Go beyond PLG and focus on the Customer Journey

In recent years, PLG, or Product-Led Growth, has become a significant buzz in the tech world, and rightfully so. Products that delight customers and fuel growth loops are essential. If your offering can’t deliver considerable value to your users, if your product isn’t resolving major pain-points, or isn’t providing big WOWs over the alternatives where it matters, then you’ve got (lots of) work ahead. But with the rise of digital channels, customers interact with businesses in multiple ways that drive the overall experience. Only focusing on the product or go-to-market-led growth is no longer enough – it’s time to prioritize the whole Customer Journey (CJ).

It isn’t about Product-Led, OR Sales-Led, OR Marketing-Led Growth. It’s all the above simultaneously. It’s about Customer-Led Growth. It’s about delivering an end-to-end experience at every touchpoint of the customer life cycle that feels like one, delighting the user at every step.

PLG focuses on customer acquisition and engagement through the product itself as the primary growth driver. Yet, the biggest Product-Led Growth success stories, such as Slack and Zoom, build a robust online presence and significant sales and marketing teams to keep their momentum going.

PLG is often compared to traditional inbound and outbound methods, which focus on more traditional marketing practices, such as email campaigns, advertising, lead generation, and sales activities, to name a few. Through a CJ approach, businesses focus on understanding customers' different channels to interact with the company and the motivations behind their decisions to move from one touch point to the next.

While both PLG and traditional methods have their advantages, they offer a siloed view, often resulting in different user experiences depending on the part of the organization involved. A holistic CJ approach focuses on a unified experience, providing additional insights into customer behavior at every step. This starts with the first touch point, such as an online ad or mentions on social media. It continues through selection, trial, product usage, upsell, and churn. Attention to detail at every step is paramount.

Businesses, for example, gain insights into customer behavior across various channels and touchpoints (sometimes associated with the name omnichannel), tailoring the marketing and product offerings to meet users’ needs. Companies identify opportunities to improve customer experience, engagement, and loyalty. A Customer Journey approach can also recognize areas to reduce churn, as customers may be experiencing difficulties based on a bad experience very early in the journey (has it ever happened that the wrong value proposition was implied?)

“But when you’re creating a new product, regardless of whether it’s made of atoms or electrons, for businesses or consumers, the actual thing you’re building is only one tiny part of the vast, intangible, overlooked user journey that starts long before a customer ever gets their hands on your product and ends long after” – Tony Fadell, “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making” book. 

The Customer Journey "Game of Life"

When considering the whole Customer Journey as one holistic voyage, an attractive mental model is to think of the famous “Game of Life.” The right users must progress through the stages, from initial awareness to usage and, ultimately, churn. While each “level” has specific success metrics and priorities, it is critical that the whole experience from start to end feels like one, providing a fantastic & unified Customer Journey at every step.

 At each step of the CJ “game of life,” the focus must be to maximize the number of right participants moving to the next level. While you should adapt the specific steps for your business, and sometimes customers will take shortcuts, you can expect the following general flow:

1. The journey starts when your prospect builds an initial awareness about your solution at a very high level. That learning can be through word-of-mouth, a social media ad, a sales associate outreach, or a Google search for a specific pain point.
2. As the journey progresses, your prospect will discover more about your solution. This part is increasingly self-served in our digital world and will include sources such as your website, review sites, forums, the first two pages of search results on relevant (in the prospect's mind) keywords, and analyst reports.
3. While some customers might go directly from discovery to purchasing the product, many journeys go through an evaluation phase. Factors such as the price of the product or size of the company purchasing can have a noticeable correlation with the time required for the evaluation phase – think large enterprises deploying expensive solutions company-wide compared to a freemium mobile app. Using a trial version of your software is part of the evaluation phase.
4. While calling this “a next step” is greatly over-simplified as it constantly happens, consideration to purchase is a critical part of the Customer Journey. Assuming every step so far has confirmed the pain-relieving capabilities of your offering, the CJ will shift to a whole new level of the game.
5. The customer sees the light, understands the value, and believes your product or service will remove significant pain. Offering a seamless first transaction and onboarding experience is critical for the long-term success of the whole journey. Whether you have in-app purchases, a self-serve eCommerce sales process or going through enterprise sales with customer success teams for the deployments, understanding and exceeding the different participants' expectations is critical.
6. Product Usage is genuinely a journey on its own (see the Ferris wheel analogy below). Yet it needs to feel integrated with the rest of the CJ. And remember: the worst thing you can do is leave the customer alone until a few days before renewal, hoping that everything went well during the last 1-, 6- or 12 months.
7. While getting help can take many ways, from self-serve knowledge base articles to forums, talking to a human on the phone, or even on-site visits, too many companies treat support as a cost center to be minimized. I propose that, taking a CJ perspective, the “call for help” from the customer should be treated as a symptom of a problem somewhere else in the whole journey and that the data from support “incidents” needs to inform many different aspects of the holistic approach to customer experience.
8. With any luck, much hard work, and assuming you are not selling a one-and-done product, the Customer Journey so far and the value derived from your product continue to be high enough for the user to renew their subscription or extend their maintenance agreement.
9. Customers will move on at one point in the life cycle – hopefully through an expansion. If you’ve done a fantastic job with the whole Customer Journey so far, you’ve been able to build loyalty. The customer will decide to go to the next level of the game – this might take upgrading to a premium version of your offering or adding more users within the company (also known as land-and-expand).
10. Sometimes, customers will no longer need your solution. Many reasons exist: My favorite is that they no longer have the pain point. But whatever the explanation for your customer to stop having a monetary relationship with you, it is critical that you make the churn experience as positive as possible. Let me repeat this point. How we churn/exit our customers is as important as how we generate awareness in the very first place.

Throughout this Customer Journey, build every step around data and feedback loops to maximize the number of users going to the next step. You want to identify the leading indicators for each phase, those that matter to move things forward along the whole Customer Journey. It would be best to have built-in feedback loops to ensure you move as many right players forward as possible. The transition from one step to the next should feel natural and as one – the worst is when customers can see your org-chart at every phase of the journey, when experiences are disjointed and don’t feel like coming from the same company.

The product-usage Ferris Wheel

Usually, this is where Product-Led Growth happens, yet product usage is more than just the growth loops you can build into the product. Each product offering will differ, and the Ferris Wheel will be unique for your business. The one depicted below could be used for collaboration software. Your product managers will need to understand the customer needs and define their version of this life cycle within the life cycle. 

Areas that must be considered during the Product Ferris Wheel journey include the onboarding and discoverability of features and benefits, the time it takes to deliver WOW, and ensuring your product gets the job done with the best possible experience.

A holistic view of the Customer Journey is essential for delivering products crafted with care at every step. This focus enables businesses to make informed decisions about product and marketing strategies, meet customer needs and build loyalties. It is essential for those who want to remain successful and grow in the digital age. By focusing on the Customer Journey, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, identify opportunities to improve their products and services and reduce customer churn.