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- 👓 Unlock Revenue Growth With These 5 Core PLS Playbooks
👓 Unlock Revenue Growth With These 5 Core PLS Playbooks
Ben Williams
June 25th, 2024
Hey - Ben here 👋. Welcome to the latest edition of The Product-Led Geek, the newsletter helping you get smarter about scaling with product-led strategies.
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Here’s what you’ll find in today’s PLGeek:
📅 GEEKS OF THE WEEK: 5 links for you to bookmark
🧠 GEEK OUT: Unlock Revenue Growth With These 5 Core PLS Playbooks
😂 GEEK GIGGLE: 1 thing that made me laugh this week.
Total reading time: 8 mins
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📅 GEEKS OF THE WEEK
5 bookmark-worthy links:
🧠 GEEK OUT
Unlock Revenue Growth With These 5 Core PLS Playbooks
Last week’s edition of The Product-Led Geek provided a basic primer into Product-Led Sales Playbooks.
This week I’m sharing a menu of the five most common PLS plays used to unlock revenue growth.
All of these playbooks as well as the narratives that the reps use are driven by relevant data about what’s happening inside the product within the accounts.
The 5 core PLS playbooks
Each of the playbooks below should only target accounts within your ICP. Make sure that all scoring, qualification and playbook eligibility assessment filters out none ICP accounts.
Because the playbooks will be tuned for your ICP accounts, running them with non-ICP accounts may lead to suboptimal outcomes.
Additionally, since we’re talking B2B, all of these plays will often demand engagement with multiple people within an account, so be prepared for that.
1. Unblock
First, and embodying the help don’t sell approach to product-led sales is unblocking.
Here, product specialist type roles are intervening to help accounts get to value and habits.
In an ideal world this would not be necessary. Users/teams would have sufficiently high intent and no competing priorities, and your product would perfectly self-serve onboard every new account. But that’s not reality.
It can be helpful to think of this as assisted activation, but it’s important to discover the goals of the account and help them achieve them.
Goal | Getting the user and/or their team to activate and achieve their JTBD. |
|---|---|
Targeting | Typically accounts on the Free Plan or Free Trial that have not yet activated |
When | Typically within your product activation period. |
Trigger | Signals of friction and/or activation drop-off |
Owner | Sales Assist / Product Specialists |
Different people in an account may be responsible for setup steps during the activation process so it’s common here for this to need a coordinated approach across those people.
See here for more on accounts vs users.
The more accounts that you get to establish habits around your product the more accounts in the pool that you can potentially monetise.
And since usage retention is the cornerstone of product-led growth executing this play well can boost other parts of your growth model too.
Geek Tip: Don’t be tempted to try to push these accounts to a paid plan while executing this play. If they enquire, it’s fine to discuss but otherwise this is you putting your best foot forward and establishing a trusting partnership with the people in the account. You’re helping, not selling.
2. Convert
Conversion plays take new free accounts that you determine to have high monetisation potential and converts them to paying customers.
Geek Tip: This play can devolve into the situation depicted in one of the many meme’s about PLS if not executed thoughtfully and with appropriate constraints. Ensure that account engagement is only triggered by signals demonstrative of high monetisation potential.
Hint: ‘signing up’ is NOT such a signal.
When your model becomes more accurate and predictive this play will effectively accelerate revenue that would otherwise have taken longer to materialise, and capture revenue that may otherwise have gone to competitors.
Goal | Getting a free account already realising value to convert to a paid plan. |
|---|---|
Targeting | Accounts on the Free Plan or Free Trial. |
When | Anytime - continuously monitor, but typically within 60 days of signup. |
Trigger | High monetisation potential signals in product or on adjacent surfaces (e.g. pricing page or ToS page visits) |
Owner | Sales Assist / SDRs / Velocity |
Geek Tip: It’s a great idea to build a model that can identify accounts that will likely convert on their own without human intervention, so that effort can be directed to accounts that need engagement to commit.
Additionally, PLS can be a slow burn so while you may see it is common for lots of conversions to happen within a short period post signup (e.g. 30 days), don’t assume the intent is there and wait for the relevant signals so engage, which could come much later. Engaging sooner will lead to frustrated users and frustrated reps.
3. Expand
Like Unblocking, Expansion plays are often a great place to start with PLS. You have an existing relationship with the customer, likely over a more extended period of time, so you know more about them and their usage.
There are three main types of expansion plays. It’s worth differentiating them because the signals and playbooks can be quite different.
The first and simplest is usage expansion. Typically that’s selling more seats or addons for additional volume/throughput.
