How to integrate PLG and corporate sales to improve your bottom line • TechCrunch

between changing With the economic storm and digital shopping choices, SaaS companies are under a lot of pressure. Most of these companies realize that 80% of their interaction with buyers happens on digital channels. At the same time, they must drive profitability to meet the needs of investors.

The question is, how do you delight customers who want self-service while accelerating profitable growth?

While product-led growth (PLG) is a successful strategy, many companies channel these efforts into sales-led growth (SLG), or corporate sales activity, to upmarket or target a specific customer segment. With the right go-to-market (GTM) architecture and effective use of data, companies can use both strategies to accelerate revenue growth.

When does supplementing PLG with SLG make sense?

Typically, companies follow three patterns when it comes to their GTM approach:

1. In product management Focusing on the user and their experience with the product as the main revenue stream.
2. Sales driven: Using traditional marketing and sales methods to reach the buyer or the economic decision maker. This approach can be supported by selected PLG techniques to drive user advocacy.
3. Mixture: Combining the best of both worlds, with PLG techniques creating awareness and getting into futures accounts, and sales activities drive the majority of revenue.

With PLG, the product needs to make an impact on the user – and do it quickly. After all, the product is the main vehicle for the acquisition, retention and expansion of users. While PLG works best for products with some degree of virality, in many cases, you don’t have to choose between SLG and PLG.

As an example, Calendly’s sales team talks to customers about how we can help the platform create a deeper impact in their organization. We follow a hybrid GTM approach, PLG provides a critical access point to future accounts, and sales drives enterprise expansion and revenue. When PLG feeds the mine, sales targets are where we serve users in a core use case (e.g. Sales VP), where we drive high value and business results.