Product-led growth focuses on leveraging the product, rather than sales or marketing to drive acquisition, monetization and retention. Exceptional success has been seen with companies who adopt this model, with Slack, Zoom and Atlassian leveraging PLG to deliver phenomenal value to clients. The best thing about PLG is that it equips people with direct purchasing power, but that’s not where the real magic happens. When you combine PLG with marketing and sales, you can unlock an unreal amount of growth, while transforming your company into an agile and dominating force. Whether you have a traditional business or an enterprise, PLG is truly for everyone. Some of the best businesses in the world have this figured out already, and if you want your company to rank amongst them, now is the time for you to take that next step.
Key Takeaways
Data-driven environments are prerequisites for PLG
Adoption of PLG means integrating it at every level
PLG has to be rooted in your customer journey
PLG and your Customer Journey
You have to put your product at the forefront of every moment in your customer’s journey. For this kind of growth to be effective, you need to focus on user-generated content and virality to drive users to sign up. You also need to help your users see the value of your product so you can encourage them to make a self-service purchase. You can also give your sales team usage signals that tell you when it is time to expand.
Prerequisites for Product-Led Growth
If you want to truly adopt PLG, then you need to focus on two different priorities. You have your environment and your team. With your environment, you need an experiment-first-based culture that’s data-driven and forward-focused. In terms of your customers, you need behavioural data that helps you to see the journey people are taking. Your data has to be democratized, and accessible across your organization. This allows everyone to work with the system, comfortably. Embracing experimentation is also key if you want to scale. This allows you to refine your customer knowledge, without having to rely on assumptions. You can have a meaningful business impact, and make decisions that go on to benefit you in more ways than one.
Scaling with PLG
Data-driven cultures are useless if they do not have a modern growth stack or the right technology. Technology drives growth across a customer’s journey by making it easy for prospects to sign up and try the product in question. It also helps to promote engagement and retention with a CRM system. When technology is used to scale PLG, you can identify the highest lifetime value of your customers through lead scoring. You can also deliver accessible customer support that lowers your churn rate. A modern data stack that supports scalable growth will include analytics, activation tools, collection data and digital analytic platforms. Tech is your friend when trying to scale with PLG, and if you do not embrace it, you’ll soon find it almost impossible to maintain the results you have been achieving.
The Value of Experimentation
You need to ensure that you have a team who have a holistic view of your company. This involves you trying to create a constant level of curiosity about your growth levers, and what you can do to try and improve them. Having a solid organizational culture that works around PLG, and having it be the centre of your business will help a lot here. There are several things you can do to help yourself scale with PLG. One thing you can do would be for you to have your growth team, report to your product team.
You can also take steps to make growth its very own department. If you appoint a VP of growth, then they can oversee a vast team, which includes analytics, product growth and marketing. Several teams can then co-own growth over different marketing avenues, as this helps to reinforce shared metrics and collaboration.
Putting your Focus on Long-Term PLG
If you want to scale your business then you need to make sure that your business has a long-term focus on PLG. Studies have found that 94% of companies plan to adopt PLG as a way to increase their ROI. This is great, but you can’t hope to scale if PLG is not effectively seated within your company’s core. One way for you to ensure long-term scalability would be for you to shift your strategy. You need to move from a top-down approach into one that transitions away from closing enterprise deals. You then need to gravitate to longer-term strategies, so you can close your accounts early and then expand.
This is the key to scaling with PLG.
You will also be able to increase your user base with trial plans or low-cost entry points. As users begin to see the value of your product, you can then turn this into an expansion opportunity. Partner up with your sales team and make sure that you have product champions who evangelize your product and its usage. Your sales team can also offer upgrades to allow core customers to unlock higher-end, premium features.
Expanding Customer Success
Scaling with a PLG model means casting a wide net. Your customer success team have to support a huge volume of customers. As you begin to offer free, or low-cost versions of your product, you should consider adopting a one-to-many system to handle communications. This will help your account managers, as well as your sales representatives. They will be able to engage more with the influx of new users, while marketing teams source new personas. Driving acquisition and retention is key when scaling your PLG business, as is building relationships and establishing a sense of community.
By adopting a scalable approach and by building stickier experiences, you can ensure the longevity of your company while ensuring that every step you take, is one towards a bigger and brighter future.
Ready to start your business growth journey?