Early in my career, I struggled to create compelling presentations. Looking back, there were two misconceptions held me back:

1. Presentations weren’t really that important (“good work speaks for itself”)

2. You’re either naturally good at presenting—or you’re not.

In terms of #2, I definitely saw myself in that latter category. Yet, interestingly, I had no problem telling captivating stories to friends (or at least I thought so!). In my mind, though, that felt like an entirely different skill set.

But here’s the thing: everyone recognizes a good story when they hear one, and those same storytelling elements—an engaging beginning, a satisfying peak, and a clear resolution—can transform any presentation into a memorable performance.

From Slides to Storytelling

When starting to plan out your presentation, instead of getting bogged down by what slides you need to create, focus on the story you want to tell and how you’ll perform it in front of your audience. It’s easy to get stuck at this step, but with the help of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude (my go-tos), you can quickly get over this hump.

Getting into the details of the AI prompts is beyond the scope of this article, but if you want to learn more, check out the section under 15 Best AI Presentation Prompt Examples in 2025 in the linked article.

Good storytelling doesn’t happen by chance - it takes plenty of practice! This is A good segue to the next point.

A study cited in the Harvard Business Review shows that narratives are significantly more memorable and persuasive than plain facts alone—some say up to 22 times more memorable. So it’s worth investing in this skill.

Practice in Chaos

Ask yourself: Would your presentation hold someone’s attention in a noisy environment?

While you’ll likely present in a quiet room, people can still be easily distracted by phones, side conversations, or simply their own thoughts.

A great way to practice your presentation is to recruit a friend or a colleague to be your audience, and give your presentation in a busy park, a noisy bar, or anywhere filled with distractions. Then, ask your practice audience what they remember most. If it’s not what you intended, you’ll want to refine your content. Two main benefits you'll get from this is that you'll likely have better content, and you'll feel much more confident walking into a quiet conference room.

By the time you step into a quiet conference room, you’ll be ready to captivate even the most restless listeners.

Simplify the Details, Exaggerate the Key Points

Being an active listener is hard work. Your audience has to juggle a lot details in their heads at once. Unlike reading an article or watching a pre-recorded video, they can’t rewind your live talk. To help them follow along:

• Trim unnecessary details and avoid heavy business jargon.

• Use sensory descriptions (smell, sound, touch, taste) for a more immersive effect.

• Exaggerate or emphasize crucial points to make them truly stand out.

When you simplify what’s unnecessary, your audience can better focus on what really matters.

Warm Up Before You Speak

Just like you’d warm up before a workout, a quick warm up routine before a presentation can work wonders for your energy, confidence, and overall delivery. A few light stretches and vocal exercises can loosen you up and help you start strong. Remember, those opening lines set the tone for everything that follows.

If you need ideas, check out Top 10 Public Speaking Warm-Ups to Keep You Calm and Focused Before A Presentation. If you find yourself feeling silly doing something like this, know that I did too! Pro tip: GET OVER IT! I can tell you from first-hand experience it makes a huge difference.

Close with a Strong Ending

We’re wired for clear resolutions to a story, and your presentation is no different. A weak ending can drag down the entire thing. Remember, the main reason you gave the presentation in the first place is to persuade your audience of something. Using the ending to sum up your main points, remind everyone why your presentation matters, and encourage them to take a specific action or adopt a new perspective.

Measuring Your Success

As a consultant, I pay attention to what I jokingly call my “Persuasion Conversion Rate,” or PCVR (a term I coined, but you get the point 🤣). One KPI I use is the kind of questions I get at the end of a presentation. If people are asking about things I’ve already covered, that’s a sign I need to articulate my points more clearly.

Bringing It All Together

While I’m not claiming to be one of the best storytellers out there, I have found that ’ve gotten much better using these techniques. And a big part of it was shifting my mindset from what specific slides I was going to create to what is a compelling story I can tell.

By practicing in challenging environments, warming up effectively, and focusing on immersive storytelling techniques, you can elevate your presentation game up as well.

Remember, it’s not just about delivering information—it’s about creating a performance that people will remember.

Your website serves as the primary gateway to essential company resources, everything from product access, support, and documentation to exploring product offerings or reaching out to the sales team. This demands refining data collection, ensuring data reliability, and providing timely access to reports. Integrating GA4 and GTM enables you to do all this and more. Here’s how these tools work:

• GA4 will give you the depth of web analytics data needed to understand the performance of your website. The platform includes a wealth of features for tracking the sources of your traffic, analyzing user behavior, and much more.
  

• GTM enables you to customize the tracking on your website without needing to alter the code, freeing you from relying on the engineering team for these modifications. Additionally, GTM provides a debugging tool that helps verify the accuracy of the data you collect.

Let’s dig deeper into each tool to see how it’s done.

Google Analytics (GA4): An Overview

GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics, offering several new and improved features compared to its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA). One of the main differences between the two versions is that GA4 uses an event-driven model for data collection compared to UA’s session/page view approach. For those familiar with UA, understanding the differences between the data collection models will help you better understand the data you analyze.

If you’re brand new to Google Analytics, you’re in luck! GA4 aligns more closely with contemporary analytics platforms, and there's little benefit in delving into the distinctions of earlier versions. With a fundamental grasp of the GA4 interface, you can quickly draw insights from the platform with minimal extra customization after its installation on your website.

Setting up your GA4 account

The process begins by setting up a GA4 account, where you’ll be guided through a five step process that includes:

1. Account Creation

2. Property Creation

3. Business Details

4. Business Objectives

5. Data Collection

Setting up your account through the interface is straight-forward, but there are some important considerations to keep in mind.

In the Account Creation screen, make sure the Account Data Sharing Settings comply with your company's data sharing policy. To learn how Google uses your data, see Data sharing settings for detailed information. 

On the Business Objectives screen, you can choose the set of reports that will initially be displayed in GA4. For those new to GA4, I suggest opting for "Get baseline reports". This will display the Life cycle collection of reports in your GA4 instance.

Your selection here doesn't affect the way your data is collected, only its presentation. Since most GA4 tutorials reference baseline reports, selecting them will make it easier for you to follow along. You have the ability to change these settings at any time after the initial setup within the Admin section of GA4, including the ability to select multiple collections as well as defining your own. To learn more, see [GA4] Business objectives collection for detailed information. 

In the final step, Data Collection, choose Web as your platform, I recommend sticking with the default choices under "Enhanced measurement". 

These selections enable tracking various interactions, such as page scrolling, outbound link clicks, video engagement, and file downloads, and will appear in the Event name column of the Events report (more on that later). For a detailed list of events, how they’re triggered, and what data is collected in the process, check out [GA4] Enhanced event measurement

Once you’ve completed these steps you’re ready to install GA4 on your website. There are two ways you can do this: 

1. Hardcoding the GA4 script into your website

2. Deploying GA4 through GTM

Both methods lead to the same outcome: initiating the collection of data from your website into GA4. Deploying GA4 through GTM is my preferred approach since it allows you to create custom tracking events without relying on my engineering team to implement. Let’s look into how that’s accomplished.

Google Tag Manager (GTM): An Overview

For those unfamiliar with tag management systems like GTM, it’s important to understand the context in which they are used.

Over time, your tracking requirements will evolve in response to your website's specific features or marketing strategy. For instance, you’re planning a LinkedIn ad campaign to attract visitors to your site for product sign-ups. You would need the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website for effective tracking of conversions, audiences, and demographics. Similarly, if you've recently added a feature carousel on your site and want to track views and clicks on each item, you’ll need to instrument some custom tracking as GA4 will not track this by default. Without GTM, all of these requests will fall on your engineering team. 

