Product led growth is all
about putting your customers on a happy path towards conversion.
How is AI impacting PLG today and what’s to come?
Let’s talk about it on today’s episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to Market Leaders.
I’m Geoff Coutts,. SVP of sales and customer operations
at Unbounce and Insightly.
Today. I’m joined by Dave Boyce, Executive Chair
and EVP of Product at Winning by Design.
Dave, welcome to the show. Geoff I can’t.
I’m super excited. It’s great day to be here.
Let’s, Let’s do this.. All right, that sounds good.
Hey, Dave, where are you joining us from today?
Where’s home for you?
I am in the mountains of Utah.
Oh, that sounds great. I’m jealous.
I’m jealous.
Maybe just before we get going, can you tell us a little bit
about Winning by Design and your role as head of product?
There? Yeah, sure.
So, winning by design.
Some of your listeners may be familiar is a go to market research
and advisory firm.
We do a lot of work with go to market leaders.
So, you know, the listeners hear on things like product
led growth, AI led growth, human led growth.
How do you design those motions?
How do you architect those motions, and then how do you train to the skills
and competencies required to execute within those motions?
Awesome. It’s, extremely topical.
And I’m really excited to talk about this today
because it’s the world that we live in today.
For example, in our SaaS company, we have both sales and product
led growth, and it’s important that we nail both of them.
And with the, you know, the the onslaught of of AI
and the possibilities it brings, it’s a pretty exciting place to start.
So maybe we’ll start here.
We’ve had a few guests on the podcast
talking about AI and how it’s impacting sales led growth.
Our conversations
today is about product led growth and how AI can facilitate that too.
Let’s maybe start by defining PLG.
We kind of assume everybody knows what it is,
but just in layman’s terms, how would you describe what what PLG is?
Yeah. There’s a couple of.
There’s lots of definitions out there,. Geoff, maybe I’ll surface a couple. One.
One is that product usage
is the source of of, pipeline.
Usually it’s the other way around.
We start with pipeline, and then we convert it,
and then we start having the usage of the product.
But in PLG, we flip it with the product gets used first.
That creates pipeline.
We turn that into monetization.
So that’s one that’s one way of thinking about we just flip those two things.
But in the process, you know, because product is at the beginning,
we’re actually de-laboring the go to market process.
Like there’s no there’s no human on the seller side assisting the customer
for getting her hands on the product, starting to achieve first impact.
You know, get, you know, starting to use it and achieve first impact.
That all happens with no labor at all.
So we’ve de-labored that that pipeline process.
Got it.
That’s a nice, clean definition.
To have to have in the back of our minds.
So without labor, we can still move forward.
Okay, so given that, what would you say makes a product
a prime candidate for a PLG-type motion versus sales led.
Yeah, it is way easier
if the product is simple to understand
because they don’t have a human there explaining it, you know, to the customer.
So if I’m the customer,. I got to understand it easy.
I’ve got to be able to solve my problem on my own without assistance.
So it’s it’s really it’s easier if there’s a single player mode, meaning
I don’t have to get two of my colleagues
or all of my department or all of my company to adapt it.
I can actually get value by myself.
Simple to understand, and usually a low price helps at least a low entry price.
Because then I can actually we can go all the way to conversion to paid
without having to have a human.
Eventually I’ll get to a teams or a pro or a teams or an enterprise, version,
and that might be more expensive, but if I can just get started easily,
a product that can be slimmed down to a single use case,
single person, easy conversion is the easiest.
All right, I love it.
That’s nice and nice and clean as well.
So the motion often starts with, an investigation
and a self-serve, motion, and you probably get into trial.
So this is where it gets fun, I think.
Let’s say I’m in a self-guided demo today of a product.
What does I look like within that experience?
Yeah.
So, you know, in PLG,
you know, we talked about there’s there’s no one in the room helping the customer.
And in PLG, we’ve had the product has had to take all of that on on its own.
So so like you’re talking about a demo, the demo would have to be
kind of self-evident and self running.
Well, what happens if I now have availability?
I have access to. I don’t have access to people.
But what if I have access to AI?
Then during the demo it can be a guided demo, like I could actually
have an AI persona, an agent or an avatar who’s guiding me through this.
I could have a conversation with her as I go through.
I can ask her questions as I go through.
So you can imagine now a more complex
product being navigable without human assistance.
Because I have AI assistance, the. AI can say, okay,
the next thing I want to show you is blah blah blah.
I can click on that piece of the demo.
I can ask her questions about what I’m seeing.
Does, you know, where does my data live when I, you know,
when if I have a multi continental deployment, is all the data
housed in Europe or is it, you know, so I can have a technical feature,
you know configuration conversations alongside the demo.
