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Product-Led Growth Customer Success: Metrics, Upsells, and Data [with examples]

Customer Success find patterns and patches all the areas in self serve PLG

Author

Gary Chan
October 04, 2024

Table of Contents

What are the Customer Success team's roles and responsibilities in PLG?

If your PLG motion does not have a Customer Success team, you are doing it wrong… 

We got it wrong until we got it right...

What you hear from PLG, it usually refers to "no touching" 🚫✋🏼

What you hear from PLG, 

"We'll design the best self-serve path from the get-go, and let it rip"

What you hear from PLG, 

"Dude, we'll design a self-serve onboarding, they will Wow themselves, and boom 💥, here comes the $$$ 🤑🤑🤑"

This is not further from the truth 

I really hope you design the best self-service from the beginning

The TRUTH is you are probably NOT GOING TO

Customer Success patches all the holes with self-service

Here's what we heard in the first 6 months of the TrustCloud PLG launch:

  • Customers kept asking, "What do I do next?" 😨

  • Customers kept asking, "What does my team need to do?" 😅

  • Customers kept saying "It all feels overwhelming" 😡

Here's what the PLG team did:

PMs acted as the first Customer Success

Why? Its because… 

  • PMs design the self-service experience

  • PMs design the PLG automation

  • PMs design the PLG Sales playbook

How did we do it?

We rolled up our sleeves ✊

  1. We conducted Superhuman Onboarding

  2. We guided customers to use our platform over a 30min call 🤙🏼

  3. We gathered repeating questions and update our FAQ page ؟

  4. We captured product feedbacks for the design and technical team 🎙️

  5. We gathered the voices of the customers 🗣️

  6. We added new self-serve enablement content 📝

  7. We gave discovery of new features before we made our self-service flow 🤓

  8. We collaborated with support on resolving tickets 🎟️

  9. We identified upsell opportunity patterns $$$

  10. We continuously improved the self-serve flow 🔧

How did we know it worked?

We had less and less customers asking "what do I do next" 😁

Customer Success drove the PLG growth motion 🛞

Little by little, our self service gotten better and better

Customer Success scaled self-serve with ultra-fast learning cycle

Without CS, you are constantly churning from self-serve

Without CS, you are operating in the shadow of 

Without CS, your PLG motion will not be successful

If you do have a CS, please give them a high five today🫸🫷

Because they are making your PLG motion scalable and sustainable ❤️

How does Customer Success drive Activation in product-led growth?

My Backstory -- 

We launched our PLG motion in December 2022

We've acquired 1000+ free customers 

Improved our free-to-paid conversion rate 💥

Finally, setting up paywalls and experimenting with upsell & pricing…

I discovered that CS is the real catalyst for PLG growth! 

Here's the breakdown in 3 activation playbooks:

1️⃣ Superhuman Onboarding gave the best first impression

Instead of selling or leaving customers high and dry, we spent time reassuring them

We transformed 30-min demos into onboarding calls

We provided free customers access to our product

We guided users through the platform, showing the path to compliance

📞 "Hey Joe, with TrustCloud's essential controls and policies list, you have a roadmap to achieving compliance"

This helped customers overcome the skepticism and put them in a place where TrustCloud WILL BE THEIR compliance platform — don't have to look too much into other vendors

2️⃣ Create content "People Like You" made them fit in

We reassured customers worried about not having the right setup

We want them to feel comfortable that we have help customers like them, we know their problem, we know their pain… and other folks that use TrustCloud can attest to our level of expertise and support

We used Challenger Sales methodology to educate them

We shared real examples: 

📧 "100s of our SaaS customers use the public trust portal to showcase their compliance. Here's an example: [LINK]"

3️⃣ Low Touch Automation, always lead to meaningful High Touch Support

Our low touch email steer them into the next activation milestone

📧 "Hey Joe, setup all your integrations and you will be 30% complete on your compliance journey" 

We end every low-touch email with "We are here to help" -- this level of trust is already carried over from our superhuman onboarding call and "people like you" content 

We incorporated FAQs from high-touch support into our low-touch processes

We proactively reassure common concerns: 

📧 "You might be wondering if HIPAA compliance needs an audit? We get this question a lot, and..."

-------

How do we know it's working???

We measure activation success by:

1. Customers no*** longer ask "its overwhelming, I don't know how to get start"

2. More and more are reaching first milestones in their compliance journey

3. After that, consistent self-service product usage with minimal help

-------

Making sure activation is successful is key to gaining PLG customers' trust. 

We've seen a high correlation between activated accounts and upsells/brand advocates.

Customer Success is the catalyst in driving PLG growth

What are the key customer success KPIs for PLG companies?

Here's our 4 success metrics for customer success with our PLG 📈

1. Upsells 💸

2. Onboarding 🎓

3. Resolving at-risk customers 🛡️ 

4. Asking for advocates 🗣️ 

-----

1. 💸 Increase # of Upsells:

Our CS roles in PLG is tied to upsell success metrics

When we launched our freemium plan

We expect % of our free customers will have more needs and will upsell

So by supporting qualified customers to reach their outcomes

We use a combination of PQL and CSQL

Product Qualified Lead is where customers raise their hands 🙋🏻‍♀️ or hit a usage limit

📞 "Hey Joe, I noticed you hand raise about edit policy, love to learn more so we can enable this for you"

📞 "Hey Joe, I noticed you hit the 2 security questionnaire usage limit. Do you want to purchase more?"

