The Definitive Guide to Product-Led Growth (PLG) CRMs
CRMs don’t work for Product Led Growth Companies: A definitive guide to PLG CRMs
Zack Khan
Kashish Gupta
August 19, 2021
9 minutes
By feeding product usage data into our CRM - Salesforce - we were able to see which Accounts were over their usage threshold and by what %. This product data enabled our renewals and customer success teams to have healthy conversations with our customers on Product adoption and usage roadmaps. In some cases this led to expansion of our Products to match the customer's use cases. This helped further our long term relationship with our top customers.
Lin Ling
Senior Director Business Operations
Who is a PLG CRM for? How is it used?
Everyone in your company (ex: marketing, success, support, product) should have access to a PLG CRM: not just the sales team. Typically, Sales is the main team tracking customers before they sign a contract, and Customer Success is strictly post-sale (after a contract gets signed). This doesn't work with PLG. With PLG, Customer Success should be pre-sale, starting from the moment a customer signs up for the product and seeing them through the onboarding process and post-sale.
But if both Sales and Customer Success should be involved, how does ownership work? There should be two pipelines: a "Sales Assisted" pipeline and a "Self-Serve" pipeline. Most customers should fall into the Self-Serve pipeline, where they can use the product themselves to gain value and receive helpful nudges along the way. We recommend that Customer Success and Product teams own the "Self Serve" pipeline. Product or Marketing can own this pipeline on an aggregate basis (i.e. by sending lifecycle emails to a set of accounts), and Success can own this pipeline on an individual and personalized basis (hopping on an onboarding call and debugging issues with customers). We would even consider giving Success and Solutions staff KPIs like number of successful onboardings or revenue targets in order to align their incentives with customer activation.
The Sales Assisted pipeline is reserved for customers that likely need an extra hand with understanding the product, such as Enterprise companies that prefer demos or users that will require help setting up. The Sales Assisted Pipeline can be owned by the Sales team. Customers should have the option at any time in the Self-Serve pipeline to talk to Sales if they have Sales questions (for example, questions about pricing).
To see how this looks in practice, this is how we separate our Self-Serve and Sales Assisted Pipeline at Hightouch. Customers in Self-Serve get automated lifecycle emails, with opportunities to talk to sales as they like.
Note that this only works because users are able to enter the product self-serve. This is a prerequisite for true PLG. The core question to ask yourself is: "Can I go through the product and receive some value without having to interact with the sales team?". Note, this does not mean your entire product needs to be self-serve: just enough for customers to get some value.
What features does a PLG CRM need to have?
A PLG company needs interfaces for each team to understand how a customer is using your product today, so that they can take action accordingly. This includes:
A view of all communications with a customer (across Marketing, Support, Success, and Sales)
A view of all product interactions a customer takes
A view of all marketing interactions a customer touches before and after converting
Breakdowns of a customer account by the users in the account (if B2B)
Ideally, each of the above views would also allow you to take action on a customer (such as send an email, issue a refund or increase allowances)
Which customers should a PLG CRM track?
Going back to the question that started it all: What is the point of tracking calls in a traditional CRM? It's all about intent: you want to focus your attention on customers that have shown intent and thus have a higher chance of converting. So how do you capture this in a PLG world?
Intent is not a binary attribute. You need to score your leads based on intent through lead scoring. The self-serve funnel will get very noisy unless Sales (ex: an SDR) is qualifying leads as they come in and choosing which ones to prioritize. This can be automated via Data Science or it can be human labeled at a smaller scale. Your lead scoring should leverage product data as well as publicly available information about the lead. Customers using your product frequently and for high value use cases likely have a high intent to purchase, and enriched data from Clearbit/People Data Labs will tell you how big a company is and what industry it's in. We have found that the best place to calculate lead scoring models is in your data warehouse, since that is where all customer data lives (ex: billing and product usage data).
Should you buy a PLG CRM?
Purpose built PLG CRMs now exist because of the very problem articulated in this blog post. If you're looking for one, we recommend: Correlated, Endgame, Pocus, Calixa, Breadcrumbs, HeadsUp, or Variance. These solutions are not trying to replace your existing CRMs. Rather, they allow for out-of-the-box analysis without relying on a data team. These metrics can then be used to take action directly from the PLG CRM, or the data can be sent to traditional CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot to give visibility to the larger sales team.
If you are married to your existing CRM (because it’s hard to get people to adopt a new tool), you can extend your existing CRM and achieve an 80% solution. The purpose built tools above are better long term solutions, but your sales org may not be ready for them just yet. You already have a pre-sales CRM (ex: Salesforce), a post-sales CRM (ex: Gainsight), and a marketing CRM (Marketo or Customer.io): all of these can be PLG CRMs if they have product usage data and that data is used to power workflows around your customer journey.
The big question: How to make your CRM a PLG CRM
Now that we've established the value of a PLG CRM, the natural next question is: how do you turn your existing CRMs into PLG CRMs? There are three key steps:
Adding opportunity/deal stages for product onboarding steps (signed up, invited more users, etc) rather than sales stages (First call, second call, etc)
Get product and customer data into your CRMs (using Operational Analytics tools like Hightouch)
Build views and workflow with customer data in your CRMs
Want to learn more about how to make your CRM a PLG CRM? We've created tactical guides on how to turn popular CRMs (ex: Salesforce and HubSpot) into PLG CRMs. The guides offer a step by step framework for thinking through setting up your CRM for PLG. Sign up below and we'll email you a copy.
Thank you to Elon Eliya and Lin Ling for providing feedback and edits!
