How to Create a PLG CRM from a Traditional CRM

Traditional CRMs struggle to keep up in the product-led growth (PLG) era.

Sure, these CRMs might suffice for sales teams at the frontline. But for product-led companies, these tools miss one glaring feature: product data. 

Without insights on how users interact with your product—not to mention the lack of a complete view of the user’s journey—there’s little you can do to speed up the sales process, improve your product, and catch churning customers before it happens. 

Fortunately, that’s where PLG CRMs come in.

What is a PLG CRM (& Why Do You Need One?)

The PLG CRM suite is a treasure trove of customer and product insights that refines the product experience—which further optimizes your main growth channel, revenue, and relationship with customers.

The PLG CRM suite is a traditional CRM tool on steroids. 

Instead of siloed data that only the sales department can access, a PLG CRM platform acts as a single source of truth for everyone in the revenue or customer-facing department (e.g., CRO, email marketer, account executive, and customer success manager).

PLG CRMs contain extremely detailed customer data from every touchpoint—like the specific nurturing email they engaged with or where they dropped off during onboarding.

These PLG CRM suites can be created by connecting your existing CRM and product analytics tools with a revenue acceleration platform like Breadcrumbs. 

For example, here’s how it looks when you build a scoring model with Breadcrumbs, HubSpot (a CRM), and Pendo (a product analytics platform). 

When you add a PLG CRM platform to your tech stack, you’ll discover it impacts the entire organization. 

Here are four scenarios likely to happen when you get your teams onboard with the underutilized PLG software:

• Marketing team can achieve better engagement and nurture marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs) in personalized campaigns thanks to hyper-specific customer data captured in lead scoring 
• Sales team hit or even exceeded their quota as they can now spot the hottest leads quickly with no guesswork 
• Product team can identify hidden opportunities to turn inactive to active users due to automatically captured feature usage data by customer segments, and finally,   
• Customer success team can pin down at-risk customers so that they can intervene before it’s too late and pick out expansion-qualified leads to cross-sell and upsell, ultimately improving revenue retention

Without the PLG CRM tool, the product-led motion would fall to the ground.

The 2 Most Important Features a PLG CRM Must Have

In the product-led growth era, everyone in the revenue department—including the marketing team, sales team, customer success team, and product team—should be able to access the PLG CRM platform. 

Check that it provides the following features besides the standard features a traditional CRM provides.

In-depth contact scoring

Lead scoring refers to the process of assigning leads a score. The higher the score, the easier it is to convert them to customers.

Contact scoring is heads and shoulders above lead scoring. Besides surfacing the hottest leads at the right time, it also identifies upsell opportunities and churn risks. In other words, it uncovers hidden revenue opportunities instead of giving only a single numerical score.

If you want to turn your product into a massive acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion channel, you need to look at contact scoring.

Here’s how you can get started:

• Connect Breadcrumbs with HubSpot
• Determine who makes up your sales-qualified leads (SQLs) in the Fit model (e.g., CRO, VP of Sales)
• Indicate actions that show buying intent in the Activity model (e.g., reads a specific product-focused blog post three times within a week)

With Breadcrumbs, you can create timely scores with recency and frequency controls in your scoring models. Focus your efforts on leads who interacted with your product and content three days ago, not a year ago. 

What makes Breadcrumbs streets ahead of traditional lead scoring tools is its co-dynamic scoring capabilities.

Get notified on your chosen CRM the second leads show buying intent. Analyze your customer data. And examine how the different data points play a role in hitting your revenue goals so that you can rinse and repeat for the days, months, and years to come.

Pro plans start at $799/month. Book a demo with Breadcrumbs to build your first scoring model, catch leads at the best time, and hit your revenue goals today.

High-level product analytics

A product experience platform helps you understand what users are doing specifically in your product. It answers the questions:

• “What is the most popular feature?”
• “What is the least favorite feature?”
• “Where do users get stuck?”
• “Where do users drop off in onboarding?”
• “How can I improve the product experience based on the data?”

Besides improving onboarding and driving adoption through in-app walkthroughs, these product adoption platforms also help you gather and prioritize valuable user feedback.

For example, Pendo, a product experience suite that Breadcrumbs integrates with, centralizes user feedback according to customer segments. 

Imagine a startup that wants to enter the enterprise market. It can review the feedback from its enterprise customers and plan its product improvements accordingly. To instill transparency and confidence, it could inform them of the recent changes in a roadmap.

This sounds fine and dandy, but how do you include these product data in your CRM?

Now that you’ve connected Breadcrumbs with your CRM to unlock contact scoring, here’s what you should do next:

1. Connect Breadcrumbs with your product analytics platform (this automatically pulls your product data into your CRM) 
2. Determine what makes a product-qualified lead (PQL) in the Fit and Activity models (e.g., invites three members and creates five documents)
3. Set your PQL scoring model live

You’ll get a complete picture of your customer’s journey in one place. 

Discover what users are doing in your product across the entire journey and what’s holding back free users from upgrading.

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One last note before we end this section.

Many resources on product-led growth advocate focusing on PQLs. 

At Breadcrumbs, we recommend focusing on SQLs as well.

There are two main reasons we’re preaching this approach.

One, not all PQLs need a paid plan. Sometimes, the free or limited features will suffice! 

Case in point:

As a freelance writer who works with long-term clients and sends contracts when projects begin, I only need at most three contracts every month. Since my e-signature software tool offers three free contracts every month for its freemium plan, I have no reason to upgrade to a paid plan.    

This proves that there are far too many nuances with PQLs, which leads us to the second reason.

PQLs are still largely a siloed piece of data.

If you want to turn your product into a massive sales force, you need to connect all customer data across different touchpoints in a single source of truth.

That way, you’ll have a more holistic view of all users’ activities.

Create Your PLG CRM with Breadcrumbs Today

Your PLG CRM acts as a single source of truth for your product-led company. Ensure that it boasts sophisticated contact scoring capabilities and accessible product analytics.

Get the most out of your existing tech stack. Book a demo with Breadcrumbs to get a 180-degree view of your customers and accelerate your revenue today.