Product-led growth: How to get a seat at the table and prove success as a PMM

This article originates from Madison's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

Hello, my name is Madison Leonard, and I'm currently leading PLG Product Marketing at Vanta. Today we're going to talk about product-led growth (PLG) and what it means for a PMM to not only get a seat at the table but also to prove success.

I've spent a lot of my career at PLG companies, and I'm really excited to share my learnings with you.

I’m going to cover:

• What PLG is (and isn’t!),
• What it means to be a PMM in a product-led organization,
• How to get a seat at the table in a product-led organization, and
• How to prove success once you get there.

Intro to PLG

First, let’s get into what PLG is. PLG stands for product-led growth, which is essentially a fancy way of saying that the user gets to experience value from the platform on their own without talking to sales.

I believe that this is the future of all B2B selling and buying, and we're already seeing this come to fruition: Figma, a product-led company, was just acquired for $20 billion by Adobe.

However, there's an interesting point here that often gets overlooked. If you take just one point with you today, make it this one: PLG is not owned by marketing or product – it’s a company-wide strategy.

Perceived value vs experienced value

What I love about PLG is that it closes the gap between perceived value and experienced value. Perceived value comes from things like seeing screenshots of the product and reading copy about it.

It's also in the narrative you hear throughout the sales cycle. Experienced value, however, only comes once you get into the platform and start using it on your own, hopefully getting to that 'aha' moment and then habitually coming back to the product.

Now, in more traditional sales-led growth motions, you only have perceived value, which comes from what the sales reps are telling you and maybe a product demo; the experienced value doesn't come until later.

Meanwhile, in PLG, you still have perceived value, whether it comes from the website or marketing you see on social media, but there’s less of a gap between that and what you experience once you get into the product. This is the unique selling point of PLG.

PLG is a spectrum

I like to think of PLG as being on a spectrum. At one end, you have purely product-led motions, and at the other, it’s totally sales-led. As I mentioned, with sales-led growth, you don’t get to experience the product on your own while you’re in the sales cycle. At best, a sales rep might do a demo to help you visualize it a little bit.

A little further along the spectrum, there's something I like to call the sneaky trial. This comes about when sales reps are up against a competitor and they don't know if they're going to win the deal. Sometimes they'll manually add in a trial, which while helpful is not scalable or standard across the cycle.

Then there's something called the demo trial, in which the customer essentially gets a demo on your website. They don’t create an account, so it's not personalized to them, but it helps walk them through what the product could look like for them once it's all set up. It's a great way to experience some of that value.

On the product-led end of the spectrum, limited, freemium, and reverse trials come into play. Limited trials allow the user to create an account on their own and see value in real time.

However, there’s a time limit. It might be after 14 days or 30 days, but eventually, they'll be kicked out if they don’t swipe their credit card. Limited trials have a decent conversion rate, but a majority of people still fall off.

Then we have freemium and reverse trials. We're all very familiar with freemium today – there's a basic product that's free forever, plus self-serve options to upgrade for more features.

Reverse trials form part of the new wave of PLG by combining freemium and limited trials. With a reverse trial, you come to the platform and create an account, but instead of being kicked out of the platform altogether if you don’t pay, you're just downgraded to the freemium account.

This makes it really easy for people to continue to see the value and upgrade when they want, which adds to the word-of-mouth value that PLG provides.

PLG vs SLG

Now let's talk about the difference between how product-led growth companies and sales-led growth (SLG) companies measure success.

Product-led companies focus on delivering value and a great user experience, whereas the mindset in a sales-led company is more focused on winning and closing deals. This all means that there are three main KPIs that are used very differently in PLG and SLG.

The first concerns acquisition. In PLG, word of mouth is huge. We want users to acquire other users, so making sure that we have ways for users to share the product and engage with people who don't have accounts yet is a key part of how we get people coming back.

Meanwhile, acquisition in a sales-led company is much more focused on generating leads.

Monetization works very differently too. In PLG, we want people to be able to swipe their credit cards on their own without talking to sales. In SLG, the sales team is getting people into the sales funnel and working with them to close contracts.

Lastly in PLG, we want to make sure that people are habitually coming back into the product, day after day and week after week, so we look at retention through very small windows of time – seven-day and 30-day retention are common metrics.

However, with sales-led, you might not even know if someone's retained until you go to renew their contract. That can make renewal conversations and QBRs (quarterly business reviews) pretty awkward.

Why is PLG important in today's B2B selling environment?

There are so many factors that make PLG important in today's B2B selling environment. Not only do we have a competitive market that only has expanded as more and more people have started working remotely, but we also have tighter budgets.

Under these circumstances, we’ll have to really fight for a seat at the table to win deals through sales-led motions, so PLG is a smart option.

However, my favorite reason for PLG’s importance is that we have a new generation of buyers. Millennials hold 60% of the purchasing power in today’s B2B environment.

They grew up on technology and are used to self-serve products. Making them try the software in a totally different way would be a huge challenge for everyone involved. That’s why PLG is the future – we want to make it as easy as possible for new buyers to get started on our platforms on their own.

Product marketing in a PLG company

Now that we've gone over what PLG looks like, we're going to talk about product marketing in a PLG company. At first glance, product marketing in a PLG company looks similar to product marketing in any other company.

PMMs deal with alignment, go-to-market strategy, launches, and execution. However, the way you do all this very much differs.

