Sales is underrated
I'm a believer - every PLG company ends up with sales.
You know when you buy furniture and convince yourself: “I don’t need to check to instructions, this seems simple enough”.
And end up restarting 5 times?
Don’t do the same thing with your go-to-market strategy. Subscribe to High Intent and share it with friends!
This week we've got the hottest PLG news 🔥 and freebies 🎁 like the AI tools you need to know about, Ben William’s onboarding checklist, 10 uncommon questions to ask your ICP, and more. Let’s dive in 👇
PLG World
PLG needs a sales makeover
Source: Techcrunch
Turns out, 84% of PLG companies’ revenue comes from either a Product-Led Sales motion or a traditional sales-led motion (Data from Pocus & Openview). Yes, I will shamelessly s/o competitors if it’s valuable to you, the reader.
Got fooled? Me too. Techcrunch addressed it this week in a collab article with Amplitude. Takeaways:
🔑 Companies are not either product-led or sales-led. In fact a combination of both. Atlassian, Pendo, Amplitude and Slack all have both PLG and SLG motions.
🔑 The price threshold at which people are self-converting is increasing. This leads sales with high revenue opportunities, which require humans to navigate.
🔑 MQLs are a thing of the past. The real deal is layering MQL data points on top of PQLs to provide more context on a lead’s real intent to purchase.
🔑 Change management is an issue when transitioning from sales-led to a hybrid. There’s a dichotomy between the decision to go PLG coming from non-sales functions like growth, and reps needing to update their workflows accordingly, subsequently feeling like the product is competing against them.
🔑 To mitigate product vs sales, compensation needs to change. Elena Verna argues that more compensation should be geared toward expanding existing accounts.
🔑 Reps who sell in a PLG motion need different skills like data analysis and deep product knowledge. Some may argue that modern PLG reps need basic revenue ops and sales engineering expertise.
Sales
How reps feel when using product data in emails
Source: NFL
Sales reps at PLG companies have a superpower. They can leverage the most effective personalization technique in their outreach to prospects: product data.
Yesterday, I introduced 9 ways that reps leverage product data to book more meetings:
1/ Using specific features ➡️ “Hey, I noticed that the way you're using the product is X and I think in order for you to be successful, you should be doing more of Y”
2/ Implementing sticky features like integrations ➡️ “Saw you integrated X tool. We often see people get hung up on a minor thing or two and have a quick guide to unblock you.”
3/ Reaching usage milestones ➡️ “Great job getting your first outcome of feature A 🎉! Would love to understand your team’s goals with feature A and help make it a reality.”
4/ Growth in users ➡️ “Great to see so many of you joining the club ;) Seems like you’ve been getting things done. Would love to show you the benefits of features B & C for teams. Here’s a help doc.”
5/ Predicting roadblock ➡️ “You didn't ask for sales support, but across our past customers, we've seen that people who look like you are going to start to struggle with X or Y or Z.”
6/ Decision makers signing up ➡️ “John, wanted to personally welcome you to Company A! I see that your team has been using feature B a lot but getting high bounce rates. We’ve implemented Feature C at Company D and theirs dropped by 80% immediately, care to learn more?”
7/ Close to paywalls ➡️ “Saw that you’re almost out of feature A! Would you like to discuss our paid plan? Otherwise, your data won’t be stored going forward.”
8/ Rapid surge in usage ➡️ “Woah, I’m impressed with what you’ve done with the product. Company B gained Y value after they’ve set their whole team on feature A, worth a chat?”
9/ Contextual reach outs ➡️ ”Saw you were just using feature A. Working on Saturdays? I feel you. Anything I can help with?”
Growth
Leadership’s wildest dream
Source: Andrew Mewborn
Arriving to work fully prepared is like showing up to a sword fight with a lightsaber. Ben Williams did what only a select few do when he started at Snyk to lead PLG efforts. This week he publicly shared his 30/60/90 plan. He states the importance of FOCUS in a time of hyper growth. You can find the link to his plan at the bottom of this newsletter 👇🎁.
