Prepare to be enlightened as Kyle helps us dissect the nuances of PLG and how this transformative model helps software companies boost their customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. Through the course of the conversation, we unravel the differences between extreme and hybrid models of PLG and expound on the critical role sales teams have in this innovative strategy.
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Introduction to the episode
(00:00 - 01:16)
AS: Welcome to another episode of the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast! I am delighted to welcome Kyle Poyar. He's the operating partner of OpenView, which is a venture capital firm where Kyle helps portfolio companies fuel growth and become market leaders. He specializes in monetization, pricing, product-led growth, and SaaS metrics. He also runs Growth Unhinged, a weekly Substack newsletter with over 30,000 readers.
Kyle is really, in my view, one of the true go-to-market experts on something we call product-led growth, something we are very passionate about at RELAYTO. I think, quite frankly, a lot of the world is getting excited about this way of engaging with software and digital products.
So, Kyle, tell us a little bit about what product-led growth is and, more importantly, what it's not. So that our audience that's not as familiar with all the B2B lingo that you and I live in will get into the topic a little bit faster.
Understanding Product-Led Growth in Business
The summary to people with all this work is to think about product-like growth as taking things that would normally be done by people, finding automated, productized experiences, and pointing those towards helping you acquire, convert, and retain your customer base.
(01:16 - 06:35)
KP: Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for having me on the podcast! So it's actually an interesting story. Product-led growth is a term coined by a colleague of mine at OpenView Blake Bartlett. What we were noticing was that there used to be an old playbook for how software companies grew, and that was higher armies of SDRs or BDRs.
They would cold email and cold call decision-makers and then hopefully create opportunities for the sales team. Maybe marketing could generate some of those opportunities as well. We're looking at fairly long deal cycles and a long lag between when the conversations happen and when end users ever get to touch a product.
And when we looked at portfolio companies, many of them struggle to grow in a profitable way with that model because you're constantly behind the curve around hiring. You have to hire a lot of people to make these motions work in scale. And you're either not hiring fast enough to support the growth targets, or you're hiring too fast relative to the demand environment, and then you have too many people on the team. So it's just a constant game of catch-up.
What we started to see is that there were companies like Atlassian or, in our portfolio, companies like Expensify and Datadog that were taking a different approach. They were saying, “Hey, look, we're going to go after that end user rather than just the executive. We're going to open up access, let them try the product, see the value, and then advocate. Go to their boss to try to explain why the organization should buy.” It really flipped this notion of how to grow a software company on its head. At the time, there were a lot of different terms that people used, so we would hear it as the consumerization of IT needs, a C2B. Some people called it “shadow IT”. Because these were tools that weren't officially sanctioned by the CEO.
But there was no consistent playbook for how to grow these kinds of companies, and in many cases, VCs were actually skeptical about these companies' ability to grow because they didn't have a clear plan to spend money to make money. This went really against the curve of traditional SaaS growth. We looked at it, and we said these companies are actually able to grow faster as they scale. They drive a really fantastic customer experience. They can run experiments to make that experiment experience better, and they're just less reliant on hiring people. There's an opportunity to hire people in sales, customer success, or other roles to accelerate growth, but that's not required for any growth. And so we just started getting really excited about these businesses, hence creating this kind of category of company around product-like growth, a set of frameworks and best practices.
The summary to people with all this work is to think about product-like growth as taking things that would normally be done by people, finding automated, productized experiences, and pointing those towards helping you acquire, convert, and retain your customer base.
So just about any software company can take elements of PLG to reduce friction and bring productized solutions into their business. But then there are, of course, companies that are totally bought in. They're on the leading edge of product-led practices, and they apply PLG to every part of the funnel. They'll have a product experience and all that.
AS: What are the extreme PLG companies, and what are the hybrid models?
I think there's a difference between lending into an account building, relationship building, and champions for the PLG motion. Still, in the global 2000 organization, sometimes that's the world that we live in. There are still prophecies for something to become a serious platform that you're required to go from. Compliance, approvals, and budgeting.
