POV

Revenue growth has always been hard, but it’s getting harder. Last year was defined by cutting costs and scaling back, and we’re now emerging with reinvigorated growth goals in 2024, but fewer resources to achieve them. About half (49%) of B2B marketers in the US report that they’re facing budget or other resource constraints in 2024.

Throughout my career at high-growth companies including Trello, Atlassian, and now Typeform, I learned the importance of equipping teams to do more with fewer resources. There’s one motion all these companies have doubled down on to grow efficiently and at times astronomically: product-led growth (PLG). PLG is a strategy where the product is the primary driver of acquisition, retention, and expansion. In other words, you don’t need a giant go-to-market (GTM) team to get customers in the door.

What you need to do, however, is focus on the high-value, revenue-driving customers who find value in your product. This concept is at the heart of PLG–you build your product to appeal to your target customer, letting other customers come and go in the process. PLG has been operating on an “achieve more with less” edict since its conception, which is what makes it the ideal motion to align your teams around to deliver on today’s mandate of aggressive, yet efficient growth.

Addressing Data Challenges

For revenue teams, PLG means targeting, attracting, converting, retaining, and expanding the people who will use and love your product. Sounds easy enough, but to succeed, you need to first know who those customers are. This requires data, and the data you need is likely not at your fingertips.

Most companies today have a data fragmentation problem. I’ve found that often about a quarter of the data we have is inaccessible, scattered across siloed teams, tools, and systems. The lack of a unified view renders it unhelpful for understanding your core customers and how to best engage them.

We’re doing away with data fragmentation by bringing GTM teams and tools together. We call this approach “One Funnel.”  This allows data to flow seamlessly, so you can create an end-to-end view of customers and keep revenue efforts laser-focused on reaching and converting the types of people who are an ideal fit for your product. Aligning teams around a PLG motion in this way will not happen overnight. Here are four steps you can take to get started.

1. Unify Your Revenue Team: Aligning sales and marketing teams isn’t a new concept. What is less common is the alignment among sales, marketing, and other teams like customer success, account management, and support. These should all be part of a united revenue function. Why? Because the support team frequently talks to customers and has insights that can help understand the customer. No longer are customer success and account management just watching health indicators, they are looking for opportunities to expand use cases and get into more departments and teams. These groups are a critical part of the continuous funnel and should be aligned with the wider team’s remit.

2. Build a Customer-First GTM Tech Stack: Typically, different teams will purchase the tech solutions for their respective teams without communicating. Now there is a shift taking place – companies are beginning to recognize the beauty of a unified GTM tech stack and investing in revenue operations to make tooling decisions based on insights across all revenue funnels. This has only recently become doable because technology vendors are starting to build the integrations and partnerships required for a unified stack. With tools that talk to each other, you not only unlock data to complete your customer picture but also teams get the information they need automatically sent into the systems they use, and this is all streamlined and managed by the rev ops team rather than separate teams cobbling together the system.

3. Know Your Customer (Deeply): We’re all consumers in our personal lives, and we’ve become accustomed to having highly personalized buying experiences. 71% of customers expect brands to personalize their experience, and B2B brands are no different. The more we can learn about our customers by asking them to tell us, the better. Zero-party data, which is data shared directly and intentionally by customers, provides explicit insights, straight from the source. Combining zero-party data with other information available creates a holistic customer view and powers their personalized journey.

4. Prioritize Communication Between GTM and Product Teams: PLG means we must release some of our GTM control to the product team. My biggest partner is the Chief Product Officer. We run ongoing meetings together, where product shares what is coming down the line, and my team can relay what we need and ask questions, connecting dots across product, sales, support, and success. Remember that your support team is a member of GTM, too–they know the most about feature requests and feedback. Every team must feel like they are a part of what the company is building.

Kickstarting Your PLG Journey

There’s an undeniable shift happening as we face the mounting pressure to grow in a challenging environment. Change takes time, but you can start asking yourself the following questions to assess where you are:

• Do all employees feel like they are members of your company’s revenue success?
• Do you know who your best customers are and understand that deeply?
• Are you focused where you need to be, and are you willing to let the rest slip through?
• Are you leveraging all the data points you have, even if they aren't all in the same place yet?

By taking the initial steps to address gaps that exist, you’ll be in a better place tomorrow than you were yesterday to pursue the people who will get the most out of your product, and your company will reap the revenue rewards.