The Definitive Guide to Digital Customer Success
PLG Nudging system for the Dark Pipeline
Lets start with defining the Dark Pipeline
As depicted in the diagram the sign up to conversion flow is the weak link for most PLG companies and remains unattended. There are a few reasons why?
- Companies expect late or no monetization from these sign ups. They are good for strategic reasons but it is not a priority for monetization. As Kyle Poyar points out “as PLG companies grow past $10M ARR, your larger accounts start to drive a disproportionate amount of revenue and incremental growth”
- The self-service sign up flow already exists for those that might find value and want to upgrade to a free plan.
- The amount of product activity is negligible for a large number of these sign ups and it isn’t easy to triangulate the companies that these people work at through third party data sets.
On the other hand, 90%+ of your sign ups are in the dark pipeline. So, making this efficient is the fastest way to reduce CAC and improve ROI from the marketing dollars spent.
The first challenge in making the system more efficient is the fact that most PLG teams utilize multiple Marketing automation tools as depicted such as MailChimp for Transactional or Marketing email, Customer.io for Customer Onboarding, Intercom for In-app assistance coupled with emails.
Growth and Marketing teams have to configure filters/profiles in each of the different tools.
The second challenge is that the product usage data is available in analytics tools such as Segment, Amplitude or MixPanel. It is worth mentioning that some newer PLG companies are skipping the analytics tools altogether and putting the data into a Data Warehouse directly using tools such as NetSpring.
This creates the complexity for Marketing and Growth teams to visualize cohorts in product analytics tools and then replicate them in Marketing Automation tool(s) that are being used.
Even if these rules are set up once it is hard to keep them in sync over time and for early stage companies to experiment with what is working and what is not.
A PLG OS is focussed on building, experimenting and learning from persona in a no-code fashion is an ideal solution to help extract most value from the dark pipeline.
