There are so many tools available today that can help you achieve your Product Led Growth go-to-market (PLG GTM) goals. Especially for companies looking to get started with a PLG GTM motion, or companies that are trying to improve their PLG tech stack, it’s difficult to sort through all the noise and find the right tools for your needs.
So, where do you start?
Here, we summarize the tools that we believe are essential to your go-to-market stack. With each of these categories – from demo software down to customer success – you’ll be set to 1) identify gaps in your current tooling to keep pace with your peers or 2) put in place the right set of tools as you kickstart your PLG go-to-market engine.
Demo software
A great demo is the lifeblood of PLG. Your potential customers want to see your product in action and understand how it can bring value to them. You want to get them excited. This is where demo software comes in – with tools like Navattic and Reprise, you can create interactive product tours that wow your users, accelerating sales and driving growth in your PLG company.
User onboarding
User onboarding tools are a lot like a skilled tour guide. When your users land on your product, you want to show them all there is to see, equip them with the most important knowledge, and give them the most seamless experience possible. With tools like Userflow and Pendo.io, you can create customized in-app tours, checklists, and surveys for your product, all of which work to bolster customer conversion and retention.
Product analytics
As a product-led company, you need some super solid product analytics in place. You need insight into how users use your product, where they get stuck, and when they leave. Tools like Heap and Amplitude will allow you to understand the full customer journey and give you much-needed visibility into product usage.
ETL
You’ve got a bunch of data that you need to move to a bunch of different places. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools like Fivetran and Airbyte can do take all of your disparate data sources and push them into a data warehouse.
Customer data platform
Every product-led company needs a customer data platform, and we’ve seen that most product-led companies use Segment. Your company needs to collect product usage data somehow – and then you have to clean and standardize all that data, and get it all in front of your teams. Segment provides an easy way to do all of that, while also exposing your data to other tools (like HeadsUp!) through a standard interface.
Reverse ETL
Your data warehouse is the source of truth for all of your customer data. But now you need to take that data and move it to other tools that your product, marketing, and customer success teams rely on, from Google Sheets to Marketo. Hightouch and Census are the right tools for the job.
Business intelligence
At HeadsUp, we’ve often seen sales teams use interactive dashboards from companies like Looker or Tableau. These dashboards can highlight which accounts have high growth potential or the usage of certain features across important accounts over time. They help you create dashboarding with little to no code, and exposes your data sets to the rest of the company, who can then pivot and explore them to serve their needs without writing SQL. Nifty.
Data enrichment
It’s difficult to understand your users when they’re only dropping their names and email addresses in your signup form. Data enrichment providers like Clearbit and ZoomInfo will gather important information about new leads at the company and person-level. This will help you better identify future prospects and better understand your customers.
Sales engagement
It’s crucial for the product-led sales team to have a streamlined sales process: sales messaging, communication channels, automation of tasks and workflows, etc. Software like Outreach and SalesLoft allow product-led companies to create personalized and automated sales journeys.
PQL and product-led sales platform
PQL and product-led sales tooling are not yet widely adopted, but our previous posts (like this one) break down how the right sales tool can vastly improve your PLG GTM stack. In short, the PLG sales tool can take product usage data and create Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), which help you prioritize accounts to target with the right actions at the right time. We at HeadsUp recommend HeadsUp for the task!
Marketing automation
The marketing automation platform is, of course, the command center for all marketing campaigns. Data-driven emails, SMS messages, content downloads, automation triggers, MQL criteria, and all that good stuff. Tools like Marketo and customer.io get the job done effectively.
Conversational support and marketing
There’s no doubt you’ve visited a website just to find a chatbot sliding into your DMs, asking you if you need more information or help with navigating the site. That’s conversational support and marketing from the likes of Drift, Intercom, and other tools – they’re an incredibly powerful way to create personalized message flows, which help your company increase revenue and strengthen the brand.
Customer success
Customer success platforms help your company drive the best possible customer experience by centralizing customer data and giving you a clear view of customer health. Platforms such as Vitally and Catalyst have a ton of features – customizable dashboards, product usage analytics, customer health scores, to name a few – that give you deeper insight into the customer experience.