This is very cool to think about because, you know, the traditional demo is
is either a video recording or a human right.
And so now we have got essentially what starts in my mind as a video recording.
And then you can interrupt it
and ask it contextually relevant questions and change the trajectory.
I think of what I’m what what how the demo goes.
If I’m hearing you correctly. Yeah.
You can ask a demo.
You can ask a video question.
You can’t ask a self-service don’t click through demo question.
You’re going to log all these questions.
Then you got to schedule it scheduled conversation.
And the cool thing. Geoff is also I can ask stupid questions,
which is also good because I don’t always want to schedule
a 30 minute call to ask a few stupid questions.
And you won’t get embarrassed by that.
Okay.
All right, so let’s now, progress forward.
If I were to move beyond the demo
and I would start using the product and in some sort of trial motion.
How can I help me onboard?
And, And would this be via some sort of copilot?
Yeah.
So onboarding is the most critical thing of, product led growth like I have.
I have very limited attention span from that user.
And I’ve got to help her achieve first impact before
she loses her attention span before it’s like she’s moved on to the next one.
Right.
So, PLG companies have worked very, very hard on their onboarding flows.
You’ll notice they’ll try to figure out exactly what you’re trying to accomplish
and get you right to, you know, right to publishing that first report or
designing that first, project or whatever the thing is that you came to do.
So now imagine a copilot, same similar as in the demo situation.
Imagine a copilot actually helping you get to First Impact
and being able to ask a question like, hang on,
was I supposed to
upload this first, or do I, do I authenticate first?
Oh, sorry about that.
Here’s what you do.
Like natural language assistance.
This is, This is so cool how this is is, advancing.
I think about the traditional model and organizations that have struggled with
what is the right onboarding experience look like in a self-serve motion?
Can we create a checklist of things we think a customer or prospect
should run through?
And we’re forced the customer
to bounce in and out of the experience as they go through a checklist.
And what you’re describing is just so much more,
engaging.
So I love the idea of having help when someone gets stuck using the platform.
Maybe reading help documents, sifting through videos is not the quality
user experience that would lead somebody to have a great experience.
And they might even give up, which would be terrible.
That’s the worst outcome.
How does AI show up in some of these instances, do you think?
So you’re saying you’ve given up sometimes
when you’re trying to figure out a product like.
I would admit that for sure.
I mean,. I, I think it’s a terrible experience
to kind of go try to read help documents or going to the help site.
Like, I literally will.
This will show you how old I am.
I alt tab over like I alt tab over to another window
and go to ChatGPT and ChatGPT usually helps me more figure out
how to use a feature of a product I’m using then the product helps me itself.
Well, what if those two experience
I literally can go to chatGPT and say, hey, I’m trying to transfer a domain,
you know, from, a web, to this new website.
I was doing this the other day with, with GoDaddy.
GoDaddy super hard to understand.
Shouldn’t be supposed to be self-service, but it’s hard for me.
Hard for me.
But ChatGPT said, oh, step one, step two, step three.
I think, good, I can do that.
So now if I kind of pull that assistant into the product itself,
I don’t have to leave and I can just keep making progress within the product.
I love it.
It’s just becoming so powerful.
All in one experience.
Okay, so let’s fast forward.
Let’s say that we’ve reached a point of a conversion.
Now, you’ve been through the demo.
You’ve been through the self-serve onboarding motion.
This is where the user is making a decision on what and how to purchase.
When you’re at that stage, how can I show up here
to effectively help close the deal? So.
So now we’re getting into, sacred territory. Right?
Because like you said, your company use this product on growth
and sales like growth, a lot of us do. Right?
And so like, hey, these are my accounts.
I’m the sales person.
These are my accounts.. You can have those accounts over there.
Oh, wait. One of those proved to be really lucrative.
Okay, then it’s my account.
Like we have a lot of debates over territory and whatever,
so I’m not going to comment on that at all.
But the ideal is that the customer gets to choose.
The customer gets to decide, when do I want to talk to a human?
When do I want to talk to a robot?
When do I just want to get my hands on the product?
And then this scenario you’re talking about, I’ve had my hands on the product.
I’ve achieved
first impact, and now I’m like, you know,. I think it’s time to go to the next tier.
Does that mean that a human. I got to schedule a call with a human,
and she’s got to book me into the silver, gold or platinum package?
Hopefully not.
Hopefully I can self-serve my way into it.
But you know as well as I do, a lot of those packages are confusing,
like the the pricing page and the features.
They’re super confusing.
So same thing as in the demo.
I got some questions.
Maybe I just talked to and talked to somebody and it could be a robot
and and help me understand like I’m trying to get to I’m trying
to accomplish the following.
Does that mean I need gold or platinum?