As your website and marketing tactics become more complex, your tracking needs will also grow, inevitably creating a backlog of requests for your engineering team. GTM reduces your reliance on engineering for code changes, not only saving their time for other website tasks but also allowing you to implement changes as needed.

Deploying GA4 through GTM

Before setting up GTM, you must first create a GA4 account, following the steps previously described.

Setting up GTM is simple. On the main GTM screen, navigate to Accounts and select Create Account. 

Follow the given steps, making sure you choose Web for the Container Setup, until you reach the screen with installation instructions.

You’ll want to pass the two associated code snippets to your engineering team to add to the website, along with additional instructions available here: Tag Manager for web pages. 

Once GTM is successfully integrated into your website, the first step is to learn how to configure the GA4 tag for tracking web activities. Before diving in, it's important to understand some fundamental GTM concepts.

Tags and Triggers

Tags and Triggers are the basic elements of GTM. A "tag" is essentially a code snippet or tracking pixel added to a site to gather data and carry out tasks linked to digital marketing and analytics. A "trigger" defines the condition(s) under which a tag activates. In our case, we want the GA4 tag to fire every time a page loads.

Starting on the Overview section of GTM in the Default Workspace, select the Add a new tag option. 

Once there, click the edit icon in the Tag Configuration card.

Navigate through the Google Analytics option and choose Google Tag. 

This will take you to a page displaying your GA4 Measurement ID. This ID is a 10-digit alphanumeric code (e.g. G-XXXXXXXXXX), which connects your web tracking directly to your GA4 account. Add your Measurement ID, name the tag in the top left. Your GA4 Measurement ID is available within the GA4 interface. If you’re having trouble finding your GA4 Measurement ID, check out [GA4] Measurement ID.

Note: The Configuration Settings, Shared event settings or Advanced settings offer a TON of additional settings to tweak your GA4 implementation. For your initial setup, you don’t need to worry about those settings. When you’re ready to get into more advanced configurations, check out Configure your Google tag settings.

Before clicking Save, click the edit icon in the Triggering card.

Select the All Pages option in the Choose a trigger screen. This will instruct the tag to fire on any page that is loaded on the website (assuming GTM is installed on each page). 

With the Tag and Trigger configured, click Save. Now it’s time to test our configuration and then publish it to the site.

Once you’re back on the Overview section, on the top right you’ll see a Preview button. Once you click into this option, add the URL where your site is published and click Connect.

Once successfully connected, you should see the webpage of the URL you entered along with the Tag Assistant widget pop-up on your screen. Move that window out of the way (don’t close it!) and behind it should be Tag Assistant screen

If you see the tag you recently created listed under Tags Fired, that means everything is working and you’re ready to publish the tag to your live site! 

Note: Tag Assistant will become your best friend when debugging tracking issues. To learn more, be sure to check out Troubleshooting with Tag Assistant.

To publish your tag, go back to the Overview section (you likely have more than a few windows open at this point), and click Submit. The last step is to Submit Changes.

Make it a practice to provide descriptive information for the Version Name and Description. GTM's versioning feature lets you revert changes, which can be a life saver if a new bug is introduced to your website with the latest published version.

With this done, GA4 should now be actively gathering data from your website through your GTM setup!

Configuring your first custom event

While initially setting up GA4 via GTM might appear to be an overly complex process compared to direct code embedding, it's actually very beneficial when you start creating custom events. So, let's explore how GTM becomes incredibly useful by creating a tracking custom event.

Let’s revisit the feature carousel scenario previously mentioned. With such a feature, you would want to track the number of views (aka impressions) and click-throughs for each section.

The first step in the process is to add the Google Analytics: GA4 Event tag in GTM. This tag lets you set up events on your website that will show up in your GA4 reports.

Starting from the Overview, go to Tags and then click New.

In the Tag Configuration section, click the edit icon, choose Google Analytics, and then select Google Analytics: GA4 Event. We'll begin at the top of the form and work our way through the different options.

The only required values you need to worry about include the tag name, your GA4 Measurement ID and the Event Name. Make the tag name something descriptive you can understand at a glance in case you need to reference it in the future

I want to name the event something obvious that can be easily understood by anyone using the system. So in my scenario, I’ll use contact_impression. Your setup will look something like this: 

Event Name will define how the events will show up in your Events report. 

Now comes setting up the trigger. Unlike the GA4 tag which is set to trigger on every page view, I only want this event to trigger when a feature carousel item has been viewed. Here’s the process.

In the Choose a trigger screen, click the plus icon on the top right to get to the Trigger Configuration screen. 

Then, in the Trigger Configuration card, click the edit icon and under User Engagement select Element Visibility.

Note: there are lots of Trigger types available for any tracking scenario you’re after. Be sure to check out Trigger types to get an idea of the various options available.

Selection Method allows you to target the specific element on the page that, once visible to the website visitor, will trigger a custom event in GA4.

Because the underlying HTML defines each item using IDs, I’ll select the ID option and add the exact ID name on my page: contact.

The rest of the options are up to you. For my purposes, I only want to trigger an event once per page, when at least 50% of the section is visible to the visitor. 

With my selections made, I’m ready to save and test my changes before going live. Click the Save button on various screens until you’re back in the Overview section of your Workspace.

Under Workspace Changes you should see your new trigger and tag listed. Click the Preview button to initial Tag Assistant for debugging. 

In the Tag Assistant preview window, I’ll attempt to trigger the activity that I want to track, specifically a view on my Contact item. With that done, I’ll go back over to the Tag Assistant screen to confirm the tag was fired.

As long as I see my tag under the Tags Fired section, I know my configuration is working as expected and is ready for publish. To track the rest of the carousel items, all you need to do is repeat the process for each individual item.

Once published, I can further confirm my changes by going into the Realtime reports in GA4. If the event was triggered in the past 30 minutes, it will show up in the Event count by Event name card.

Note: it can take up to 24 hours for newly created events to be shown in your main reports.

What about tracking the links in each carousel item? GA4 has you covered by default. GA4 automatically collects a number of useful events, and for common use cases, you may not need to configure something new. Be sure to check out the list of [GA4] Automatically collected events.

Note: Hate repeating yourself? You can use variables in your GTM configuration to dynamically target all carousel items with a single pair of tags/triggers. Learn more here: About variables

GTM is an incredibly powerful tool that I couldn’t live without. If it’s your first foray using GTM, it can seem very complex. However, once you've set up a few tags and triggers, everything will start to make sense, and you'll soon find it to be an essential tool in your arsenal!

An overview of the GA4 Interface

If you have a brand new instance of GA4, it’s likely you don’t have a lot of data to look at. No problem! Google offers a fully functional Google Analytics account filled with demo data, which is a great way to look at real business data and experiment with Google Analytics features.

To access the demo data, access the Google Analytics 4 property: Google Merchandise Store (web data) link in the instructions and the demo data will be imported into a new property in your GA4 account (it will NOT be mixed in with your actual site data) and can be removed at any time: Access the demo account

Once you’re in the demo account, you should land on the home screen of the GA-4 Google Merch Shop. If you find yourself in a different account, just click on the name you’ll be able to switch to the right account.

Hovering over the icons on the left will reveal the navigation pane that provides links to following:

• Home provides a collection of data based on user behavior and traffic trends. The AI-driven Insights & recommendations sections can be especially helpful as it detects unusual changes or emerging trends in your data and notifies you automatically.
  

