Transforming A Company: A Journey Towards Product-Led Growth

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, adaptability and innovation are key to staying competitive. As a forward-thinking company, we recognized the need to shift our approach from a traditional sales-led and enterprise-focused model to one that embraced Product-Led Growth (PLG). This journey was not without its challenges, but it has been a transformative experience that has reshaped our company’s future. In this article, I will share our experiences and lessons learned in building a successful PLG initiative.

1. Starting off on the right foot: Building a PLG initiative requires a well-thought-out strategy. We began by assembling a successful team of individuals who were passionate about the change we were seeking. This team would be instrumental in driving the initiative forward and ensuring its success. Also, consider how you will approach this initiative, and don’t start cannibalizing your existing business by targeting the same customer base and starting internal battles over logo acquisition.
2. Empowering teams to experiment: We were faced with the choice of either allowing existing teams to experiment and change their processes, or creating our own team to lay the foundation for PLG. We chose the latter because it allowed us to build a knowledge base and present concrete examples to the rest of the company without disrupting the ongoing business, while slowly adding a new revenue stream. For true end-to-end impact, we didn’t just focus on a technical team, but ensured that roles in different departments were involved in this initiative to have a “vertical” mission team that included sales, marketing, customer experience, product and engineering.
3. Sales integration: A key step was to bring our sales team closer to the self-service process. We educated them on key indicators of user engagement and product value. Instead of being salespeople, they became enablers, helping users match their business needs with our product features. We also took into account sales reps’ feedback on what indicators would help them and what information they needed to have a well-functioning meeting, and ensured that product-related information was further reported by integrating it into their sales system (Salesforce in our case) and applying an intelligent scoring mechanism based on users’ activities, e.g., downloaded whitepapers, signed up for webinars, used this feature x number of times, used a generated asset in production, etc.
   This helped prioritize user lists for the SDR and Account Executives to target the most active users and understand who was already spending the most time with our services/products.
4. Marketing redesign: On the marketing front, we launched a rebranding effort to focus on our value proposition. We also took a hard look at our SEO strategy, not only in terms of sign-up traffic, but also meaningful user interactions within our product. Analyzing data from high-performing users allowed us to effectively optimize ad spend. With minimal effort, we implemented properties for the purpose of tracking, which gave us a great advantage in the long run, as we were able to reduce the budget and double the spend on effective keywords and campaigns.
5. Community engagement: We actively engaged with our user community and created a dedicated platform for discussions. This helped us drive traffic and establish ourselves as thought leaders in our field. Sharing links to questions that were also asked on other platforms to point to the answers on our platform was an important strategy to increase our reach. It also provides a good opportunity to better engage with users by offering a “rewards program” when they engage and help others. This also has a positive impact on managing increased support requests as more users come to your platform, as you can expect others to help them or find answers to questions that have already been asked, reducing the need to open a ticket with your support team.
6. Adoption of SaaS best practices: Lowered user barriers to entry by introducing SaaS best practices such as trials, freemium models, and transparent pricing. We streamlined the onboarding process and integrated social logins for greater convenience. We also integrated key questions and data collection into the onboarding process to better guide users on which product to use and what information to receive, with custom Nurture mail flows based on interests, product features used, etc. The onboarding process is great for A/B testing and trying out different approaches to see which messages resonate better to activate users or reduce the drop-off rate during the onboarding steps.
7. Product transformation: The heart of our PLG strategy was our product itself. We simplified it to focus on the most common use cases and ensure users could quickly get value from it. Complexity was pushed aside in favor of user-centric simplicity. Make sure your “happy path” is working properly, and don’t sacrifice your user experience for the ability to solve edge cases or other complex use cases. Try placing these cases elsewhere, and let users know where they can find them. As usual, these users will go the extra mile and be seen as someone with deeper knowledge on the subject when looking for solutions to specific complex use cases. Incidentally, this is also a good indicator for sales, customer success, or support to reach out to this user, as you can assume they know exactly what they are looking for.
8. Company dashboard: To maintain transparency and alignment, we created a company-wide dashboard with easy-to-understand metrics and updated it regularly to keep everyone on the same page. This allowed us to make ad-hoc adjustments to our progress when we identified a negative trend and make data-driven decisions.
   Warning: don’t start complicating the others with your complex funnel explanations or north star metrics. These may serve you as an individual or your team, but will lead to confusion or lack of understanding by others. In general, I’m a fan of using North Star metrics to compare the other metrics when it has a positive overall effect or when you just want perform growth hacks of individual metrics.

Conclusion: Transforming our business from a sales-focused company to a PLG organization was a daunting task, but the success has been significant. By building the right team, enabling experimentation, integrating sales, transforming marketing, engaging the community, and adopting SaaS best practices, we set the stage for success. Our simplified product and transparent metrics kept us on track. In the ever-changing business landscape, simplicity scales while complexity confuses. With a well-thought-out PLG strategy, your company can thrive in the digital age. I would add that it doesn’t have to be either one or the other. You can build a PLG strategy while strengthening your existing sales strategy and see the opportunity for one to help the other.