Lucid is the main supplier of visible collaboration software program with over 70M customers worldwide. Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Technique and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Gross sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG firm to a PLG and Gross sales-Led firm.
As we all know at the moment, a powerful product-led movement begins with a powerful product. Lucid launched in 2010 (earlier than PLG was a time period), and their workforce had an intense deal with product early on, a lot in order that the COO on the time learn by means of tons of of hundreds of buyer help tickets to listen to instantly from clients. Of their first yr, that they had their first paying buyer.
Do One thing Unscalable to Do One thing Scalable
Studying by means of over 100k help tickets isn’t scalable. Of all of the unscalable issues Lucid’s COO might do, why that? There isn’t a substitute for the voice of the shopper. The PLG rules which can be foundational to Lucid have been outlined, however what these clients wanted was:
- A simple, quick path to person worth
- Easy pricing and seamless enlargement
- Widespread discoverability
Lucid employs a freemium mannequin, changing customers to paid plans early on. As they started to distinguish the product and add extra worth, that meant upselling clients and creating an enlargement path. To do that, Lucid invested in a progress workforce tasked with iterating on all features of pricing, packaging, click on pathing, and CTAs.
They turned true champions of their inner tradition of experimentation and outlined Lucid’s PLG mannequin. That third precept, widespread discoverability, drives distribution. For Lucid, this meant a number of issues.
- You should be discovered the place customers are trying
- You will need to work the place customers work
- Your customers can uncover you thru their colleagues
Investing in website positioning early on, rating for over a thousand key phrases, becoming a member of ecosystems, investing in integrations, and driving that discoverability by means of their product have been the keys to Lucid’s commercialization efforts. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than they landed their first Enterprise buyer in 2012.
Your First Enterprise Buyer
Lucid’s first Enterprise buyer was a big publishing home within the U.Ok. It required Lucid to vary its product, course of, and general person and administration techniques to have the ability to scale with the shopper.
It additionally required them to:
- Negotiate their first Enterprise buyer contract
- Bear deep safety evaluations
When you land your first Enterprise buyer, it could be time to construct that first gross sales workforce. Lucid employed somebody with a enterprise background below a particular mission. They talked to clients and friends within the business to construct an inside gross sales movement.
That individual flew solo for some time, making an attempt totally different gross sales methods to seek out the best formulation earlier than hiring 4 salespeople. Your first rent wears many hats, however as you scale, you begin constructing out extra particular roles.
Constructing a PLG + PLS Movement
Lucid’s merchandise are typically thought-about horizontal. Each information employee can use them, so that they have a scaled and diversified person base. With PLG, you concentrate on the person’s wants, discovery, the trail to worth, and extra. However for product-led gross sales, you incorporate the shopper’s wants primarily based on the traits of their industries, geographies, languages, and so forth.
These traits decide how the shopper purchases, adopts and engages together with your account workforce to derive worth from the software program. In fact, it turns into extra advanced in bigger organizations. That is the place product-led gross sales is available in.
As Lucid layered in product-led gross sales, they stayed true to their PLG rules. Prospects nonetheless wanted easy pricing and seamless enlargement.
For a PLG movement, you might have standardized paperwork, phrases of providers, and safety paperwork. With a PLS movement, it includes addressing extra advanced buying behaviors like enhanced authorized, safety, and compliance measures, and you have to prepare your workforce on these complexities.
You’ll be tempted to facilitate each buyer’s needs, however you may’t try this at scale. You may solely deal with a restricted quantity of hand-holding and customizations.
Complicated Adoption, Utilization, and Engagement
Onboarding and coaching look totally different for a buyer vs. a person in PLG. With PLG, you’re onboarding your customers, and their journey is outlined on day zero. However in product-led gross sales, each person’s day zero is totally different.
As a substitute of a single person journey, you might have a set of person journeys, making it extra advanced. And, as your gross sales workforce engages with bigger organizations, clients have extra sophisticated and technical wants.
