Vinyl jackets and leopard prints are back. So are free software trials. Welcome to #PLG

I just finished an article from Bazaar magazine called?‘11 Trends from the 1960s That Are Making a Comeback’?(we’re looking at you, headscarves). It seems every generation thinks they created something that never existed before. It's even in our language. If I have to hear ‘dope, fire or lit’ one more time when a simple?‘cool’?will do, I don't know what I will do.

Why does revisiting old fads--or ways of doing business-- matter?

Because they can be instructive.??And learning from them can help you both mitigate risk and not relearn old lessons. If you apply the lessons learned, you can be more effective and productive. That doesn't mean you can apply them as if it were 70 years ago; you must apply them carefully and reasonably in the ‘new context’. But much can be applied.?

My company, Sopheon, is investing in our next generation of products. Like most companies building modern B2B enterprise software products, they will be ‘Product-Led Growth’ or PLG products. In case you haven’t read up on this latest generation of Software as a Services (SaaS) products, PLG is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. And that got me to think about vinyl jackets and bell-bottoms. Well not really. But it got me to think about the first time I was a product manager in the B2B enterprise software business when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the 1980s over 40 years ago.??And to think about how we sold products and what today is called the ‘customer journey'.?

How did that look and how did it look relative to today's PLG?

Well, it's actually hauntingly similar to PLG! Now of course there is this thing called ‘the internet’ which removes all the friction and automates most of the process, which is an enormous difference, but the fundamental process is quite similar if more manual:

1.?????The product.?It was designed to be installed easily and provide some immediate benefit. For example, we marketed a product called Multi-Image Manager that when installed it allowed mainframes to share disk drives and also tape drives. We had another called QuickFetch that when installed, it dynamically?copied the highest-used load modules into memory to eliminate load processing, thus increasing the performance of the computer., We had about 20+ of these products. They were often called ‘utilities’. For the non-geeks out there?utility software?is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer?infrastructure - in contrast to?application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ordinary users. However, utilities often form part of the application?systems.?

And PLG? Interestingly we are now taking application software and making it look like a utility. A Product-led growth product enables users to quickly understand the value of your product, ensuring that user expectations are aligned with your product's capabilities.?

A PLG offering, like the old days of mainframe software utilities, must show value quickly to an end-user. One of the most undervalued points about product-led growth is quick time to value. Your users need to get to the value within minutes not days.

2.?????The go-to-market.?According to the Product-Led organization’s Gina Allman, there are six types of product-led models, all of which allow the user to experience the product. I remember a sales rep at Duquesne Systems that used to say his goal was to ‘give them a taste’.??In those days it was straightforward; we offered users a FREE 30-day trial. This was offered but inside sales reps (today's equivalent of SDRs or BDRs) or often was offered in an outbound physical mailer or in a magazine ad that annoyingly fell out when the magazine was opened. They were officially called ‘subscription card inserts’ also referred to as ‘blow-ins or ‘bind-ins’.??But like today's Google ads or SEO, they served the same purpose. A Call to Action (CTA) with something free.?

Here are the 6 ways PLG can do that today:

• Opt-In Free Trial
• Opt-Out Free Trial
• Usage-Based Free Trial
• Freemium?
• New Product
• Sandbox

But it's all the same idea: Target the persona and get them to try the product in a free trial and make sure the product is stupid simple to (install) use and delivers immediate value.?

3.?????The sales process.?In the old days of utilities, executive management used to kid the sales team that the product sold itself. But even in those days, it wasn't true. A salesperson had to do what was called ‘trial management’ to make sure the FREE trial converted to a paying sale. Those processes were analyzed to death to make sure there were conversions. And like today's PLG, it's not just the marketing process—it's the product as well. We had a product called DASDMON that was a disk performance monitor. People would install it, tune the performance, end the trial, and never pay. They would do this several times a year. In essence, getting the product benefits for free and never paying. So we had to change the product to not give all the benefits unless it was paid for. But it took the cooperation of sales, marketing, product management, and development to figure this out, see the problem and solve it. Much like how PLG teams need to work.?

And in today's world of PLG, the processes of managing the trial or the freemium is all automated—you get emails and videos, all time-based on where you should be in using the product, or even better, responding to your usage as seen by the company’s instrumentation of the applications.??It's all instrumented and automated, making margins even higher.?

And that leads us to where we are today and what’s not changed. Once the product is established and creating value for a customer, then a salesperson is required. That can be different by different products, based on usage, number of users, whatever. But at some point, in today's world sales is required for a larger enterprise-wide sale. Also, different than years gone by vendors have established customer success organizations, so customer usage and satisfaction is monitored to ensure uptake, versus waiting for ‘break fix’ type of customer support where vendors respond to problems reported. In a world of subscriptions and SaaS, this is required since there are essentially no switching costs of customers, making vendors' revenue vulnerable.?

So, break out the bell-bottoms and embrace PLG! It’s totally different and new, and has been with us since the modern software business was established because of IBM's decision in 1969, under the pressure from the US Government's antitrust lawsuit, to ‘unbundle software’?and services from hardware sales. As many industry observers note, this action precipitated the rise of the independent software development industry.