With rising costs, inflation fears, and higher interest rates, many companies are looking at how they control costs. At the same time, they don’t expect their financial results to drop. All this has me thinking about the intersection of Product Led Growth (PLG) and Customer Success for growth.
I was introduced to PLG in 2020 when I read Wes Bush’s book called Product Led Growth. PLG relies on your product as the main vehicle to try, acquire, expand, and retain customers. The product experience lends itself for trials, in app onboarding, next best actions, purchase, and even renewal. Done right, it’s a frictionless way to distribute and drive adoption of technology. You’ve experienced PLG products if you use Slack, Shopify, or Zoom.
BVP laid out key principles of PLG:
If PLG embeds hooks that drive onboarding, adoption, expansion, and renewals, do you really need a CSM on a PLG product? This was the question I wanted to answer. I dug into literature and found a great e-book, Digital Customer Success Maturity Model, by Gainsight. The maturity model is a phased approach to scaling Customer Success leveraging things like self-service communities and content, scaled outbound messaging, journey maps, and you guessed it... PLG!
The e-book is good so I recommend you read it. I’ve summarized some points on 1 slide for processing and discussion. I’ve added an orange hand next to the content I added as take-aways. Gainsight did not review or endorse my take-aways.
A few things strike me:
1.) PLG is a team sport on steroids. If you have worked in tech, you know that no product comes to life without collaboration. However, in PLG, your sales, marketing, and CS teams will likely never meet your users face to face. There’s a ridiculous amount of collaboration across Product Marketing, CS, and Product Management to coordinate content, messages, and answer client questions. Without collaboration, marketing and CS will be contacting your customers from both sides and you will look like siloed teams. However, there should be a team that takes the lead in the different phases. I’ve taken the liberty to declare who I think leads that phase.
2.) The more automation and instrumentation, the less human engagement needed. As your product adopts in app onboarding, in app messaging, instrumentation to trigger next best action, in app purchases and expansion, the less direct human engagement is needed with clients to drive adoption.
3.) AND not an OR. The maturity model is not linear. You could adopt multiple paths. For example, a self-service community for users to get questions, pooled CSMs to act as SMEs in office hours, and PLG in product. There’s no orange hand here without mucking up the visual.
This model helped me conclude that YES, you can have CS on PLG, but it looks different than high touch CSMs. It’s likely a pooled CSM team working at scale on a higher ratio of CSM : User on a select product set in a select market (ex. SMB) with communities, content, and great PLG products.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and how you are thinking about Digital CS and PLG.
Continued CS,
Janine