PLG Sales Integration

"Meaningful product usage become the key success factors for generating PQLs (product qualified leads), which can be then passed over to the sales team similarly to MQLs. In some cases, the prospect customers like the product so much, and the price fits their budget, that they may even purchase via a self-service checkout flow without talking to sales at all."

"As the company starts to scale, relying purely on self-serve often results in an asymptotic flattening of the growth curve, resulting in linear or worse, declining growth."

"However, there are enough customers out there who want to kick the tires and try your product without getting into a long-term protracted negotiation with a salesperson. If you don’t have self-serve onboarding, you will miss out on all these customers."

"You can adjust your sales strategy down the road — Zoom and Amplitude started sales-driven and later became bottom-up-driven. Box and New Relic did the reverse."

"The first 1k-ish customers either signed up through me or self-serve (routed to me if they had questions; we also had to create a B2B TOS). The first 10 customers were all inbound and mostly SMB or business unit within a larger enterprise."

"The question is not either or but both and a matter of sequencing. PLG is perfect for lowering the barrier for more people to try the product and broaden the reach."

"In the sales team involvement route, if the customer fits the ideal customer profile (like being from a Fortune 500 company), the sales or customer success team may reach out to them to provide personalized service, potentially leading to a larger deal."

"The crux of this article is that waiting too long to add sales-involvement often leads to a large opportunity cost. Many successful self-serve applications saw their market position usurped by competitors who adopted a sales-assisted motion and effectively firewalled the self-serve-only products out of lucrative enterprise segments (e.g. Dropbox)."

"Rather, teams within organizations might start using Slack to communicate amongst themselves, and the addition of an “Account Manager” (psssst...it’s a salesperson) helped unify those various pods into a single contract, while potentially adding more pods, was powerful."

"Imagine a situation where the average user of your software ends up spending $5,000 a year. And further imagine you know that engaging with a hung, unactivated user doubles the probability they convert to a customer from 10% to 20%. Lastly, you know that the time cost of doing so is a couple of hours, by a staff resource that costs $50 an hour. With those inputs, we’re essentially saying “I can spend $100 in human labor to capture $500 in expected conversion upside.”"

"If you can differentiate between the valuable hung users and everyone else, this can work. For example, if early Slack sees that a Director of IT from, say, Tesla had signed up for a Slack account, and abandoned their instance before inviting anyone else or setting up channels...well, I have a hunch that it might be worth a person’s time to engage"

"Sales reps can enhance the user’s experience by helping guide them through the buying process rather than forcing them to go it alone. Contract size used to dictate when procurement got involved. Now even free tools may be scrutinized if important data is involved."