Building a better PLG Demo
Building a better PLG Demo
"Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #94
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Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I publish this newsletter on finding data products and interesting data observations with the goal of finding patterns and future product insights. (Also, it’s fun.) If you need a background on how we got here, check out What is Data Operations?
This week’s toy: flying a jetpack turns out to be harder than expected. Until we have much more energy density, we’re not going to see a real-life version of Iron Man. Edition 94 of this newsletter is here - it’s May 23, 2022.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Building a better PLG Demo
Introducing buyers to enterprise software is a tricky business. Often, you will encounter prospects that are interested in some aspects of your product and not well-aligned with the overall outcomes you are trying to drive. Or you might find prospects who are in desperate need of the solution and cannot determine the intermediate steps to get there.
For those buyers who don’t know what they need yet, the ones that want to get their hands on the product to try it out, and the ones who are looking for a quick fix, the concept of product-led growth can be a great fit. Product-led growth is the idea that there should be a channel led by interested prospects who self-discover whether the product is right for them, and who then opt in when they would like to purchase.
This concept makes great sense. Interested users can try out the product, and sales teams get alerts. Right? Except there’s a bit more involved than that. The PLG motion involves teams across the company from the marketing messages designed to attract a trial through the playbook used by SDRs and sellers and the operational rigor necessary to make sure all this works well. I wrote a bit about this, so if you want more details check out “PLG is more than just alerts.”
What happens after the initial demo build? In other words, what are the ways you can optimize the PLG motion for the people who actually show up, not just the people you imagined would be part of your cohort? Focusing on key motivations for each of these users will help you to decide how to improve your demo effort with the goal of finding more prospects who perceive interacting with your product as a low effort, high output experience.
Indexing Effort and Functionality
The likelihood of demo success (and of longer-term customer outcomes) is tightly coupled to the effort prospects spend to learn new things and the functionality they achieve from applying that effort.
In this case, we’re defining effort as “the amount of time, energy, and cognitive function a prospect can devote to learning enough about the product to move forward with a buying decision.” It does not mean an equal amount of effort from one prospect to the next, which hints at the problem. Effort is probably pretty limited for most people unless the prospect has a very specific goal that your product solves and has a timeline for achieving that result and a timeline for doing so.
For most prospects, effort needs to be as low as possible to agree to try out a product.
Functionality is another axis on which to measure the potential success of a trialer who wants to learn more about your product. In many cases, if you have a functionality match, you’ll get a buyer, because they are often searching for a capability rather than just ease of use when they have a problem that needs solving. Functionality alone does not win the prospect, however. If the functionality is whiz-bang cool and doesn’t deliver the outcome expected by the prospect, then it’s going to have minimal impact.
Be mindful of the user effort required to deliver high functionality.
While there are lots of interventions that are possible to lower the effort required or to frame the demo so that it provides a better outcome, one helpful step to tune your PLG demo is to consider the motivations of several common types of users.
Four Common Types of PLG users
In my experience leading or participating in PLG efforts to drive trial motions at Saas companies, there are a few types of users that show up as reliable patterns. Answer the questions posed by each of these general types, and you’ll be a long way towards optimizing your demo efforts. This is not an exhaustive list, but these should be familiar to you if you’ve ever had a trial process.
The frustrated user
“I don’t get it - what should I be doing?”
We’ve all seen people get frustrated with a trial. They show up, expect one thing, and then are surprised. They either don’t know how to proceed or they are unable to continue because they’re just mad.
Frustrated users need a reason to continue with the trial.
They are reacting to a combination of high effort – higher than they expected, at least – and low functionality. Whether they arrived by accident or expected the software to work differently, frustrated users present a problem both because they will tell other people about their negative experience and because they will not get what they want from the process.
Here are a few suggestions to deal with frustrated users:
Make it easy for them to ask for help through in-app chat
Reach out to them programmatically if they login and do nothing
Reach out to them personally - a quick email from a real person goes a long way
What you’re trying to learn from a frustrated user is some more details about how they are feeling, what they were trying to do, and where they got stuck. A good outcome would be giving them a reason to try again and continue where they left off. A perfect outcome would be to resolve the root cause that blocked users like them.
The bored user
“What’s the point? I don’t see anything worth doing.”
The bored user represents perhaps the biggest opportunity for PLG. You are competing with an alternate action of nothing. Because it’s easy not to participate, bored users have a default of showing up, looking around, and not continuing.
