CMO of 6sense, taking the guesswork out of predictable revenue growth with the power of AI and insights to uncover buyers already in market.
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It wasn’t long ago that ABM (account-based marketing) was the three-letter acronym every marketer was talking about. These days, we’re obsessing over a different one: PLG (product-led growth).
As with the ABM craze, PLG has its purists and bona fide experts. And then there are people like me — the ones who pay close attention to the trends to determine what takeaways we can apply to our worlds.
For all its disruption, ABM at its core turned out to just be good marketing. And the more I learn about PLG, the more I think that beneath the hype, we find the same thing: It’s just good marketing. After all, the whole point of PLG is to make people fall in love with your product by bringing it as far forward in the buyer’s journey as possible.
And while I’m neither a PLG expert nor a purist, I do think there are a lot of takeaways that any marketer can glean from the PLG philosophy. And equally important, there is plenty that marketers can bring to PLG — even if that seems at odds with the PLG ideal of a product that sells itself.
The reality is that, in my experience, good marketing is essential to a successful PLG strategy. In fact, with mastery of the market, an obsession with customer experience and a firm grasp on what it takes to drive revenue, I’ve come to believe that marketers might just be the difference between a PLG strategy that succeeds and one that falls flat.
There are three reasons why marketing can make or break PLG.
1. Marketing knows how PLG works for your market.
A risk of the hype surrounding PLG is that company leaders may want to implement it without realizing that one size does not fit all markets. In fact, for some markets, a pure PLG play just doesn’t make sense. In those cases, marketing can still find ways to apply the core tenets of PLG by bringing the product further forward in the buying process.
By taking into account what makes the most sense for a particular market, marketers can ensure any PLG efforts target the right ideal customer profile with the right approach. Whether it’s a full-throttled embrace of PLG or a partial one, marketing can help you find the right flavor of PLG for your ideal customers.
Even for the same product, the approach may need to be tailored to specific verticals or segments. For instance, a freemium model of a complex SaaS product may work for small businesses, while a full-featured, self-driven demo might be more effective for enterprise customers.
2. Marketing optimizes the user experience.
By understanding the market, the product and where the two meet for the best chances of success, marketing can also optimize the user experience at every step. By working closely with the product team, marketing can bring the product forward in the user experience, deliver value quickly and help usher the user to that aha moment — where they convert from free trial to paid subscription, or from self-serve demo to “book a meeting.”
At this year’s Empowered CMO retreat (a community my company hosts), Ashley Stepien described how to create a cohesive and effective customer experience in a panel I led. “When [users] are logging in, what is that product experience, and also, what is marketing doing to support it?” she asks. “What are the triggers that we have set up to complement that entire product experience? And that’s a new relationship that I think a lot of marketers have not leaned into enough. We’ve kind of let product own that when in reality, we have such a good pulse on the way our customers want to be spoken to.”
3. Marketing uses PLG insights to drive revenue.
One of the top benefits of a PLG strategy is that it nets a goldmine of information about who’s using your product and how — and marketers can use that information to improve a company’s bottom line. By harnessing usage data, marketing can glean important insights about a user’s intent to buy. Combined with other intent signals marketing tracks, this usage data can provide invaluable indicators about when a user is ready to engage and buy.
This is especially helpful in deals that require team buy-in — and that’s most big deals. We know that, according to Gartner, the typical buying team for complex B2B solutions includes six to 10 individuals. So marketing’s ability to see, understand, and act on usage and intent data is critical to realizing revenue in PLG motions. Engaging all the key decision-makers at the right time in the process can be the difference between a single user staying in freemium mode indefinitely and a whole buying team buying in.
We should pursue PLG without the hype.
Product-led growth may be the new “it” acronym, but it’s one that I believe is here to stay. And as marketers, it’s important that we understand what PLG can do for us, as well as what we can do for PLG.
By representing the voice of the market, driving a stellar product experience and deriving maximum revenue from PLG motions, marketers can transform a popular fad into a sustainable and successful strategy.
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