Evolving Human-Onboarding to True-Self-Serve PLG

In my previous post, I talk about how messy launching PLG is. Launching PLG is like turning on multiple light switches at the same time and getting the team and organization to believe in the vision, the strategy, and the roadmap.

In December, we launched our Free Starter PLG strategy with human onboarding because we can learn quickly and get our team trained. We can test the stability of our platform to understand the user experience and buyers’ journey. Identify challenges, a customer’s house, and many things that help us develop better compliance software for start-ups. Within that comes a sequence of building workflow automation for our sales team PQL Slack alerts for product-qualified accounts, upsell levers, and bundles and pricing plans to get our marketing team situated with our paid ad flywheel. This also gave us time to develop our data pipeline infrastructure (see this post). The manual human onboarding helped us capture learnings and gave us time to set up our data pipeline infrastructure. Looking back, it allowed us to launch PLG within three months. And have us operational for another three months as we develop this planning cycle.

Our next strategy is to create a true self-serve PLG experience. Customers can sign up at FreeSOC2 .com, get access to the Trustcloud compliance platform immediately, and experience the value.

The challenges we had previously were human onboarding folks who signed up, a FreeSOC2 .com will schedule a call. We had a considerable percentage of customers who never followed through on our call on scheduling a call, and with our CPC leads being high. Additionally, they were not activated. Another challenge was that our sales team was spending cycles on Onboarding calls, which were highly effective, but we had hit the top of the S-curve in learning after three months. So it was the right time for us to transition to a true self-serve experience because we’re confident that our customers can onboard themselves and navigate our platform, hitting the WOW moment. They would have the option to contact us for a follow-up call. We use this follow-up call as a signal within our PQA intent.

Launching PLG in making a dent in the market will be a year in the making in the sequence of flipping light switches from accelerated learning, enabling, Sales, Team, product, stability, product, activation, and active activating the power of our free Starter customers as a word of mouth engine. As a PLG growth leader, I am blessed to combine SaaS, product, growth, viral networking effects, and B2B sales.

— —

Bonus:

I decided to use ChatGPT to rewrite my post above, and it did a pretty good job

We have been evolving our PLG strategy from human-onboarding to more product-led. It’s messy, it’s complicated, and it’s like turning on multiple light switches at the same time. But despite the challenges, we’re making progress.

Last December, we launched our Free Starter PLG strategy with human onboarding. 👩‍💻 It was a great way to learn quickly and get our team trained. We tested the stability of our platform, identified challenges, and developed better compliance software for start-ups. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. 👍

Of course, there were challenges along the way. 😶 Many customers who signed up for human onboarding never followed through on scheduling a call. And our sales team was spending too much time on onboarding calls, which were effective but not scalable. With a new self-serve experience, we’re confident that we can activate more customers and streamline our sales process.

🔜 Coming soon, we’re moving on to our next strategy: a true self-serve PLG experience. Customers will sign up at FreeSOC2 .com, get access to the Trustcloud compliance platform immediately, and experience the value. 👌 It’s a big step for us, but we’re confident that our customers can onboard themselves and navigate our platform.

We’re excited about the future of PLG and the impact it can have on our customers. And we’re grateful for the hard work of our team, who have made all of this possible. So if you’re looking for compliance software for your startup, sign up at FreeSOC2 .com and experience the value for yourself.

If you want to learn more about launching #plg and our journey to disrupting the compliance industry, free feel to message me.