So guide us a little bit where does the extreme PLG work and where does it stop working? Even on growth, we definitely see a pattern that even the companies that start were a PLG eventually, once they hit a certain level of size, they start hiring sales teams to operate a little bit differently. They're not called sales, but there's this sort of hybrid motion that's emerging as well in a number of companies. There's a lot of confusion as to what's one versus the other. What would be your advice on that?
Calendly's PLG Strategy
(06:35 - 09:38)
KP: For folks listening, PLG is not anti-sales. Every at-scale PLG company has a fairly sizable sales team, and that's not some sort of flaw in PLG. You might look at Calendly as an example. They're one of our portfolio companies. What makes Calendly interesting from a PLG standpoint is that end users can sign up for Caendly for an everyday problem that they face in their workflow. They hate the back-and-forth of scheduling. A lot of people have this problem.
So you sign up for Calendly, integrate your calendar relatively easily, and start sharing your Calendly link with other people. You find a lot of value relatively quickly through all of this time savings, and then you ultimately oftentimes buy Calendly because you can put it on a credit card. You can often expense it. It's about $10 per month for that initial purchase, which is relatively reasonable for a knowledge worker given the amount of time that Calendly can help save folks.
So it's PLG and Calendly’s case from an initial entry acquisition standpoint and even from a conversion standpoint. Then there's an expansion motion where the expansion happens two ways. One is that you realize, “Hey, look, I'm a sales rep, but I want to bring in my BDR in a meeting. I want to bring in my customer success person, I want to bring in someone else on the team.”
You can start to schedule group meetings with Calendly, and you start going viral within your organization where Calendly is, instead of just a single-player mode product in a company. It's all of a sudden used in multiplayer mode, and so you have teams using Calendly in a larger company.
So it starts to expand its footprint in an organization. Then you notice that Calendly is a product that'd be really boring if you were the only one who used it. You want to send your Calendly link to someone else, and they start to see, “Oh wow, this is kind of an interesting product. Well, I'm scheduling a meeting with someone else, should I just use Caledndly myself?” They sign up for Calendly and start using it to schedule their own meetings.
Calendly can expand inside of an account. But it also has a virality component that attracts new users who then sign up and go through this flywheel. Calendly has PLG elements that support a lot of the pillars of growth. But they still have a sales team, and that sales team is important for enterprise deals that have more stakeholders involved in deeper use cases for Calendly. They're often working with people who already know the brand, already love using Calendly, and can help advocate from the bottom up and help Calendly get to that decision-maker.
Calendly's Importance in Product Growth
With PLG products, you often find these power users who want to talk about their experiences. And so they start to build a community around your product. A lot of that happens organically, without the company doing a whole lot.
(09:38 - 18:49)
AS: First of all, congratulations on the wonderful investment. One of the things that we've started advocating for our clients is actually embedding Calendly, for example, inside a presentation. Historically, you just see more as a “Hey, here's an email link that is really viral, and people put it in their signatures, which is a fantastic application.” What if we put it inside key assets on our website so that the ebook or some other collateral directly gets you to the subject matter expert?
Oh, let me put in my first name and last name and get bombarded by some sort of semi-automated spam sequence of follow-ups. Why don't I just get directly booked to the meeting right from that time when I'm interested in that product? Then in parallel inside your proposal deck or some other sales presentation? Oftentimes people send those to have the meeting. The whole point of sending that is like, “Hey, let's get ready for the next meeting.”
Tools like Calendly have this additional ability to be integrated into other partner ecosystems. I wonder what your take on that is with this product-like growth direction. I think it's one of the channels for product-like growth that is being integrated into other places where people work. So people work inside presentations. We can put Calendly inside a presentation as an example.
Do you have some views on that channel and how important it is for product-like growth companies? And we'll come back as well to the price topic. I'm sure it's a gift that keeps on giving.
KP: Yeah, it's a great question. Something my colleagues and I think a lot about is the role of partner ecosystems in PLG. To me, there's a huge overlap there. If you look back at the market, part of why PLG is available now is because products are so seamlessly integrated. People are using other cloud-based software and then adding something else they're able to integrate relatively quickly and share that data. It makes the setup so much smoother, and it means people don't have to be super technical in order to start seeing value from any product.
