Episode #17: The Rise of PLG and the Next Gen of Marketing Automation - Dave Rigotti
A deep dive into top-performing PLG playbooks and the future of PLG automation.
PLG has had a renaissance over the past few years.
It’s not hard to see why:
Customers love the ease and confidence of trying a product before committing and the ability to pay with a credit card vs. a lengthy sales process.
Companies / investors love the potentially lower CAC that comes with a self-serve business as well as the greater possibility for product stickiness, automation, organic growth loops, and net positive NRR. All this can make PLG the epitome of what’s great about SaaS.
And yet, despite these benefits, PLG businesses have been underserved in the marketplace. Marketing automation platforms, growth playbooks, reporting frameworks, and “best practices” have been largely designed around the needs of their sales-led cousins.
I’ve lived the journey of being a PLG business using sales-led software. You can make it work, but it always feels like you’re colouring outside the lines - never truly natural.
Now that’s changed. PLG has its own communities, methodologies, frameworks, and tools.
And today's guest, Dave Rigotti, has quickly become one of the godfathers of PLG as a thought leader and co-founder at Inflection.io.
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About Today's Guest
Dave Rigotti is an entrepreneur and marketing leader dedicated to furthering the B2B marketing industry. Dave was VP of Marketing at Bizible (acquired by Marketo), Director of ABM at Adobe, and now is co-founder and marketing leader at Inflection.io.
Take-Aways
PLG offers a better buying experience
Chatting with Dave made me think about how sub-optimal the typical SaaS procurement process is.
Sales-led SaaS is time-consuming for both parties, has a lot of inefficient information-exchange, is risky and stressful for buyers who aren’t totally sure what they’re getting until after they sign, often requires long-term commitment, and is an extremely costly motion due to sales commissions.
With product-led, your customers can start immediately, fully vet the product before buying, have low commitment, and can purchase much more easily and quickly. On top of all that, it costs less for the company to acquire them.
Obviously product-led doesn’t work for all products or all buyers. But when it does work, the benefits are very compelling.
A sales-led stack doesn’t scale for PLG
This one really hit home for me thanks to my experience of being a PLG marketer in a sales-led product marketplace.
For example - “traditional” marketing automation platforms use the CRM as the source of truth for data. But for PLG marketers, some of the most critical data is in the product or data warehouse. Integrating product data into Marketo or Pardot isn’t impossible but certainly isn’t seamless and usually requires a developer.
PLG volumes are often an order of magnitude bigger than sales-led in terms of users and activity. Software that’s priced for sales-led volume can become hugely expensive in a PLG world.
PLG Ops pros need to develop a next level of data literacy
The power of PLG is leveraging product activity data to create timely, relevant, and helpful communications.
But this requires PLG operators to have in-depth knowledge of how product event data is structured and produced.
Many sales-led operators today aren’t as familiar with event taxonomies or schemas nor do they work daily with data teams. But these skills will be table stakes for PLG operators.
PLG can learn a lot from B2C
Because of its lower sticker price, PLG purchases can be more impulse-based and require less consideration.
For this reason, a lot of the best PLG campaigns have similarity to B2C - things like abandoned cart campaigns and data-driven summaries like Spotify Wrapped (which Dave calls “mini email-based QBRs”).
PLG and Sales-led funnels aren’t mutually exclusive
It’s normal and desirable to have a variety of sales-led motions running along-side a product-led motion.
These can consist of product specialists that are there to enable and help users, often based on product triggers.
Or they can be enterprise sales people who serve larger companies that can’t buy with a credit card or who “graduate” beyond the scope of what the product-led plans can offer.
While having multiple motions does create complexity and risk of toe-stepping, Dave says it doesn’t need to be perfectly coordinated or over-architected to work well.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:39] - What is PLG?
[04:00] - Why PLG has gotten so popular recently
[05:50] - Reasons Dave focused his new company on PLG
[07:26] - Why sales-led software doesn’t scale for PLG
[07:40] - Playbooks of top PLG companies
[14:34] - Inflection’s data structure
[19:12] - Opportunities and challenges of PLG ops
[22:46] - Funnels, attribution, and PLG
[25:31] - Scoring in PLG
[26:47] - Top-down vs. bottom-up PLG motions
[29:34] - Dave’s journey from startup to enterprise to startup
[33:17] - Sustaining product agility as a startup
[35:01] - How it feels to see Bizible not evolve after acquisition
[36:06] - How to break the cycle of product stagnation as you scale
Resources
Inflection.io - Official Inflection website