The PLG playbook: Unlocking growth by letting your product shine 

Creating a product that meets customer needs—or even exceeds expectations—is no small feat. If your product makes a real difference in people's lives and you're committed to delivering exceptional experiences, you're already ahead of the curve. But here’s the catch: can new customers start using it and immediately recognize its value? That's where the real challenge lies.

No matter how outstanding your product may be, customers are hard to win over if they can’t try it firsthand. That’s why product-led growth (PLG) is gaining momentum—it aligns with how customers prefer to engage and helps brands break down barriers to entry.

Whether you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling mid-market company, adopting a product-led growth strategy can sharpen your business focus and connect your marketing efforts to your big-picture goals.

Product-led growth puts the product at the core of the customer journey. Unlike traditional sales-led approaches, PLG focuses on providing immediate access to the product so customers can experience its value firsthand. By letting the product sell itself, businesses drive growth through user acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization.

This approach thrives in industries where:

• Customers can easily access the product
• Free trials or freemium models reduce barriers to entry
• The product provides immediate, discoverable value

PLG is not anti-sales or anti-marketing—it simply shifts the focus. Sales and marketing functions guide customers toward meaningful engagement with the product, helping them reach "aha moments" where the product’s value becomes undeniable.

Historically, sales-led growth has dominated business strategy, even in SaaS and B2B spaces. Marketing teams focused on bringing leads to the sales team, who would take those inbound leads through the funnel to conversion (and do outbound cold calling as well). While this strategy still works for many companies today, the PLG model has emerged as a fresh take on the old-school sales funnel.

Sales-led growth typically targets large enterprise clients through high-touch processes like personalized sales efforts and lengthy purchasing cycles. This approach often generates revenue through major deals but has challenges: scaling becomes difficult as the pool of large clients shrinks, and big customers may demand customizations that disrupt long-term product vision.

Sales-led growth is ideal if:

• Your customer base is primarily large enterprise companies
• Your purchasing process is long and/or complex
• Your product itself is particularly complicated to use
• Your pricing model relies on lots of add-ons or uses only custom pricing

In contrast, product-led growth focuses on smaller, self-serve customers and relies on intuitive product design and onboarding to drive adoption. By letting users explore the product independently, PLG scales efficiently with lower acquisition costs and maintains product control by avoiding client-driven customizations. While growth may start slowly, momentum builds as satisfied customers advocate for the product and grow their usage.

Product-led growth works best if:

• You target primarily small and medium-sized businesses
• Your purchasing process can easily be self-serve
• You have an intuitive product and robust in-product onboarding
• You limit one-off product customization and stick to your roadmap

Product-led growth is rooted in the value your product delivers to customers. If your marketing neglects that angle, it won’t support your business strategy. These six strategies can help you craft campaigns that enhance your product's customer experience and appreciate its worth.

Center your marketing efforts around helping customers engage with your product. Use tactics like free trials or freemium models to reduce barriers and let users experience value firsthand. Highlight the product’s benefits through personalized messaging and educational content that empowers customers to explore and adopt critical features.

💡 Pro tip: Leverage in-app messaging to guide users through product tours or tutorials tailored to their needs. Use data-driven insights to showcase features that align with each customer’s goals, driving faster engagement and adoption.

The aha moment is when a customer truly understands your product’s value. This pivotal experience differs for every product. Identifying what drives these moments—and making it easy for users to reach them—is critical to your product-led growth strategy.

At Customer.io, we've observed that users have an aha moment when they send their first automated campaign. However, we identified a key friction point: some new customers left messages in draft mode instead of setting them to “send automatically.” To address this, our onboarding messages now guide users step-by-step toward successfully sending their first campaign.

💡 Pro tip: Use behavior-triggered messaging to drive engagement. These messages can respond to user actions in real time, nudging customers toward the features and activities that unlock value and lead to aha moments.

Effective marketing hinges on personalization. Use customer data to tailor messages, ensuring content and timing reflect each user’s needs and actions. Incorporate business data like roles, locations, or lifecycle stages to refine your targeting further.

Dynamic content and event-triggered campaigns can guide users through their unique journey, helping them discover value faster. For instance, you can use data to highlight role-specific features during onboarding, highlight account changes (like removing or adding team members), or send timely promotions based on past interactions.

💡 Pro tip: A personalized experience needs more than “Hi {{ customer.firstname }}” to feel genuine. Segmentation allows you to deliver messages that reflect the customer data you have on hand, thus making the experience much more personal.

Disparate data can hinder your ability to engage customers effectively. Unifying data in a customer data platform (CDP) creates a comprehensive view of each customer’s attributes and behaviors, enabling seamless data activation within your campaigns.

With a holistic data foundation, you can deliver highly personalized, real-time messaging that enhances the user experience and supports your product-led growth goals.

💡 Pro tip: Use our CDP to unify your customer data. With a holistic view of your customers, you can precisely segment and personalize messaging based on people's actions while using your product. 

One strength of product-led growth is that the needs of a few big customers don’t dictate your product’s evolution. But that doesn't mean you shouldn’t welcome customer input! Solicit feedback to identify pain points and optimization opportunities, like after customer service interactions or when people drop off during onboarding. Collecting customer input on an ongoing basis can create a feedback loop to support data-driven decisions.

Automating the process makes it even more effective. For example, consider this clever idea (using multiple integrations) from Stripe’s head of product, Kevin Yien. If you want to interview customers about specific topics, use the call-recording platform Gong to listen to sales calls, filtering for keywords you want to chat with them about. Gong can send you a Slack alert whenever a customer mentions a relevant term. Then, you can trigger an email inviting that customer to schedule an interview with your product manager. Learn the ins and outs of how Kevin uses customer feedback at Stripe by listening to his episode on Lenny’s podcast. >>

💡 Pro tip: Deploy in-app surveys to gather real-time feedback. Use these insights to optimize features, enhance user satisfaction, and identify trends that can drive future product updates.

Continuous testing and iteration are essential to a successful PLG strategy. By adopting a test-and-learn approach, businesses can swiftly adapt to evolving market trends and customer preferences, ensuring that their product consistently delivers value.

A prime example of this approach is Goody, an all-in-one gifting platform. By embracing continuous experimentation, Goody refined their messaging and engagement tactics, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and revenue growth. In the end, they achieved a 2.7x increase in their end-user conversion rate within just four months. Read all about how Goody made experimentation a core part of their strategy. >>

💡 Pro tip: Use A/B testing to experiment with messaging. From individual message elements to onboarding flows, A/B testing helps you uncover what drives engagement and refine your strategy with confidence.

Whether your brand is fully committed to a product-led growth strategy or leverages it with sales-led tactics, capitalizing on the benefits of a PLG model can help you deliver value to people faster.

Effective product-led growth marketing enhances the customer experience, acting as an extension of your product to provide value and engender loyalty. If you want your customers to shout your praises from the rooftops, engage them with messages that inspire that cry of eureka!

Now that you’ve got product-led growth fundamentals down, dive deeper into marketing strategies and tactics you can put to work now:

📖 Lifecycle marketing for product-led growth: download the guide

📺 3 messaging plays to drive product-led growth: watch the webinar