Product-led Growth (PLG) meets Revenue Operations.

In this post, we discuss issues in B2B SaaS GTM models that led to the biggest movement in SaaS, product-led-growth (PLG), how B2B can learn from B2C principles, and how RevOps can be the connective tissue between product and revenue teams.

See when PE firms gifted us 'PLG' around two years ago?

In fact OpenView, a growth-equity firm, has been writing extensively about PLG since 2018. 

PLG is perhaps the biggest major movement to come by in SaaS since the beginning of the concept.

That said, freemium or trial-to-cash has been around for a LONG time. Design principles to make products self-serve has been the genesis of nearly all B2C products. This is not a new concept. 

Yet we needed to be hit over the head with a new acronym to see great product design + hyper automation of the sales process as the GTM revolution that it truly is. Why?

We brand things that are neglected.

PLG had to happen because a majority of today's SaaS companies have serious issues. 

CAC payback ratios are out of control - why? Buyers want to buy on their own terms yet GTM teams are continuing to deploy tactics that worked 10+ years ago.

Marketing teams continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on e-books, paid search, cold outbound, and email nurture campaigns. RevOps teams support these efforts with expensive tools and countless hours of support.

Result? Shoving your product down a buyer's throat BEFORE adoption. Before they see the value. 

This brings high support costs and early churn. 

The SaaS sales process and the resulting data is extremely flawed yet we pretend to make 'data-driven' decisions from it. 

B2C has had fully automated  'sales stages' and funnel data for years. The shopping cart is understood by everyone and regardless of familiarity with a particular e-commerce website, any user can configure their cart with no help.

This is because pricing is simple. Offerings are easy to understand / well packaged. But most importantly, the product team designed an experience for buyers to understand the value of what is being purchased and take the necessary steps all on their own to complete their purchase.

See this chart from Google analytics.

 Nobody asked a seller to update the sales stages for a given shopper. The sales stages moved all by themselves based on the actions the buyer took. 

The resulting data as a result is objective and showing where the buyer got stuck.

There are tools built onto the e-commerce website to watch an entire user session to understand behavior and make product refinements to increase conversion rates. 

What doB2B SaaS companies d in comparison? In B2B, 99% of the team you will find the funnel and funnel data in the CRM completely disconnected from the buyer. Sales stages are changed by sellers based on their interpretation of what took place. 

Then RevOps collects this data and shows it the head of revenue, who then concludes we have big drop off after the Demo stage... let me throw a $200K sales off-site and train my sellers on how to improve their demo.

Time spent on CPQ is madness. Configure. Price. Quote. In B2B SaaS sales, the back and forth it takes to coordinate between the buyer, seller, buyer's finance team, seller's manager etc. etc. to get a 'cart' right is mind boggling.

I won't even get into what it takes to implement and maintain a CPQ tool. Why can't the buyer configure, price, and quote themselves? 

These are just some examples of issues created by the short-comings of the sales-led GTM motions today.

To be fair, this is not entirely a GTM team problem. Product team needs to lead.

The fact that we think of Marketing, Sales, and Customer success as the go-to-market team and the Product team absolved themselves of the responsibilities to go-to-market is the failing of product management as a discipline.

Products that are designed to delight customers can hyper-automate the sales process and we are nowhere near that.

Imagine a world where the sales stages change by themselves, buyers CPQing their own 'cart', CSMs spending their time actually talking to customers to uncover unmet needs vs. handholding them to use the product. That world can only happen if the product and engineering resources are at the table working side by side with the marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams to make this happen.

We work with many SaaS revenue leaders and products that are ready for PLG are very hard to come by. This is a failing of the product management function.

PLG is not a world where sales does not exist.

PLG is a world where sales focuses on what can't be automated - complex procurement or security review procedures, strategic expansion into departments, unlocking and deploying deeper integrations to make the product more sticky.

This is a world where sales is actually selling through relationships and tapping into their creativity.

It is time RevOps leaders start paying more attention to PLG as well... it is time we align our orgs to collaborate better with product and engineering teams.

Revenue Operations as the connective tissue as companies adopt PLG principles and unleash their self-serve funnels

In Revenue, we are arguably the biggest sufferers of the short-comings of the product function (and sales-led efforts trying to make up for it). Yet, we are not in a position to adopt PLG principles on behalf of the company.

Adopting PLG principles is the job of the executive team.

Once the movement has begun inside a company, RevOps can serve as the connective tissue between product and revenue teams to reimagine the funnel, processes, systems, data etc.

Armed with more advanced technical abilities (because the product and eng teams are at the table now), RevOps can be a lot more effective in systems, data, and actually shift their attention to work that is more creative in nature. 

In fact, there is a lot product managers can learn from RevOps professionals and vice versa. The closer collaboration would level up both functions.

More 'PLG meets RevOps' content coming in the coming weeks. Subscribe to our blog for more or follow us on Linkedin.