The second is product expansion. With this play you are selling additional products or addons that address use cases beyond those supported by the product the customer originally purchased.
The third is plan expansion. In this play you are working to move paying customers higher up your monetisation escalator, from lower to higher tiered plans.
Goal | Get customers to increase spend with you |
|---|---|
Targeting | Accounts on a paid plan |
When | Anytime - continuously monitor |
Trigger | Threshold signals of interest in additional use cases, approaching or exceeding usage limits (seats, storage, throughput, API calls etc) and/or interest in higher plan features |
Owner | Account Managers / Account Execs / Customer Success |
Remember it’s typically less expensive to expand revenue within existing customers than it is to generate revenue through acquiring net new customers.
Geek Tip: If you monetise additional usage via addons rather than higher tiered plans, the same playbooks will typically apply.
4. Consolidate
Another common play is for sellers to consolidate multiple pockets of usage in a company.
Doing so provides significantly increased leverage for (simultaneous or at a later date) upsell to higher tiered plans, and with a PLG model has the important additional benefit of fuelling any product-based acquisition loops.
At least one of the accounts should be a paying account (Run conversion plays on matching free accounts first otherwise).
Goal | Unite multiple smaller accounts in a single consolidated account |
|---|---|
Targeting | Multiple accounts (at least one paying) with a common company domain |
When | Anytime - continuously monitor |
Trigger | Identified pockets of healthy usage. |
Owner | Account Exec / Account Manager |
Geek Tip: Consolidation is mostly relevant in large (e.g. enterprise) customers where organic bottom up adoption can happen in multiple isolated pockets with little or no knowledge of eace other.
Customer (i.e. broader company-level) benefits of consolidation include easier admin, access to governance capabilities, simpler billing, as well as more obvious ability to negotiate price and terms.
5: Prevent (Churn)
Just as you can use signals and PQA scoring to identify and prioritise accounts to engage with to monentise (or further monetise), you can use the same approach to identify accounts at risk of churn.
This is a play to restore health to an account where deteriorating usage and engagement is observed.
Goal | Driving adoption and habitual use across the account to increase usage retention and prevent dollar churn |
|---|---|
Targeting | Accounts on paid plan X |
When | Anytime - continuously monitor |
Trigger | Trending toward low usage thresholds predictive of churn |
Owner | Customer Success ++ |
The longer (duration) and faster (rate) usage is deteriorating within the account, the greater the churn risk. For some accounts, it may be a slow decline, while for others it might happen over a shorter window.
Ensure you build triggers that take these different deteriorating usage modes into account.
The longer and faster the decline, the harder the task to intervene and restore an account to good health. Leave it too long and the account will be beyond saving.
Ultimately, prevention is better than cure, so this play is best deployed along with (not as a replacement for) a holistic cross-functional strategy for ongoing customer success.
…proactive intervention is a good thing, so scoring should reflect signals of trending toward thresholds vs waiting for the thresholds to be reached. The plays you might need to run (and the effort you need to invest) to get a customer back on track will differ by how far off track they are.
More here:
Geek Note: It’s natural to evolve to have multiple variations of each of these playbooks to cover different account contexts (e.g. do you have an identified buyer within the user base (a PQL)? Or have different sales narratives for different triggering signals, account industry, primary use-case and so on).
These can be implemented as alternative flows within a playbook, or as separate plays - the choice is yours and/or determined by the capabilities and design of your tooling.
The customer journey
Remember that your PLS plays should be supportive of the customer journey.
I like to think of plays as conversion rate boosters (or limiters for churn) at different stages of the lifecycle of a customer.
With Product-Led Sales I’ll typically recommend companies take what I call a ‘land small to win big’ approach. See here:
Where to start
Conversion plays to land new paying customers is what most people immediately think of when they hear ‘Product-Led Sales’, and where most companies want to start.
But it’s not always the easiest or most appropriate place to start. It can be easier to build PLS muscle with Assist or Expansion plays.
Take a look at the above lifecycle chart, and ask yourself where your customer growth is most constrained.
And always start small:
Tiger team responsible for GTM experimentation
One highest priority goal and associated play
Good luck with it, and let me know if there’s anything you want me to go deeper with!
😂 GEEK GIGGLE
Company names be like:
Thing
Thingly
Thingsy
Thingify
ThingwiseWhat else? 😅
#buildinpublic
— Natia Kurdadze (@natiakourdadze)
4:12 PM • Jun 21, 2024
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Until next time!
Ben
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