In this episode of Andy's Pod, we dive deep into the world of Product-Led Growth (PLG) with Natalie from Novatic. If you're skeptical about the "PLG or Die" mantra in B2B software, this episode is a must-listen! Natalie shares how Novatic integrated PLG into their existing sales-led strategy without laying off their sales team or making false promises.
Key Takeaways:
- The role of PLG as a lead generation channel and word-of-mouth driver.
- Practical strategies that doubled their lead channels while keeping the sales team thriving.
- Insights into organizing user conferences and live events.
- The importance of word-of-mouth and influencer marketing in a crowded SaaS market.
- How to effectively use Reddit and other unconventional channels for lead generation.
- The significance of testing and iterating before fully launching a PLG motion.
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Natalie:
No, we added in PLG. We are still sales-led. The intention was never really to switch fully or get rid of our whole sales team. And even modeling it out, to your point about the volume you need for PLG, we would have to get crazy volume to match what our sales team is doing. We never intended PLG to be like a crazy revenue driver. What we've seen it be is one, a new lead gen channel, because we are working PQLs and we are finding ways that we can pass those to sales at a higher rate than we could MQLs. And then two, a word of mouth flywheel driver. The more people using demos, the more they put on their website, the more people see it, have a good experience.
Andy: What is up, y'all? If you're skeptical about this PLG or Dye type of B2B software, you need to hear this. Natalie from Nevada reveals how they got PLG right. No layoffs, no false promises, just practical strategies that double their link in channels while keeping their sales team thriving. We also get into how to throw a user conference or live events and what the playbook is for that. So make sure you tune in. And always, as usual, if you want to keep listening to Andy's pod and getting these amazing insights, well, at least I think they're amazing. What you'll want to do is go ahead and click subscribe in your favorite podcasting app, whether that's YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Go ahead and hit subscribe there. That way you will be updated with the latest podcast drops that we have every single week. With that, I'm bringing Natalie from Nevada. I love the ring that that has to it.
Natalie: Hey Andy, how's it going?
Andy: Natalie, what's up? How's it going?
Natalie: It's doing well. I'm actually joining you guys' dinner tomorrow, so I don't know if you'll be there.
Andy: I saw that. I saw that. Well, thank you so much. It's going to be freaking a lot of fun. I've never done an event in New York, so we'll see kind of how it goes. I'm not a New York person, so we'll see how it goes.
Natalie: What I can tell you is it'll definitely be more expensive than anywhere else. That's what I've learned from doing it.
Andy: That that's also what I was told. That's what also what I was told. So I was like, Oh, okay. Interesting. Interesting. So, um, but yeah, well, Hey, let's get started. I just hit record so we can just keep going. Um, you know, I, it's super conversational, um, if you've listened to any of the other pods, but, um, I think it would be awesome to kind of learn from you today is Novatic is in a, is in a pretty crowded space. Right. And as a lot of SAS is today. And so what the heck are you guys doing to like stand out, uh, from the noise and like, kind of, you know, what, what are you experimenting with? What's worked, what hasn't worked. I would just love to hear all of that. Now you'd be, I think, super useful for me. Cause I'm trying to figure this out as well as for people listening. Right. Oh, I think you're muted.
Natalie: I accidentally turned my mic off. There we go. We'll try that again. Only podcast so many times, but you know, you don't need the mic on.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course.
Natalie: What I was going to say was more than happy to talk about it because I think this is the case for almost any software, especially more in the go-to-market side of software company that I talk to. It just feels like differentiation on product and features alone is almost impossible because you can build features faster than ever. I've talked to engineers who say like obviously with AI, they're pumping out features that would take them weeks and days. Then a lot more is out in public now. I think it's great that we've all committed to building more in public or Obviously, we're all about putting your product more on your website, putting it out there, but I think we've just seen that that's caused… It's no longer the days where you can just hide your product until the customer buys it and then they see what it is. You need to be more forward-facing with your product, which is great for your prospects that I think ultimately helps you get more customers, but does mean it's harder to hide your secret sauce a little bit. So all of that being said, you, I don't think we're alone in this problem. So many marketers go to market leaders. I talked to her, like, I don't know how to differentiate anymore. Everyone has the same products. I'm releasing them so fast.
Andy: Yeah, it's, it's tough. It's definitely tough. So what kind of experiments are y'all running right now?
Natalie: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we just experimented with, and this was like a seven month one was actually going PLG to help cut through the noise.
Andy: Oh, everyone's like, Oh, I'm gonna go peel. Okay, I have thoughts on this. So I would love to hear yours and kind of how it's went so far.
