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As the software industry has shifted to a product-led growth (PLG) approach to building and growing, the need for a new kind of CRM has emerged.
PLG is a new approach to CRM that looks at the full lifecycle of a customer, from the first time they show up on your website, to signing up for your product, inviting users, and expanding. It’s built on the concept of customer growth being a hill that you continue to climb rather than a funnel you fall through once. Instead of an opportunity ending when it’s closed, that’s really just the start of your relationship in a PLG world and a PLG CRM should recognize that.
What problems does PLG CRM solve?
Unfortunately, too many CRM systems are little more than a dumb database that you have to fight with salespeople to keep updated. It’s been that way for too long, and something’s got to give. At the center of the shift to PLG CRM are three big issues with the traditional approach:
Best Practices
Like most business systems, a PLG CRM is only going to be as good as the data available. While most PLG CRMs can pull data from a variety of sources (Customer Data Platform [CDP], Stripe, Data Warehouse, etc.), some amount of data must be in place to get value. Likewise, the better tagged and organized that data is, the easier it will be to get started with a PLG CRM.
Beyond that, it’s important to have a sense of your key go-to-market metrics and events. Having a definition for what a product-qualified lead is and the events that lead up to it and other critical sales milestones will help drive immediate value in a PLG CRM.
In addition, there are ways to further enrich your marketing and product experience to better enable sales and go-to-market teams to understand customer needs without needing to ask questions. Ensuring data from your Docs are feeding into your product signals and even designing marketing pages to better extract intent information can be important steps to getting an even richer view of your customer in your PLG CRM.
Use Cases
There are many different use cases for a PLG CRM. Here are a few common ones:
What to look for when choosing a PLG CRM?
A PLG CRM should:
In the end, PLG CRMs are tools that should allow everyone in the organization to take part in driving customer growth.
This post was originally published on Modern Data Stack.