Hello world

Kicking off the Product Pepper newsletter.

There’s a lot of interest in product-led growth (PLG) these days. Where this was initially a growth motion mainly used by startups, nowadays there are few companies large or small whose board or CEO haven’t asked their team to explore the potential of PLG for their business. Success stories of companies like Slack, Zoom and Figma got everybody wondering if they can get a piece of the pie.

There’s a lot of great content on PLG available already, but I’ve noticed that much it tends to be of the religious kind. Basically everybody should be doing PLG and it should be your primary growth motion. And if you don’t, you will inevitably lose to the competition.

Don’t get me wrong, the content is typically good and I follow many blogs and podcasts about PLG, I just don’t believe in this fatalistic view. It always depends which growth motion makes most sense. It depends on the business, the customer, the product, the pricing, and I could go on. 

The goal is not to be Product-Led

The goal is not to be product-led — it’s to grow the business. PLG principles have been around for much longer than the term itself. What we used to call “an intuitive onboarding experience” or “self-service” is now called PLG. Growth hacking principles applied in B2B are now called PLG. Even inviting new users is called PLG.

And now new terms are emerging like Product Led Sales. I believe we’ve gone a bit too far with the PLG religion, and it’s making people misunderstand what was the main point of PLG in the first place. Because PLG is great!

But the product is just another tool in your tool chest for growth. Just like marketing, sales, partnerships, referrals, and so on. It was never meant to be product-ONLY, but unfortunately this is what people have come to understand.

And now we need to introduce a term like Product Led Sales to make clear that you can still operate a sales team when leveraging the product in your growth strategy.

A PLG playbook for existing B2B companies

What I think companies actually need to understand, is in which cases to apply product-led principles and how to go about the implementation. Again, it’s not about being product-led, it’s about understanding in which parts of the growth strategy using the product as growth lever is a good way to achieve the goals the company set out to achieve. 

This is especially true for companies that are active today and are not applying product-led principles throughout their growth model yet. And I would say that this is most of the B2B companies out there. Most B2B companies are still mainly growing through sales, and if they were to bluntly apply the existing PLG playbook they would be putting their existing growth at risk.

If you are growing through sales today, your only real option is to gradually add elements of PLG to that. To do this we need to understand the different PLG approaches and what differences you can expect at an operational level, so you can prepare your organization the right way and achieve quick wins to build momentum. 

What we need therefore, is a playbook for existing B2B companies to start introducing product-led principles. 

Using PLG when it’s appropriate

This needs to take into account the type of product the company offers, the market it operates in, the size and success of the company, as well as its ability to operate the processes required for PLG to thrive. There is no silver bullet for this, it’s different per company. And through a thorough analysis you’ll come to see that in some cases PLG will be a great idea, while in other cases there are better alternatives. 

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in the potential of PLG - I do, very much so. I think it’s one of the most powerful ways to grow a business today. I believe there are many macro trends pointing towards the growing importance of PLG. And I am convinced that for many companies eventually there will be no way around applying at least some product-led principles.

But that doesn’t mean that every problem you encounter today needs to be solved with PLG. Or that it needs to be solved only with the product as a growth driver.

My goal is to make you feel empowered to use or not use PLG by itself or in combination with a sales team or any other growth possibility you have at your disposable.

I will also cover the changes you’ll need to make in the different parts of your customer experience and your organization to become more product-led. Where you will start and how far you will take it is then up to you, and I’ll try to provide some guidance for that too.

What’s next

In the next article I’ll expand on how PLG can be applied in the different moments of the customer journey to drive your business’ growth strategy. See you there!