PLG (Product Led Growth) naturally aligns itself with this buyer behavior shift. There’s more emphasis than ever on being transparent and being easy to work with.

PLG lets you lead with your product, showing potential buyers the value you can bring upfront.

But beyond that, there are hard benefits to PLG as well.

Product pulls you forward
A lot of times, especially in early-stage companies, it can seem like an uphill battle, constantly trying to push your product to your ICP.
In PLG, with the right product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams to support, your product will pull you forward. Your ICP will see the benefits of your solution without any unnecessary friction.

They’ll invite their team members, who want more access to features and integrations.

A lot of this can be done in a self-service model, again with an emphasis on ease-of-use - skipping the complicated IT and procurement processes that plague the sales-led, or enterprise, model.

Shorten the feedback loop
A constant struggle in marketing and sales: what channels are bringing in the most customers and what do these people care about?

Doing customer research can be a time-consuming task, but in PLG you can build in prompts to ask customers for demographic and firmographic data, in a directly attributable sign-up you can see where that demand was created, and you’ll get valuable usage data on what parts of your product your ICP cares the most about.

With PLG what could normally take a year or more could only take a few months. With more users trying your product early on, you can set up mechanisms to collect usage data, product feedback, and carefully refine your GTM strategies.

Land and expand
A phrase that nearly everyone in the B2B world has heard at least once. PLG is designed to get people in the door and expand over time. This is even more effective (and faster) because you’re often working directly with the end user not an executive, a common issue with the enterprise model.

Trying to get the attention of a C-Suite executive is harder, slower and more expensive than marketing to the end user of your product.

It’s a much easier proposition to get in the door with a highly effective but lower-cost option and then expand with higher value offerings once you’ve built trust with your customer.

Much Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Similar to the above bullet, it’s just easier to market, sell and work with the end user rather than an executive who is typically stretched for time.

That means faster sales cycles and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) thanks to more word-of-mouth advertising and a modern buyer experience which becomes viral with the rise of communities and review sites.

By Amenallah Reghimi

Keywords: AI, Customer Experience, Future of Work