• Reports is where you’ll likely spend most of your time, at least initially. Within this section you’ll find Reports snapshot, a Realtime report, and a number of predefined reports.
  
  The reports you see in the GA-4 Google Merch Shop demo account are the Life cycle reports collections. This is the collection you would see if you selected Get baseline reports on the Business Objectives screen during account setup.
  
  You can change the Collections of reports listed in the navigation panel by accessing the reports Library link at the bottom of the reports column. This requires admin access to your GA4 account, which is not available when using the GA-4 Google Merch Shop demo account.

  

  Collections can be added or removed using the Publishing option associated with each collection. You also have the ability to edit the collection of reports in each Collection, creating a highly customized dashboard for your business.  

  

  Before building your own custom reports, it’s worth looking through the available options in the Library. With so many reports available, you’ll likely find exactly what you need with some digging. Be sure to check out the documentation for detailed information on each Report collect: Report collections
  
  Note: Any custom tracking events that you instrumented in GTM will appear in the Events report. If your account is using GA4’s baseline reports, the Events report is available under Engagement.

• Explore provides you with advanced data visualizations features that are not available through standard reports. This section is ideal for performing ad-hoc analysis so you can get deeper insights on web traffic and user behavior. Here you can explore behavioral differences between cohorts, visualize the steps a user takes to complete a task, drill down into individual user activities, and much more. 
  
  An entire article can be written on the Explore section alone. For more information on what is available from this powerful feature, check out [GA4] Get started with Explorations.
  

• Advertising provides detailed reports related to your paid advertising efforts. This section is most useful when linked to your Google Ads account. If you’re not doing much in the way of paid advertising, this section will not be as useful and a lot of similar (non-Google Ads) data is available in the Reports section.
  

• Admin, as the name implies, is where you can access all of the administrative features of GA4. Since there are way to many features with mentioned, be sure to make yourself familiar with what’s available by referencing the documentation: [GA4] Admin page

Next Steps

We covered a lot in this article, and if you’re next sure what you should look into next, here are some helpful tips:

Explore the UI: a great place to start is poking around the UI and making yourself familiar with what’s available. The reports you get by default will, more than likely, cover the majority of your needs. 

Take the GA4 training course: Self-paced and free, Skillshop offers a GA4 training course (sponsored by Google) that covers all of the basics of GA4. It was incredibly beneficial for me and I earned a “Use Google Analytics for Your Business” certificate in the process! 

Set up conversions: if there are key actions that you want website visitors to take, like submitting a contact form, downloading an asset, or signing up for the product, you’ll want to distinguish these events as conversions, so they show up accordingly in recent reports.

To mark an event as a conversion, go into the Admin section of GA4 and look for Conversions option under Data Display. Once there, you’ll have the option to create a New conversion event. Make sure you use the exact Event name as its listed in the Events report.

Once your conversion event is saved, you can confirm that it’s enabled if the slider shows a blue checkmark.

Emailed reports: one of my favorite features is the ability to get reports emailed to me on a recurring basis. This feature was available in the original version of Google Analytics, and it was recently reintroduced in GA4. 

To setup scheduled email reports, go to any of the reports available under the Reports section, and on the top right you’ll see a share icon. This will open a panel with multiple options, one of them being Schedule Email. You can also check out the documentation for additional details on this feature: [GA4] Schedule reports

Integrate with other Google products: one of the biggest benefits of using GA4 is the ability to integrate with other Google products to extend the scope of data available in the platform. One of the first connections I make to GA4 is linking it up to Google Search Console. Once I’m ready to run ads, linking GA4 to Google Ads becomes a priority. 

Linking up various products is a straight-forward process that requires admin access to both systems. You can find these options in the Admin section of GA4 under Product links. 

Be sure to check out the documentation for a detailed list of available integrations: [GA4] Integrations

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: As you become more familiar with your data, you’ll inevitably find gaps in your reporting and integrity issues with the data being collected. Rarely (never?) have I seen data that I considered to be in a perfect state. But you don’t need perfection to make data-driven decisions on improvements to your website.

The quality of your data is something that you will refine over time. With GA4 properly installed with some baseline configuration, there are plenty of insights to glean while, in parallel, you work on refining more questionable areas.

• +800k active users 

• Double-digit millions in ARR 

• +200% NDR 

Most impressive is that this growth has been completely from a self-serve, product-led growth motion without a marketing or sales team!  🤯  

The article below provides a synopsis of the interview. In the interview, we cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Founder’s story

• Validating the idea

• Finding early product adopters 

• Attracting top-tier talent to your company

• And way more…

🔉 The full length audio version of the interview is available here

📹 A video version of the interview is coming soon!

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🎙️Interview with Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render 🎙️

A founder’s journey

For those that aren’t familiar with the company, Render offers a platform that has automated and standardized DevOps best practices in a scalable infrastructure solution, allowing developers to focus on shipping products and services as quickly as possible, rather than complex cloud management. Founded in 2018, Render was born out of the friction Anurag experienced while deploying applications to the various cloud service providers, as well as the DevOps sprawl he witnessed during his time at Stripe.

In 2011, Anurag joined Stripe in the company’s early days (employee #8) as an engineer, and later became their Head of Risk. Stripe was in a significant growth phase during his 5 year tenure, where Anurag got to see first-hand the overwhelming necessity for organizations to build out large DevOps teams that support the cloud infrastructure their applications relied on.

In 2016, Anurag left Stripe and started investigating various domains for an ambitious problem he could commit the rest of his career to solving. From healthcare to GPU-backed notebooks, Anurag spent the next two years building and deploying various software applications. While he recognized that none of these domains were his calling, in the process he noticed some consistent challenges across cloud providers. It was through this experience Anurag's vision became clear — to create a platform that eliminates the complexities of cloud infrastructure.

Since its inception, Render has grown to a team of 65, raised nearly $78M in funding and has grown the user base to over 800,000 developers. The company now boasts ARR in the double-digital millions, and an impressive NDR that’s +200%! All of this growth has been completely from a self-serve, product-led growth motion without a marketing or sales team. Anurag credits the strength of the product as the main driver of their growth in its ability to appeal to developers seeking dependable, scalable, and efficient cloud solutions. 

Finding early adopters 

Render attracted its first users through Anurag's personal connections, including friends and past colleagues, and by participating in in-person events and online community discussions. Anurag specifically highlighted South Park Commons, a community of entrepreneurs in San Francisco, as a valuable source for gaining more users. 

The most substantial growth in users came in 2019, when Render was the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF. Winning Startup Battlefield not only elevated the company profile but also provided them with a wealth of product usage data, which was instrumental in refining and evolving Render into its current form.

Attracting talent

Anurag talked about the difficulties he faced in recruiting skilled people to an early-stage startup that had limited resources and essentially no external validation. He recounted stories of successfully hiring the initial engineers who remain with the company. Notably, using Triplebyte’s resume-blind candidate assessment process, his second engineering hire had an unconventional background with no prior professional engineering experience. Anurag also highlighted the significance of tackling a major problem for an early-stage company, serving as a draw to bring in highly driven and skilled individuals eager to address the problem. 

“One of the things that picking an ambitious problem gets you is that it gets other ambitious people excited about what you’re doing, even when you don’t have social proof or a lot of funding” - Anurag Goel, co-founder and CEO of Render

Targeted leadership search

Render's impressive organic growth meant there was no urgent need to recruit a Sales and Marketing team for expansion. Instead, the company concentrated on enhancing its platform, aiming to support a substantial influx of new users while sustaining highly efficient unit economics. With the company’s unit economics in great shape today, and improving month-over-month, Render is actively looking at hiring their first marketing leader. Admittingly, the unicorn criteria Anurag is looking for will take some time to find. 

