Account-based marketing is key to unlocking enterprise pipeline potential. Adding an ABM motion in a product-led growth company requires a mind shift and strategy change. In this post, we are going to share how you can drive more enterprise pipeline via ABM at a product-led company.

We delved into the intricacies of onboarding, exploring strategies that extend far beyond the traditional sign-up process using psychological principles in this blog post.

We just published our 2023 edition of the product-led go-to-market (PLGTM) vendor landscape for 2023 and it has attracted many more views than the last year’s edition. We believe it’s mainly because of the whopping 178% growth in the number of vendors from our first edition (PLG Vendor Landscape 2021) and the increasing popularity of product-led growth among SaaS companies. 

Onboarding red flags can be your roadmaps to improvement. If you are designing an onboarding experience from scratch, it’s useful to have these points at the back of your mind as you build and launch.

Naturally, every SaaS business wants to build a better product onboarding experience. But, where are we falling short?

Like most early-stage startups, we built an onboarding experience from scratch with limited feedback while our product is still evolving. In this article, we will take you through our journey of switching from a time-based to product activity-based onboarding approach at Inflection.io.

Inflection.io secured a spotlight position in The 2023 Emerging Tech Report by GTM Partners, a recognition shared with just 14 other vendors out of 100 applicants.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) puts the product experience front and center, aiming to win customers over through the product's own merit. But like any hot topic, myths have popped up around it. Today, we're here to uncover the reality behind onboarding myths in PLG companies.

What does an ideal onboarding journey look like? There is no one answer to this question. The ideal onboarding journey looks a bit different for everyone. Onboarding experiences, when done right, can be both simple and the best possible introduction to a product or service.

If you already have a product onboarding process in place, it is high time to evaluate and make changes to positively impact your business. Here are 15 proven best practices for product onboarding.

Companies collect heaps of data directly and indirectly from their customers every day. This data ideally should help the stakeholders make business decisions. Reverse ETL helps us break data silos and leverage data by pushing it to SaaS applications where it makes more sense.

There are some very effective best practices to revolutionize onboarding at a PLG company. But, the biggest lever a PLG company can pull to make their onboarding more efficient and successful is ‘personalization’.

One of the leading causes of customer churn is poor onboarding. Onboarding is your chance to show off the value of your product and leave a lasting impression on users. Getting onboarding right also establishes trust and credibility, making users feel confident in achieving their goals with your product. So, how not to suck at onboarding?

According to Google Trends, CS Ops is growing at a faster pace than marketing operations. Why are companies like Jasper, Miro, 6sense, and Gong have all recognized the value of CS Ops and have incorporated it into their team?

Product-led growth is implemented differently by each company. We wanted to know how successful PLG companies are doing it and surveyed a bunch of them to gather insights. Here are my top 5 learnings from The State of Product-Led Growth 2023 report.

Inflection brings you the never-before-seen journey builder that is going to help you execute the most effective customer and prospect journeys, effortlessly. You can now automate complex, multi-stage journeys at scale, all powered by real-time product usage data.

We are excited to introduce Product Data Explorer to our platform to help our customers easily understand and manage product events. This new feature enables non-technical teams at product-led companies to easily see all available product events in one place with the option to enable and disable them as required. 

We are thrilled to announce a significant enhancement to Inflection - the introduction of Salesforce Accounts support. This exciting new feature allows seamless integration between Inflection and Salesforce, enabling automatic synchronization of Account objects and associated fields and the ability to use Account data in building audiences and personalization. 

Product-led growth. Never has a term seemed so clear, yet meant so many different things to different people. Through 100s of conversations with companies doing product-led growth, I've come to the conclusion that there are 3 different maturities. Product led offer, motion, and company.

Not only does PLG offer great economics on that user/customer, often with fantastic NRR results, but every user/customer ALSO helps you win more accounts. This blog talks about how PLG can give you compounding returns.

In this blog post, we'll delve into the nuances of acquisition-led versus customer-led growth, explore the potential of "product-led" strategies, and discuss the significance of net revenue retention (NRR) as a key metric for sustained business growth.

Figuring out the product packaging is as important as figuring out the right pricing strategy. In this blog post, we are going to discuss two important product packaging strategies that are popularly used with a usage-based pricing model.

