Leverage Product Data to Drive Sales

Play Video about Aseem Chandra @Immersa- Leverage Product Data to Drive Sales Video Transcript: Our next speaker as it is asim chandra co-founder and ceo of immersa a scene co-founded in mrsa while serving as the entrepreneur in residence at mayfield and now serves as its ceo the company's mission is to bring data intelligence to every user in the enterprise previously as senior vice president for experience cloud a seam was responsible for the go to market strategy for a 3.3 Billion dollar experience cloud business at adobe during his tenure at adobe he participated in the acquisition and integration of several digital marketing companies including magento and marketo a team is on the board of gaza capital a private equity fund based in mumbai india he also advocates on behalf of the hydrocephalus association a non-profit organization that directs research on Behalf of those affected by brain injuries a frequent speaker at prominent industry conferences a scene regularly presents on leadership use of data to drive operations and business transformation customer experience and digital marketing a team holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the india institute of technology and a master's Degree in business and manufacturing systems from the university of texas i seem excited to have you take it away hi dave thanks for that introduction and thanks for creating this wonderful community of plg marketers so my name is asim and i'm the co-founder and ceo at mrsa but before i started a mrsa i was at adobe where i was part of the leadership team that created marketing clouds as a category And over the past year we've met with dozens of founders that are betting on product-led growth for building their companies in the sas space we started immersive with the mission to bring data intelligence to every user in their flow of work and as we talked to these founders we learned that product usage data is an untapped goldmine of signals so i'm here to talk to you about how to leverage product data to drive sales These signals are useful for your marketing team your sales team your service and finance team not just to your product team and as immersa we're really focused on bringing product data intelligence to customers customer-facing teams and accelerate the conversion of free trials to paid customers or to drive upsells and cross-sells and renewals now why does plg matter this is a hot topic in the tech industry Today and the idea originated from the open source community where investment in product experience was seen as the primary means to drive adoption and from there this moved on to the world of sas where companies like slack and calendly and dropbox asana twilio well known for driving massive adoption using a product-led approach now plg is a pretty fundamental shift in how software is built distributed sold And adopted and i love the data that's uh available here from uh openview partners uh offers great research on this topic uh that we've quoted here what you notice here is that plg companies tend to start a little bit slower than sas companies but they scale a lot faster after they reach a certain inflection point uh compared to their peers and that inflection point is usually at about 10 million in arr Why is that well the 10 they tend to drive non-linear growth at scale as sales are created by optimizing product adoption and customer success rather than a forced need to generate leads and therefore they create nearly twice as much in enterprise value as traditional sas companies now there are some common myths that we hear about as we talk to founders in This space and before we dive into some of the key principles uh on which plg is built from a growth standpoint let's look at some of the myths that are out there the first one that i hear the most often is that plg is just free trials well sure there is an element of free trials that is needed to drive the initial user acquisition but freemium is simply a path to introduce the end user to the product As a plg marketer your job is to take that initial moment of interest and turn it into value that the users can realize immediately as they start to use the product another myth that i hear often is that plg does not need sales or marketing and sure at the early stages of adoption end users may sign up and use the product on their own but as plg companies start to scale up marketing must create the funnel to turn those Product qualified leads into revenue and sales must engage with enterprise clients to negotiate and close on commercial terms and this last one is my favorite that plg implies that the product team is in charge quite the contrary plg approaches are successful only when there's a deep collaboration between the product team and sales service marketing and ops teams to convert and retain customers So what are some of the core principles on which prg's plg companies can scale well one of the key principles of the first one in our opinion is that plg represents a shift of power from executives making purchasing decisions to end users making those decisions and as a startup you must therefore engage in building your community of users alongside with building your product this is absolutely necessary in order to connect and learn directly from your end Users as you build your product now trying out an early stage product requires as much effort on the part of the users as it does on the part of the company that builds it let users have access to the entire product during the trial period not some subset of it the product should create value for the user before you can charge for it and then you can start to scale up as your consumers as your users start to get Value that you can scale up your pricing based on consumption in actual usage digital marketers have invested the better part of the last decade collaborating with sales to optimize customer experiences and drive leads into the sales funnel an entire new multi-billion dollar category emerged around software tools and data infrastructure known as marketing clouds later on known as experience