PLG Weekly #1: Lessons from Monday's PLG success, Productboard - breaking through PLG ceilings, and More
Breaking down how Monday.com scaled PLG success and insights from Sarah Guo on breaking PLG ceilings.
Welcome to the first edition of the PLG weekly. We're excited to bring the latest in the PLG world to your inbox and help you optimize your Product Led Growth. This week, we are looking at Monday.com to understand how they scaled their PLG success and how Productboard smashed some typical PLG ceilings.
🏆3 takeaways from Monday.com’s PLG success
But wait... What is Monday.com?
It's simple and super customizable. I'd highly recommend you check them out if you're looking for a project management tool :) They are one of the breakaway PLG successes, and here are 3 key takeaways from how they built their PLG super engine.
🙅 PLG does not stand for no sales.
One of the prevalent myths in PLG is that it means no sales - It's not. What a PLG looks like for different companies can vary wildly, but knowing when to get a salesperson to "help/assist" an account is the trick.
When filing their S-1, 46% of Monday's 799 full-time employees were in Sales and Success. Interesting? We think so too. Here's what they said:
In mid-2018, we experienced rapid growth and demand for our platform through our self-serve funnel. So we began investing in building and scaling our Sales, Customer Success, and Partnership teams. We are still in the early stages of building and scaling these teams. But we firmly believe there is a considerable expansion opportunity within our customer base to continue growing our platform. Once we realized this opportunity, we have (more than) doubled our Sales and Success teams from 154 employees at the end of 2019 to 365 employees as of March 31, 2021.
If you haven't added a Sales team to take care of your Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) on trial, you might want to rethink this because you're probably missing out on 💰💰.
💰 Sales assist leads to 270% more Revenue for Monday.
Before 2018, Monday.com customers would adopt and expand on a self-serve basis, absolutely independent of any assistance. After adding a sales team in mid-2018, the new ARR generated from their 2018, 2019, and 2020 cohorts were higher than the new ARR generated by their 2016 cohort by 6.7x, 16.0x, and 27.1x, respectively. Sales assist works!
Post this, they've seen significant customer spend from their cohorts during the first 12 months of their subscriptions.
Takeaway: A dedicated team assisting your PQLs that show significant activity during their free trial is a no-brainer!
📈 For effective sales assistance, you need access to product usage data.
Monday.com built BigBrain, an internal BI tool, to help teams across the company with product usage data. It has become crucial to Monday's day-to-day operations that they gave a shoutout on significant events during IPO. It's been instrumental to the AE's and Managers to target accounts based on usage, and you can see the power of it in their remarkable growth.
Want a BigBrain for your product-led sales motion? Talk to us now!
Productboard: PLG Ceilings and how to break through them.
According to Sarah Guo, there are 3 limits to Product-Led Growth.
Productboard offers a masterclass in breaking the first two limits. Take a look at their pricing page.
1️⃣ Productboard is free for contributors and viewers, charges only its makers.
The end-users of Productboard, like the Executive teams, Sales teams, or sometimes even customers, get free and easy access to it, thus making it simple for the Product team to drive adoption and pass information. This also has an unintended(or intended) network effect - everyone from Productboard's customers and their customer's customers, is viewing a roadmap on Productboard so everyone would want use Productboard in their respective companies :)
Takeaway: Find a way to get eventual buyers/budget approvers in your product so that the RoI conversation becomes really easy for your champion.
2️⃣ Productboard has segmented plans to adapt the differences of their 4,000+ customers.
Productboard has customers from Enterprise companies like Zendesk to an early-stage startup. Each of these segments has different needs and different buying processes.
Features like Salesforce integration, managing multiple workspaces, and other enterprise features are available in the last two plans, with a minimum limit of at least 5 users. Also, understanding the enterprise purchase process, the primary CTA on these plans is "Talk to Us", thus allowing them to manage the enterprise buying cycle quickly.
Takeaway: Pay close attention to your customers and look at how to adapt based on newer buying processes that you might encounter.
You’ve reached the end of this week’s edition and we hope you’ve enjoyed it. We’ll be publishing every Wednesday and if you like what you read this week, please subscribe and share with anyone who might be interested in PLG.