We sat down with our partners and PLG experts in producing The State of PLG Report 2023 to comprehend the report stats and the ground reality of running a successful PLG motion. This blogpost summarizes the discussion.

We’re now introducing the support for manual scoring for marketing qualified leads (MQLs), product qualified leads (PQLs), and product qualified accounts (PQAs) on our platform. This functionality lets our users set up MQL, PQL, and PQA scoring seamlessly and efficiently and then take action to create more MQLs, PQLs, and PQAs.

Product-led companies can now create highly engaging campaigns for their audiences and personalized communications, from onboarding to automated QBRs, to revenue & pipeline expansion with data directly from BigQuery.

Customer-led growth (CLG) is a strategy that prioritizes customer insights to guide growth. In this growth model, the focus is on delivering an amazing customer experience and scaling up brand advocates. By prioritizing the customer experience and building long-term relationships with your customers, you can drive sustainable growth and differentiate yourself from the competition.

The Inflection marketing team needed to learn Segment. Like many of our customers, Segment is tracking product actions (logics, features customers are using, etc). We needed to use this data in campaigns - onboarding, adoption, free trial flows, retention.

In this article, we will explore the importance of PLG in driving sustainable growth and some of the best examples of companies that have successfully implemented this strategy. 

Product-led sales has emerged as a subcategory of selection and prioritization, specifically built for and targeting the sales team at product-led companies.

Insights derived from Amplitude can be actionable in more ways than product improvement. Connecting a marketing automation platform is one of the most popular integrations to use the power of product intelligence to drive growth in PLG businesses. This article details the process of data sync between Amplitude and the popular marketing automation tool, Hubspot.

Aaron Bird, CEO and co-founder of Inflection.io (former VP of Product Adobe and Marketo) walked us through the best practices for maximizing a PLG motion and 8 email campaigns successful PLG companies are running today that drive more activation, revenue, and pipeline.

Most marketing automation tools, like Marketo, do not recognize product users and they are not aware of the org contexts of product users (they can only handle accounts from Salesforce). That makes it very difficult for PLG companies to properly coordinate and run growth campaigns for these users at Org level and user level.

Branching in campaigns is crucial for personalizing and directing your customers to their own customized paths of product experience. It allows you to tailor your messaging to your audience segments based on their interests, behaviors, and preferences to generate more PQLs/PQAs, convert to paid, or expand the customers. With conditional branching, you can always reach out with the right message at the right time.

We're excited to announce a powerful new feature for our users: the ability to update person fields as an action step in the campaign flow.

Webhooks are a way for one web application to communicate with another application in real time, allowing our customers to greatly extend the capabilities of Inflection. You can use webhooks in Inflection to trigger action through any of the tools in your tech stack that accept webhooks. Let’s unpack a few of several use cases of using webhooks with Inflection.

Inflection is thrilled to announce our bi-directional native integration with Salesforce. With the power of product and CRM data, you can now personalize PLG campaigns like never before as well and push data into Salesforce from Inflection.

Onboarding is a crucial part of any product experience. When done right, it can help your users become familiar with your product quickly, and get the most out of it. In this guide, we'll look at how to create product onboarding campaigns with Adobe Marketo Engage.

Connecting BigQuery and Marketo helps marketers track, analyze, and report leads and contacts better with centralized marketing data. It also opens new gateways to opportunities arising from data integration with other sources like CRM with product analytics.

More than 14,000 businesses use Redshift to get actionable insights from their data. Using the data for launching automated marketing campaigns is at top of the list of use cases powered by Redshift. Redshift users can establish a custom data integration with Marketo to exchange data that powers the marketing campaigns. There are two ways to do that.

The purpose of integrating Marketo with Segment and Marketo is to seamlessly transfer customer data to Marketo in real-time to power marketing automation with the right data. This blog post explains how to establish a connection between Segment and Marketo in detail along with known limitations.

Product-led growth thrives on great product insights. Amplitude is a popular choice for PLG companies to get those insights. This article explains the process of connecting Adobe Marketo with Amplitude, for running PLG comms.

