Challenges of Driving Sales On Top of Product Led Growth
Over the past 10 years, product-led growth (PLG) has proven to be incredibly effective at generating low-cost leads. The bottoms-up model gets multiple prospects in a buyer organization engaged and championing the offering without having to talk to sales. PLG has lowered acquisition costs and paved a path for SaaS businesses to increase LTV.
For most businesses, however, PLG alone isn’t enough for long-term success. Hitting long-term ARR and MRR milestones absolutely requires having the right sales, marketing, customer success teams in place. PLG businesses still need:
- Consistent user activation, instead of small pockets of adoption
- A proven customer journey for prospects looking for Enterprise-caliber offerings
- A nuanced monitoring system to predict churn or downgrades
The revenue org needs a system that does this well, and current tooling is inadequate to fully address these needs. We typically hear of three pain points that customers most want to be solved. Go to market automation tools like Workbase are designed to tackle these problems.
(1) Account reps don’t know who to engage with and when.
PLG businesses typically generate incredibly valuable buying and retention signals. It should be easy to know when a prospect is ready to buy, how the product is already being used, and whether key milestones are met or red flags are triggered.
The problem is that all of these actionable signals are buried within data, and most reps need to focus on selling instead of combing through data. Even if they’re great at data, it’s incredibly inefficient for reps to check dashboards every day.
Ideally, a company’s tech stack should (1) turn raw data models into actionable insights and (2) proactively alert reps in their tool of choice like Salesforce, Slack, email, Gainsight, etc.
(2) It’s too difficult to deliver a tailored customer experience.
PLG is creating an arms race for delivering the best possible customer experience. Buyers increasingly expect reps to know how the product is being used, who’s using it, where the challenges are, and how to drive more value. As a result, they want more tailored conversations.
When reps engage with customers, they need to have easy, centralized, and contextualized access to this information. More often than not, a couple of fields in Salesforce is not enough. Pulling together multiple Tableau dashboards is also too cumbersome as it’s difficult for reps to make time to check the dashboards for each customer call. Whether it’s through custom tooling or a vendor, the relevant insights need to be routed to the rep.
(3) Ops and analytics teams can’t keep up with business requests.
Most high-growth businesses move incredibly quickly. Strategies, processes, people, and data change every quarter. This creates tremendous pressure on ops and analytics teams to make sure that operational tooling is effective and up-to-date. Dealing with one-off requests for data pulls is reactive when the goal is to proactively serve internal teams.
For PLG use cases, the zone of control often spans RevOps/BizOps, an SFDC engineer, a data engineer, and the core analytics team. This makes hitting OKRs with minimal project management work challenging. Initiatives get delayed, stakeholders become frustrated, and the business can’t iterate quickly. In these situations, there is great value in rebundling part of the tech stack so fewer stakeholders need to be involved.
At Workbase, we currently see companies cobbling together several tools, including internal custom code, to address current Ops problems that hobble reps’ ability to leverage PLG. The approaches typically are:
- Reverse syncing some data fields into Salesforce
- Building separate BI dashboards
This works well for companies at certain stages. However, at some point, it no longer scales and customer acquisition isn’t optimized. Even for earlier-stage companies, getting the entire data stack in place takes time, meanwhile, the business can get blocked.
As B2B software purchasing preferences are changing, we believe that the next generation of tools needs to solve these problems. This is where Workbase comes in — we’re building customizable, out-of-the-box templates to solve these challenges. If you are interested in our tooling, we would love to hear from you here.