So end users can adopt things that historically would have never been possible for an end user to adopt, and that's unlocked because of these partner ecosystems. For example, any of the Shopify marketplace is a great use case.
A small merchant might have a Shopify store, and then they want to go on the Shopify marketplace. They can add emailing, chargeback automation, and SMS messages. They just start to download that app, and then all of their core Shopify information is passed through, and they can get up and running relatively easily. No complex IT implementation support, no dealing with API or the developer to set things up.
For me, these partner ecosystems are just super important because they allow you to reach users where they already are. End users can discover the products in their moment of need, and then the setup is super easy. They can get to their aha moment without a whole lot of effort. Then the products also tend to be stickier because people don't have to go log into yet another tool. They can access the product from the places where they already are.
I think that's very much the future. Especially as cloud products are so ubiquitous in the enterprise. Whether it's distributing through marketplaces or just having close partner relationships, that's a huge direction for PLG.
AS: Great. Well, I think you've highlighted one of the core differences in the approaches of the PLG. You don't have an army of SDRs, sales development, business development reps that are a couple of years out of school reaching out and saying, “Hey, I'm going to share my expertise with you on topic A or B.” You bypass that because that's inexpensive. B doesn't really address the end user. Typically it's for maybe a buyer or persona of some kind. It's still rather going to get for some products and decisions but in the PLG world.
So you've got this partner direction. But where else do you find the discoveries happening for the products? And let's talk about the role of content, whether it's STO or maybe building community-driven content. Let's talk about your newsletter as well. How do you feel the content complements the product-led growth motion? Let's not say that it doesn't support the traditional enterprise motion because it still does, but let's focus on particular challenges around product-led.
KP: When I think about PLG, you're marketing to users of your product, the people who are going to log in and try it themselves. Not just the executive buyers.
You generally want to reach users in their moment of need, so they're experiencing a pain point that they could solve with your product.
And when you market to users in their moment of need, the channels that you start thinking about are like Google search. Because when someone has a need, they often turn to Google. It's like I'm facing this problem. Is there a solution out there for it? Or just how do I fix my problem?
You end up seeing content and SEO-oriented channels still working for PLG. I think particularly what's interesting is the more programmatic SEO opportunities at the top of the funnel, which I can get into if you'd like. But then also what's interesting about PLG businesses is, if you reach this end user and they fall in love with your product, they're often willing to talk about it in communities or online.
You're going to be willing to talk about how much you love Calendly more than how much you love Salesforce, right? Or that's the hope.
AS: Well, I love Salesforce. By the way, one of our clients, friends, and one of the most amazing people that I've encountered professionally works there. I want to tell you that at the time when Salesforce was starting, I had the privilege of being there as an MBA intern. It was a very fun journey.
People forget it, but they probably had the first PLG solution, which was a free CRM for individual users. I think it was called freemium back then. Because you guys didn't invent the term yet, and it wasn't a proven tactic. But I think, obviously, as strategies evolve, there are some changes there.
I will agree with you that some of the products that you don't have to go through IT to buy, you feel like you've discovered Calendly, and you feel a certain sense of pride that you've discovered this and found more efficiency in your day.
KP: The value proposition, a lot of times, is going to the end user versus the more executive-oriented product. It's more about solving a business need and driving ROI for the company. While obviously, people are willing to pay for that, it's very important. It is a little bit less viral or something that individuals are less likely to shout on the rooftop.
With PLG products, you often find these power users who want to talk about their experiences. And so they start to build a community around your product. A lot of that happens organically, without the company doing a whole lot.
You obviously see this in developer-oriented products. But it's even in horizontal PLG products. Airtable and Notion have a massive community. Figma has a massive community of designers. This ends up being an interesting growth opportunity for PLG companies to tap into when they see signs of a lot of organic love and organic social activity.
Different Types of Communities in Salesforce
You get a lot more acquisition benefits from the community if your users get it. The users find value, share that value, and other people can sign up and try it for themselves. It creates more of a flywheel. We're all on the acquisition side.
(18:49 - 24:38)
AS: It's not like Salesforce cannot organize a community. I've been privileged to be part of the Salesforce community. There are people who tattoo Salesforce on themselves. I haven't seen Notion tattoos yet.