Connecting Salesforce to Intercom is super easy and doesn’t need technical expertise. Managing SFDC leads can also be done directly from the inbox of the Salesforce app. Though Salesforce and Intercom seems like a dream combo, Intercom falls short when it comes to executing personalized communications for PLG use cases. Especially for B2B companies.

The goal behind connecting Snowflake and Marketo would be to use actionable raw data to fire up personalized campaigns to communicate with your customers at scale. The integration would also help in analyzing and taking data-driven decisions in marketing.

By integrating Salesforce and Customer.io, businesses want to streamline their communication processes and gain valuable insights into customer behavior. But, the absence of native integration between the platforms raises a set of challenges for Salesforce users planning to personalize communication at scale and at a fast pace.

Both Marketo and Outreach became the leaders in their respective eras by recognizing the fact that one-size-fits-all is not acceptable and enabled automated and tailored experiences with a different GTM. The same winning formula applies to the new era we are in. Curating a unique product experience at scale for the users through automation and personalization is the way to win in the product-led era.

This simple guide helps you build your first product onboarding emails and campaigns in HubSpot. 

The buying process is easy in PLG businesses. With the transactional ease comes the abandoned cart problem commonly faced by consumer businesses. Abandoned cart emails are popular in B2C because of their success rate and the same best practices can be applied for better conversion rates in PLG businesses too.

Growth automation helps product-led companies run both ENT and PLG motions out of one system to get a much more comprehensive view of the prospects and customers.

When it comes to upgrades, oftentimes your user is not the decision maker or buyer. And, the buyer need not be an active user. Upselling and cross-selling campaigns crafted with the right product activity and CRM data can be instrumental in reaching out to the right customer and gaining expansion revenue.

Product qualified accounts are an aggregation of metrics collected about the company compared to threshold criteria.PQAs are commonly used in B2B product-led growth (PLG) companies to understand buying readiness of an account.

Think of how you got started on Slack. Word of mouth is not a cliché but an effective growth strategy to compound user acquisition in PLG. How often do your best customers and product champions organically share their amazing product experience with their network purely out of delight?

A reactivation strategy should be part of every PLG company’s growth strategy to ensure that churn is not permanent. A tailored product-led reactivation campaign helps you win back the best customers and maintain a healthy bottom line.

Recap emails can be the ultimate tool to drive product engagement for a product-led growth (PLG) company. Reminding users of the value they are getting with the product is another touchpoint to improve retention and reduce churn.

Personalized and product-led milestone emails delivered at the right time are one of the best ways to mitigate activity churn. Show them appreciation, give them reasons to stick with your product, help them at tricky turns, and celebrate their wins. You can earn their loyalty on top of slaying churn.

After the recent announcement by Intercom's CEO, they are shifting their focus toward customer support. Since then Intercom customers have been looking for better alternatives to accelerate their product-led growth (PLG). Here's why Intercom customers are switching to Inflection.

You and your team designed the world’s most intuitive and frictionless onboarding process known to humans. There is a chance that you are still seeing a good percentage of your users abandon your product during onboarding.

Inflection is excited to announce the general availability of our Salesforce integration.Combined with our previous announcements for integrations into data warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift, and product activity such as Segment, you can now align your cross-functional teams to drive more revenue, usage, and faster onboarding with user and account-based automation empowered by product and sales data.

We are proud to announce that we are now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, achieving the ultimate gold standard in data security.

The marketing team at Stack Moxie uses Inflection to fully automate the process of compiling metrics matrix for their admin users and personalizes the data to their organization. All this while not depending on other teams and saving hours of unsustainable manual effort.

Product qualified leads (PQLs) are the customers and users that show higher intent of buying after experiencing value from your product. Identifying the right product qualified leads is crucial for your growth and can also give you a huge competitive advantage. Once you identify the right triggers in the conversion path, all you have to do is nudge them with the relevant message.

Marketing automation at a high level refers to using software to automate repetitive everyday tasks. That means you can complete tasks faster with seamless data flowing to trigger the right action.

Product-led growth (PLG) is the go-to-market motion in which the product is the primary channel to drive business growth. Implementing a PLG motion in your SaaS company means driving acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion using the product as the main vehicle for growth.

