Don’t be fooled by the PLG mullet
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My partner Gil wrote an interesting piece yesterday encouraging companies to decide if they are PLG Now, PLG Later or PLG Never.
Gil argued that in an era of easy money, it was possible to punt on that decision and experiment with top-down and bottoms-up simultaneously. But with the market tightening and investors looking for clear signals of outperformance, that’s not the case anymore.
In response to the piece, a common question we received from founders was: how do I know which kind of company I should be building?
Often, this isn’t too hard to figure out. An easy question to ask yourself is how is your product adopted. Can a single user adopt your product, or do they need to involve management (e.g. to get approval to connect to their data warehouse, or pass security review etc.)?
If your champion needs to get sign-off to get value out of your product, you need to build your top-down sales motion. Certainly viral expansion may be important to prove out, but nailing the top-down motion will be critical to reaching the next phase.
A less obvious question to consider is: who benefits when your product expands from being used by one person at a company to many people?
If your product is collaborative, then your users benefit. If your product is not, then management benefits. And if management benefits, you need to build a top-down sales motion as soon as possible, even if you’re acquiring users bottoms-up.
Here’s an example I was discussing with a founder friend the other day. Consider Scratchpad. Scratchpad is a tool for sales reps to enter data into Salesforce faster. Sales reps love it. And Scratchpad has a free plan that drives bottoms-up adoption among reps.
However, as more sales reps use Scratchpad, the reps don’t benefit. The product stays the same. You know who benefits? RevOps. Because, ultimately, Scratchpad drives sales rep efficiency and sales process adherence. And that’s what RevOps cares about.
In other words, to close the enterprise-wide deal, it’s not enough that sales reps love the tool. Scratchpad needs to get specific buy-in from RevOps on the value it provides to their team (and sales management). That’s a top-down sale if I’ve ever seen one.
It may be tempting, if you run a company that looks like Scratchpad, to focus on bottoms-up metrics. Especially if users love your product and adoption numbers look great. But don’t let this bottoms-up in the front, top-down in the back, product-led-growth-mullet fool you about what you really need to prove to bring your business to the next level.