You’ll need somebody internally who can deal with these queries initially, who you may lean on to attend buyer conferences and assist develop sample recognition. That’s not scalable, however you glean beneficial info on easy methods to add worth and scale the operate.
Increasing Internationally
A serious milestone of scaling from PLG to PLS is increasing internationally. Let’s have a look at Lucid’s timeline. They needed to make investments quite a bit upfront to ensure they have been prepared to fulfill the wants of a worldwide person. All PLG rules nonetheless apply to international customers, so that they wanted to increase their language choices and enhance the person expertise of the product.
They made the next changes:
- Discover the straightforward, quick path to person worth for the non-English person
- Hold pricing easy
- Native was key with expanded currencies and discoverability in new areas.
The core to your product is knowing your buyer’s advanced wants. How do they buy software program, undertake it, and interact with account groups to derive worth? Prospects’ wants additionally differ from area to area, so how do you remedy this complexity?
- In the beginning, you need to have proximity to your clients
- You need to converse and have as many languages as doable to serve clients
- There are particular guidelines in a neighborhood area, so that you need to have the ability to adhere to regulatory compliance primarily based on location
- You need to function in probably the most environment friendly means doable, with a quick buyer suggestions loop
The place to Increase
When increasing your workforce, you must take into consideration 3 key elements
- Attracting high expertise
- Value
- Ease of operations
From there, you want the unique touchdown workforce who will increase the workforce. These individuals are normally seasoned leaders in gross sales, buyer success, and revops. They need to be extremely cross-functional and know easy methods to navigate your gross sales movement.
Now, 33% of Lucid’s income is from EMEA. Including regional groups means you scale quicker, function extra effectively, and obtain your objectives. It doesn’t occur in a day, however it’s definitely worth the effort. Worldwide enlargement is just doable when you might have a powerful partnership and inner alignment between product, advertising, and gross sales.
The Gross sales-Led Buyer Journey
The client journey in a sales-led movement creates a whole lot of blurred traces of possession internally, so you must be tight on goals between product, advertising, and gross sales. The particular sauce is establishing the way you’ll combine gross sales. The primary gross sales rent at Lucid wasn’t a salesman, and so they constructed out the gross sales operate as a result of they have been deeply conversant in PLG and had sturdy relationships with the advertising and product groups.
To scale PLS, you want a powerful suggestions loop for your entire firm. As you layer on gross sales, that movement requires quantity of evangelism, integration, and disruption to evolve the corporate into two totally different motions.
Sign Optimization
When occupied with a partnership, there’s no higher method to internally mirror than speaking about sign optimization. You could be conversant in product-qualified leads, accounts, and customers, which implies figuring out the best individuals on the best accounts on the proper time with the best actions.
That additionally means product, advertising, and gross sales should be tightly aligned on the definitions of every as a result of they’ll always evolve as you iterate, launch new merchandise, and evolve the motions.
Within the early days at Lucid, a very powerful factor to be aligned on was who wasn’t the shopper reasonably than who gross sales ought to interact with. This means of elimination helped them calibrate and leverage the chief benefit of PLG, quantity.
Key learnings as you iterate.
- The larger the pattern measurement, the quicker you be taught
- Begin with actions after which construct alerts. For plenty of PLG firms with a powerful movement and tradition of experimentation, they usually over-calibrate these alerts
- There’s extra to this than lead and account scoring. You want a democratized set of data on your gross sales workforce to leverage and inform how they will add worth to clients
Key Takeaways
You might want to be tightly aligned together with your individuals, processes, and techniques. Crew-based promoting is on the core of alignment as a result of it’s as a lot a PLG movement as a sales-led one. The important thing takeaways for scaling from a PLG to PLG+SLG movement are:
- Experimentation should be on the core of how you use
- Doing one thing unscaled can allow you to scale quicker
- As you layer in product-led gross sales, you have to keep true to the enterprise mannequin and PLG rules