Our tech stacks are varied depending on the purpose and our flavor of product-led growth. We compiled a PLG tech landscape to help you build your own tech stack. Here's what we learned when we deep-dived into the vendors.

ABM isn’t just marketing. The market or category conversation from account-based marketing shifted to ABE “account-based everything” and ABX “account-based experiences”. Are we at that moment in product-led growth?

Building an audience based on their actions adds another dimension to the customer profile that can give context to the communication. We built our dynamic list feature to help marketers get their campaigns delivered to the most relevant customers.

he aesthetics of an email are not only pleasant to the eye but also make the user experience of consuming the email content easy. Use relevant product event data combined with the person and account information with Inflection to build hyper-personalized emails that present your customers with value realization on a silver platter. Create beautiful and fully customized emails for your automated product-led growth campaigns, now faster with Inflection’s Visual editor.

This direct quote from the podcast neatly sums up successful product-led growth. “When you nail the right product, and it's priced the right way, you grow with your customers and your customers never outgrow you.” This is a magical dynamic we all can aspire to achieve.

A lot of people think PLG = freemium. Reality is freemium (Figma) or free trial (Salesforce) is ONE of MANY models that work for PLG.There are product-led companies that ventured off the beaten path and found success while having their product steer their growth engine. Open source (MongoDB, Elasticsearch), per-seat pricing (Hootsuite, Slack), and usage/consumption-based (Twilio, AWS) are the other GTM motions adapted by product-led companies.

Our 2022 edition of the product-led growth vendor landscape is out now. We all have seen an explosion of new tools in the market to help companies do product-led growth efficiently. As a result, now we have 108% more vendors than last year. So we decided to expand the categories and here’s what it looks like: 

Marketing technology (martech) is a massive landscape that is ever-expanding. There are established crowd favorite products and also many notable new entries, especially in the product-led growth stack. There are SO MANY options to choose from and for an early-stage startup like ours, it can be overwhelming.

I was recently reviewing a “Marketing Operations Manager” job description for a well-known product-led company.One thing really stood out to me. The job was WAY more than marketing operations, which got me thinking: Is Growth Ops a better way to think about Marketing Ops?

Elise Bentley, VP of Marketing at Tiny is an incredible marketing leader with experience across a range of industries and organization sizes. She published three books that are dedicated to marketing and business growth and she became the VP of Marketing in less than 10 years. We got a chance to chat with her recently for ‘The Product-Led Marketing Show.’ 

We are excited to announce Redshift integration with Inflection, to supercharge marketing teams in product-led growth companies with data from the data warehouse, such as relevant product activity events that drive amazing campaigns.

Being able to grab an opportunity as soon as it exists can be a game-changing advantage in a competitive industry. Perfect timing is super important for better conversions in sales and customer success. When (you read that right) are you approaching your red hot leads?

We just showed Inflection’s demo to hundreds of marketers at our first-ever product unveiling event. If you couldn’t make it, here’s what you missed.

I know first hand the tradeoffs you need to make at an early stage startup. The scrutiny around every dollar spent, and how it impacts runway. I believe that having a great relationship with your users and customers is something that can’t wait until you can afford it, so we're going to make the decision easy for you. You can now get Inflection for free.

With this integration, Inflection assures protection against the biggest threats to enterprise security – people’s identities and behaviors. This integration enables us to extend a user's Okta identity to all of their resources without disrupting the user experience at all, and it only takes a few minutes to complete. 

We want to stay in touch with contacts accrued from events, ad campaigns, partner programs, and so on. In many such scenarios, marketers need to pick and choose the contact cohorts to communicate with. And the ask is simple - a feature to upload and maintain contact lists. We heard you!

The role of email as one of the most important channels of communication in B2B SaaS is undeniable, even in product-led growth motion. An email backed by hyper-contextualized product value metrics for each of your customers timed perfectly can help heighten product adoption, increase engagement, establish brand affinity, and drive revenue growth.

We’re happy to share that Inflection.io is the only B2B marketing automation solution with usage-based pricing. It’s the most customer-friendly pricing of any B2B marketing automation solution.

There are many variations in the description of product-led growth. The bedrock of the concept, however, is self-serve motion. The new-age customer wants zero or minimal human intervention in evaluating, experiencing value, and purchasing the product by self-education. When buying, we want an experience centered on the user’s needs. Self-serve is the growth mantra that can give an extra boost to your PLG business.