Ben also shared his recollection of the biggest mistakes he made over the years. His motto: Treat every day like a school day.
❌ I micro-managed my teams too much
❌ I gave my teams too much autonomy when they needed more guidance and course correction
❌ I didn't provide enough context to my teams. They questioned the why and were less motivated as a result.
❌ I didn't clearly recognize, separate and prioritize the distinct needs, expectations and responsibilities of my CEO and fellow exec team vs my product team.
❌ I wasn't close enough to customers and users.
❌ I wasn't close enough to data.
❌ I thought I knew more than I did and I demonstrated a lack of humility.
❌ I neglected key relationships within the business.
❌ I followed the advice of experts blindly and without the balance of a healthy dose of skepticism.
❌ I was too attached to my vision and strategy.
❌ I didn't evangelize the work of my teams clearly or consistently enough.
❌ I prioritized scalable systems and frameworks over deliverables and impact.
❌ I didn't devote enough time to deepening our widening my own sphere of knowledge.
❌ I didn't push back hard enough against following short-term revenue opportunities vs addressing core product issues with retention.
❌ I prioritized work over family.
❌ I didn't own my mistakes or apologize for them.
Inside the org
Shopify grew $10B in a week - you can too
Source: Imgur
You read that right. Shopify added $10B to its valuation in the last 5 days.
How: Pricing! Timely enough, Adam Schoenfeld and his team at PeerSignal released new data regarding pricing at 150 PLG companies. What stood out to Adam:
💡 Usage-based tiering is dominant in PLG. 80% of top PLG companies used it.
💡 Seat vs non-seat based is nearly an even split in B2B SaaS (53% vs 47%)
💡 How you package pricing matters. ~2/3 of PLG approach usage via package (vs charging usage per unit, like your gas bill)
💡 Pricing metrics vary widely. We found 44 unique pricing metrics across 150 companies.
💡 Not all PLG companies offer freemium plans. ~36% of top PLG companies offer a free plan. 54% of PLG offer free trials (without a freemium plan). Does that still make it PLG?
Our take: Interesting dynamics are forming between rev ops, new comp structures and focusing on expansion rather than acquisition. All in the name of maximizing revenue with less headcount. Pricing feels like the missing piece. To make it work, revenue teams need to understand the subtle nuances between their product's value drivers and monetization opportunities.
Marketing
Big techs against bots
Source: Anita Kirkovska
Open AI and Google are working on watermarking technology that will be able to discern if SEO-purposed articles were written by humans or AI. So be careful when marketing gurus brag about millions of organic views in a few months. DoNotPay recently saw its organic rankings crumble after Google cracked down on its AI-written content.
Similarly, Google is cracking down on companies who use domain warming to make sure their emails land in your inbox. It’s particularly detrimental to PLG companies, who (most often) rely on automated email campaigns to self-support their free user base. And god knows that PLG companies have LOTS of users.
💡Tips for PLG folks: Use product usage insights to personalize emails to your free users. Make sure to filter out bad emails and add prompts for users to engage with your automated campaigns, like replying to an email with feedback or questions. As for AI-written content, it’s recommended to use AI for captions, rewriting paragraphs, social media ideas, but avoid having blogs fully generated by ChatGPT.
🎁 Cheat sheets, templates & freebies
There’s an AI for that
Calculate how much PQLs help your ARR
Ben Williams’ 30/60/90 onboarding plan
10 uncommon questions to ask about your ICP to standout
How to use ChatGPT to create SEO landing pages
🎧 and 📺
🎧 How powerful long-tail SEO can be for PLG
🎧 How ClickUp aligns its teams for PLG
📺 Personalities in a pricing call by Corporate Bro & Rashad Assir
🔥 Hot conversations
Replace MQLs with PQLs
What sales reps need to start & stop accepting
Coming up in PLG
Webinar: Enterprise consolidation playbook
ProductLed acquisition program
Aaaaaaaaaand that’s all for today!
Please share High Intent with your friends and colleagues if you got something out of today’s drop 💛
✌️, Fred.