What I Learned from Analyzing 495 Product-Led Growth Companies (Part II)

This analysis is based on?The PLG List. Join 2,000+ sales & marketing people who use PeerSignal datasets to benchmark GTM, discover role models, and map their market (for free).

In my last update, I looked at 394 product-led companies and shared a few early take-aways from tracking this movement.

Since then, our PLG index has grown, we have more times series data, and we added the B2B Growth Index. That means more companies to analyze, more trends, and more comparison points in the broader B2B landscape.

Here's what stood out in this deep dive...

Product-Led Growth + Community-Led Growth = ??

Content and community are not new ideas. Many of the best B2B brands "get it." ??

That said, plenty of B2B companies still outbound their way to $10 or 20M ARR and defer the investment in content and community.

On the flip side, PLG companies seem to embrace this idea early and often. As our bots track these company websites, we searched for prominent content & community CTAs. Here's what we found across our 2 indexes:

The most clear difference is in the Owned Community column. This is based on CTAs to forums, Slack groups, Discords, and other company operated communities. We can't tell how big or successful these communities are, but on the surface, PLG companies are much more likely to invest than your average growing B2B company.

It makes sense for their model. When you build for self-service, content & community are critical for growth, adoption, and advocacy. When done right, there is a natural flywheel here.

Product-Led ≠ Rep-Free

Product-led rarely means rep-free. I made this statement last time. And I can put a finer point on it this time.

The averages are a good starting point. PLG companies tend to have smaller sales teams across stages, but especially in the earlier stage. Here's how PLG sales teams compare to our broader B2B Index:

That said, the hiring patterns show that most PLG companies are "catching up" on sales hiring as they scale. It looks like the inflection point is prior to 300 total employees.

Now, you'll have to excuse my handwriting here, but if we are trying to generalize a picture from these averages, it would be something like this:

Again we do have to be careful with averages. There is not single "standard" PLG playbook. Even on a surface metric like size & growth of sales headcount, you can see the wide distribution:

Some of the best insights come from examples. If you want to dig into some of the companies on the edge of that chart, you can filter on "Sales Employees" and get a closer look across over a dozen different fields in your PeerSignal dashboard:

In case you were wondering (I know I was) this divergence holds when you map it by company size too. In this graph you can see the wide distribution of sales team growth vs total growth at all sizes:

Drawing some circles around this graph, there are 4 main buckets. And you can see that these don't really correlate to company size:

• 8% didn’t add sales (see the dots on the far left?).
• 27% added sales, but slower that total headcount (dots between the zero and 1 line).
• 25% grew sales proportional to total (that's the weird line in the center!).
• 41% grew sales faster (to the right of the 1 line).

So what? Even though we can generalize the shape of their sales ramp, we know that product-led sales is going to look very different in different companies.

This reinforces a take-away from part 1: ?There's No Single Go-To-Market Playbook For PLG

You can earn the right to talk about your product

The data here is more anecdotal, but I think it's worth calling out.

In building this index, I've had the privilege to stare at a lot of B2B websites, blogs, and social media profiles (I do a lot of manual checking to validate our research bots and data pipeline ??).

The thing is... these companies talk about their products. And their audiences just eat it up.

Look at this Tweet from Notion. It's a ~10 second gif showing off a new feature.

Seems like a tiny product improvement. But 1,700+ likes and 130+ retweets. Wow.

This goes back to point #1 about community. The product experience is core to the community. The community reinforces the product. The product reinforces the community. Why not lean into that? It's a beautiful thing for the marketing team.

In fact, this example was a feature directly sourced from Notion's community.

The pattern showed up many times when we dug into PLG company content. Here are a few other examples: Figma posts a quick demo of a new Vimeo plug-in, 3,640 likes. Postman announces support for gRPC, 2,480 likes. Github shows off code navigation features, 2,609 likes.

I'm not saying to just start talking about your product non-stop. We've all been taught to market around the product. Market the problem. Market the category. Market the content. Market the community. Market the movement. Those "rules" come from good principles.

But in PLG land, if you build the right community, you can earn the right to talk about your product.

Not surprisingly, many of the prominent B2B brands on LinkedIn are product-led. This shows the aforementioned flywheel at work.

In my opinion, this dynamic is going to drive even more demand for excellent PMMs in product-led companies. And it will put pressure on the sales-led companies to up-level their game.

Next Questions?

I'll keep digging in based on your feedback and suggestions.

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What questions would you like answered next time? Let me know in the comments. ????