“They are very hard hires to make. I’ve heard about so many cases where people feel great about their new marketing hire, and then ask them to leave 6-12 months later. I don’t want to find ourselves in that situation” 

Top of mind is finding an experienced marketing leader with a keen understanding of developers that can optimize every step of the user journey: from increasing awareness of the offering, to optimizing website traffic for sign-ups, to monetizing the large base of existing customers through their wide product portfolio.

To the future and beyond

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Anurag's journey offers insights into the strategic and operational challenges of starting a tech company. For the tech community at large, Render's evolution is a beacon of innovation in cloud computing, promising a future where developers can unleash their full potential, unencumbered by the backend complexities of cloud services.

Anurag Goel's story is far from over, but it's already a rich source of inspiration and a case study on how to build a successful tech venture that remains closely aligned with the needs of its community. Render, under his leadership, continues to push the boundaries, proving that with the right approach, even the cloud's limits can be rendered limitless.

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It's been a couple of weeks since I posted a new article, at least on my own newsletter. I've recently been working on new content for a few other blogs that I thought are worth sharing with this community.

My latest article - How to Maximize ROI on Your Early Paid Advertising Efforts, was published in OpenView Venture's Newsletter last week.

How to Maximize ROI on Your Early Paid Advertising Efforts is all about getting your early-stage B2B startup's paid advertising off the ground. It covers a bunch of important stuff to help you make the most out of your ad spend. Here's a quick rundown of what is cover:

• 💰 Setting the Right Budget: Figuring out how much to spend without breaking the bank.

• 👫 Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Why you need people from design, content, engineering, security, and legal all on board.

• 🛠️ Tools of the Trade: Diving into web analytics, UTM parameters, and platform integrations.

• 🧐 Smart Strategies: Getting into remarketing and finding audiences that resemble your best customers.

• 🎯 Goal Setting: The role of experimenting and using industry benchmarks to guide you.

• 🙉 ROAS – Your New Best Frienemy: Understanding and calculating Return on Ad Spend to scale your advertising efforts.

Stay tuned as we delve into each of these areas to help you launch your advertising strategy successfully!

🎙️ Interview with Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render 🎙️

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Anurag Goel, co-founder and CEO of Render. Founded in 2016, Render’s trajectory has been phenomenal!

• +800k active users

• Triple-digit millions in ARR

• +200% NDR (net-dollar-retention)

Best of all, Render’s growth has been completely organic and product-led! 🤯🤯

There’s a ton of great stuff in this interview. From Anurag’s 5 years at Stripe as Head of Risk, to the 2 years he spent researching new ideas, all the way up to where Render is today. Be sure to check out the full interview where we discuss:

• How the company was founded

• How was the idea validated

• How Render acquired their first early adopters

• How to attract top-tier talent for your company

• And way more…

The interview will be published early next week and includes an 📝 article, 🎤 podcast and 🎥 video of my interview with Anurag.

Stay tuned!

🗣️ Comments, Feedback and More

I’ve really enjoyed having the time to write about the stuff I know, and really appreciate having an audience to share it with. While I have a lengthy backlog of ideas for new articles in queue, I’d love to hear from you!

If there’s a topic you want me to cover or an area you would like for me to explore in more depth, leave a comment or DM on LinkedIn.

1. Missing necessary skills on the team 👨‍🚀

2. Lack of clear strategy and supporting processes 🎯

3. Unable to demonstrate value from your efforts 📈

An effective experimentation program starts with a solid foundation of people, processes and quality data. Start with small experiments to generate quick wins. With clear insights, you’ll build momentum, start seeing meaningful growth, and increase your confidence so you can start swinging for some home runs.

In this post, we'll look at what you need to build an optimization program that can transform your website into an acquisition machine for both self-serve sign-ups and enterprise leads.

Failed at first

Our enthusiastic marketing team was bursting with ideas, we had an A/B testing platform, and our engineering and design team was ready to bring those ideas to life. 

But it didn’t work.

We launched several experiments and spent tons of time trying to make sense of data. We brought creative ideas to life and attempted to learn our way to growth, but we couldn’t keep the momentum or significantly move the needle.

We tried to be super collaborative, with multiple departments having a say in experiments. Anyone in marketing was able to come up with an idea and test it, no one truly owned the process. And even when some tests did show promise, there was no follow-through to implement those insights.

In the end, our big experimentation experiment had very little to show for all our effort.

But the story doesn’t end there.

What changed the game

Tl;dr - dedicated ownership, a systematic approach, and quality data.

The pivotal moment arrived when my company recognized the need for dedicated ownership and expertise. I started hunting for an expert and eventually I came across an interesting LinkedIn post on how to build a highly effective website navigation from Scott Olivares. My hunt was successful and Scott came to work for my company.

Here are some of the additional components we focused on to create a truly successful optimization program.

Find the truth

You know what they say about data: “garbage in, garbage out.” Before starting any effort to drive growth, you need to establish a sound data-driven foundation to ensure you understand the impact you are having and make the right decisions. 

 Here are a few tips on how to get your data in order:

• Find the right data: Not all metrics are created equal. Identify those that are closely tied to the impact you are trying to make so that your efforts reflect true growth.
  

• Validate the accuracy: Questionable data can undermine your confidence in what you are doing, and at worst, it can lead you to make the wrong decisions. QA your most critical metrics by walking through the flows on your website and matching your activity in the analytics platform.
  

• Identify the gaps: Explicitly call out missing metrics or the pens you don’t trust. There are countless metrics, dimensions, integrations, and visualizations that will drive deeper insights and measure your impact. It’s okay if you don’t have everything in order right away. Work with the data you trust, and enhance the rest in parallel.
  

• Create a roadmap: With the gaps identified, create a prioritized list of metrics and capabilities that you need, and start tackling them systematically. This is the beginning of your analytics roadmap that will enhance the fidelity and quality of your data your experiment program will depend on.

Prioritize for impact

As Scott used to say, keep it S.I.M.P.L.E - Systematic, insight-driven and meaningful changes on popular pages to learn through experimentation (ok… the acronym is a bit of stretch). Here are the three key aspects to this approach:

• Create an experiment spreadsheet: Compile a prioritized list of experiments with key details: hypothesis, target KPI, weekly page traffic, estimated impact (high/medium/low), effort level, and strategic significance. This will allow you to prioritize the best experiments first. Once a test is finished, be sure to document the results in the same spreadsheet.
  

• Engage with cross-functional teams: Collaborate with design and engineering teams to assess the feasibility and effort required to bring a test to market. The effort-to-impact ratio will be critical to prioritizing your experiment roadmap. Share the spreadsheet with the team and beyond. I will show how and why you are prioritizing certain experiments.
  

• Simplify where needed: High impact doesn't have to mean high effort. Reassess and simplify experiments to reduce the effort required to implement them without compromising quality or results.

Build momentum

Rome wasn’t built in a day. The foundation of an effective optimization program starts with a series of small, quick wins. Keep these three points in mind at the beginning.

• Stay lean: Avoid the distraction and stay focused on what is essential to launch your equipment. While experimentation platforms offer myriad features, most of them you’ll likely never use.
  

• Start small: Technical issues are inevitable, and you’ll encounter plenty of them when you are first starting out. Start with simple ideas that don’t require a ton of engineering or design work - many of your high impact tests may not require any engineering or design work!  Get a few quick wins to build momentum.
  

