PLG Weekly #20: The PLG spectrum, when to upsell, the three types of aha moments
Welcome to the twentieth edition of the PLG weekly. We look at how companies can look at PLG as a spectrum.
🌈 Spectrum of product-led growth
Devon from Trustpage put an amazing summary of how to do PLG and how you can look at it as a spectrum.
If you’re moving or want to move to product-led growth, you can do it gradually by moving across the spectrum.
A few examples of companies across the different spectrums:
80/20: Pendo.io, HubSpot, Trustpage
Pure PLG: Slack, Notion, Figma, Webflow
3️⃣ The three type of Ahas according to Gitlab
User-level Aha: “This level of activation can apply, for example, to an individual GitLab user who has finished some basic setups and maybe committed their first set of code,” Hila says. “At that point, they have solved a problem, and found the product feature useful.” She notes, however, that this user-level aha moment is not always enough. It’s just the starting point.
Team-level Aha: “Most B2B products have a team element that has to do with collaboration,” says Hila. “Again, using GitLab as an example, maybe the original user invites three team members to join GitLab, and they begin to collaborate. They merge some changes and release a piece of code. They realize that GitLab helps them collaborate and save time because they don’t need to do multiple things in multiple places. That’s their aha moment as a team.” At this stage, however, the team might still be using the free version of a product, so there’s still another activation step to go.
Organization-level Aha: Once a team has experienced success with a product, they might take on the role of internal champion—pitching the product to their engineering manager, CTO, or other decision maker as a solution to be used across the whole company. “At this level of activation, the customer needs to reach the moment of understanding that the paid option is worth the money in terms of the ROI it will deliver,” Hila says.
How are you delivering these aha moments in your product today? Once you start delivering org-level ahas, the next thing to do is upsell!
📊 When do you set up a team for Upsell?
We are beginning to love math at the PLG weekly and this equation should help you decide whether to set up a team for upselling.
In simpler words, Companies should only invest in a true Customer Success function when the opportunity cost of both time and headcount is less than the contract value. Alyson from Twilio advises sales leaders to add pure expansion roles into the sales organization once they understand what implementation looks like for enterprise-wide rollouts.
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