straight.
• Match the play to the committee. As deals move upmarket, speak to budget owners and deal-runners differently, using each person's actual usage.