Repeatability vs Personalization

Choosing between PLG and Sales - Part 2/3

Last week we looked at the trade off between Scalability and Time to Market when choosing between PLG and sales. This week we’ll continue that exploration by looking at the difference and Repeatability and Personalization in the two growth motions. Let’s get started.

Personalizing the experience

One of the big success drivers in sales is to make sure you personalize your message. People nowadays can smell a standard outreach template from a mile away so you need to show that you have done your homework when reaching out to a potential customer.

That means for example referring to any recent developments at their company that are worth mentioning, or relating to a recent post or piece of content that was shared by the person you are getting in touch with.

When doing PLG, personalization happens at different levels. Before the user has signed up it is quite hard to be company specific, so often a product-led experience “personalizes" around the use-case the customer is trying to do.

By solving a specific use-case the customer has, the customer feels addressed because that’s exactly what they were looking for. It is important in that case to have an efficient flow from signup into the specific use-case.

Look for example at Canva, where you can pick the type of design you’re interested in while still on the website. And as soon as you decide to get started and sign up, you land in the right type of project and can choose from templates for this specific type of design.

Once a user has signed up and more information is known, personalization in PLG can also be done based on the information and content provided or created by the user.

Especially when the customer integrates a third-party solution, like a CRM or other type of data source, the product receives a flood of new data through which personalized messages, dashboards, and other content can be created to show the user value, keep them engaged and make them come back into the product.

Nonetheless, most PLG motions don’t personalize towards the user in a way that a sales rep can. Creating a system that would be intelligent enough to mimic that kind of personal interaction would be incredibly complex. Although maybe with the increased adoption of technologies like LLMs (like ChatGPT) we’ll start seeing more of that in the future.

As of writing though, companies using PLG have a more standardized and focused approach to personalization which comes from the use case and the fact that people can work with their own data in the product.

Generating trust

For potential customers to take the leap of faith and try your product, you need to reach people at the right time, with a relevant value proposition, and create a certain level of trust that makes them willing to engage with your company.

A good sales person can go a long way in creating trust and report with the customer, even if they’ve never heard of your business. Because there is no person involved in a product-led experience, the way to achieve these things in can be quite different though from when you are interacting with a person through email or by phone.

The best way to create trust and relevance in PLG is through a true product-led user acquisition motion. This is when existing users invite people they know to collaborate or engage on something specific they want to share.

Because the invite is coming from someone they know, trust is high. After all, it would be fair to assume that someone is getting value out of a product if they think it’s worthwhile to invite us to it. After trust, relevance comes from the thing that’s being shared, be it a message, a call, a document, or anything else.

Even if your company is not well positioned to deploy product-led acquisition, there are many other ways to generate trust amongst your users.

Some of these tactics are the same as what you’d apply in sales, like showing customer testimonials or providing case studies. A good rating on customer review websites like G2 can also play a role here.

Since there is no personal conversation in which trust can be created, it’s important to have these materials available and integrated throughout the product experience to remind your users why they should continue on their journey.

Replicating success

While the level of personalization in a product-led experience cannot be as high as in a personal conversation, it does come with another benefit: repeatability.

In essence, being product-led means automating things, so that once you’ve iterated towards a process that works, you can replicate this success with every new customer that comes in.

To improve a product-led experience you need to iterate through different hypothesis on what a customer is trying to do and how to best progress them to the next phase of the customer journey.

By doing this, you also gain a much more detailed and common understanding of the intention of the user and how you can get them to value. This has further benefits when customer-facing teams are looped into this knowledge.

Imagine for example that a customer needs to connect their marketing system. There can be a clear path to this in the customer journey, however this can also be highlighted by onboarding specialists or a Customer Success Manager when they speak with the customer.

This level of repeatability is one of the things where traditional sales often still struggles. A company might have a few top performing sales reps but for some reason the rest of the team cannot achieve their level of performance. Their success is not repeatable.

This can be a major inhibitor for further growth of a company after they’ve seen first success. And while there are approaches in sales that can help you become more data driven and make that success more repeatable, those benefits are included by default when working on PLG.

In a product-led approach the entire process becomes aimed at getting the customer to take the right steps in the product, increasing their likelihood to buy every step of the way. It makes the process more targeted and makes it easier for the company to replicate their success across a wider customer base.

Sounds good, right? However this doesn’t work for all products and buying journeys. And sometimes the business doesn’t have time to figure this out. In those cases, a good sales rep can make up for a lot of this missing knowledge, at least in the short term.