Natalie: So what I will preface is I I think what my thoughts are going to be similar in a way to yours is I don't think it's for everyone. I don't love how sometimes this like, you know, going PLG will solve all and suddenly you're gonna get a million leads and it's gonna be perfect. I think there are a lot of products where PLG doesn't make sense. And actually, I came from another company that we were like a CRM. So uploading your data was really hard and we sold to a not very technical audience. And we had a PLG offering and it was actually the bane of my existence because I was a marketer, all of our leads mostly came PLG, and I could not get them to activate. So I will clarify, I don't think PLG saves all of you, but very hard to activate. and more like complex product. Maybe there's a portion of it you can make PLG or maybe you can use demos to show off your product more, but I don't think everyone should just go PLG. For us, we were getting feedback from good fit ICP customer or potential customers saying, I love you all. I've seen your branding. I've seen the work you've done, but I went with this person because it was free. Or like, I really want to try demos, but no one on my team wants to spend money on something right now. we just can't. Like we just kept getting that feedback that either we were losing to free alternatives or people just didn't have, no matter how many case studies or data we armed them with, they're like, I need to prove this out internally before I can ask for any money. And I can't prove it out if it's not free.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And then how to, okay. So let's walk through that. So you've been trying this PLG motion for your product. You happen to work because your ICP, it worked for your ICP. Now, it's probably also what I'm gathering here is it's a low lift, your product to like get started and set up, right? That's kind of a requirement. Like you're not going to PLG Salesforce, right? Like no one's going to PLG Salesforce. Like that's not going to happen. So with that, you're, you're making that easy to do. What was your acquisition channels to get people to, to try it in PLG, right? Because if you think about PLG, um, The hardest part that I think from a lot of founder friends that I talked to is like, to make it really work, you have to know how to get lots of amount of traffic, right? How do you get lots of traffic? Well, you know, in a lot of cases, it's a lot of SEO, it's a lot of paid people have different strategies, right? So for y'all, like, how did you fill that top of funnel with these PLG type users? And what was the strategy there?
Natalie: It's funny because our strategy is really not that different than our normal sales led strategy was. Like even looking at the data, the lead sources are basically identical. Number one is SEO. Granted, I think that's overinflated because we don't have a super complex SEO strategy. I think it's people Googling us, so organic word of mouth. And then also we rank higher on a few key keywords, like interactive demos, kind of an obvious one. But what I really think it is is word of mouth, which is our number two lead channel, which also includes people seeing other customer tours. That's also why I think PLG works pretty well for us. I think it's kind of similar with you all. When people use the free version of Nevadic or interactive demos, there's that water stamp that says powered by Nevadic. So people are on a website, they see an interactive demo they like, they go, they click through and see, oh, this was made by Nevada. I want a similar experience. And that's really helped with the volume for PLG. And also just why we think PLG is going to work. Cause that's going to just increase the volume.
Andy: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. And so for you, let me ask, so you think SEO is overinflated. What, what is kind of that, that like main channel that's working for y'all? Is it paid? Is it like, is it something in particular that's worked for you?
Natalie: I really think it's word of mouth, which is annoying.
Andy: Wow. Really word of mouth. Okay. And now this is interesting because. Especially in a crowded market, you're doing word of mouth. Right. And so now let me ask you this and I'm probably going to annoy the heck out of you and Natalie here, but it's like, how, how do you stand out and get more word of mouth in your competitors? Right? Like that, that's kind of the next question. I'm sure people are asking that I'm asking. Right. Word of mouth is probably the most powerful form of marketing. I think we can all agree on that. How do you spread the word of mouth? Is the obvious answer just comes down to freaking great product?
Natalie: Not that I don't think our product is great, but I wish it was that simple. Definitely not. It's easy for me to say word of mouth, but there's a lot behind the scenes. I'd say one, as I mentioned, the natural flywheel of demos are a very public tool. If you go to someone's website, you see an interactive demo you like, you tell a friend about it, then they're interested. So that's like one portion of the word of mouth. Two is we do have a pretty in-depth advisor influencer program. I've talked about this a few times publicly on other podcasts and things, but that's really fueled our like LinkedIn organic word of mouth as well as my own LinkedIn. I do a lot of posting and promoting, but essentially we found either ex-customers or consultants and freelancers who work with our customers. So really good ICP fits or like they work with our ICP directly. They are advisors. So it's not just like we pay them per post. We work with them on a monthly basis. They give me feedback on like marketing strategy, ideas, campaign messaging. But then part of that is obviously promotion as well. And really focusing promotion on educational content of like here are use cases for interactive demos or here is some stats on it versus just like, hey, go check out Novatic with this link.
Andy: Interesting. So you're using the influencers, but I think, who took this from user evidence? What's his name? The VP of marketing.
Natalie: Mark Huber, who's actually one of our advisors and he took our model and then replicated it, which was pretty cool.
