Advice for building CS in a Product Led Growth strategy

Brandon Hemmelman

My company has had a Sales Led Growth strategy since its start, and currently has a CS motion in place to support it.

Beginning in 2024, we are launching a new product that has a Product Led Growth strategy. I want to help lead a CS function to support this strategy.

Anyone have experience or advice in standing up a CS function like this?

Here are a few areas I am focusing on:

• Leveraging our existing Community program
• Building tight alignment with the Product team
• Rethinking our Tech/Digital Touch approach

Let me know your questions, thoughts, or recommendations!

Thanks

Brandon

Ed Powers

Hi @Brandon Hemmelman --

I consult with a number of Customer Success clients who doing the same thing right now, and you have a good list. I would add:

1. Understand your tiers and segments. While your experience with 1:1 engagement provides helpful guidance, it's the nuances that make all the difference. Spend time interviewing customers in your product-led set, and in particular, look for things that are distinctly different than those in the sales-led set. This will give you critical clues for your CX design.
2. Simplicity rules. In a sales-led environment, you can rely on human intervention to cover sloppy UX, but you can't tolerate it in product-led environments. The the most successful product-led companies make things very simple--and it's hard to make things simple! It can be a struggle for Product teams, but they need to up their game, too.
3. Nail your CX. You will need to map your customer journey in high resolution detail, step-by-step, screen by screen, data field by data field, for the entire digital journey. It will be highly sequential and time-triggered in the beginning and quickly shift to contextual triggers. And the design must leverage all the links for in-product training, value proof points, and community.
4. Upskill your CS Ops or Rev Ops team. Since there will be zero contact with end customers, you will need very strong analytics and predictive model-building capabilities to detect and respond to the segment, user, and behavioral data you'll collect. This goes beyond a platform administrator or CS enablement person. You need someone who's very comfortable using statistical tools and can make data-driven decisions.
5. Study adoption behaviors. A key success factor is learning the mechanics of how new habits propagate within a social system. The emerging science of social network analysis unlocks the secrets to "viral" behavioral change, elements that must be present to drive high levels of product adoption all on its own.

I hope that helps. Good luck and let me know if you want to chat further.

Ed

Brandon Hemmelman

Thank you Ed! Appreciate the insights!