PLG CRM

What is a PLG CRM?

PLG CRM is a term we first ran into from a post by Astasia Myers at Redpoint Ventures. In her post, Product-Led Growth (PLG) CRM — A Primer, she describes the problem in much the same ways we do:

Why does PLG require new sales tooling? Existing CRMs like Salesforce do a great job as a source of truth for prospective and existing customers’ information, sales engagement history, opportunity tracking, and governance. They don’t give GTM teams visibility into free plans, trial, or non-paying users. Traditional CRMs don’t capture information about product usage and user journeys before payment. This information is crucial for sales reps trying to identify signals of whether a person or account is ready to convert. Without this information it is hard for sales reps to prioritize leads. Traditional CRMs also don’t help sales reps understand the next best action to win an account. We’ve heard some PLG companies have already felt the pain and have built internal solutions using Segment and Looker to solve the problem. A modern PLG-focused CRM is needed.

While we believe the problem goes beyond PLG companies, this is very much aligned with our vision to give everyone in an organization the ability to drive growth. What makes Variance different is two big things:

1. It was built for everyone: most data tools were built for people who can write SQL. Even the ones that claim they're simpler still require a pretty strong understanding of what's there and how it works. Variance is different. We're doing the hard work of translating the data into the language of sales. All you have to do is follow the accounts and contacts you care about.
2. It's about action, not analysis: you surely already have a BI tool (or three) laying around. They're great, but they're fundamentally designed to look backward and understand trends and changes. Our goal is to make all that same data operational in the moment: allowing you to take actions when your prospects and customers do. Big prospect just invite three new users onto the platform? Reach out. Mid-size customer just check out the pricing page? Good time to drop a text.

How is the Variance approach different?

Most of the other companies working in this space are focused on providing scores and other aggregate data to help with lead qualification. While we believe that's important, and have the ability to sync with your CRM, our focus is much more on empowering everyone in the organization to drive growth. We think the people on the front-line, whether in sales, success, marketing, or product, can all help grow customers if they had better and simpler access to data.

Our app revolves around simple concepts like Following and Streams that makes it easy to access all your customer data in real-time. What's more, Variance is deeply integrated with Slack, to put all your data right where you work.

Get in Touch

Whether you're a PLG company or not, we'd love to talk to you. You can dig into our Docs, check out our blog, or just reach out. We are adding new customers to our early access program every day. If you'd like to try out Variance or check our our on-demand demo, just click below.👇