How can PLG companies sell better to enterprise customers by utilizing data integration tools & which data is most useful?

PLG companies are where we started. Figma was one of our very first customers, so we worked very closely with them in the early days. Actually, some of the ideas behind Census were informed by things that we had to build custom for Dropbox in a past life, as well. We saw these similar problems.

The interesting twist with PLG is that you're giving anybody in the business decision making power over what software to use. Another label for product-led growth is bottoms-up adoption or bottoms-up growth, where the decision makers are not necessarily your CIO or the IT department anymore. It's maybe an individual, maybe a manager of a team, maybe a division. It's the people who are actually going to be using the software. That means that the old sales motion of enterprise software, where you try to find the most senior person in an organization and start sending them lots of email and try to get them interested in your particular piece of software -- even if, let's say, you're friends with them -- they're probably going to tell you, "Yeah, I think somebody in the company probably cares about that. Maybe I can go find them for you." Despite being in the C-suite, they're not necessarily going to be involved in that decision at all.

The flip that happens in these PLG companies is that I don't necessarily know whom to go prospect or reach out to. I can start doing more marketing, but that's obviously less of what the sales team is interested in doing. This is the product-led part of it: people signing up because they saw this app on Product Hunt or a friend at another company in a similar role is recommending it. They're going to try it for themselves. They might start using it themselves; maybe they're using it with a small team; they share it with other people in the company. It grows from there. You see this organic spread of adoption inside companies. But oftimes that adoption is piecemeal. You have a couple people here and there, you have small groups of teams. You might have people who signed up with their personal email addresses, not their work email addresses.

We see a lot of companies using something like Census to take a look at all of the adoption that's happening in their product today. What a lot of the successful PLG companies are doing is trying to take this very amorphous, loosely defined usage data inside a product and collapse it together into signals that say, "Oh, you should go take a look at Disney, because it turns out that there's a bunch of new use inside Disney. There are these teams that are particularly active." Maybe you want to go reach out to somebody that's got manager in their job title but is not necessarily "head of" or CIO.

More often than not, though, the signals that are really interesting are, "Who's the person that's inviting everybody? Who's the super spreader of that application?" Chances are, that's the person who's your biggest champion inside the company. Looking for those sorts of product signals -- the people who are really engaged, the people who are sharing the product with other people in the team -- and pulling those together, especially across different teams and different organizations, a salesperson then can go in and use that information to say, "I should reach out to this person, that person." This could also complement the old school way of doing things. If you're still doing the standard enterprise sales practice, you could reach out to the CIO and say, "Hey, did you know there's this huge new growth of usage organically inside the product? You probably want to have an official sponsored version, maybe you want to turn on your single sign-on solution and everybody who was using this organically has to use it."

The types of signals that we typically see sales teams using are usage metrics, like who is adopting, who is there on a regular basis, and the team-oriented usage metrics -- are they inviting, are they sharing, are they taking those critical actions for the product. Then there's the temporal aspect: have they been doing that in the last couple of weeks? If they used your product a year ago and engagement is flat or hasn't happened since, that's going to be a lot less interesting for an upsell. But if you are talking to a team where, "Oh, it looks like they're suddenly using my virtual whiteboard solution at an event," this might be the moment to reach out and talk with them.

Part of the real selling point for us with this operational analytics push is this data is now available near time, almost instantly. You have sales teams that wake up in the morning and are responsive to, "Turns out that Disney is using a lot more of our product now than they were a couple of days ago or last week. Now is an interesting time to strike."