CROs: Do I Need a PLG Tool for Our Sales Motion?

As we talk and work with more and more companies, some patterns are emerging around the kind of organizations and sales processes that most benefit from a tool like ours. One of the first questions I typically ask is how long your sales cycle is and how many stakeholders are typically touching your product. If the answer to either of those questions is greater than two, then the value of a more data-driven approach to sales should be immediately apparent.

Whether your motion calls for a trial, a proof of value, or a proof of concept, you know that your stakeholders will be in and around your product. As you qualify through that process it’s critical that you’re able to diagnose and playback your prospect’s pain points as part of a well-orchestrated sales motion. What’s more, throughout that journey it becomes critical to understand your buyer personas (and the potential proxies they may have in place) as a way to ensure that you’re able to properly deliver on your sales methodology. 

Here is a helpful example of how you can lay out your Technical Buyer Persona in Variance. This would obviously need to be configured for your organization based on the expected behavior of each persona during an evaluation: 

Beyond just persona identification, Variance should be the source of truth for the behavioral sales stage of the prospect or customer. While it’s not a replacement for your seller-tracked stages, Milestones allows you to set up quantitative stages that trigger directly off the actions of your prospects and customers. These can (and should) extend forward before your customer even signs up for a trial, allowing you to measure and analyze the full lifecycle of your sales journey. The following graph illustrates how you can use a sales methodology like MEDDICC during a proof of trial motion: 

What a PLG Platform can do for you

If your company profile matches the characteristics above Variance is the best solution to overcome your business-critical pain points. 

Variance will enable you to:

Identify:

• Track and identify anonymous and known users, and enrich user profiles in the pre-sign up and post-sign up process.
• Sync data from your warehouse, CRM, marketing automation, CDP, and other event systems to put this valuable data directly in the hands of sales for the first time. 
  

Qualify: 

• Build milestones to lay out the golden path of how to prospect, convert and expand a customer based on a unified view of all their interactions. This golden path of quantifiable data (eg. PQL: Product Qualified Lead) can ride alongside your methodology from more simple qualification frameworks like BANT to the most complex enterprise qualification scenarios like MEDDPICC. 
  

Notify

• Update sales, marketing, success where they need to be updated and kick off workflows based on your technology stack and the data you have configured in Variance. 
  

Sell

• At the end of the day, Variance is there to reduce complexity for the sales, marketing, and CS reps so they can do what they do best, all the while knowing Variance is feeding them with an understanding of where their customer is at all times. 
  

Recommendations: 

• Have an event-driven mindset around your customer data. 
• Try to allow data to flow freely between systems of records (eg. CRM) and systems of collaboration (eg. Slack). Salesforce purchasing Slack for $28B is a big vote in them pushing their customer’s in this direction.
• Determine the golden paths in and around your product for your different buyer personas
• Map out your quantitative milestones that can complement your sales methodology.  
• Look for solutions that can work in your pre-sales and post-sales motion so that your revenue teams (Sales, Marketing, CS) aren’t silo’d and are all focused on customer outcomes that translate to growth for you.