• Avoid over-complicating: Prioritize quality over quantity. It’s tempting to run multiple tests in an attempt to accelerate time-to-insights, but running too many simultaneously can lead to technical collisions as well as confusing results.

Take big swings

Once you've worked out the kinks and have a few wins under your belt, aim higher.

• Go big: Leadership loves big wins and big wins require big swings. Propose experiments that go beyond simple UI or messaging changes, and get executive sponsorship to run the test. Launch the experiment to a small user segment, monitor, and expand based on results.
  

• Do your homework: Big swings often come with or higher effort, and usually require resources and collaboration from across the organization. To increase your chances of success, take the time to create a compelling business case for your experiment. A strong business case defines a clear problem, breaks the problem down to understand what might be causing it, and proposes a solution that is grounded in data-driven insights.
  

Crowdsource the effort

Having primarily worked in B2B SaaS companies, where the majority of the employees have a technical background, I’ve come to find that these folks LOVE data and numbers. Harness the collective intelligence inside your company!

• Evangelize your efforts: Use your company Slack channel (or similar) to provide updates on upcoming experiments and those in-flight. Welcome new ideas and use your experimentation spreadsheet to prioritize the best.
  

• Gamify the process: Encourage company engagement with initiatives like "pick the winner" contests. If you want to get fancy, create a poll allowing participation with a single click.
  

• Encourage vigilance: While you should test every experiment before it goes out, bugs are inevitable. When evangelizing your efforts, also provide an avenue for submitting bugs. It can be a dedicated channel or a direct DM. Better to hear it from a peer than from the CEO!
  

• Celebrate and share: Test results are effectively the punchline of the experiment. Share results, and recognize contributors, especially if the idea came from outside your team. Don’t worry about sharing failed experiments. Transparency breeds trust. There is something to be learned from each experiment regardless of the outcome.
  

Don’t test everything!

When your tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. There are some things that you test, and others you should simply do.

Create a clear distinction between experiments and necessary website updates. Treat your website as a product and create a roadmap accordingly. Experiments will be one component of that roadmap along with necessary website updates, analytics improvements and engineering-led infrastructure initiatives.

In conclusion

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and the ability to run experiments means nothing without the right people and process in place. 

The right person in your organization will make all the difference. Find your growth expert and hire them, or find someone bright within your company, get them trained, and give them a shot.

Find the data you need to measure your impact, make sure it’s accurate, and plan on improving your data maturity. Remember, “garbage in, garbage out.”

Prioritize the best ideas based on potential impact, required effort, and strategic importance; don’t waste your time on ideas that fall to the bottom of your list.

Start small to build momentum and work out the technical kinks, then take big swings to get some home runs. When taking those big swings, do your homework to build your credibility and get buy-in.

Documenting all your experiments will allow you to learn from the past, aggregate the impact, and demonstrate the value of your program.

Please don’t test everything! You’re a growth driver, not a scientist. Fix what needs fixing and spend your brain power on innovation and un-obvious ideas.

Powerful marketing embeds a deep-seated purpose and narrative into your story, going beyond the functions and benefits of a product. Using your underlying mission to create a powerful narrative will allow you to engage with a broader range of topics and increase your share of voice in your domain.

While your product may not be unique in the problems that it solves, your mission is truly your own. So how can you frame your mission within the context of your marketing? This article offers an approach to unlock mission-driven marketing with authentic, purposeful messaging that can stand out in a noisy environment.

Separating Art from Science

Marketing is often referred to as both an art and a science - distinguishing the creativity required to craft compelling marketing (the art) and the precision needed to effectively execute campaigns (the science). "Write Drunk, Edit Sober," serves as a metaphor reinforcing this point - both unrestrained creativity and meticulous refinement is required to produce high quality creative work. "Write Drunk, Edit Sober," encourages separating these two modes to allow creativity, uninhibited by constraints. Let's explore how we can apply this concept to our marketing work.

I recently found inspiration from an essay by philosopher Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence and Morality". The essay suggests that those with the means to solve a dire problem have a moral obligation to do so. I am not suggesting comparing business solutions to saving lives. Rather, the core sentiment can be tailored to create a narrative: understanding the deep pain a problem inflicts and your unique position to alleviate it.

Why You, Why Now

Let’s consider a hypothetical example within the realm of cybersecurity. Modern cybersecurity tools collect and analyze data from various sources to help security teams detect and block attacks. While these tools help security teams do their job better, the story doesn't end there. It extends to real-world ramifications—a data breach's cascading effects, the potential harm to innocent individuals, and the ensuing chaos. Tapping into the larger narratives of security breaches offers a richer tapestry of topics and discussions, establishing authority and increasing share of voice in a domain while elevating the message on a visceral level.

To articulate your company's mission, get into the moral urgency of the issue. Instead of claiming superiority over competitors, express that you're addressing the problem because no one else is willing to. Present it as your moral obligation. By framing your story through Singer's "Famine, Affluence and Morality" lens, you elevate your ability to make a difference. While you may fall short in certain technical aspects compared to larger competitors, you project an altruistic purpose, offering a north star for your journey. 

Singer's essay on the straightforward moral obligation was controversial amongst his peers, but the controversy helped to expose his work to a wider audience. Similarly, attempting to portray your company's activities as being motivated by moral obligation may lead to welcomed debate, but it also runs the risk of being perceived as grandiose. Let’s consider two real world examples on how you can calibrate your approach.

Mailchimp’s “Essentials” 

In 2021, Mailchimp partnered with VICE Media to produce "Essential," a docuseries of short films, series, and podcasts. These projects focused on a pressing concern for many of their customers: the challenges small businesses encountered during the Covid-19 pandemic. At its heart, Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform for businesses. By addressing their customers’ bigger issues, and offering a free usage tier, "Essentials" portrayed Mailchimp as a solution to the challenges businesses faced. Whether "Essential" was merely capitalizing on the pandemic is a matter of opinion. While the campaign's success is not definitively known, Fourth-quarter Fiscal 2023 Conference Call Remarks by Intuit (Mailchimp’s parent company) suggest that the company is still thriving.

Cloudflare’s Project Galileo

In 2014, Cloudflare launched Project Galileo, a program designed to offer free, enterprise-grade cybersecurity to vulnerable public interest groups, including artists, humanitarian bodies, and political dissenters. The project was born from the desire to champion free speech, emphasizing the democratization of enterprise-grade cybersecurity. However, with nearly 8 million websites under Cloudflare's protective wing, some controversial entities have also benefited, sparking criticism against the company. Yet, given the company's substantial growth pre- and post-IPO, it seems the risk was worth the reward.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is noisier than ever. Without a compelling narrative, even exceptional products can go unnoticed and companies risk falling into obscurity. By weaving a purpose-driven story into marketing strategies, brands transcend mere communication; they resonate. They cultivate genuine bonds with their audience, evolving from mere product suppliers to collaborators in a shared vision. In a world of fleeting attention, messaging with genuine purpose doesn't just seize attention—it can captivate hearts.

While there are plenty of approaches you can use when putting together your growth playbook, this approach has proven the most effective for me in the various Growth roles throughout my career. 

This approach allows you to clearly identify the various touch points where users are dropping off, so you can develop and prioritize strategies to address it. Along the way you’ll discover gaps in your data and existing resources (technology and team), as well as the cross-functional dependencies that may be limiting your go-to-market strategy. 

With that in mind, let's start with a simple framework that we can use to break down the various touch points of your user journey: The 3 Levers of SaaS Growth.

