Product Lead Growth (PLG)A go-to-market strategy in which product usage drives customer acquisition and expansion is becoming increasingly common among SaaS companies in all sectors. 60% of this year’s Forbes Cloud 100 companies use a product-led strategy, and 70% of the top 50 allow users to try their product for free before buying or upgrading.
But developing and launching a product with this model is no guarantee of success. The traditional top-down enterprise sales model just doesn’t work with PLG’s freemium user base, which can see thousands of subscribers per day. Blanket email or marketing campaigns aren’t targeted enough, and a 1:1 sales approach just doesn’t scale.
PLG companies need to know how to analyze and identify which of their paying, potentially profitable customers, as they gain interest. To drive revenue growth and profitability, a product-led growth model requires a different approach to sales: product-led selling (PLS).
Image Credits: Kalika
The PLS model involves giving sales teams product and customer data so they can prioritize users most likely to convert quickly and at scale. Unleashing the power of PLG through PLS requires a slightly different approach to data, leadership and sales roles. Let’s see how to adjust your thinking.
Both your free offering and the features customers get when they upgrade to paid plans should create a natural transition to your organization’s offering.
Rethink your data
To see the benefits of a PLG strategy, you must start by cutting through the noise and creating visibility into consolidated customer data. Data is the foundation you use to discover the buyer’s journey, key patterns of user behavior, and actionable insights. At the same time, this information should be easily accessible and understandable to account executives, support staff, and customer success managers.
Unfortunately, many sales teams lack this kind of self-service access to the information they need to inform their sales pitch. A company’s central data team can often take weeks to respond to such requests, and even when it can provide the data, it’s in the form of static reports that may not reflect customer data to leverage opportunities. Rethinking your data means moving past fragmented data systems that are tied to manual reporting and not informed by product usage analytics.
