Leave it to the management consultants to come up with acronyms…
Move over Product Led Growth and Sales Led Growth… here comes PLS – Product Led Sales!
Jokes apart, here are the key points to consider:
- There was and continues to be lot of hype about PLG.
- PLG is not the “holy grail” and not for everyone.
- Sales led growth works well when decision making is top down – buying your ERP, picking a payroll system…
- PLG works well when it’s easier to try before you buy – graphic design tool, email campaign tool, small team productivity solutions.
- It’s hard to do PLG right, even if you have the right problem and market to address.
- If PLG is not done right then results can be worse than doing SLG.
In our own experience with clients selling enterprise solutions (SaaS or not), PLG alone does not work and you do need sales teams and motions.
Try before you buy can augment the overall sales process, but making it easy can be quite challenging (security approvals, data access, getting past IT….).
You can do some things with sample or demo data, but difficult to show value like that.
A well-defined, paid POC for a small fee can work much better than a free trial that hardly anyone uses.