Andy: Okay. I was like, this sounds like Mark has been on the pod too. And I was like, you know what? This sounds like Mark's play here. So Uh, yeah, Mark, definitely. He was telling me about it. And so the pillars there are like posts, monthly meetups on marketing strategy. Um, so it's, it's truly like an advisor, not like a influencer marketing. Right. It's like, that's an interesting niche because it's like, they kind of have a following and people listen to them. Right. Or that they're, they're a thought leader, but also they're like, they they're thought leaders. Right. So they're going to also provide you with like really good insights. Um, which is interesting. Now, do you, do you lay that out like in a contract or something? Sorry to get in the weeds, but like, you're like one monthly meeting, um, one post a month. Like it's kind of like in bullets. Is that what you say are the biggest kind of check boxes there?
Natalie: Yeah, we do have a standard contract. And what I tell anyone thinking about this type of program is we always start with a three-month contract just to see if it's a mutual fit. People have full-time jobs. Sometimes they have every intention to be a great advisor, and then they get busy. Totally understand just to make sure it's a good fit. We start with three months, and then we outline things like roughly one post a month. I do a lot of it async as well, so I send a monthly newsletter asking for, that's where I like put all my asks and then updates. So baseline, you respond to that, obviously do co-content with us. And then it sort of depends. Some are more involved than others, and we have different tiers for level of involvement, but some of them do include that monthly meeting. That being said, I have no spreadsheet anywhere being like, who posted this month? I understand, again, people are busy. Some months people post twice, some months people post none. I generally just try to make sure like, And that's why I usually also recommend keeping these programs small. Cause if you have like 50 people, you're just not going to be able to keep those relationships and keep up with that.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. It's we're doing it now and it's interesting. Um, you know, it's, it's kind of weird because I have very high standards and I'm just going to be honest people, because I, you know, I do the whole like content thing as well. And, you know, so when I see what, like, when I, when I, when I see what people are doing, It's hard for me because when I look at these influencers and I see what they charge, I'm like, what? Like, come on for a post like three grand, give me a break, you know? Um, but in some cases it's, um, it's worth it, but it's kind of like gambling, I think a little bit sometimes. Right. And so for us, what we've kind of doubled down on and I'm giving everyone my secrets here, but it's okay. That's, that's the point of the pod. Um, if you listen, see y'all, if you're listening, you get, you get payback here, but with all the secrets that we use, but. It's a, for us, I think it's going with the micro influencers, like the people that like have it, it's almost like a recruiting tactic. It's like betting on the stock. That's like, hasn't popped yet. And that's what kind of what we're looking at for micro influencers. I'm like, Oh, this person to post a couple of times here and there, their stuff is great. They're not like posting every day just to post every day. Don't get me wrong. That's part of how you get good. But, um, I think there's some potential here. And what we're actually doing is because I know this content game really well, I'm coaching them as well. So I'm saying, Hey, like you, you have potential and I will personally help you make some content. I know that will resonate. And then they're micro influencers. And so for us, right, what we're actually doing there is we're actually able to. Now, again, not everyone can do this because they don't have the founder is like the content person. Right. So it's, we're definitely playing with our strengths here, but for us, I do that. And I, you know, for the, the, the plus is I push them to my network, which people pay me for. Right. So there we're giving them that much value. Um, and we're still paying them of course, cause like I want to support creators, but what we're also doing is like, I think the value that we're giving a lot of these micro influencers that we work with is actually a lot more than like them getting the $250, right? Cause we're going to promote them in our newsletter, right? Hey, look at what this person posted about distribute. Uh, we're coaching them on content and then we're helping them like feel confident about it too. Right? So it's almost like this weird, um, it's different, right? It's, it's definitely a little bit different. It takes some of my time, of course, which, you know, but like, That's what we do to make it work. I think overall, it saves us a few bucks. And then it's these people that are up and coming that others haven't heard from before, which is also a little bit exciting. Because their friends are like, whoa, I've never seen you post before. What is this thing? And I think it actually creates more attraction than the bigger influencers. Because when they make a post, you kind of know they're being paid for it. And you're kind of like, eh, whatever, they're being paid. They don't really truly care. Um, that's our strategy, right? Everyone who's listening, go and steal it. Um, but you know, again, for us, we're kind of doing the coaching slash influencer model there. Um, but anyways, thought I'd share that Natalie, uh, again, everyone kind of has a different approach, but that's, what's the other thing I'll say is that's, what's different about this, um, B2B influencer marketing, right. Is, I don't know if there's one right way to do it, kind of like B2C, right. Where it's like, okay, find someone, give them a script. Get a video, push ads to it. Right. Um, someone that's known and put it on their feed. Right. Um, because for B2B LinkedIn, the half-life is like super short on the content. Right. It doesn't like, say you have something that pops the half-life on that content lasts a couple of days. If you're lucky versus like Instagram and all those, right. Where, you know, people run ads and all that fun stuff. Um, more likely than LinkedIn, but the half-life much shorter. So it's definitely different. And then you're not selling like a, you know, new sunscreen. Um, right. Which is like, you can just, you know, buy it like that. It's like a big purchase. So there's definitely, uh, I think a lot more to figure out on that end. Um, but let me ask you and push it to you. Cause now I'm just going on a rant. Um, you know, you have that advisor model and weaving back here. You also mentioned you do other things for word of mouth. What are those kinds of other things? Are they a live event? Are they. Stuff like that. Like what, I think you guys just threw a live event recently. Maybe.
