Gartner is out with a new 109-page(!) report on CRM. Our interest lies in Product Led Growth or Product Led Revenue as defined it in this report. Gartner has the category approaching the peak of the Hype Cycle, which tends to mean there is a lot of buzz around it, but the market penetration doesn’t match the hype. 

David Yockelson of Gartner pegs PLG penetration at less than 1% of the target audience and puts its maturity at embryonic. His rubric also sees PLG as “highly” beneficial to the enterprise and 2-5 years away from mainstream adoption. 

Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM

I specifically appreciated some of the drivers for PLG tools like Variance and the deficiency in the market. Without a solution, revenue teams are left to cross their fingers and hope they’ve got the data they need and a team ready to use it. Some of David’s specific calls outs for the drivers behind enterprise companies needing solutions are: 

SaaS providers pursuing PLG have typically undertaken significant data engineering and integration work to accomplish these elements, but the resulting constructs are inflexible and driven by data engineers. 

Our customer page has many examples of customers who struggled to scale efforts around PQLs (Product Qualified Leads) because of a lack of engineering resources. With Variance, this can be set up in minutes and can be tweaked by revenue operations without relying on engineering resources. 

■ CRM platforms can’t address or accommodate users and usage data, yet the account information they hold is necessary to enrich the user records. 

Our new embedded Salesforce product was built for this exact use case. Now with Variance you can access rich customer data right inside of an Account or Contact record. 

■ Marketers and sellers need a tailored environment to identify, test and delineate PQLs, integrate with account and other intent data, and create automated or human sales-assisted actions or workflows.

Here is a great example of this in action with our customer, Paperspace and their CRO Ben Lamson: 

"Variance provides our sales and customer success teams critical insight into how our users are interacting with our products. This data lets us know exactly when to reach out and prioritize who we invest our time in for the highest ROI."

These drivers match why even the most tech-forward B2B companies in the world choose systems like Variance over trying to roll this solution out themselves. 

Gartner also gives some great advice to prospective companies interested in looking for a solution: 

■ Favor product-led revenue applications that can blend intent signals between MQL/SQL sources and PQLs to address both bottom-up and top-down sales motions.

The key here is how to think about event data that goes beyond just product usage—how you can take in to account other signals that can come from your website or even the rest of your tech stack. We cover this quite a bit in our Minimum Viable Milestones Guide in the pre-sales process. 

The one area that Gartner didn’t cover that I believe is worth mentioning is the expansion role within a product led revenue motion, something we think is increasingly important as companies weather this recession. Similar to all the reasons that Gartner highlights around why you want to configure and build PQLs, the same can be said for the milestones that exist after the first transaction and how you want to think about your EQL (Expansion Qualified Leads) process. 

Thanks to Gartner and David for continually highlighting and helping us build the category. If you are interested in learning more about Product Led Revenue and/or you want to trial Variance, you can do so here

Try the Variance customer growth platform

Join some of the world's top software companies that use Variance to power data-driven sales.
Get Started 🎉

Subscribe to Variance News

An inside look at building a company delivered in (roughly) bi-monthly installments

Thanks for signing up.
Look out for our newsletter!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Get to know Variance

We believe the best way to learn about a product is to read the documentation. Have a look around.

Explore our Docs