I can’t go on without giving a shoutout to Ben Cotton and his great article “There’s Only Three Levers to Grow a SaaS Business” . He provides a great articulation of 3 Levers concept, which I has been very informative to many people in or field.

3 Levers of SaaS Growth

I was first introduced to the concept of the 3 Levers of SaaS Growth when I was working at Cloudflare as part of the first cross-functional team responsible for growing the self-serve business. We used the 3 Levers as a starting point to map out the various touchpoints in a new user's journey adopting the Cloudflare CDN.

The idea behind the 3 Levers is simple: any tactic you implement in a SaaS business falls into one of these three categories - Acquisition, Retention, or Expansion. These levers become the building blocks you can use to develop strategies in your growth playbook. The 3 Levers are also effective when thought of linearly. Meaning - if you’re attempting to upsell a user to a more expensive plan (Expansion), before they’ve shown meaningful product usage (Retention), you likely won’t get the results you’re after.

Let’s dig deeper into each lever so we have a more tactical approach to developing your growth strategy.

Acquisition

Acquisition is the lever you pull to increase the number of customers that sign-up for your product. This lever allows you to impact critical metrics like sign-ups, both in terms of total numbers, and percentage growth over time. Acquisition can be broken down into:

• Awareness: there’s a problem and you have the solution

• Evaluation: you have the right solution

• Activation: convincing people to sign-up or install your product

In the context of Growth, a Growth Marketing team will have the majority of responsibilities in this area, with support from Sales in certain situations, and in collaboration with the Product team since in a PLG motion the product itself is usually the last hurdle to cross to acquire new customers. 

What about do Referrals? 

Great question. You can bucket referrals from your existing user base either in Acquisition or Expansion, depending on your specific use case. For example - you ask your existing customers to “Refer a Co-worker”, if that would result in a net new sign-up, then bucket that into Acquisition. If the resulting activity adds a team member to an existing account, that may be better under Expansion. If you need help answering the question, feel free to reach out.

Awareness

Awareness is the stage when an individual is not yet aware that you offer a solution to their problem. Within this stage, it’s all about making your solution known within the market, and one of the most common goals is to get them to land on your marketing site where they can start evaluating your marketing materials and product documentation so they can ultimately get to the activation process.

Technical SEO and a SEO-centric content strategy are common tactics used by Growth teams to create more visibility in search engines, and as a result send more organic traffic to the marketing website. Paid advertising strategies like Google search and display advertising can be used, but in order to be economically viable, some level of integration between the product and associated ad-platform is generally required to enable programmatic campaigns.

Website traffic, both in terms of total users/new users/sessions and growth over time, may be one of your primary metrics within Awareness. There are plenty of tools available to help you monitor traffic on your website, and one of my favorites, which happens to be free, is Google Analytics. 

Depending on how you implemented the tool, web analytics can be impacted by cookie consent requirements, and the data in your system may be lower than the actual traffic. Using server-side analytics can provide more accurate results for specific numbers like user count. Regardless, even if the data within your web analytics platform is not reflective of 100% of your traffic, the additional information it can provide in terms of traffic attribution, user demographics and content engagement provides robust data collection to help you make better decisions for improvements.

If you’re trying to underhow who your domain is showing up before anyone even reaches your site, there are numerous tools to help you monitor aspects like social listening, share of voice, search volume, backlinks, and more. There is a lot you can do in terms of Awareness monitoring, and I’ll leave that for a future blog post. For now, at minimum, you should at least have Google Search Console setup to monitor your domain(s). If you want to learn more about Awareness metrics, check out Zapier’s article: How to measure brand awareness: 9 key metrics to track

Evaluation

Once a visitor is on the website, they’re considered to be in the Evaluation stage. In the Evaluation stage, the user is learning more about your offering and likely comparing you to your competitors. In the Evaluation stage, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a common tactic used by Growth teams to influence users to move to the next stage. CRO leverages A/B testing visual elements and content on the website, and requires specific software (e.g. VWO, Optimizely) to run, along with design and engineering resources to execute.

The primary metric within Evaluation would be conversion rates, calculated by the percentage of users who take a desired action (e.g. click the “Start free”) divided by the total number of users. As your efforts progress, you might refine this to include more filters such as "number of in-profile users" or "qualified users" to weed out “junk” traffic.

Conversion rates are usually framed within the context of CTR (click-thru rates) on specific pages. While CTR is the primary metric for success, additional metrics like bounce rates, pages per session, and average session duration provide deeper insights that allow you to create hypotheses for tests to help increase conversion rates. Most web-specific analytics platforms offer these metrics right out of the box without needing any additional configuration. 

Activation

The final stage is Activation, and in this stage the user is attempting to gain access to the product. For most SaaS products, Activation begins on the sign-up page (usually outside of the marketing website), and ends when a user has finished the sign-up process. For self-hosted products that require install, Activation would begin at download and end once the product has been successfully installed.

Within the context of Activation, conversion rates can be calculated by the percentage of users that start the sign-up process, or initiate a download, divided by the number of completed sign-ups or successfully product installs. Heap, Amplitude or Mixpanel are common platforms used for product-specific metrics. For hosted products, analytics instrumentation is straightforward. Self-hosted products, including web downloads or from the CLI, may require some additional configuration to get proper telemetry. Since some self-hosted products may be behind a network firewall or are subject to offline installations, you may see some under-reporting. Regardless, even if data isn’t perfect, limited information can provide enough signal for data-driven decision making.

Retention 

Retention starts as soon as a user has gained access to your product, having either completed the sign up process or having successfully installed the product. Retention is all about helping onboard users, and getting them to see the value your product provides as quickly as possible. User churn is a key metric associated with retention, and generally it can be helpful to break it up into additional cohorts, like a new user’s first 30 days and after. We can further break down Retention into three stages: A-ha!, Onboarding and Value.

In the context of Growth, you’ll often see a Product-Growth team shouldering most of the responsibilities for Retention, given the close connection they have with the in-product experience. A Growth Marketing team can contribute to retention efforts by creating out-of-product experiences that include triggered emails, content hubs with associated materials and more. Oftentimes this will be framed under the context of customer lifecycle marketing.

To support these efforts, consider implementing a marketing automation platform like Iterable, Braze or similar. These platforms can be complex and may require a significant amount of technical resources to implement. Once they’re properly set up, they allow the responsible teams to instrument various types of growth campaigns and experiences with little to no dependencies on other teams. These products also offer built-in metrics that can be used for reporting on the associated activities.

A-ha!

Getting to the A-ha! moment is about defining what the minimal steps that a user can take to realize the value your product provides. Asana provides a well known A-ha! example - after a user has created a list of tasks and checked a few off as complete, the user sees any animated unicorn that flies across the screen to remind them of the value provided.

Understanding what your A-ha! moment is for the user, and realizing the effort it took for them to get there can be easily overlooked, which would result in a missed opportunity to help retention. Asana’s unicorn flare is intended to make that moment more memorable by explicitly celebrating it to remind them what they accomplished using their product.

More complex products, like those you’ll find within the category of developer tools, cybersecurity, etc can require more effort from your end user to get up and running, and your target audience may not be as impressed with a unicorn flying across their screen once they’ve accomplished their first task. How the A-ha! moment is defined and how you explicitly showcase the value to your end users is product specific. 

Make it a point to clearly define what the A-ha! moment is for your product. You can send that event to your analytics system to create funnel reports on users, and to your marketing automation platform to trigger an in-product experience, a personalized email, or maybe both!  may be just as impactful. The key is not to miss the opportunity to celebrate the A-ha! moment with your user.