Oh, actually, you could do gold there, as long as you’re not going to go over
a certain amount of storage or a certain amount of
just make sure you save your project, okay?
Thank you so much.
And now I know what to do and I have confidence to move forward.
love the idea of giving the customer that choice that you describe.
So now it’s.
It’s what’s the best experience for them?
Let them choose on their own.
And we can react to that one way or the other.
I also like the idea of if you think about the whole go to market
motion, it includes all of the pre-sales stuff.
We’re talking about the actual conversion and but it also includes some post-sales
things as well.
Right after they’ve committed, what does that experience look like
on an ongoing customer relationship standpoint?
Are they hitting a usage ceiling or what have you?
But how do you see AI helping them post the sale?
Yeah. So now I’m so. Now I’m converted.
So I went through like this, and I went through all those, stages.
It’s again just an assistant.
We’re de-laboring this entire process.
We’re pulling the necessity of a human out so it could be training.
It could be configuration.. It could be upgrading.
It could be spooling up a new instance.
It could be, accessing a new feature, introducing a new feature that
maybe is brand new.
And all of that can be smoothed over by giving me a very natural
kind of human like interface to somebody who can guide me.
We, winning by design,
just published a whole report on AI on the right,
what we call the right side of the bow tie.
Everything post sale.
And so we’ve looked at all the agents, all the guides,
all the, and, and all the available AI right now.
And I’ll tell you,. Geoff, it’s not very mature.
So you’ve seen some. AI agents that are like sales
development reps that can qualify and schedule a demo.
There’s not as much on the right hand side of the boat.
I what’s mostly happening with the on the right hand side
and it will come, it will come, we’ll see it.
What’s mostly happening right now is
harvesting signals and surfacing
those opportunities to a human like, hey, hey,
hey, account manager, here’s here’s a customer that’s maxing out their usage
and is ready for a conversation about where it goes next.
Now that AM knows to call that customer and they start to engage.
But I don’t think that’s going to be that way forever.
I think we’re going to have kind of AI engagement at those critical moments also.
Right. So?
So, Dave, you’re.
You’re a product expert.
That’s your role as EVP of product.
When I think about everything you’re describing, I think
a lot of this really comes down to, first of all,
you’ve got to have a great product, but fundamentally,
you’ve got to build in this capability into the product at each stage.
You’ve talked about here today at the introduction stage, the demo stage,
the onboarding and trial stage, the CS motion stage.
So, you know, when you think about that,
how how do product leaders need to think about this and
what do they need to do to be able to take advantage of what’s available today?
Yeah.
So, you know, when I think about unbounce,
there’s a self-service happy path through the whole thing.
I can, I can, I can discover it.
I can create an account,. I can activate myself.
I can start using it.. I can reach first impact.
I could do all that without any human assistance.
That’s what I call the self-service happy path.
And it already exists for unbound.
Amazing.
Okay, but does it exist for your product?
And if it doesn’t, if if I literally cannot proceed
to the next step without somebody helping me from the software
side, then I don’t have a self-service happy path.
So I got to get that first,
and that means. I got to get simple monetization in place.
I got to get simple onboarding configuration in place.
And after that, and it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to exist.
After that, I can start to layer in AI because the imperfections
can be glossed over.. We used to gloss over.
We still do gloss over imperfections with humans.
Oh, here’s I’m your onboarding consultant.
Let’s schedule a call and let me train you on how to do blah blah blah.
I’m your CSM.
Let me show you the various features and blah blah blah.
Well, what if AI could do that?
I can only do that if I have a self-service happy path.
So the first thing I want to do is make sure that a customer
could theoretically make it from beginning to end on her own.
Got it.
Dave, this is, incredibly eye opening.
Today is a great, great discussion.
And when I think about the evolution of the go to market
motion end to end, and what AI can do
for it, it’s much broader than people’s traditional thoughts here.
I really want to thank you for joining us to to talk through this today.
I appreciate you coming on, on the show.
Amazing. Geoff I love the questions.
I love your products.
And, And I really hope that
that we can start giving customers the choice at every step in their journey.
Yeah. And listen, quick plug for you.
Where should folks go if they want to find you
or be better connected to your organization? Amazing.
So Winning by design.com is a great place to start.
There’s lots of free content there.
And then around the topics we’re talking about
productledgtm.com, which I’m sure you’ll put in show let’s, show notes.
productledgtm.com is where I’m pre publishing
chapters to my book which is called freemium
comes out from Stanford Business. Press in August of this year,
but you can find it for free on my Substack at productledgtm.com.
Because you have
if you have a book called freemium, it’s got to be out there for free too, right?
I love it.
It’s on my reading list now, so thank you for the tip.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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and we’ll look forward to seeing you next time on Closing Time.
Have a great day!
