🔥 Your onboarding emails are useless
Secrets from Snyk and Miro; how to fix your pricing and onboarding emails.
Annoyed by the mountain of posts about AI tools on LinkedIn?
Me too. So, this week - nothing on AI, promise.
Here’s what you missed in PLG in the last 2 weeks👇
🔄 A look inside Snyk's biggest growth loop
💵 Your 201 guide to product-led pricing
🧑💻 How Miro builds products
😒 Your onboarding emails are useless
💬 How to nail enterprise messaging in PLG
Scroll to the end for 🎁 Cheat sheets & templates, 📊 New data, 🎧Podcasts, 📺Videos and 🔥 Hot conversations.
🔄 A look inside Snyk’s biggest growth loop
Snyk allows developers to build secure applications. From 2021 to 2022 clicks to their sign-up page grew from 150K to over 1M per month from a sidebar product called Snyk Advisor!
Snyk did this through a Company Generated Company Distributed (CGCD) loop - a robust SEO strategy where they used outputs of their Advisor product to rank on thousands of Google keywords.
Thanks to Ben Williams & PLGeek, we have the details ⤵️
Source: PLGeek
What is a sidebar product you ask? A free product that offers value in the same or closely adjacent space to your core product.
How they did this: Four steps of the Advisor CGCD loop:
Snyk Advisor publishes new package pages (including data on newly found security vulnerabilities) into indexable pages.
Developers search for packages and/or specific vulnerabilities and find links to Advisor.
Developers learn about and compare characteristics of packages they are considering using and become aware of Snyk.
Viewing Advisor pages drives developers to sign up or return to Snyk.
Some of those new or returning users and their teams eventually go on to purchase paid plans.
💵 Your 201 guide to PLG pricing
Last week, Kyle Poyar shared 7 pricing mistakes that go against conventional wisdom, and how to fix them. Summary below ⤵️ Read the full post for examples
Source: Growth Unhinged
The TL;DR - How to fix your PLG pricing
Optimize packages and pricing to reach teams rather than individual users.
Pay attention to the admin experience of your PLG pricing and the mechanics of how you grow from the bottom-up.
Offer enough value to attract high-value customers who can grow with you.
Quantify the perceived value of your features for different audiences through willingness-to-pay surveys and actual product usage data.
Consider democratizing access to SSO rather than making it the main pillar of your enterprise pricing.
If you plan for a product-led sales motion, find a way to create FOMO among your end-users so that they actively want to advocate for an enterprise purchase.
Monetize new capabilities as you add more value to users. Start with GenAI.
🧑💻 How Miro build products - and sells
Lenny Rachitski and Varun Parmar, CPO at Miro discussed how Miro outmaneuvers competitors, structures its product org, and moves ridiculously fast. Towards the end, Varun also shares how they added a sales motion toto their PLG motion (summary on this below) ⤵️
Source: Lenny Rachitski
Varun’s 4 learnings for incorporating sales into a PLG strategy:
Alignment and collaboration: It's essential to align sales and product teams around shared objectives, fostering a collaborative environment rather than a competitive one. Both teams must recognize that they serve customers through different channels but ultimately contribute to the same company goals.
Bridge the gap: Assign a dedicated product marketing team to work closely with both sales and product. This team's primary responsibility is to ensure seamless communication between the two sides, relaying customer feedback and needs from the sales organization (focused on the enterprise side) to the product team (focused on self-serve users). This approach helps align sales strategies with product development efforts and ensures that the company remains customer-centric.
Process and handoff: Create a well-defined process for transitioning customers from self-serve to high-touch experiences as they mature within the platform. This approach starts with self-serve adoption, followed by a hand-raiser event, which prompts the engagement of a sales rep for account qualification and expansion opportunities. Over the years, Miro has fine-tuned this funnel and process, making it a critical part of their operational success.
Unified efforts: Work towards streamlining sales and product operations to function as one cohesive unit. Continuous improvement and optimization of the collaboration between these teams is a crucial aspect of driving long-term success in a product-led company.
😒 Your onboarding emails are useless
Time-based onboarding sequences suck. Users ignore them. Here's a detailed article on what makes a great onboarding email and how to use product data to build sequences.
Source: Fred Melanson
Quick story. About a year ago, a major player in the analytics space had a bug in their email system. For 2 weeks, 0 onboarding emails were sent to the thousands of new user sign-ups.
Guess how much it affected activation rates? It didn’t…
The future of onboarding communications is contextual and hyper-personalized. Here are 3 tricks to try today:
Fire emails based on what users do in your product in real time.
Platforms like Customer.io (unsolicited plug 🔌) allow you to build cadences off product usage data coming from either customer data platforms (CDP) or warehouses.
Branch users by firmographics (on top of product acivity) for enhanced personalization.
Firmographics (like title, company size, job function) influence which product actions should hold true for onboarding emails to fire.
Qualified users should be out of onboarding campaigns and passed to sales
With some users, you’re wasting your time with automated onboarding cadences. Or at least leaving money on the table.
🔑 here is to indentify qualified users the would benefit from a sales conversation and can then exit onboarding sequencing so sales can provide deeper and more personalized value to those accounts.
💬 How to nail enterprise messaging in PLG
Selling to multiple personas? Verticals? Need to upsell or cross-sell? You can't pitch the same value prop to everyone. Anthony Pierri shared his framework for enterprise-scale messaging ⤵️
Source: Anthony Pierri
1️⃣ Adjust your messaging to each product line: speaking at the right level, with the right business context, is what makes a value proposition compelling for your buyers.
2️⃣ Use marketing content to support sales: go one level deeper than generic case studies. Create templates that show specific ways to use your product, and share metadata around how others in their industry use the product.
3️⃣ Adjust your sales narrative based on audience, channel and time horizon: For example, someone lower in the organization focuses on today and tomorrow; mid-level managers on the current quarter; and executives plan for next year.
🎁 Cheat sheets & templates
6 emails hooks using product data
Sales email masterclass (how Lavender’s team gets 40% reply rate)
15 ChatGPT prompts to proofread your copywriting
PLG enterprise messaging checklist
📊 New Data
Take 3 min to answer the PLS survey
VC funding is down, down, down….
2023 State of Product Onboarding
🎧 and 📺
(📺) Building rapport in discovery is underrated
(📺) How to build a cult-like brand
(🎧) How Miro builds product
(🎧) Finding purpose as a sales professional
(🎧) How to reach your target audience
🔥 Hot conversations
I’ve decided not to have ChatGPT write for me.
📅 Upcoming PLG events
The only event for product-led GTM (I’ll be there)