Onboarding

While it may be tempting to want to show the user everything at once, a "firehose" approach usually does not produce the desired outcome. A "firehose" approach is a metaphor for giving too much information to a user at once, which can be overwhelming and lead to the user not absorbing any of the information. By separating the A-ha! moment from Onboarding, you can provide users with information in a more gradual and digestible way. 

Product onboarding is a most widely covered topic, so I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing what already exists. Instead, I will offer this - a lot of existing material lumps together various touch points, from sign-up to full product usage, under onboarding. Logically this makes sense, however, by teasing apart the sign-up flow from the A-ha! moment and then onboarding, I’ve found it easier to make meaning improvements across these touch points with a divide and conquer approach. Teasing these stages apart is also transferable to marketing automation platforms allowing you to trigger specific experiences that help move users along to being one step closer to an active user of your product.

Value

Similar to celebrating the A-ha! moment, the intention of the value stage is to remind users of the value your product provides, through thoughtful in-product experiences, personalized emails, alerts, etc. 

Take the Cloudflare CDN for DDOS protection as an example. If your website falls victim to a DDOS attack, it can cause your website to go offline. That pain is very clear. With Cloudflare, that same DDOS attack will have no impact, so nothing happens to your website. That value can be missed.

Since Cloudflare CDN can be a set it and forget it type of product, a strategy that was implemented was a monthly analytics snapshot email. The email provides an out-of-product experience that includes personalized analytics showing the number of threats stops (amongst other things). This monthly email with personalized analytics is a reminder of the value they provide, with the intention of increasing overall user retention.

A key takeaway from the Cloudflare example is that the email is thoughtfully crafted and presents personalized analytics in a unique view not available within the product. This makes the email interesting, and most importantly useful to the user resulting in more opens and less unsubscribes, while reminding them of the value the product provides. There’s also something more below the analytics portion that is related to Expansion.

Expansion

Expansion is the last lever and includes the majority of your monetization efforts including plan upgrades, product cross-sells, usage increases, etc. It’s worth noting that monetization is not exclusive to Expansion. Getting users on a paid plan during Activation, or supporting additional use cases during Onboarding to encourage increased product usage include clear monetization components. 

Expansion efforts primarily impact your recurring revenue, as calculated monthly or annually. Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is another important metric within Expansion that is used to calculate the percentage of revenue you’ve retained from your existing user base over a particular period of time. NDR can be calculated monthly or annually and includes all of your monetization activities as well as downgrades and user churn.

Expansion follows the broader path covered within Acquisition and Retention. First, you need to drive awareness around the additional products or services that you offer. For example, just because you have an active user on your free plan, doesn’t mean they know what is available on your paid plans, so you have to make them aware of what is offered. To encourage adoption, you have to expose them to material to evaluate the solution, and create experiences that showcase the (potential) value. Once they’ve taken the steps to upgrade (product Activation), it’s your job to help them realize the value by getting them to the A-ha! Moment and beyond, as quickly as possible. Finally, don’t forget to remind them of the value it provides, as quickly and as often as possible.

Using the previous Cloudflare email as an example, while the analytics in the email reminds existing users of the value they provide, below they include additional information on newly released products, features, and promotions to webinars. This provides users with material they can evaluate to support Cloudflare’s expansion efforts.

The key takeaway for Expansion is to not make the assumption your existing users know the additional products or services you offer, or the value they provide. Like getting a net-new user, you first need to drive awareness for the product, help them see the value it provides as quickly as possible, and remind them of the value provided as often as reasonably possible. 

You want to plan on taking them through the journey just like you did to win them as a new user in the first place, and the result will be higher rates of expansion and better overall retention. This is the concept of a loop feeding a loop.

I hope you have found this information as useful and informative as I have using it in real-world applications. Let me know your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

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If you need help with your own PLG playbook, feel free to reach out to setup a chat.

Introducing a product-led growth strategy in these situations can be tricky. This article highlights 5 critical planning considerations to help you minimize disruptions to your existing go-to-market strategy while enhancing your prospects for success with PLG.

The 5 Keys to PLG Success

• Partner with Sales: Sales will be a key source of feedback on how prospects perceive a new self-serve product, and the sales team must be prepared to handle objections.
  

• Brace for impact: Introducing PLG requires careful planning and execution to avoid disrupting existing sales and marketing efforts.
  

• Define a playbook: Minimize losing qualified leads by defining a strategy on who your team should engage with and how.
  

• Do the unscalable: Use a personalized approach to stop the bleeding at critical touch points while developing scalable solutions to prevent future issues.
  

• Plan for incremental change: One of the biggest challenges is shifting the company mindset and building a team with the right skills and resources.

Plenty of early stage SaaS startups start with a sales-led go-to-market strategy, and for good reason. Solving complex problems often requires complex solutions, which means that acquiring, onboarding, and retaining new customers while ensuring that they get the most out of your product requires a lot of direct interaction with your team. For these startups, landing a few big customers early on can have a significant impact on the company's trajectory. Those close relationships you build with large customers create tight feedback loops that help the company prioritize product development to create better product-market fit, while also generating revenue. There are trade-offs of course, mainly that scaling a sales-led organization is expensive. 

Product-led growth as a go-to-market strategy focuses on delivering value to customers through a self-service product experience. This can lead to increased sales efficiency, as customers are able to find and adopt the product on their own, without the need for extensive sales and marketing efforts. Companies that have been able to successfully leverage PLG have topped the charts in terms of cash & sales efficiency, earning truly impressive multiples in the public market. Klaviyo, a customer data platform, showcases these efficiencies in their recently filed S-1. As Tomasz Tunguz wrote in a recent blog post, “The PLG efficiency is tremendous both in cash & sales efficiency, which tops the charts of public software companies at 1.03 for the last 6 months. When the company spends $1 in sales & marketing expense, Klaviyo produces $1.03 in gross profit next year.” 

Sales efficiency is one of the many benefits of PLG. However, if your business currently relies on a traditional sales pipeline for growth, introducing a new sales motion can be challenging and poses some real risks to the business. I have recently spoken to a number of founders who are currently in this situation. Having worked in companies where PLG was introduced after an established sales-led motion (ultimately successful but with some false starts), I wanted to highlight some key areas you can focus on to mitigate the short-term risks and optimize for long-term success. It is important to note that the ultimate goal is not to replace your current sales-led efforts with product-led growth (PLG), but rather to embrace both motions in a complementary way.

Partner with Sales

Sales will be one of the primary sources of feedback on how prospects perceive your self-serve product in the context of your existing product portfolio. At launch, your new self-serve product is bound to compete with the enterprise sales motion. Some prospects will start testing the product instead of engaging with sales, leading to less pipeline. Other prospects may see the self-serve solution as a less expensive option to solve their problem, leading to cannibalization. Enabling the sales team to properly handle objections can help reduce the risk. Unlike objection handling against competitors, both products must be presented in the best possible light with clear distinctions between them. The insights gleaned from these interactions can inform the product strategy to create better product differentiation, as well as how the products are uniquely positioned in marketing materials.

It's also possible that your enterprise sales team will use the self-serve product as a sandbox for customer pilots and longer term demonstrations, disrupting the 'pure play' delineation between the two motions. They will need to be prepared to take on a more consultative role and focus on helping customers succeed. Their role will evolve to include providing support and training to customers. They’ll need to be more knowledgeable about the product and help customers get the most out of it. Whether compensation adjustments should be considered is a conversation to be had with sales leadership.