Natalie: I was about to say a lot of events is so top of mind. Cause we just threw our first mini user conference. So day and a half long flew customers to New York organized, you know, multiple days of content presentations. So we hadn't done anything on that scale before we'd done like dinners and mini workshops, but this was the full like user conference.
Andy: Wow. And how did it go? How did it go?
Natalie: I was just like, it went awful. It was so bad. No, no, it went very well.
Andy: You're like, okay, I'm gonna tell you the truth. We got to cut this from the pod. Yeah, it was the worst thing ever. No. No, I was it though. I'm sure it was amazing.
Natalie: It went really well. I was super happy with it. And I think the thing I would recommend for anyone throwing an event, especially a longer event, what we did like five months ago, is I asked the audience that like our power users who I thought would be coming to the event, just like five very simple questions of like, what do you hope we do? What do you hope we don't do? What do you like about going to conferences? What do you not like? What do you hope to get out of this? Just like very simply ask people what they like and don't like. And it is shocking the littlest things that make a difference. Like one, people were saying how conferences usually feel so overstuffed and they don't have time to like actually take in all the information. So we had it start at 10 and I can't tell you how many people were like, that was the best thing ever. I got to do some work in the morning. I got to go sightseeing. I got to sleep in. So by the time 10 o'clock rolled around, they were excited and ready to network versus waking up at like 8 a.m. hungover and being upset that they were there.
Andy: Yeah. Oh, shoot. That's really good. Um, I like that. I like, what else did you guys do that was different? I think that's, that is definitely interesting. Cause usually they start like eight and it's like, Hey, not everyone was, is just like, you start work at eight from your house or other places. Cause you're not like drinking the night before. Right. But like you guys get it, you know, it's like some people are doing, I don't drink personally, but if you are drinking, you know, um,
Natalie: then yeah that makes total sense what else did you guys do that kind of like kept people engaged because that's always super hard yeah i joke about the 10 a.m thing i do think people liked it but what really i think stood out was one no presentation was longer than 30 minutes and the presentations were really like Customer led and workshop style. So we had customer show and tells which are about 15 to 20 minutes gave time for questions, but it's really just a customer being like, hey, here's a cool thing I did with Nevada. The presentations were anything super fancy, but just like very tactical and very like I did this exact thing. You can see exactly how I did it. Then we had workshop style. So it was four Nevadic employees led each workshop. We made them very like, again, hands-on. I incorporated scategories, the game into my workshop. Someone else incorporated like a crossword puzzle, just trying to think of ways where I was like sitting. And then again, and other presentations were a mix of presentation and open conversation or small group conversations. So almost nothing was just like sitting and watching a presentation for an hour.
Andy: Nice. Okay. This is cool. And like, for that, how much should, okay. So like, we're thinking about doing our first conference right now and I'm sure a lot of people are right. Um, by the way, if you're not doing like live stuff, like you need to also like webinars are hitting off right now I've noticed, but like you have to have it like a main creator is like the kind of like front and center. Right. But like those that are popping off for us, like it's amazing. Um, people are like, we've gotten like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of signups, which is pretty crazy. So, um, That's something interesting, but that's more, you know, zoom live, but still getting people together. That fun, that fun stuff there. How much should someone budget for a conference like this or think about it? Like to do it right now, Natalie, you guys sound like you did it pretty well here, but like. How much does someone think about budgeting? And I'm selfishly asking for us, but I'm sure other people would want to know too.
Natalie: So it's hard cause I did it in New York and I will say I tried to avoid like unnecessary spend doing things like a bunch of signage that was expensive. I'd say though, at least probably budget 50 K unless you want to do like a really cheap, realistically 50 to a hundred K. But I'd also recommend you don't need to start with the user conference. I know that sounds really scary. I am so glad that I had done multiple workshops, which are closer to like 10 to 15k. And again, New York's expensive. You can do it for less, just like space in New York is expensive. I had done dinners beforehand. Like every time you throw an event, you learn something about what people don't like and don't like. So also don't feel like if your budget or your mental sanity, because I will say it was pretty exhausting planning the whole thing, is ready. Do a small coffee meetup. That could be really cheap. And then just learn what people like and don't like. And then when you feel like you have it under your belt, that's when you can spend more money and time on the big user event.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And yours is a user specific event. So it was like all of your Novatic people, right. Getting people together. I'm sure you also brought in like some prospects, you know, like it was like maybe 70, 30 or something like that.
