🔥 It’s all about accounts baby
Forget AI. Engineers are the new sales reps.
Are engineers the new sales reps?
AI perhaps? Let’s find out.
Here’s what you missed in PLG in the last 2 weeks👇
💸 Free to Paid Metrics for B2B
📈 It’s All About the Account
🧑💼 Got Value Metrics?
😲 Engineers Doing Sales?
🚀 PLG the Open Source Way?
Scroll to the end for 🏈 Play of the week, 🎁 Cheat sheets & templates, 📊 New data, 🎧Podcasts, 📖Reads and 🔥 Hot conversations.
💸 Free to Paid Metrics for B2B
Free-to-paid conversion is a crucial step toward paying customers. So how do you benchmark the performance of your free-to-paid plays? Leah Tharin, Head of Product & Growth at Jua.ai, has a nuanced answer for you 👇
Source: Leah’s ProducTea
“Free to Paid” is a short sentence with a lot of “what if”s and “but” inside, so it’s highly volatile.
The problem is also that it does not consider an extremely important factor by looking at it. The quality of the traffic that you’re getting in.
You need to be aware of this because if you start to compare your conversion metrics with other companies.
Does their conversion rate has this traffic quality in it?
As you move upmarket (from B2C to B2B) you can also expect your free to paid metrics to improve. (While your absolute number of users will decrease.)
📈 It’s all about the account, baby
There’s been lots of discussion in the Product-Led Sales community about PQAs vs PQLs – scoring accounts vs users. Ben Williams, Former VP PLG at Snyk, breaks down when user analytics fall short 👇
Source: Robert Deyber - Flying Blind
Insights from user-level analytics still matter in B2B of course, but alone, and without account-level context, they fall short.
That’s because, in B2B, every user event happens in the context of a team, workspace, company, or account.
People (users) work together in a team.
This account-level perspective also becomes critical for use cases across the company, such as:
Input to PQA scoring and providing rich data for sales interactions
Feedback on acquisition channel performance
Customer health scoring for CS teams
Support team resource modelling
🧑💼 Got value metrics?
Value metrics are key to executing a successful product-led GTM. It aligns your revenue model, pricing, and product metrics to customer value. ProductLed founder Wes Bush states there are two types of value metrics: functional and outcome-based 👇
Source: ProductLed
According to Wes, a good value metric is:
Easy for the customer to understand
Aligned with the value customers receive from the product
Grows with your customer’s usage of that value
Many customers will subscribe to your SaaS based primarily on the value it provides. They’re willing to spend money because of what they get in return.
Value metrics represent the value and what’s needed to push a customer to sign up, upgrade, or renew.
😲 Engineers Doing Sales?
We’ve all heard of how Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said in 2016 that the company didn’t need sales – only to hire 900+ people in sales by 2023. The truth is PLG companies do need sales, but it’s more consultative than traditional sales. Can Palantir’s journey be the same as Slack? Let’s see what Adam Judelson, former Head of Product at Palantir, has to say about this 👇
Source: Lenny’s Newsletter
One of our most controversial early decisions was to put people like me and engineers in front of customers, instead of a formal sales team.
Instead of forcing our government customers into opportunistic pitches from professional relationship brokers, we could put former operators and engineers in the room.
Instead of golf, steak dinners, and boxes at sporting events (which aren’t allowed in government contracting anyway), I would ask questions to partners like:
“How will you make your money on this?”
And to prospects: “How fast can you get us integrated into your mission so we can have an impact?”
🚀 PLG the Open Source Way?
There are different ways to do PLG, from productivity apps to dev tools. Open-source is a popular form of PLG that endorses a culture of collaboration and transparency. Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO at GitLab, shares the key principles of succeeding in open-source GTM 👇
Source: Paddle
⚡ Foster Transparency: Encourage openness not just in the product code but also in the company culture.
This openness should extend to company policies, decision-making processes, and communication, creating a sense of inclusion and trust among team members.
⚡ Harness the Power of Customer Feedback: Customer feedback can provide invaluable insights into the product's strengths and weaknesses.
This feedback should be regularly analyzed and integrated into the product development process to continuously enhance the product's value and align it more closely with user needs.
⚡ Regular Release Schedules: Regular release schedules contribute to operational efficiency.
This practice instills discipline in the team, ensures that developments are timely, and provides a sense of predictability for both the team and the customers.
🏈 Play of the week
🎁 Cheat sheets & templates
How to position your startup
Don’t lead with benefits
One of the best cold emails - breakdown
📊 New Data
Reserve your copy of the 2023 PLS Report
🎧 and 📖
(🎧) Is AI capable of human empathy?
(🎧) "PLG False Starts" with OpenView
(📖) 5 marketing tactics for higher free-to-paid conversions
(📖) 5 heart-winning sales copy tips
🔥 Hot conversations
AI tools for marketing
5 new truths about today’s outbound sales
📅 Upcoming PLG events
The only event for product-led GTM (I’ll be there)