clouds to achieve this goal Now plg marketers must collaborate with product teams to remove friction from the product itself from product onboarding process and then to optimize the in-product experience and there's an opportunity to create a similar multi-billion dollar category for companies that are building tools and data infrastructure that plg marketers and product teams are going to need so let's dig a little bit deeper and Recall what the traditional marketing funnel looks like we have invested years perfecting this funnel with algorithmic models it begins with the marketer capturing the customer at the point of awareness and qualifying them to define their budget to identify the decision maker and to figure out their decision time frame then they send this lead to the sales Team where a sales rep picks it up and then she engages with the customer and takes them through the solution fit and a purchase process next the product team sometimes together with a services organization will implement the sas product for that customer and then the customer success team will meet with the customer periodically and review quarterly business goals identify opportunities for them to get more value out of the Product and then this creates new expansion opportunities like renewals and upsell for the customer success team the process is fairly linear and has significant room for failure at each handoff point between different organizations so now let's take a look at what the plg motion looks like for the same process very different from the traditional marketing funnel in fact it is not a funnel at all It is a continuous motion to create a community of users to then drive adoption with a premium product turn the freemium users into product champions who then advocate on your behalf and drive viral adoption so what role does marketing play in this process and as with any area that is going through significant changes the role of the marketer in the plg category is continually changing and evolving At each step marketers play a critical role in creating and engaging the community then setting up an on-ramp to the free product then collaborating with the product team to minimize the time to value for for their end users and working closely with product champions so that they can advocate on your behalf inside their organizations while marketers have had Decades of experience with the traditional b2b marketing funnel in order to generate leads the tools that are necessary to drive the plg motion are just being created and every tech company that we met with is trying to cobble together a set of marketing tools but that were designed to drive a traditional linear marketing funnel and just like with digital uh just like with traditional digital marketing data is the fuel that powers the plg Motion not just for marketing but for the entire plg live life cycle so at mrsa we believe that product usage data is a goldmine of signals to drive plg adoption so for instance take product usage data it can help drive sales teams to prioritize accounts that are ready to move from free trials to a paid version or it can help sales teams figure out which customers are using more than their committed plan And help them prioritize accounts that are ready for an upsell product usage data can also provide services teams and early signal into account health if the account is under utilizing the product it is a signal for the services team to engage and avoid churn marketing teams can of course leverage product usage data to create personalized campaigns that optimize not just the web experience or the digital experience but Also the in-product experience and then drives adoption of the product with with their end user even finance needs product usage data to determine how to build customers accurately for what they've already consumed connecting the dots between product data and other data sources across the organization is absolutely critical to drive the entire plg life cycle we've talked to over 100 revenue operations Teams data analysts and founders and almost all of them run these data processes manually today in spreadsheets or they try to cobble together different sas applications that were not designed for this purpose at a mrsa we're building a data process automation platform to bring data usage uh to bring product usage data to sales service marketing and finance teams and we would love to hear your thoughts on plg as well as how to automate data Processes you can check us out at mrsa.co or you can contact me at asim mrsa.co i'm also pretty active on twitter so you can find me at steamchandra on twitter thank you so much for your time and i look forward to hearing from you

“Just like with the traditional digital marketing- data is the fuel that powers the PLG motion, not just for marketing but for the entire PLG life cycle.”

Aseem Chandra

About The Guest

Aseem is co-founder and CEO of Immersa, on a mission to bring data intelligence to everyone.

In his prior role, as senior vice president for Experience Cloud at Adobe, Aseem was responsible for all go-to-market strategy & execution for one of the largest ($3B) SaaS businesses in the world. As GM for AEM & Target, Aseem was responsible for the P&L for a $1B rapidly growing business.

Aseem brings over 20 years of business strategy and investment planning, mergers & acquisition, partnering, product strategy & market positioning, field and customer-facing skills to his role.

What We Cover

Our previous post on Driving Product Led Growth Through Data Insight highlighted how companies are moving from sales-led to product-led; leveraging product usage data to drive your business is more critical than ever before.

In this session, Aseem addresses common myths, such as – PLG does not need Sales and Marketing. He also responds to your questions such as what are the core principles of how PLG can scale your business? How the traditional marketing funnel must evolve to take advantage of product usage data? This session includes practical tips on implementing a PLG motion for SaaS companies considering a transition to the PLG motion