Customer Success Qualified Lead is where customers tell us they are using the platform, have expanded their needs, have a positive sentiment with our support and community

📞 "Hey Joe, it's awesome to see you are so active on our platform. I am glad we resolved your support tickets. I love to show you TrustRegister, and how it applies to your business."

PQLs allow us to be reactive and transactional of upsell

CSQLs allow us to take advantage of our proactive outreach and offer an upsell

Both are tied to the positive outcome from CS in PLG

You can read more about CSQLs.

2. 🎓 Increase % Onboarding:

We have 45% of our customer activated!

During our initial launch, only 10% of our customers were activated

Since then we scaled our enablement content and support

With Superhuman Onboarding, we take 30min to onboard customers

We make sure they are feel reassured

3. 🛡️ Decreasing At-Risk Customers:

CS for PLG are no different

Making sure % of inactive customers to active and resurrect 

Making sure % of active customers become CSQLs and PQLs

We track this via usage levels

Our product is a based of MAU monthly active usage

If they have 3 months of inactivity, then we want to set up an outreach 

Making sure paid customers are renewing and their challenges are resolved

Making sure % of paid customers into advocates 

4. 🗣️ Increase % of Advocates:

By the byproduct of delivering great experience and business outcome

We saw champions and advocates

From our landing page sign-up

"How did you hear about us?"

We want to mobilize our champions to give us G2 reviews

Create affiliate programs

Systematize word of mouth

——

Customer Success is the catalyst to our #PLG growth

How can Customer Success teams leverage product usage data in PLG?

Our simple product analytics dashboard we use for PLG Customer Success: 📊

Our PLG team managed success for 1000+ customers

We need*** data to keep us inform

A quick view into the customer activity 

We separated by 3 parts

  1. Login Activities

  2. Core Activities

  3. Discover Activities

We use this to speed up engagement 

Have understanding on how to outreach

How to upsell

How to communicate with at-risk customers

👣 For Login Activities: 

Compliance is not "fun" or a daily routine

We defined our success as MAU

We have to get end-users to come back 

So its important we track

Whether its the last login

Or activity chart

We want to know TrustCloud is still top of mind

If they did not, we need to setup resurrection campaigns

⚙️ For Core Activities:

We want to track usage behaviors

When they visit

What they did do

These actions are product dependent

For TrustCloud, its:

Inviting # of end-users per account

  • Automating # of integrations

  • Approving # of policies

  • Passing # of controls

By doing these actions

We know they are fulling setup

We ensure that they are getting value

If they didn't do these activities

We would put them in our at-risk customers

👀 Discovery of advanced features:

We also want to know opportunities to upsell

Or opportunities to do an outreach

Did the customer use advanced features

  • Turn ON our Slack <> TrustCloud integration

  • Turn ON our Trust Portal

  • Hit our paywalls

This gives us reasons to reach out

Provide educational materials

What's the last thing they did

More context to support customer needs

How can the Customer Success team help identify upsells in PLG?

What building an ultimate PLG Customer 360 Dashboard would look like 📊

When you are managing 1000+ customers, you ain't got time⌚️for everyone of them

You need a quick snapshot into each customer

This usage data gave us the WHAT

I grouped into: 

1. Login Activities 

—> Last login info

—> Activity timeline

—> Cohort Analysis

—> MAU

2. Core Activities

—> Activation milestones

—> Users invited

3. Discovery Activities

—> Turn ON "advanced" features

—> Hit paywalls

This simple usage dashboard allows our PLG CS team to:

A. Quick snapshot to diagnose the customer problem

B. Find upsell opportunities

C. Create a resurrection campaign for inactive customers

It’s very powerful

But…

We were missing the WHY

A. Is the customer satisfied with the product? Why?

B. Have we resolved their latest issues?

C. What other channels have we engaged with them on?

C. What are other indications leading upsell opportunities?

D. What was the last pricing we quoted?

E. What are the outcomes they want to achieve?

F. Who are involved with this account?

Having a more holistic view of the customer beyond usage

This information can live in

  • Support tickets 🎟️

  • Sales email conversations 📧

  • Chat conversations 💬

  • Marketing emails 📬

  • Zoom calls 📞

By having a Birds Eye view together with our usage data

We will:

A. Become more prepared with full visibility into each customer

B. Become more time efficient from stringing the story and quickly identifying issues

C. Become more confident in spotting upsell opportunities because of multiple leading indicators


How does being more data-informed with PLG customer success grow upsells?

Customer Success in PLG…

… Is filling in the blindspots in a self-serve motion

… Uncover issues that cannot be resolved via self-serve

… Ensure customers are activated and scaling enablement

… Showcase discovery to new products and cross sells

… Discover signals to upsells

Deploying PLG is not operating in the shadow 👤

It requires Customer Success in the front driver seat 🛞

I write daily*** about my learning on launching and leading PLG. Feel free to subscribe.

I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.