Natalie: So we kept the daytime portions to customers and we actually also invited the advisors. So I mentioned how the advisors are really customers get to learn about Novatic. This was really cool because our advisors could give more advice and like the go to market side because They're all experts in that. And then customers taught our advisors more about like specific Nevada implementations. So that was also just really fun to watch. And then, so daytime was actually just customers and advisors. Then we did like a nighttime happy hour where we also invited some prospects. I'd maybe change that next time and invite some late stage prospects to it. But for first one, I think I'm glad I kept it just customers because it kept the quality discussions really high.
Andy: Yeah, I bet. Cause you're instantly relate to others, right? Oh, use the bag. How do you use it? Right. Oh, what works, what doesn't, you know, all that fun stuff. And for you, I mean here, so did you like, and again, dumb question. When you throw these events, do you have like a, like a, like a, um, do you hire an outside agency to help you put this event together? Or do you do it all in house? Like what's kind of, what have, what have you seen work best?
Natalie: So I did get some part-time freelance help to help with some of the smaller stuff like finding the swag or help me do some event research, but that was maybe like 10, 20 hours of work. I'll say it depends on your level of experience and comfort level. Like if you have no events experience, I'd recommend an agency just because there are so many small things that I did not think about and still the day of was like, shoot, I should have done this or this or that. If you have, again, have built up that practice, I would recommend getting some help, just someone who can help you with some small tasks to get off your plate. Because I was playing this for at least six months before, and I was taking up a good portion of my time.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Wow. Okay. So definitely get some freelance help to help you on that. I might need to get your contact on that, uh, to, to do that. Cause we, you know, it's funny, um, early outreach days at outreach we put together, um, it was four of us, I think internally, and we put together the first unleash. I was on the team, believe it or not. Um, and, uh, I was just. It was a nightmare. Luckily we got some outside help, but we were like, okay, we're going to do this event in two months. Right. And like, we just kind of were like, all right, we're going to do it. It's going to be a hundred people. It's going to be in Sonoma. Um, it ended up being like 80 to a hundred people. And it was, it was definitely more, um, intimate, which I fricking loved. Right. Because like, it was like a customer conference slash bring prospects to in the Bay area. And then we did like the whole winery thing and like, that was fun, but it was small enough to get everyone on a bus or a couple of buses and like go to a winery from like the hotel and Sonoma and all that. Right. So, um, we did that and it turned out to be a success, but now I look at it and it's like, yeah, there's no way I would know what to do for that level of an event. Right. It was like, okay, 80 to a hundred people. Great. Um, easy. But now it's like, yeah. You everything you mentioned, right? Like the little things that like people need in an event that you just don't think about science for the bathroom is right. Like simple things like that. So, um, but I like your idea of like starting small. And I think one of the best conferences that I've been to was, uh, was earlier this year in Austin, uh, peeps or pip, I think is how you pronounce it. He's going to kill me because I always, even in person to call him peep, but it's pip.
Natalie: uh pips winter conference i don't know if uh were you at that or i wasn't but i heard a lot about it and definitely modeled some of the like like i but also asked people about what events they love and that one came up a lot and modeled especially the like free time more casual atmosphere that was also something we were really trying to create when this one like one of our attendees told me like this was the most relaxed he's ever been at an event just because it felt like, you know, everything wasn't so rushed. There were breaks. It didn't feel like anyone was just trying to like outsmart each other on the presentations. It really was just so supposed to be like a casual setting to learn about Nevada.
Andy: Yeah. Nice. Okay. Got it. Yeah. That was definitely very casual. It was like, you can always get a drink when you want. There was always food available. So you didn't have to wait for like a specific lunchtime. Um, and then there was like the breakout room portion, which, um, I think I love specifically. Right. And like, I think if we do an event, we're going to do that same style. This is actually, I did like my brand 30, um, like LinkedIn cohort courses, which was like, you know, we'd have like hundreds of people on the zoom call, but what we do is like teach for 40 minutes or so breakout room on what we taught for 20 minutes. Right. And honestly, that still wasn't even long enough. People were like, we want more, want more, but some people were like, I can't spend more than an hour in the zoom. Right. But, um, Yeah. And that's when the actual magic happened, I think is like hearing it and then, okay, how do we apply it for my specific use case? Or that won't work. And then other people are like, Oh, if that doesn't work, have you thought about this? And then you can kind of like jam, right? They're almost like little jam sessions. Uh, which I really dig. And actually we're going, we're doing that for our webinars now. Um, so we're not just doing webinar and then like pitch our product, right? It's, it's, uh, the framework we're doing, um, is like going to teach something for 40 minutes. something related to our product, right? How you can do it. And then breakout room on, you know, from users on how to make it better, uh, or people that are new that haven't used it, that also helps them like get excited about it. Right. So that's kind of a little play that we're doing, um, to get people excited there. So, uh, I don't know, have you guys played with webinars at all?