Bored users need a reason to learn more about whatever it is that you are doing.
A person who is bored doesn’t see a reason to exert effort. It’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if they don’t exert effort and don’t see any reason to continue, nothing is going to happen automatically. Bored users need a reason to engage and don’t want to do things unless they have to do them.
To deal with bored users:
Tell them exactly what to do and make it easy
Prepare sample data and actions to give them reasons to learn more
When they do engage, reach out to them proactively
Because bored users make up such a large portion of the prospects you are likely to see in a PLG motion, making even a small dent in the conversion of this group will yield big results. It has the side effect of helping your other, more engaged users (since some of them get bored too).
The power user
“This is cool. Can it do {this incredibly specific thing in the way I want to do It}?
Power users are your best friend and a potential pitfall. Because they are smart and can extrapolate quickly to solve their problem, they will find a way to use your product in a way that works for them. Why is this great? You’ll get good feedback on what you’re doing. Why is this bad? Very few power users represent the mass market user you are trying to reach. They have a high tolerance for putting in a lot of effort to reach their desired outcome.
Power users need a repeatable outcome that can be completed by other users.
A power user will push you by finding the very edges of a feature or product. They will want to do things that maybe don’t make sense for other users, partly to prove that they can complete a smart thing. But their smart idea might have little relation to other users and how they want to engage.
To engage power users:
Ask them to make testimonials or walkthrough videos
Interview them on their use of a feature
Inspect what they are doing and think about how to generalize it
Power users are a clue to get to the real goal: crossing the chasm to the mass market. Even if you don’t get there immediately, power users are going to be one of your best tools because they care deeply about making your product work for them.
The mass market users
“I’m pretty sure this might solve a need I have. I wonder if I can get some results in {incredibly short time}”
Geoffrey Moore writes about “Crossing the Chasm” into a mainstream market that “the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution.” You reach a mass market by providing a lot of targeted value in a short time with relatively low effort. How do you know you’ve gotten there? Lots of signups and strong conversion for your PLG effort where many people stay within the guardrails (not too much help needed).
Mass market users want fast time to value for a problem they need to solve with relatively low effort.
Reaching a mass market can be like rocket fuel that ignites. Yet it’s also a reminder that not all strong adoption for a product ends up being high-conversion, high-average contract value, and high-profit customers. When you see a mass market trend, it’s important to think about how this use of your product might have unintended consequences and act accordingly.
To benefit from mass market users:
Focus on the areas of the product used by the most people more of the time
Make those areas incrementally better
Survey the users (NPS is fine) and ask them how they would feel if the product went away
When you end up with promoters who would be sad if your product went away, you probably have a hit product. Even if you don’t achieve that holy grail of sorts, reaching a mass market probably will encourage you to segment your PLG effort towards the features used by that market.
What’s the takeaway? If you’ve built a demo for your PLG effort, congratulations! It’s hard to combine a story that resonates with the customer, instructions that make sense, and value that shines through the product. But if you want to go beyond your initial assumptions, you’ll need to deal with the kinds of prospects that will push you to make things easier, more exact, and to provide quicker time-to-value for your solution. Listening to each one of these user archetypes will give you a much better chance of succeeding as you iterate and evolve your PLG motion.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ Pizza Mystery - Why does Pepperoni curl? Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats dives into the slightly serious story of pepperoni shapes during pizza cooking. Why is this relevant to data nerds? Because Kenji goes about this in a very methodical fashion, controlling for variables like a scientist. Even if you don’t like pepperoni, I think you’ll learn something from this review.
2/ Adapting Design to Constraints - Much like the challenge of taking your idea of a glorious piece of Pizza to the actual product, Ted Goas has documented the process of designing a product from end to end. What I really like about his Product Design Process for the Real World is that it acknowledges the messiness of the product process while also providing hope that after all, it’s a process. You can apply product design principles to almost any problem and describe that problem and potential solutions. (There are great examples here too.)
3/ Cable Strikes Back - Ben Thompson provides a primer on the history of cable companies and delivers insight on how they will continue to grow in the age of OTT boxes as they are the gateway to many customers not yet accessible to online-only products. The traditional “bundle” of services now looks a bit different but the billing relationship remains the most valuable part of the cable company’s service.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
I’m grateful you read this far. Thank you. If you found this useful, consider sharing with a friend.
Want more essays? Read on Data Operations or other writings at gregmeyer.com.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon