Sr Product Manager, Crypto
Surya has built and scaled PLG at three different companies. He sits down to share what he's learned, recommendations for early stage PLG strategies and even a few confessions of why certain tactics worked in theory but not in practice. Surya has a product background and sheds light on how product-minded, engineering leaders envision and build out their product-led strategies. He also shares insight as to how an effective self-serve model ultimately improves the sales-led motion as well.
Surya Sendyl has a rich background in PLG, having worked at various B2B SaaS companies as product manager exclusively focused on user experience and driving adoption within freemium and free trial platforms. His resume includes Mattermark, Rainforest QA, Sendoso, and Flatfile. Most recently Surya is working in the FinTech / crypto space for a stealth mode startup.
You’ve had to set up a product-led / go-to-market motion more than once. How do you recommend teams get started?
For me there are two important things. First is data. I like to audit the funnel and try to understand how a lead learns about your company, what their experience is like on the website, what leads them into the tool, what onboarding looks like and then what actions help drive adoption. Even if there is a sales-led, hands-on component I like to take that journey as a customer would. I try to remain agnostic. The whole goal is to understand the experience and see where the gaps might be.
It’s really important to map and be able to quantify what that journey currently looks like. More often than not there will be data missing so early days are spent working with teams figuring out what data we do have, what we need and how we can best capture what’s missing. Once you have the data you can start making hypotheses on how to improve the journey and parts of the funnel.
The second part is product. Each product is sort of different. But just like the funnel I would go through that experience to activation and try to mark out what I see in the platform and what visually helps or hurts early adoption. My focus is understanding and creating that initial aha moment for the users. Once you get efficient at that, it really opens up the possibility for other growth motions.
For most of my cold start initiatives I’ve had the luxury of small very agile teams. We’ve been able to work through these things quickly. But whether it’s a small or large team, or a small or large company, change management and broad company buy-in are important.
You obviously approach these topics from a product and engineering perspective - how do I track engagement and optimize for certain behaviors in-product. Go-to-market teams might be focused on who is in the tool and which of them might lead us to a broader deal. How do you think these two differ?
I think if they're in a successful PLG motion, they differ very little. The philosophy is the same and a lot of the ways the strategy is too. You are solving for a user or customer pain. Engineers obsess over it at the user level. Go-to-market at the account level.
What makes it all work is communication and data flow. Marketing gets people familiar with the brand and the value. Product works to get users into the platform, experience smooth onboarding and can get them activated, returning, and hopefully referring others. But where sales has the value is connecting individual success to organizational success. Helping broader teams see the value and benefit.
But to do that there needs to be data, quantified and it needs to be piped to the CRM. Sales needs access. They need to know who is a hot lead and when the right time is to jump in.
There's various tactics that can be put in place, but in a PLG motion, ideally, those are not at odds. They're just separate parts of the funnel and each team is focused on doing what they need to in order to optimize within their part of the funnel.
How do you think about working with your peers and colleagues where you can, you're able to basically translate it into like, here’s what sales should do next?
I mean this is one of the core challenges with PLG. When you're tracking usage within the product, for a lot of teams outside of product, it’s a quote unquote whole new world.
Sales is used to Salesforce and CRM data. It’s important to meet them where they are but also to marry the usage data with all of the customer and account data. You have to get those two datasets to speak to each other and you have to make sure it is syncing regularly and quickly. Behavior in-product can change fairly quickly and with it so does the conversation you should be having with the potential buyer. So you have to get those data sets together and you have to get non-engineering teams familiar with leading indicators. Help them recognize what milestones indicate a hot account and help them with driving the conversation.
My advice is to take it slow. Start simple and make sure sales is comfortable with the data and understands how to take action off of it. I made that mistake and learned the hard way. I set up complex data flows but sales as my end user didn’t understand what some of the metrics meant, weren’t sure how to use it and ultimately weren’t able to leverage it for their own success.
This is a cross-functional motion. It is not going to be successful if only product is championing this, or only growth or marketing or sales. To truly be successful, it needs to be from the top down, where everyone is on the same page and it's thought through in the right way.
What is the Future of PLG and B2B SaaS? Will Self-Serve ever replace Sales?
Software is definitely becoming consumerized. You're, you're totally on point with that statement. People are used to their Instagram experience or TikTok or whatever, and they demand the same from their B2B products. Why should B2B products be subpar? There's no reason, right?
If you take PLG and self-serve seriously, you are going to build a better product. In my opinion, those are very synergistic goals, making your product work in a self-serve manner just leads to a better user experience, better adoption and overall a more streamlined, better product. Period.
Self-serve exposes all of the gaps in your product and if you don’t address them you won’t have many users.
When user experience is not the focal point - and in B2B a lot of times it’s not - it's very easy as an engineering team to have a subpar product. If sales is really good at what they do, you can scale as a business without addressing some of the in-platform nuances. You end up papering over some user experience cracks with people, with relationship building. You can throw an onboarding team or account manager or support at common problems instead of engineering.
So from a product perspective I think PLG is ultimately leading to better software and better B2B products and better user experiences which create more adoption and retention.
But I also don’t ever see a situation in B2B where humans aren’t a critical part in scaling and growing the revenue.
There's also always going to be the need, especially upmarket, to go through a more traditional sales motion. Even within PLG companies, having a sales assisted layer on top of your self-serve and other motions can boost your numbers significantly.
Imagine having great usage data and you can recognize that someone is stuck in their product experience. Just by adding a little chat bubble where an SDR can chime in and say, “Hey saw saw you got stuck. I'm here to help. You wanna schedule a 15 minute call?”
It's always going to help. A human touch is a necessity. We are, after all humans. I don't think it's ever going to go away. I think it will instead allow us to be more informed, informative and ultimately more effective at helping problem solve for the customer.
The way I see it is if you can get effective at activating, retaining, and maybe even monetizing a subset of users, you can refocus your teams and resources on the right accounts and more important problems.