Natalie: Or is that, is that so funny enough webinars? I'm pretty strict with our marketing where I believe we can't do everything. And even sometimes I feel like I fall habit to doing too many things at once. And webinars have been one of those things that have just been on my list of like, I can't think of a way yet to make them unique. I'm sure there are like what you're describing. That sounds so cool. Very more engaging than like typical webinar format. The amount of work that goes into making a unique and different webinar, it's just always sort of putting it on my back burner. We've done a few more, like we sponsor webinars of certain communities, but building up a reoccurring webinar series just has not been top of the list. And we even tried it a little bit and then ended up getting it just like prerecorded because the act of scheduling a live event and finding guests and all that was like, this, this juice doesn't work the squeeze for us.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, I think, you know, again we're a little bit we're an anomaly because I have a following and a 32k email list and that you know all the fun stuff but um you know for us it's it's a couple things it's like the artist that shows up right almost like a music festival like okay do people know it right and then the hook. What's the topic? What's the benefit they're going to get out of it? And is there a topic market fit there with that person to the actual topic, right? And then the other thing that we've learned is you have to email the crap out of people before to join. It's not like send one email and then hope everyone should… We like, you know, from a very smart buddy, I know that's helped do, you know, millions of dollars in sales from webinars specifically. He's like, he gave me his framework and he's like, dude, you got to send like six emails, like within three days of the webinar coming of like, Hey, show up, put on your calendar, text people. Like, so we've got this, we're kind of like taking it seriously. Uh, if you can't tell, right. I think it's, it's one of those things now that like, as a new channel, it will work. Right. It's just that you have to like, you can't just throw it together. And you have to, as you mentioned, you have to like really think about it. And like, it can't just be like a, this side thing that you're doing, you know, you have to kind of like, Really figure out what makes a good webinar today. And like, what are the tactics and how do you do it? And so we've thought about that, right? Which is like get people's numbers, text them before, right? Six emails after the webinar, uh, or give the prize away at the end of the webinar to increase retention. After that, you send a followup sequence for people who attended people who didn't attend. Again, now I'm like, you're doing a masterclass on this whole thing, but Um, for us, it's kind of been awesome. Um, at least for like, you know, we're a newer company. Um, but yeah, that's what I've kind of learned. And hopefully people listening, you know, get some, get some thoughts on that. Um, and then the webinar stuff, but Hey, if you want to do something one day, now it'll be the webinar, but let's figure it out. Well, we can make something work. So, um, yeah, let me see. All right. What else is top of mind? So you've talked about word of mouth. You've talked about some live events. You did that. What other kind of channel have you guys relied on or that's been the juice worth the squeeze? I guess. Is that what you said? Yeah. What else has been worth the squeeze for y'all?
Natalie: So what's been interesting is I said before main channels are still very similar to what they were in a sales led motion, but we're experimenting with some new channels with PLG and more just want to share this because I've noticed there are certain channels that work a lot better if you are PLG versus when we were sales led. So things like sponsoring newsletters. When we were sales led, I tried it a few times, but really did not see that much success because I think it's just too much to go from reading a newsletter to booking a demo with someone. That's a pretty big gap. Granted, obviously you can always offer content. It doesn't have to just be book a demo. We've done that as well with some big reports. That's another one as far as what content has done well, big data reports for us. But I have noticed that since going PLG, we've seen a lot more success with newsletters and even offering like guest posts and newsletters. And then another fun one that I can't say it's been a success yet, but just feel like I've heard a lot of B2B marketers talking about it, but we're experimenting with Reddit. It's scary a little bit.
Andy: Interesting. Okay. Okay. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more.
Natalie: Same thing where we experimented when we were just PLG, basically just like finding posts that are already talking about topics similar to your webinar like topic market fit, finding posts that are similar topic market fit, and just adding organic insights. But even more than LinkedIn, we're like commenting on LinkedIn, you really want to make sure you're not being overly pitchy, you're adding value. But the Reddit, you have to strip away like all jargon and just say it and make sure it's not pitchy at all. So first, we're just experimenting with organic channels. And we have seen a few leads, especially again, from our PLG motion, coming in from Reddit, just from us like engaging in Reddit conversations around like demos or product letters, like growth marketing.
Andy: Oh, so, so what, okay. This is freaking amazing. So you were talking about Reddit. How do you find what to comment on? Like, what's the strategy? Do you search like demo tool or like you're only commenting on demo stuff or are you commenting? Like, are you taking it up a level and doing like generic sales stuff? Like what's the strategy on. what to comment on, because as you know, you're kind of like, there's a million things on Reddit. So how do you find the ones that like, you should be commenting on that work for you?
Natalie: I'd say a combo of two things. One, we did find a tool that we can just do like keyword search, very similar to what I see a lot of people do with Slack communities, right? You just like put in the keywords that work well for you.