Let’s talk about the five letters that keep you up at night, CHURN! (Not so) Fondly dubbed as the ‘churn beast' it can come in different forms like customer, product activity, revenue, involuntary churn, and so on. Though churn is the common enemy across industries, the types of churn you measure and how frequently you do it can be unique to your business goals.

When I was working on its pricing page, I decided to check out how the pricing pages of other PLG companies look like. Yes, I did analyze the pricing pages of 20 well-known product-led growth companies and the list includes the following: 

You need marketing to drive off the source of truth, Snowflake has moved to be the 'source of truth' for so many companies. We are proud to be the only B2B marketing automation solution with a native integration with Snowflake to power product activity-based marketing.

Product-led growth companies have the lowest entry barriers for getting into the product and the widest top of the funnel as a result. It is great to have a steady influx of new signups and active users every month. As a marketer, you need to remind your users of the value they get from your product to be able to monetize the product-led motion. 

In this episode, Partho talked about how marketing and product teams alignment works at Hootsuite and the challenges when customer experience transitions to a self-service or product-led model. 

Seeing as we’re built for product-led growth companies, we thought to ourselves, there has to be a better way. While we still support scripting-based personalization, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach, inspired by the coding language almost all marketers know - Excel functions. 

Jake Levinger from Retool is a well-known name in the PLG space with his contributions in the product-led communities, events, and publications. He built the marketing tech stack for Retool - a well known PLG company that helps build internal tools. Jake shared his experience with us in The Product-Led Marketing Show’s very first episode. 

If you are a Twilio Segment user, integrating with Inflection can help you deliver tailored marketing campaigns across the customer lifecycle with an audience and token builder built for product-led growth - including supporting your sales-led motion.

I’m excited to announce Inflection is out of stealth and shout from the rooftops that we’ve built B2B marketing automation for product-led companies and you can now request a live demo. The future of B2B marketing is product-led and at Inflection, we know this new end-user era requires innovative solutions that are purpose-built for product-led companies. Inflection puts product activity data at the center and optimizes for the scalability and extensibility demands of the modern product-led marketing team. 

My biggest learning from analyzing over 50 product-led growth companies’ homepages is that - there are classic best practices around creating the most impactful CTA and there are outliers to the rules.

In the traditional way of marketing, all roads led to sales. The role of a marketer is up for a paradigm shift in the product-led universe. The change comes with an amazing opportunity to take a step back and reorient the process around the customer.

Your ideal product qualified lead (PQL) is at the intersection of three tinted lenses. Your product users' value experience, their fitness of your product’s ideal customer profile (ICP), and indications of purchase intent through product usage.

PLG is changing the way B2B marketing operates. Telling changes to showing; acquiring changes to activating; dictating changes to guiding. We are giving up aggressively gating the product in favor of guiding the user to get things done.

The success of product-led organizations is undeniable. After the initial product-led GTM strategy, many startups introduce a top-down motion to sustain and accelerate growth. Does the GTM strategy alone decide whether a company is product-led?

You’ll find everything you need to figure out to build a dominant growth engine, lower CAC, and deliver the best user experience in the book, Product-Led Growth, by Wes Bush. This is what I’ve learned from the book.

Historically, software was targeted at the buying committee in organizations. These products see low adoption by the end users. this way of purchasing software gets turned on its head. The best SaaS companies are recognizing the change and winning over their end users.

Great marketing is not a constant. It evolved and continues to do so with the times. The best companies that are nailing marketing now are product-led. Their marketing function is deeply integrated with the product, sales, and customer success with the product as their channel.

Products and organizations mirror the teams that built them. Our teams have to represent our customers, proportionately. In reality, diversity in marketing teams is not as much as we’d like it to be. Black marketers are especially low in number. You know what that means - an entire community’s voice is underrepresented in our work.

Treating product-led growth like the magic potion of profitability or fearing PLG as the eliminator of all sales jobs are both huge problems. PLG can help Marketing, Sales, and CS ( honestly, the entire company) in every stage of the funnel from awareness to expansion motion.