I think Mark had an ethical way of thinking about how he was running the business, and that informed a lot of the community drive. What I'm hearing is there are probably different types of communities. You bring people together through events and virtually. Then there is this sort of “I love this product, I want to talk about this product, but I haven't met the other people yet.”
KP: I think the communities in the Salesforce model tend to be higher touch, more event-driven, and more person-driven. You create connections. But it's also just a much higher-cost type of program. Some of it is actually organized more around customer success, keeping customers engaged, and being willing to serve as a reference or renew. That's more of why companies have communities often at the Salesforce level versus communities driving top-of-funnel acquisition as aggressively, which is more on the PLG side.
AS: So the community drives the top-of-funnel. That's a good distinction.
KP: Or “Here's my Notion board and setup that I'm super proud of. I'm going to list it in their marketplace that you can go, sign up for, and use my Notion setup.” Or “Hey, here's the plugin I just made. Try it out, you get a lot more.”
You get a lot more acquisition benefits from the community if your users get it. The users find value, share that value, and other people can sign up and try it for themselves. It creates more of a flywheel. We're all on the acquisition side.
AS: I think that the distinction is share value in the community or share value to the world. We just interviewed the CEO of Alteryx, and I think they also have people name their children Alteryx. It's a really strong sense of community.
This is the classical story of Harley-Davidson. What we've learned, actually, from another episode is that there are people who don't own Harley-Davidson. They get it to Harley-Davidson. It’s the ultimate connection to a community and brand identity.
Back to the topic of the more technical SEO. We just had a guest, Godard Abel, who you know really well. Godard has really spoken quite a lot about the value that they've gotten from being very critical and creating categories, destinations, screw SEO. And now people, when they come, you're searching for an alternative to product X, for example. This is a good signal of somebody who's going to land into a bunch of sponsored ads that are expensive for people to do. Then the first organic entry is likely to be G2.
Doing a ton of SEO work ourselves, we benefit from that. So guide us a little bit on what other things you could be doing from the SEO perspective that are obviously less cost effective. Since PLG is one of its big focus areas, the pricing gets reduced a little bit to make it more portable to try. Guide us in the lower cost of customer position tactics that people are using. If they're really low cost or not. Maybe, in the end, the SEO is expensive to execute.
SEO Strategy vs PLG Approach
We have a lot of people that are using us for this one specific thing. How do we educate them that it's not just about HubSpot and Typeform but we can connect thousands of apps with thousands of apps for millions of different potential use cases? Then it becomes more of how do we take these initial users on a journey to do more and ultimately be ready to buy, then be ready to get the enterprise on board.
(24:38 - 31:03)
KP: We're going to go look at the top x number of search results for a category that's related to my brand. Those are going to be really competitive and really hard to win. You're going to write super thoughtful content. You're going to go after getting backlinks for it. You're going to really build a very high touch or high investment content strategy to rank in the top 10 keywords.
In the more PLG-oriented approach, it's a bit more of a programmatic play where you take a data source. You serve it up in different ways to be able to be found across hundreds of long-tail searches that collectively add up to even more traffic than the top search terms.
G2 has data on all of these different categories of software and all the players in the industry. They can start to serve up all of their data in really interesting ways. They're taking essentially the same data but then serving it up in different types of landing pages so that it ranks based on the intent that the user has. That allows them to go after hundreds or thousands of searches with the same underlying content pool.
A lot of PLG companies think about similar tactics. One approach would be to look at a template marketplace or just some sort of marketplace where you can say, “Hey, look at our product!” Let's take Miro, for example. “Our product is a virtual whiteboarding tool. But it's a virtual whiteboarding tool that can be used for my maps and work charts. You can build out landing pages that cover all of these different templates.”
Oftentimes PLG companies have those templates in their apps for users to find value when they get started. So it's a rich set of data that can actually go be exposed to SEO with custom landing pages to then actually bring a lot of top-of-funnel acquisition around the things that users are searching for. A lot of users might not even realize they should have an online whiteboarding tool. But they do know that they want to mind map where they want something else.
