How product-led growth (PLG) is changing Sales and Customer Success
I spoke recently with Todd Robinson, CEO of a startup I’m advising, who asked me how much he should budget for account representatives to focus on growing existing accounts. I replied: “Why pay anything to have a rep call a customer twice a month to ask, ‘How are things going?’ Just let the machine do it instead.”
It’s no secret that machines are augmenting — and oftentimes replacing — business workflows and processes in our current world. A report from the World Economiс Forum notes that by 2025, a staggering 85 million jobs will be replaced by machines with AI.
And with the rise of product-led growth (PLG) — meaning user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven by the product itself — machines are becoming even more ingrained in how we work, changing the way we’ve traditionally thought of roles like sales and marketing. We see PLG B2B companies like Slack, Atlassian, Zoom, Dropbox, Calendly, and many others leveraging PLG’s AI-first approach to reduce sales and marketing redundancies.
But the rise of PLG doesn’t mean the sales or customer success team goes away; the teams are now just reserved for the last part of escalation. It’s all about not entirely eliminating human effort, but using it more efficiently to run a well-oiled machine.
Understanding the Stages of the PLG Customer’s Journey
To understand why traditional sales and marketing roles are shifting with PLG, it’s important to take a step back and consider the stages of a PLG customer’s journey. Every stage has an event that takes you to the overall journey of becoming an active user, or even someone who is a proponent of the product.
I’ll walk through a typical customer journey at DevRev which has built a Dev-centric CRM platform and just launched on Product Hunt. First, they say, “Invite your teammates — you can’t work on your own, so go invite a couple of folks”. Once you invite your teammates, then they show you how to create a simple work item: it could be a ticket, it could be an issue. Then, recognizing you may have work items outside of DevRev too, they invite you to use AirDrop and bring in issues and tickets from GitHub. After that, they say go create your product catalog: once you build it, you can connect the product catalog to your work items, and that’s when it becomes more meaningful.
The last thing DevRev says is to put your conversation widget into your DevRev app, PLuG (Product-Led User Growth). This connects your customer conversation to customer issues and to your product.
Everything you need is now in one place instead of having to open an app every time you need to do a new task. That’s beneficial because it enables the user to see what work needs to be done and who to communicate with, all at once. Having everything in the same location helps, as opposed to working with different software for different use cases — especially in an age of increasing dispersed work and more software tools available to businesses than ever.
The Power of Nudges
Nudges are an important part of the customer journey that illustrate the power of machines in helping with follow-up and getting a customer fully on board.
For each one of these customer journey stages at DevRev, they have a campaign, and the campaign has both in-app and outside-app nudges. Say, for example, someone comes in and hasn’t invited more teammates. The machine can automatically invite a segment of folks who haven’t completed that stage and the campaign is spread out over a week.
It’ll look like this: the user might get a message saying “Did you know you can invite your friend? Here’s why you should.” If you’re still in that segment and didn’t act on it, a few days later you’ll receive an email seeing if there’s an additional way to help get you on board. If you still haven’t acted after that, then another nudge could be a text message or a targeted ad on Twitter or other relevant social media.
At any point if you follow up in that segment, you’re in the second stage of the campaign. The way DevRev does nudges is all through technology, and they have three main questions needing answering throughout the process:”What is the infrastructure to figure out the events and the clickstream, how can we create the segments of user, and how can we orchestrate communication within users”?
But while nudges are technology-driven, sales and customer success teams cannot be fully eliminated.
The PLG impact on Sales and Customer Success
If you’ve done everything else possible to get the customer on board without a human effort, you can then bring on a sales rep. With the DevRev platform, if the prospect wasn’t lured in by nudge 1, 2, 3, or 4, the last escalation could be: “hey, customer success, go talk to this person, there may be an issue with which you can help.” People become resources you use more efficiently.
That escalation could be either positive or negative — perhaps a customer hasn’t used the system for 30 days and we’ve nudged that person who hasn’t replied, and a human could step in to pick up the conversation. Or the customer may be a really avid user and pushing the system to its limits meaning she is a candidate for premium; that’s when the machine also escalates it to us. The sales rep could say: “looks like you’re doing great, here are some of the other things you can take advantage of.”
As an example, Twilio captures both personas and audiences, and has a product called Engage that then sends appropriate text messages and ads.
While PLG is bringing machine learning and automation to the forefront, it’s not completely eliminating enterprise sales and customer success roles. The bottom line: never waste a human’s time doing a machine’s job. Using machines to intelligently handle all interactions other than the most important escalations frees them up to add the most value to the business.