Andy: So for us, if someone- Oh, what's that? What's that tool?
Natalie: Let me, I should know.
Andy: I've seen it. I can't remember the name though. Yeah.
Natalie: F5bot. F5bot.
Andy: And you just put in a category and it gives you like the threads where things are like social listening or something like that. Right.
Natalie: Exactly. And you can also do like negative keywords or things that you don't want to rank for. Cause for us, like we're looking at product tour and there's a lot of things that with product tours that aren't applicable. So we can also say, you know, show product tour, but not like tour of my building. I don't know.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Interesting. And so that's the main thing. F5 bot. Okay. Then people are going to love that.
Natalie: And I'd say we do follow some specific channels. So like find, like, that's what's helped about the F5 bot. You see what channels are subreddits. Sorry. You'd think I would know the lingo by now, but I, I'm not a personal Reddit user, so I always mess up on the lingo. We use, we find good subreddits from the FI bot. And then we also just follow those and try to contribute to subreddits that have like nothing to do with us. Cause we've learned, and I have to give credit. The other member of my team, our growth marketing manager, Raman has been like owning this project. So he's the one going into scary Reddit land, but he's learned, especially the more you comment and post, you build up like karma points. And then, so your posts and comments will do better if you have more karma points. So it's also good just to like, engage with posts that have nothing to do with your product.
Andy: That's interesting. Wow. That's something I've heard more of, like Reddit. How do you think about this, all that fun stuff. As you mentioned, I would need someone to focus on it and get someone there because that's a full-time thing, it sounds like, or at least part-time. You got to actually pay attention to it.
Natalie: I'd say the way we're thinking about it is similar to how I think about my LinkedIn. I block off multiple hours a week to engage on LinkedIn, post on LinkedIn. You need to do the same with Reddit. And again, I think it was very hard for us to plug ourselves or for other people to plug us when we didn't have a free offering. It's much easier now. Reddit does tend to be a little more SMB. Granted, we've seen some larger accounts or ICPs on it. But so if you don't have a free offering, or any sort of free tool or something, I don't know if it's worth worrying about Reddit yet. That was just we observed. It became a lot easier for referrals to come once we had that free offering.
Andy: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. And for you, the other thing that I'm curious about is like, You mentioned you guys switched to PLG. Now, like when you say switched, what do you mean? Like, did you just, cause when a lot of people say switch, they typically mean they added a way for you to do self signup. Right. Is, is that what you mean by switch? Or did you like get rid of your entire sales team? Right. And like, just go, Hey, we'll have more inbound people that are scouring free signups. Like, like what was actually the transition?
Natalie: That is a great qualification. And I always need to be careful about the terminology I use. Cause I keep saying, yeah, PLG. No, we added in PLG. We are still.
Andy: Perfect. Perfect. Okay. That, yeah, no, no, no. This is good. I'm clarifying. Cause I'm like, shoot, like. Did they get rid of their sales team? You know? Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. So you added in PLG. Got it. Okay.
Natalie: Basically added just a freemium plan. So you can start try one demo for free, but we, the intention was never really to switch fully or like get rid of our whole sales team and even modeling it out to your point about like the volume you need for PLG, we would have to get crazy volume to match what our sales team is doing. We never intended PLG to be like a crazy revenue driver. What we've seen it be is one, a new lead gen channel, because we are working PQLs and we are finding ways that we can pass those to sales at a higher rate than we could MQLs. And then two, a word of mouth flywheel driver. More people using demos, the more they put on their website, more people see it, have a good experience. So it's not intended to be like a major revenue channel.
Andy: Got it. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And, um, You know, it sounds like you guys took it seriously when you added it on, like, okay, free trial, sign up. Like it's a whole nother motion. And people like, I think a lot of people make the mistake of just thinking like, Oh, like, we'll just like, turn it on. And then, you know, it'll work. And it's like, nothing works like that, right? Like it's a whole separate motion. And I think a lot of people mistake that, like you said, like you have to go on Reddit, you have to like, look at other channels that fuel the top of funnel for, the PLG motion to work, right? And so, um, in doing that, what are kind of the, the, the, uh, epiphanies you've had that you, you think other people should know as they're adding on this PLG motion? Because I know personally, I know like four or five people that are thinking about it.
