How to scale Product-Led Growth: Best practices from leading CMOs

If you build it, they will come, right? Not exactly.

A product-led growth (PLG) focus can be a powerful and highly efficient way to drive growth. It can also be a slippery slope to chaos, cannibalization and distraction if not designed and managed well.

In Friday's CMO Coffee Talk, dozens of chief marketing officers shared experience, best practices and cautionary tales. Here's our video recap, as well as a few highlights:

Product-led growth has to be a company strategy, not just a marketing strategy. (Carilu Dietrich)

Product-led growth does not mean giving it all away for free. (Kevin Marasco)

It’s up to (marketing leaders) to make the complex simple. (David Span)

Many companies say they want to do product-led growth, but aren’t ready or right for it. (Shelli Strand)

Product-led growth needs to be a whole go to market (GTM) motion, not just a SKU. Think of it as a business unit. (Sara Larsen)

We call them product “snacks”, let your prospects start with something smaller to get familiar with your value proposition more broadly. (Kevin Marasco)

Consider what you’ll be giving up to devote engineering and other resources to product-led growth initiatives. Unless you’re nailing your existing product roadmap and really delivering on what you’ve already got, it can be a HUGE distraction. (Kathleen Booth)

Think carefully about the audience who will be attracted to a “free” version, is that really a user you want to sell to?

Different experiences for different buyer personalities is important (chat, self-service trail experiential, phone, email, etc) (Kevin Marasco)

Sometimes you can successfully give the free product to a user in your ideal customer profile (ICP), who is perhaps a different persona than the buyer. So you get traction in enterprise accounts and can then go to your C-level buyer and say “Look at the traction you already have” (Fara Hain)

Smartsheet is a good example of an inside growth traction PLG model, lots of small teams downloading and using the product inside enterprise orgs. Path for upsell internally and via enterprise sales reps to cross-department decision makers.

It ain’t revenue growth if it’s free! Measure what matters. (Helen Baptist)

Understand that your customer is multi-dimensional... people who buy and people who use may be different people. You need a strategy to win both. (Christy Marble)

If you are shifting to a subscription model, I recommend doing it not as a free trial first, get some data, and then switch to free trial. Once you go to free trial you may never be able to go back. It’s a bit like a drug. (Andy Jolls)

Collecting email and cookies will be more important now more than ever. As data privacy becomes stronger, acquiring that data will be much more difficult. (Jaime Romero)

Any freemium product must still fit into the product roadmap.

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. (Latane Conant)