The major differences are in the way you approach your target audience, your messaging, and your value prop. In a PLG company, you're focused on the individual user, who is responsible for doing their job effectively to contribute to the company goals.

That means that the messaging needs to be very simple and focused on that pain point, with the value proposition being all about how you’re going to help them do their job better or faster.

This is very different from how we approach buyers in a sales-led motion. We tend to talk to buyers about the future state of their business thanks to our software, with a focus on the total time or money we can help them save or the revenue we can help them generate.

Plus, the content generally has more of a thought leadership angle.

Ideally, both of these approaches should work in tandem. You should have PLG, you should have sales-led, and they should marry to create the beautiful child that is your company.

The go-to-market strategy in product-led companies stands out too. We establish trust with individual users by delivering value organically through things like social media, blogs, and review sites. We also want to provide self-serve value, so it’s vital that users can get started easily with personalized onboarding.

Finally, product marketers in PLG companies work hand in hand with marketing teams to execute the go-to-market strategy, while in sales-led motions product marketers talk primarily to sales.

In order to deliver constant organic trust and value all the time, we need to make sure that our marketing teams understand who our individual users are and what their use cases look like.

How to get a seat at the table in GTM launches

We've gone over what PLG is and isn't, and we've gone over what the PMM’s role in a PLG org looks like. Now let's talk about how to get a seat at the table.

I love frameworks – I use them as part of every single thing I do. I’m going to share the one that I use time and time again when I'm trying to get a seat at the table. It consists of three main pillars, which are each broken down into smaller steps:

1. Develop extreme ownership
2. Create visibility
3. Establish a cadence with leadership

Let’s take a closer look.

Pillar one: Develop extreme ownership

Step one: Establish strategy ownership

I know strategy ownership is talked about a lot, but people often forget how much that ownership needs to be repeated consistently to stakeholders.

I recommend creating a sort of elevator pitch explaining who you are and your role at the company. Most importantly, you want to explain how what you do ladders back up to the business.

What business impact are you going to drive by leading this product launch or by creating this new initiative in the company? If you can set that out clearly, you’ll be well on your way to establishing strategy ownership.

Step two: Define swimlanes

The boundaries between product marketing and, for instance, content or sales enablement can often be very blurry. To establish extreme ownership, we need to make sure we identify the things we’re fully owning, the things we're supporting, and the things we just need to approve.

Step three: Make alignment a deliverable

It can be hard to find enough time in the day to hop into meetings with leadership, give them updates on what's happening, and make sure that they're bought into whatever big decisions you're making.

Yet this is an important part of product marketing's role, so making sure you have this listed as a deliverable is really important to ensure the success of your ownership.

Pillar two: Create visibility

Here’s the step-by-step guide I use to create visibility at every company I join:

Step one: Create a Slack channel and add stakeholders to it.

Step two: Pin relevant documents and the project tracker to the top.

Step three: Post an intro message explaining the goal of the channel, the cadence at which you'll post, and guardrails (if any) for others commenting or posting in the channel.

Step four: Post weekly updates highlighting progress, bummers, and blockers.

Step five: Celebrate your wins! Call out if something was an experiment, a quick win, or a strategic initiative.

This Slack channel is going to be vital. Stakeholders want to be included and know what's going on, but sometimes it's just too much to sit in meetings with all of these people all the time. By having this async channel, you're able to keep them all in the loop.

Pillar three: Establish a cadence with leadership

Anytime I join a new company or take on a new project, I send a Slack message to leadership. My goal is simple: get 15 minutes on their calendar. Here’s the template I use:

How to prove success

Lastly, let’s talk about how to prove success. As I said, I love frameworks, so I’ve got another one to share with you.

Step one: Develop a hypothesis

Hypotheses are core to the cultural aspect of a PLG company, and a good hypothesis contains three core elements:

1. A goal – This should ladder back up to the company’s mission and Northstar metrics.
2. An outcome – What does success look like, what impact will this have, and what is the cost? You need to establish these things ahead of time.
3. The why – Why are you doing this? Does it support the company’s mission? Why are you prioritizing this today? What will happen if you don’t do this? What pain point are you trying to solve? You need to be able to answer all of these questions in your conversations with leadership.
   

Step two: Start the PMM PLG framework

Once you've developed a hypothesis, it’s time to start the PMM framework. I like to think of this in four easy steps: learn, create, do, and repeat. First, you're learning about your users.

Next, you're creating messaging and positioning docs and persona guides. Then you’re doing – executing, aligning, and enabling before you begin the cycle again.

Step three: Do a cross-functional retrospective

First, you’ll need to implement a feedback survey. You can do this immediately after you've launched the product – you don’t need to wait until you have KPIs. Ask your stakeholders what went well, what didn't, and what could be improved. All of these qualitative insights are really important.

Next, it’s time to gather KPIs to find out if your hypothesis was accurate. This can sometimes be done immediately, but usually, you’ll need a little bit more time to get any meaningful data.

The most important thing about these KPIs is that they ladder back up into the goals that you initially set. Let’s say your goal is to increase adoption – tracking the number of impressions on an email is not going to tell you if you achieved that goal, so make sure your metrics are meaningful.

Finally, share your learnings. Notice I said “share your learnings” and not “celebrate your wins.” Hypotheses are all about proving and failing. A culture where you can celebrate your learnings no matter what the outcome and then pivot, optimize, and adapt is the core cultural aspect of a PLG company.