For PLG companies, you have to look at where you have that data and where you're going to be able to reach users based on their needs. It does take a lot of thought and even potentially some engineering work. But it's a different way of thinking about content to reach a very mass-market user base.
AS: How do you cover the broad footprint of all the solutions they can provide, given the flexibility of the tool? When these users discover a very niche inbound type of landing page, they go in, and then they land on a very difficult-to-figure-out platform. That's maybe not even specific to that use case anymore. But in general, I think the perception from folks that we spoke with was that over time there's no code platforms go from really easy to use to building out more and more capabilities and become a bit more of a hurdle to figure out.
The question is, what are the risks of this approach where you throw a really wide net and hope it will lead to success?
KP: It doesn't have to be complicated. Like a Miro, it is quite large and still a very easy-to-use product. If someone is landing on a template and then using Airtable to contextually surface up that same template in the app, you're basically creating a very usable product. Because someone's able to solve the pain point that they were hiring your product to help them solve. They can get that value immediately.
And then the struggle is actually more about how you educate them that your product can do more. How do you encourage them to bring on other users or find other use cases for your product beyond the initial one that brought them there?
If you look at Zapier, they have a similar programmatic strategy where someone might be thinking about, “Hey, how do I integrate HubSpot for more?” You can just build that thing, that connection that you want really easily.
We have a lot of people that are using us for this one specific thing. How do we educate them that it's not just about HubSpot and Typeform but we can connect thousands of apps with thousands of apps for millions of different potential use cases? Then it becomes more of how do we take these initial users on a journey to do more and ultimately be ready to buy, then be ready to get the enterprise on board.
That's why you see a lot of PLG and sales pairing. People will find their target customers, land and maybe find value with a pocket of what they can do. But then, with the right kind of sales motion, they can expand that account to understand the bigger picture.
Product and Sales Strategy Bridge
You want to start with the users, especially the power users. Just document how they use the product, what it does for them, and what the business priorities are. You start using them for fact-finding, and you can ask them for an introduction to their boss, or you can enable them with materials to go back for you. Then you might need to go top-down and reach out to a decision maker with data or with a more personalized work that accounts cohesively. That's a totally different strategy from working with a new prospect who's never heard of your brand, but you're trying to get that demo in front of them.
(31:03 - 38:16)
AS: Got it, that's great. So this is one of the topics we would love to cover. When you're doing a very simple specific use case or have fewer people involved and fewer approvals necessary, it's a faster cycle. You sign up on a freemium journey, and so off you go. But then, as you mentioned, it leaves a lot of value on the table. If you happen to be an employee in a very large organization, other folks could benefit from that offering. So the traditional sales tactics may not work. The users are more junior. They may not want to talk to a salesperson or somebody with a sales title.
What do you see as best-in-class companies that are bridging the product-led land with a more hybrid expansion and sales strategy? What are they doing differently? Because it's really two different cultures, and mixing them doesn't seem to be obvious.
KP: It's a great question. In some of the early days, companies would over-index on these product-qualified leads. “Hey, we've got a power user that's doing all these things. Let's have sales reach out and try to sell them a bigger deal.” You might find some needles in the haystack there, convert some customers to bigger deals. Ultimately, that strategy doesn't really work that well because the user is not the executive buyer. They don't know how to advocate internally for a bigger deal. The value propositions are different at the end user level versus at the enterprise or the executive level.
So the sales motion is not about calling on your existing product users to sell them something. What you need to do is think a little bit differently. In my mind, the best companies will start by having a really good data foundation.
When a user signs up, they're looking not just at that user but at the account. If that’s our ideal customer profile, based on the size of the company, the industry that they're in, and so on. And how many other users in this account do we have that are already on the product? Ideally, you have multiple. But you might start with the first one, obviously. And then what's the usage activity in that account? It doesn't signal that they're showing signs of high-value use cases or being ready to buy.
You look at the data to create what we call a product-qualified account. The product-qualified account should have users within it. Best companies will even be able to stack ranks of users based on both usage activity and seniority. A sales rep has visibility into the account and knows who they can reach out to.
It looks more like an account manager type of role where you navigate expansion with an existing customer rather than a traditional AE role. Even if you're working with a free account.
