Invest in a monetization team? How and when

Make sure your monetization is off to a strong start

Hey there! 

Here’s what you missed in PLG in the last 2 weeks👇

💰 How & when to invest in a monetization team

⏰ Fix your speed-to-lead problem 

🩺 Pulse-check your free trial conversion 

🏈 The ultimate guide to sales plays

🚗 The value of sidecar products

Scroll to the end for 🎁 Cheat sheets & templates, 🎧Podcasts, 📺Videos, and 🔥 Hot conversations. 

💰 How & when to invest in a monetization team

Recently, Ben Williams dove into how and when to build a monetisation team. Growth tactics are all the rave regarding PLG, but how does that actually play out in practice? A preview of it is below from Ben:

• Step 1: Agree on the outcomes you’re trying to drive: First understand the problem you’re trying to solve and the opportunity that lies in solving that problem. Debate should growth monetisation team own both:

  • Self-serve revenue $

  • PQA pipeline $ (or volume)

Decide this and then agree on a framework for ongoing reporting. 

• Step 2: Constrain your focus: The different types of work that a growth monetisation team might take on are widely varied in nature and the cost of trying to split energy across these different areas concurrently can be high.

• Step 3: Set timeline expectations: A huge cause of frustration within the management team can come with misaligned expectations around the timeline for impact. This seems obvious but is something I’ve seen growth leaders slip up with.

• Step 4: Ensure the product is ready: If your product isn’t retaining well it’s essentially down to one of two things:

  • There’s not enough value for users to keep them coming back (a PMF problem)

  • You’re not doing a good enough job connecting new users to the value

If it’s the former, stop all efforts across all of growth immediately.

• Step 5: Design and staff the team with the right skills: While growth generalists can adapt to many problems, there are going to be situations where they won’t be effective or where other profiles will be able to move more quickly. The Reforge growth practitioner profiles matrix provides a solid model to support your staffing considerations.

  • Growth generalist 

  • Growth implementor 

  • Growth visionaries 

• Step 6: Closely involve key cross-functional stakeholders: While your growth team may be centralised, there will always be important relationships to build with the GTM org (sales, marketing, customer success, and ops).  For example, it’s best practice to have an experimentation-minded product specialist or a BDR working within growth monetisation teams to better support experimentation around the end-to-end revenue optimisation process.

⏰ Fix your speed-to-lead problem

You're 21x more likely to qualify for a lead if you reach out within 5 minutes. The problem is: 99% of people get speed-to-lead wrong. 

It's not a sales problem. It's a data problem.

Not engaging leads fast enough reduces paid conversions WAY more than you think. 

❌ Slow speed-to-lead usually happens because GTM teams focus on improving the time between identifying a lead and having sales engage. Which is a sales execution issue. 

✅ Yet you should start by reducing the time between tracking product actions and surfacing that user/account. Which is a data issue.

It all comes down to getting the right balance between prioritization, timing and context. 

🩺 Pulse-check your free trial conversion 

When starting down the path of PLG, it’s all about the small steps and little wins. There is no flip of a switch overnight that happens. Kyle Poyar sat down with Jonathan Anderson from Candu to reflect on a 9-step PLG audit to get a pulse check on where you stand and where to focus time. 

Step 1: Create a sign-up page that promotes your value proposition: Consider it a moment to reinforce what your product does and what value your soon-to-be users will get.

Step 2:  Ask better questions in your sign-up survey: The most common signup questions we see successful PLG companies implement include asking about users’ primary jobs to be done, their role, and what technologies they already use.

Step 3: Goal-oriented onboarding checklist: Use the insights from your onboarding survey to surface the shortest possible pathway to value.

Step 4: Personalized templates and recipes: This helps them understand and discover common use cases proven to deliver value. Again, bonus points if you can personalize this content from the results of the signup survey!

Step 5: Value-add empty states: Instead of a blank page, a sole CTA to “Get Started”, or a “no data yet” message, consider leveraging this valuable real estate to build excitement for your feature set.

Read the full article to discover the other 4 of 9 steps and real company examples for each step. 

🏈 The ultimate guide to sales plays

Sales Plays operationalize the outreach process based on specific product events.

So that reps know WHAT to do WHEN to do it, and HOW to engage prospects to initiate revenue conversations.

We've put together 6 essential Plays that your sales-assist team needs to start running 👇

1. Usage uptick (Expansion) - A qualified account shows great momentum in your product. Openness to sales outreach will be high. Engage active users to understand how the spike can be tied to a business goal. 

2. Tending-out-of-compliance (Sales-assist) - One of your top accounts is approaching the limit of the free plan. Proactively engage active users to convert them to your paid plan. 

3. Named account sign up (Sales-assist) - A decision maker just signed up to one of your workspaces. They might have different expectations when signing up, and will likely not use the same features as the end users in that account. Align with their priorities and speak to the benefits of a paid plan.

4. Account champion engagement (Sales-assist) - You identify a champion at one of your top accounts. This person gets the value of your product and is trying to spread adoption. Help them by providing resources and offering discounted seats with an annual subscription.

5. Trial conversion (Sales-assist) - Across all of your timeboxed free trials, some accounts should be engaged by sales. Either because the account has great revenue potential or sales can intervene to guarantee quick and latest success with your product. 

6. New user velocity (Sales-assist) - You’re notified of an uptick in users at an account with revenue potential (fits your ICP). The value of your product is spreading, indicating a potential to convert to paid plans. Engage end users and decision-makers to understand how they perceive your product’s value and objectives.

👉 Check out the full guide here.​​

🚗 The value of sidecar products

This week we’ve seen lots of discussion around sidecar products. These lightweight products attract users and drive growth to your main product.

Here are a few examples from Drew Teller:

1. Clearbit TAM calculator

2. Ahref's backlink checker

3. Hubspot website grader

4. Pingdom speed test

5. June.so changelog

6. SEMrush website SEO checker

7. Canva's color palette generator

Companies like Reply.io have made it a vital part of their growth strategy. It’s clear that this tactic is becoming popular for product-led marketing.

🎁 Cheat sheets & templates

• A comprehensive look at GitLab’s upsell play

• Product-led marketing database by Drew Teller

• Pricing model examples from top 100 PLG companies

🎧 and 📺

• (📺) Grammarly Head of BD on their enterprise playbook

• (🎧) The great successes and failures of PLG

• (🎧) How product-led and sales-led growth coexist

🔥 Hot conversations 

• Sidecar products working as growth loops

• AI debate with author Yuval Noah Harari and Meta’s Yann LeCun