PLG Weekly#17: Re-thinking GTM for the PLG world - Lessons from Figma, Metadata and Scratchpad
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of the PLG weekly. This week we focus on setting up your GTM teams for the PLG world, and how leaders at some of our favorite companies are thinking about this.
As companies start implementing product-led growth to keep up with the end-user era, it becomes important to think about what that means to the structures of your GTM teams, their goals, and incentives that help achieve those goals.
Expectations of end-users evaluating software are pretty different compared to the traditional buyers, and your team’s incentives need to revolve around the ideal experience for this type of user right from the time they hit your website, through to signing up for the product, buying your product, sending feedback and being successful with your product.
This means not being siloed by the traditional sales, marketing, and customer success goals which were designed for a world of software purchasing that looked like this:
We came across an absolute gem of an event about how Revenue leaders at successful PLG organizations are have thought about this and as Oscar from Scratchpad puts it:
Start with the customer and understand the jobs to be done to create the wow experience for them based on the stage of their journey with your product.
Who are the experts and individuals who can deliver those experiences at the highest level? Let that shape the goals for the different GTM teams
👸Understand and design experiences for your Ideal Customer Profile
Different personas prefer buying in different ways. For instance, sales, marketing, teams are more open to conversations with sales teams, compared to engineers where the preference is to try out your product, purchase it if it works, and get in touch only if they’re stuck or need help.
If you tie your sales teams to rigid processes where CRM stages dictate when they should reach out and goals around how often to reach out based on traditional sales methodologies, chances are, your customer experience takes a hit to save your process. Design your sales process around the buying patterns and the type of buyer.
As Kyle from Figma puts it:
”There is going to be one call closes, people who buy over emails, velocity type motions. Our job as a sales leadership team and a sales team is not to create arbitrary friction with warranted sales methodology processes”.
😍 Make Champions not Contact attempts
Depending on the type of product, the person who is signing up might not necessarily be the person who makes the purchase at the company. If that is the case, and you go hard on them with a sales pitch, you’ve lost the opportunity to make an internal champion out of an end-user who makes the case for your product with their buyer.
For instance, at Scratchpad, the people who are signing up are Salespeople who aren’t essentially the buyers always. They’re the users.
The team there is designed to obsess about the use cases that salespeople have, how to assist the user set up the product for those use cases, and make the user a champion.
Enable your sales and customer experience teams to be experts at your customer’s job to be done, more than experts at a particular sales methodology.
🏆 Hire to make your customer successful
This was our favorite and most interesting part of the conversation.
The customer success team at Metadata.io hires marketers into customer success roles with revenue targets to go after.
Folks who have never done sales before, for the mere fact that they are the ones who best understand their customers and so can make them wildly successful when evaluating and using their product! Paint us amazed!
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, share it with anyone who might be interested in PLG.