You want to start with the users, especially the power users. Just document how they use the product, what it does for them, and what the business priorities are. You start using them for fact-finding, and you can ask them for an introduction to their boss, or you can enable them with materials to go back for you. Then you might need to go top-down and reach out to a decision maker with data or with a more personalized work that accounts cohesively. That's a totally different strategy from working with a new prospect who's never heard of your brand, but you're trying to get that demo in front of them.
There are people who use your product and love your product. So you want to bring in data and personalization to say, “Hey, based on other companies like you, here's what else you could do that will add even more value.” You navigate in partnership with the users who are advocating for you in order to get to that shared destination.
AS: Got it. So you're selling to an account that is already technically a customer. You have a little bit more trust, credibility, and evidence of your solution's efficacy. But since those product-led users or champions may not be that powerful or high up in the organization, you may still have time to do the more traditional top-down approach and outreach.
But in this case, you're going to have more of a reason and value to add to that approach. Do you ever see the top down like some sort of a dual combo where you'd say, “Hey, this is a target account, we're going to go approach the top folks. But in parallel, we'll drive some SEM strategy or Facebook ad strategy to get this in front of bottom-up users.”
I bring it up because our first customers were, I would say, teams. But they were a little bit top-down approach. We would meet with a team person who wasn't a user before. We would explain to them the value of the solution, and then they would start using it, etc. We really learned from that experience, and we'll come back to that.
Having a great product that's strong enough to stand on its legs as a PLG motion will inevitably help us spread inside an enterprise, especially if you're selling to teams, not to the very high-end organization. So we've become believers in the PLG, and we almost want to hold ourselves intellectually honest — how good is our product without us touching it that much? Will we get champions?
I think there are quite a few companies that want to start doing some things top-down. They may even have momentum, and then the deal gets stuck. How do you get it unstuck? One of the strategies is “Let's get some bottom-up usage.” We can add a little bit more off through momentum on where it's easier for us to administer that. Have you seen companies that bridge the top-down and bottom-up combination play?
Creative Approaches to Account-Based Marketing
The revenue comes from enterprise deals in larger accounts. That might happen with enough time by starting with that end-user on a self-service basis and having those users advocate and get to bigger and bigger deals over time. But in most cases, you either want to accelerate that process or help add more air coverage in order to work that account and get to that decision-maker faster.
(38:16 - 41:00)
KP: Yeah, there are definitely some creative approaches out there. You have existing product users in an account that you're targeting, right? That account is owned by a sales rep. Marketing is actually responsible for doing ABM-style emails and other advertising in order to get intent from the buyer. And so you often have some shared ownership of these accounts.
The benefit is there’re the accounts you're qualifying have some product use of your product intent. Then you want to get to that decision-maker, and you can get there in a number of ways. The more automation and scalable tactics you can use, the easier it is to run these kinds of plays rather than just relying on sales to break into and navigate the entire account one by one.
Figma is probably a good example. I wrote about some of their growth marketing efforts in Growth Unhinged, my newsletter. But yeah, this is exactly the kind of approach that many PLG companies take.
The revenue comes from enterprise deals in larger accounts. That might happen with enough time by starting with that end-user on a self-service basis and having those users advocate and get to bigger and bigger deals over time. But in most cases, you either want to accelerate that process or help add more air coverage in order to work that account and get to that decision-maker faster.
AS: Got it. So you brought up marketing. I think we haven't spoken about marketing. Kyle, you're a powerhouse of marketing. You were a director at the leading pricing consulting firm previously. So tell us a little bit about using thought leadership and education to establish a brand and a pipeline. I'm really curious how you think about this in your business as OpenView.
Content Power in Professional Growth
We're measuring success not based on page views of a report that we've downloaded but on engagement from that target audience. And looking at how we drive engagement with that audience, what they end up caring about, and what resonates with them. Then how can we nurture them to show signals that we haven't just reached them from an awareness standpoint, but we've developed strong affiliation? Or maybe they're even champions of what we're doing before we've ever talked to them.