PLG is not supposed to compete with your sales-led motion; it should create a net new channel of highly-qualified leads for your sales team to close with greater efficiency (Later in the post we’ll cover some strategies for this). Realizing the benefits will come with challenges along the way. That’s why it’s absolutely critical to communicate the strategic importance of the initiative and how you plan on implementing it. 

“...you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize what you're saying.”
Jeff Weiner - LinkedIn Executive Chairman

Brace for Impact

Introducing PLG ultimately means introducing a competing call-to-action on your website. Instead of website visitors submitting their contact info on a lead form, now they’re signing up to use the product instead. Worse yet, if you have a digital team running paid campaigns to get new leads, without carefully segmenting campaigns and metrics between the two audiences, ROI on ad spend will surely be impacted. The bottomline is that marketing generated sales pipeline goals run the real risk of being missed.

The first step in any transformation is acceptance, followed by planning. The team driving your demand generation will need to find ways to increase the efficiency of their existing strategy, as well as evaluate new tactics that can scale. This includes improving content, optimizing landing pages, and improving audience targeting capabilities, all of which take time and technology to improve. In an ideal situation, increasing the budget during annual planning to compensate for the short-term ROI impact can help mitigate pipeline disruptions. The team can also consider making adjustments to the pacing of the current budget until spend normalizes to more predictable patterns and the concurrent efficiency initiatives begin to yield results.

Introducing the self-serve product on the website doesn't have to be as simple as "flipping a switch." There are plenty of tools available that will allow you to create personalized experiences for specific segments of your visitors. Are there geos where you don't have sales coverage? Is there a specific marketing segment you want to target? How about excluding Fortune 500s or accounts that are actively in the sales cycle? Your ultimate goal is to use personalization to gracefully introduce your new self-serve product without disrupting your existing sales motions (pissing off sales, causing people to quit!). The tools available today allow you to personalize website experiences in some simple or very sophisticated ways, and likely your only limitation is imagination and your existing technology stack.

Define a Playbook

Now that you’ve allowed prospects to essentially choose their own adventure, some genuinely qualified enterprise leads (that you spent good money to land on your site) will opt to kick the tires on the product instead of engaging with sales. If the current product experience isn’t as good as the enterprise experience, you run the risk of losing highly engaged, qualified leads. So what are you going to do about it? A PQL/PQA playbook defines who fits the criteria of being a qualified lead for enterprise services and how your team should engage. You’ve almost certainly heard or read about product qualified leads (PQL) and/or product qualified accounts (PQA). If not, there’s plenty of existing content out there on the subject, like this article by Elena Verna, so the focus won’t be on how to develop a sophisticated definition, but rather where to start. 

As with any new self-serve product, you likely haven’t dialed in the growth loops yet. Wherever you see the biggest drop in your user funnel, define the PQL/PQA criteria accordingly. For example, complex products present onboarding challenges that lead users to churn before they even start using the product. In these situations, usage thresholds are irrelevant. If the user would have met the criteria for sales outreach having filled out a lead form on your website, you can use the same criteria to define a PQL/PQA. If you have plenty of product usage but few upgrades, consider combining this PQL/PQA criteria with product usage thresholds. While PQL/PQAs define who you will engage with, the playbook defines what you will do. Remember that the user signed up to try the product, not to be sold to. The sales outreach should be focused on helping customers realize the value of the product as quickly as possible (the A-ha! Moment), before attempting to sell. 

The PQL/PQA playbook will evolve as you learn more about your users. You may find that some engaged users don't want to talk to sales, or don't have buying power, so you'll need to adjust your targeting criteria. As the self-servability of the product improves, product usage thresholds may get more complex.  

Initially, a key goal from the PQL/PQA playbook is to compensate for the current gaps in the product experience that would put qualified, engaged leads at risk. These one-on-one customer interactions will also serve as feedback on how to improve the overall self-serve experience for users, both in and out of the product. Be thoughtful with your initial approach, but don’t over complicate things. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Do the Unscalable

With some basic product metrics in place and a steady stream of sign-ups rolling in, you’ll quickly see the touch points that cause the most user churn. Creating scalable self-serve experiences that resolve these pain points takes time, and users are unlikely to wait for you to fix them. Leveraging unscalable tactics means you manually tackle the areas of highest friction for the users, effectively attempting to stop the bleeding, while more scalable self-serve experiences get developed in parallel. For example, if a significant percent of new users never show any meaningful product usage after signup, you may have an onboarding problem. This can be due to anything from poor documentation, a confusing UI, or a critical feature that is missing to help the user get started. 

One of the easiest things you can do is send an email to these users directly offering support. The support you offer can be directly through email, 1-on-1 live chat, or a group webinar with live Q&A.  There’s no one magic tactic to make it work. Find the problem, stop the bleeding, and prioritize a scalable solution. Then move on to the next problem, rinse and repeat! 

The primary goal of these high-effort engagements doesn’t necessarily need to be preventing individual users from churning. The insights gained can be used to prevent other users from facing the same issues in the future. How you calibrate the approach depends on the volume of users, their potential lifetime value, and other factors specific to your business. Generally, the more personalized the approach, the better the engagement will be. 100 plain-text emails coming from a real person within the company will likely get more replies than 100 system generated emails. The appearance that you're giving users some level of special attention goes a long way in terms of building trust with your brand as well.

Plan for incremental change

One of the biggest challenges introducing PLG is shifting the company mindset. The team’s ability to quickly develop innovative product experiences and marketing tactics, taking calculated risks to get feedback from a large number of customers are essential to effectively leverage this motion.

For companies that have started with a sales-led go-to-market motion, the entire company strategy and focus is aligned on hunting large enterprise deals. To be successful with PLG, how you communicate your brand, execute on customer acquisition, and support, all need a systematic and disciplined focus, and not secondary consideration to your enterprise customer base. 

Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were the best self-serve products. To build a great self-serve experience, you need to carefully examine every user interaction and put a lot of thought into how to simplify and streamline the various flows so users can accomplish what they need to quickly and efficiently. This will require a team with a wide range of skills, with the right technology stack and processes in place to be able to develop and test solutions, and have the executive sponsorship to influence change in areas they do not have direct control over. 

Generally, you can start by putting together a growth team by leveraging existing resources from various teams, in the form of a cross-functional tiger team led by an executive sponsor. Leveraging external expertise through industry consultants or advisors can help veer your strategy in the right direction from the start. Full disclosure - I am one of those consultants. In time, the team will evolve as the company grows and business needs change. Growth may end up being its own dedicated business unit, or splintered across multiple organizations in Marketing, Product, Data Science / BI, etc. 

Random tests result in random data points. Often overlooked is developing solid processes for experimentation that go beyond A/B testing and enable you to create incremental wins from previous efforts. Developing a program that enables the team to identify strategic opportunities, test them quickly with precision, and analyze the results is a relatively niche skill set. Leveraging external expertise through industry consultants or advisors can be more cost effective than attempting to hire or develop this skill in-house (at least at the start). 

Conclusion

Introducing a product-led growth strategy poses some real risks to companies that have seen growth through a sales-led motion. PLG introduces new scaling challenges, and not all solutions may lend themselves well to such an approach. Additionally, it can be expensive to implement, as you need to invest in building a great product and marketing it effectively. However, the benefits of go-to-market strategy built around a great self-serve product are many, and implemented thoughtfully, the potential rewards are immense.  

Hopefully this article has been helpful in highlighting some key areas to focus on during this transformation. Looking forward to reading your comments and feedback. If you would like to go into any particular area in more detail in future posts, please let me know.