What Is PLG CRM?

DEFINITION
A PLG CRM is a customer relationship management tool for companies with a product-led go-to-market strategy. The PLG CRM gives insights into your user accounts and data, providing you with their product usage data. It can further be used to categorize the customer’s buyer journey stage and ultimately result in a better customer relationship and optimized revenue.

💡Understanding PLG CRM

While traditional CRMs provide the sales team with a comprehensive insight into prospects’ and existing customers’ data, they are limited to interactions with the company, number of calls, and basic account information. 

Such data isn’t enough in a product-led growth company. The reason is, that most users of a PLG product prefer self-serving, which means they rarely come into contact with a sales personnel before onboarding the product. 

In a PLG company, the sales team only pursues a user after they meet pre-defined product usage criteria. In such a scenario, the traditional CRMs don’t provide a sales personnel with enough data to determine the correct time to reach a potential customer.

A PLG CRM, on the other hand, gives you a holistic view of your users by providing data like:

• Account information (user information like email ID, name, website, industry, size of the company)
• In-product action data (activities in the product)
• Engagement with marketing materials 
• Revenue data (the plan that the customer is on)

The CRM contains data as specific as the first touchpoint that a lead engaged with, be it an email drip campaign or a social media ad, to the in-product data of where they left during onboarding.

🖋 Takeaway

PLG CRM is a single source of truth for user data. What used to be accessible to only the sales and customer success team, can now be viewed by every team involved in revenue generation, from an account executive to a social media marketer. 

Traditional CRMs fail in providing information about the subscription plan of a user, their user journey, or any product usage data. This data is necessary for your sales representatives to understand the leads better and not waste time on unqualified leads.

Without such user data, your sales and marketing teams will keep missing opportunities to engage and convert a user at the right time.

However, a PLG CRM assimilates the necessary information onto one platform which can be accessed by every operating team.

The good news is that you don’t need to migrate your entire database from your existing CRM to another platform. You can just connect your CRM and product analytics with a revenue acceleration tool like Breadcrumbs.

What Is PLG CRM?

A PLG CRM is a CRM tool to manage relationships with leads, users, and paying customers. The user can be on a freemium version, free trial, or paying customer. Based on their product usage, the sales team can determine when to reach out to the user (if at all) for an upsell or cross-sell.

It’s leveraged by almost every team at a PLG company, from the product development team to the customer success team. 

Unlike a traditional CRM that determines the customer’s buyer journey stage based on the number of phone calls, PLG CRM identifies it based on their product usage.

Why Do You Need PLG CRM?

The primary benefit of a PLG CRM is its ability to aggregate siloed data like customer information and product usage data in one tool. As the CRM becomes a single source of truth, the operational teams save time by not having to jump across platforms for the data they need. Here are some more benefits of having a PLG CRM:

1. Identify Better-Qualified Leads

Usually a blindspot, a PLG CRM makes product-qualified leads clearly visible to the sales team. Not only that, the sales team has access to specific data related to their product usage. 

For example, they can track the most-used product feature, exhausted features (in the case of a freemium model), and more. They can identify the probability of conversion with a lead scoring method, too, considering product data as a factor. The conversion becomes easier and faster with access to such information.

2. Nurture MQLs Properly

As the marketing team also has access to customer and user data, they can create hyper-personalized campaigns based on the lead scores, and nurture the PQLs and MQLs to SQLs smoothly.

3. Create More Active Users

With your product development team being able to view user activity and the conversions, they can identify development opportunities to make a user more active. 

4. Improve Customer Retention

Your customer support team can identify likely-to-churn customers before they discontinue. Reaching such users at the right time with the right solutions will not only reduce your churn rate but also present more opportunities for upselling. You can also spot churn patterns, if any, and create strategies and plans to solve the problems. 

Connect your existing CRM and product analytics with Breadcrumbs today to tap into the hidden revenue opportunities for your brand. Request a demo today to understand how a revenue acceleration tool like Breadcrumbs can transform your customer relationship and revenue.