How to run a sales-assisted PLG playbook

It’s easy to assume that product-led growth = product-only growth, but that couldn't be further from the truth! Over 96% of PLG companies have sales teams (source: Peer Signal). And with hundreds or even thousands of signups per month, these companies need ways to sift through all those leads to identify the customers who need a human touch. 

In a sales-assisted PLG motion, the expectation is that you can use all the data you have about your customers, like who they are (title) and what they have done in your product (usage) to provide the best buying experience, and that experience likely includes a sales or customer success team member reaching out to help! The best part about having these insights at your fingertips is that you’re going to be more relevant and add more value in your outreach. It’s a win-win for your customers and your revenue team.

Sales and customer success want actionable insights, not just data

Stop throwing data at your sales and customer success teams! Instead, notify them with what they actually need: who to reach out to and why. 

We’ve all been there - we’ll build dashboards, send around spreadsheets, pipe a bunch of data into Salesforce, sometimes even write SQL (!!!) just to get that list of customers to reach out to. In fact, some of our customers at Correlated ran out of custom fields to use in Salesforce! All this data quickly becomes overwhelming, and rather than spending time on making customers happy, we end up spending time analyzing data and manually digging through dashboards.

There is a better world, and that’s where Correlated comes in! 

Create PQL signals and actions (with ease!)

Correlated is built specifically for go-to-market (GTM) teams looking to get value out of the data you already have. Using our Signal Builder, Correlated monitors all your customer insights across multiple data sources and alerts you to the best customers to reach out to and why on an ongoing basis. This means that you don’t have to check your dashboards to find the best leads! Correlated will send those leads to you (and it can even kick off an email campaign). Let’s go through an example of a Signal we’ve set up internally at Correlated to help track when someone might be ready to convert to paid. 

One of the most important things we care about as our customers onboard is whether or not they’ve connected their data, which is often through a data warehouse. We just released a Redshift data warehouse integration, so we want to know when a customer connects Redshift. You can see below how easy it is to build a Signal that will track customers as they integrate Redshift. 

Now that you’ve created a Signal, Correlated will automatically monitor all of your customer data to identify when new Accounts and Users match the filters and conditions you’ve saved in your Signal. 

In the example below, you’ll see that we built a Signal that “Correlated Labs” triggered. The Signal conditions tell us when and why Correlated Labs triggered the Signal. (hint: jump down below to see the Slack notification this Signal triggered!)

We can mix and match data to our hearts desire to easily test what Signals identify the customers that we want to know about. For example, in addition to knowing whether or not a customer connected Redshift, we also want to know which customers have started sending Slack notifications. We can quickly find customers who connected Redshift who also sent more Slack notifications than the rest of our Redshift customers.

With our Signal builder, you can see how easy it is to turn all the data you have into what you care about: Accounts and Users. You can also test your assumptions as you go! You’re probably wondering how this helps speed up your day-to-day, and that’s really where our Actions come into play. 

Use Signals to trigger Actions directly in the tools you use on a daily basis

Correlated is a centralized place to store all of your customer insights. Signals turn large quantities of data into easily digestible lists of Accounts and Users who match the conditions you care about. Next step is to deliver those Accounts and Users to the downstream applications that your GTM teams use on a daily basis. 

Let’s start with an example where you want a sales manager to assign hot accounts to sales team members for follow up. You can create an Action that delivers a Slack notification with embedded context into a channel to triage.

If the hot account you’re looking at already has an account owner, you can create a Salesforce Task with a deadline assigned to that account owner.

You can also use product usage data to determine which outreach playbook to use when reaching out to customers. In our example, if a user triggers the Redshift Integration Signal, we can send them a sequence specifically catered to Redshift. 

Whether you’re a fan of Salesloft or Outreach, Correlated supports both. This makes email automation tools like Salesloft and Outreach even more powerful since you can now use product usage to kick off Sequences and Cadences. 

Send insights directly to the Account Owner

Sometimes we want to let the whole team know when a User or Account takes a key action. In other cases, not everybody on your team needs to know when a Signal is triggered. 

You can always send sales-specific signals to the Account Owner or send customer lifecycle signals (around health and churn risk) to Customer Success Owners. This makes it possible to leverage product usage in how you interact with your customers throughout their entire customer lifecycle, whether they are still thinking about converting, if they want to expand, or if they are struggling with the product and at risk for churn. 

Want to try it for your team? Get started free

By using Correlated to build Signals and trigger Actions and playbooks, you can achieve a largely automated, intelligent sales-assisted PLG motion. Sign up for here, schedule a demo, or learn more about our product!