About this episode
Everyone's talking about product-led growth (PLG) today. As a marketer, how can you build a functional PLG funnel that generates pipeline?
Sam Levan, co-founder of MadKudu has worked with dozens of companies that have built a product-led motion on top of their inbound channel, and has seen many companies succeed and fail. In his mind, there are two things you should definitely avoid when building your own product-led growth funnel.
Don't force product leads into your inbound funnel
When companies first start out building their PLG funnels, they automatically treat product leads as MQLs.
However, this dropped the MQL to SQL conversion rates since the conversion rate of product signups are low. This is because the buying intent of product signups are much lower than demo requests.
You can't treat your product signups as MQLs and expect high conversion rates to SQL. The funnel for product leads is not the same as inbound leads.
A big (untapped!) opportunity in product signups
Low conversion rates for product leads do not mean that you should not send them to Sales.
In fact, the pipeline that could be generated with product leads are 3X as much as inbound leads due to its sheer volume.
#1 Thing to Avoid: Instead of sending product signups directly to Sales, Marketing needs to create a different workflow to engage those leads to increase conversions to closed deals.
Send buyers of engaged accounts to Sales, not engaged users
#2 Thing to Avoid: Don’t push the most engaged user. Instead, identify the buyer and send that to your Sales team.
Most of the time, the most engaged users of your product do not have the buying power.
What Marketers need to do is to create an automated workflow to identify the buyers in the most engaged accounts and send them to Sales.
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