Natalie: I'd say one, to your point, it's starting over. Like your sales team learning how to sell on a PLG fashion is entirely different. You're inherently selling to people who don't want to talk to you. It is not easy. So what I would recommend and what we did is we actually did it behind the scenes for seven months before we publicly launched. So we started by adding a $50 a month plan that we didn't like advertise besides on our website, just to see, can people self-serve? It was not the best experience. I think anyone on our team would say the first iteration was Not the prettiest, but we were just trying to validate like, can people self-serve? Cause if people can't self-serve then like, what are we doing here? So we started with that. Then we switched to our freemium offer and then we slowly increased the amount of website traffic that saw that freemium offer. And with every week that we had at a certain percentage, we were getting feedback from users. We were watching user recordings. We were talking to our sales team, asking them about what it was like selling in this motion. So we got to get a little bit better and a little bit better. So by the time we launched, it wasn't like, Cause also hopefully if you have a good successful launch, you'll have a lot more volume than you had before. We were lucky with that, but I was very glad that we had some at-bats before throwing all these leads to our sales team and say, Hey, figure out how to sell in this brand new fashion. So I would. In any way you can test it before, just get your team more comfortable with a self-serve motion. I'd recommend it because even so it felt like launch week was like, Oh my God, so many things are on fire and having to figure it out. So I just can't imagine if we didn't take that seven months.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. Um, no, I, I dig that. And I like how you guys like tested it before, right. Before like saying, Oh, we're PLG now. Right. It's like, okay, let's put it on the site. See if people hit this, see if it works, all that fun stuff. Um, and something interesting that you mentioned is PQL. It's like, what? So I, I worked with some companies at outreach and they had this object in Salesforce that were PQLs, uh, that we had to figure out how to work with, uh, What is that for people? How are you thinking about it? Because I've seen it skinned five different ways.
Natalie: I was about to say, I'll give our definition and then what I think is the proper PLG definition. Because I know what we're doing is not normal, talking to a lot of other PLG leaders. So to start, we are just saying anyone who signs up for a free trial and is in our ICP criteria. Mostly like companies of a certain size, non-Gmail. We are starting probably too broad because we are trying to get more at bats, more practice, all that. What I've heard a lot of PLG experts say is it should be those things signed up as part of your ICP and hit a certain activation moment. So the reason it's a product qualified lead is because they've done something in the product to indicate that they're interested beyond just signing up.
Andy: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Interesting. And so ICP sign up. Right. And so you kind of have two, uh, so they signed up and then your qualification is their ICP, which is like sales leader, marketing leader, you know, whatever, whatever. Um, and then that is like a PQL. Okay. Interesting. And then how, and then what's the. So sales, when you get a PQL, are those automatically assigned based on account? Is that how you're, is that how you're kind of running that motion in Salesforce? Or is it like just a list that all the sellers go and look at, and then they're like, Hey, I'm going to go work this lead.
Natalie: Definitely not just a list. It is a lot of routing. This was actually one of the most painful things. This is why you should take seven months to figure it out. It's because of routing.
Andy: Now we're getting into the secret sauce here. Okay. I love it. I love it.
Natalie: It is a complex, uglier zap that we actually broke because you are not allowed to have more than a hundred steps on one zap. And so it stopped working.
Andy: Wow. Okay. Okay. A hundred steps. Tell me, and this is from like a signup page to like something in Salesforce. And that was like the, and then within that it was a hundred steps.
Natalie: Basically what we're doing is checking first, is this account already owned by someone? If so, assign it to the correct person. If not, what is the company size? And then we route off of company size. So we're checking an account. Also, we're trying to work out a lead and account model. That's also why this is so complex. Salesforce is not like, because we are trying not to convert these leads until they've, we only convert when they become an opportunity. So we're also working on a lead and account model. That's why it's so complex because for everything we have to copy both to the lead and account. I will preface, we are trying to get off Zapier. I wouldn't recommend this for the longterm. It was a good bandaid, but we're now looking at like routing solutions because that was, it's still to this day, like kind of hacky and sort of breaks. And again, huge shout out to our growth marketing manager, Raman, who's owned a lot of this routing and will like, it has to be the one that goes in anytime something's misrouted and like manually check it.
Andy: Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Well, there's a couple, I think routing, there's like, what are the routing tools today? There's, um, there's, uh, default. I think it's like the newer kid on the block. And then you have, uh, the big dog is, uh, what, what are they called? I've worked with them at outreach, not lead IQ. It was, uh, lean data, I think is one lean data, lean data. Yeah. Lean data is that one. I think those are the big two and the chili Piper does some routing now too, I believe. Right. Yeah.
Natalie: They added in some routing capabilities.
Andy: Nice. Okay. So those are the three routes. I'm sure you're looking at one of those three. We can't say who, um, because you know, well, is there one that you like more?
Natalie: I was going to say, I'm not going to touch on this. So I don't get attacked by BDRs. Sorry. Okay. Yeah.
Andy: Good call. Good call. Good call. Um, no, no, no. Yeah, they're going to be there. We're going to stick them on you here. Uh, Natalie, if you say who it is, but, uh, that's awesome. Um, well, cool. Hey, I know we're a few minutes over time here. Um, this has been great. We, we went high level. We also brought it down into the weeds, which I think is good. So like we kind of, um, hit multiple areas that people, people, uh, really dig on the pod. So thank you so much.