(41:00 - 48:08)
KP: Maybe I'll start on the personal side, and then I'll get a pivot on the OpenView side. So on the personal side, I work with portfolio companies to help them accelerate their growth and overcome roadblocks that are getting in the way of growth. I get a lot of questions from founders, and we really do in-depth work with them but also answer ad hoc emails.
So what happened time and again is I put a lot of work into answering a certain problem or helping a company unlock a challenge and then move on to the next thing.
I realized that it might be interesting to open source some of the learnings, share those in a blog post or on LinkedIn, and then also get feedback from other people on it. See if I missed anything and start to build a community around those ideas. So I started more regularly writing about the challenges that I was working with our portfolio companies on and sharing that on social media, particularly on LinkedIn. Often that would actually make me better at my job and help me understand what was top of mind to even more founders. So I would figure out what's resonating.
Maybe I test something on LinkedIn. It resonated. I decided to write an entire blog post about that. I'd share that back on LinkedIn. Other founders in our portfolio would see that as well. They would ask me other questions related to it, and it would become this sort of flywheel that built on itself.
I saw a lot of people say, “I don't have time to write content and do my job.” For me, the content actually helps me get better at doing my job and has helped me attract not only an audience of people but also build a network of like-minded folks who have different experiences than I do. That's honed my problem-solving skills and set of experiences.
That's how I started in content. I started with subject matters that I had more personal experience in but, over time, got more confident going into and exploring other topics that were important to our portfolio companies but were not areas that I worked on in the past. That's been really amazing for me from a professional standpoint. But how does that feed into OpenView? Initially, it was more helpful to support me and do my job and be more effective without portfolio companies. But now I actually oversee marketing and OpenView.
In my mind, what we want to do as a firm is we want founders ahead of raising the venture funding in the rounds that we invest in. We want them to think about us and not just know that we're a VC firm but think of us as someone who can genuinely help them grow their business. So that if someone on our investment team, for example, reaches out to them, they're like, “Oh, that's great, I already know you, guys. I know your portfolio. I know what you focus on and how you can be helpful.”
AS: Keep up the good work, I think that's the strategy that is working.
KP: Glad to hear it. Yeah, that's awesome. That is genuinely hard, but I think it's worth it. It is more of an ABM-style approach. There's a known universe of software companies in the stages that we invested in. And there's a relative number of people who are founders at those companies. We're not talking about millions of people, we're talking about tens of thousands maybe.
We have embarked on much more of a director ABM style approach to identify these companies and founders.
We're measuring success not based on page views of a report that we've downloaded but on engagement from that target audience. And looking at how we drive engagement with that audience, what they end up caring about, and what resonates with them. Then how can we nurture them to show signals that we haven't just reached them from an awareness standpoint, but we've developed strong affiliation? Or maybe they're even champions of what we're doing before we've ever talked to them.
We actually do try to take them on a very content-oriented marketing journey. But we're looking at that engagement level within a target audience rather than more traditional SaaS kind of marketing metrics.
AS: This is fantastic. I think there's a misperception that content is all about SEO. Is it content growth? Is that stealing some ideas that we like? And because content can be used in sales, it can be used in marketing.
But ironically, most people, when you say content growth, think, “I publish a bunch of blog posts, and those are generating.” We think that's really a very narrow way of thinking about content. Because there's awareness, content, and finding you at the moment of need. But then, for folks like yourself, you actually want deeper engagement with these founders. It's great if they find an occasional post on something topical. But if they go deep inside your in-depth analysis, they kind of, “Wow! This is exactly the journey that I need to go on. These are exactly the tools.” So you build a lot more trust through this deeper content. That may fuel into ABM type of strategy or very specific offerings that allow you to go deeper.
That is not traditional SEO that may actually fit into an ebook or some in-depth video series. I applaud your thinking. Actually, for us, some of the SEO efforts in our prior days have actually backfired. Because we've had blog posts that have done super well in SEO.
Aligning SEO With Target Audience Needs
We need really high-value content and thought leadership to resonate with the founders. But then, our engine is about getting that fuel in front of the right audience at the right time.
(48:08 - 51:13)
KP: But looking back, how to write a daily report to your SDR manager? That was one of our top five SEO-oriented posts for a while. The marketing team would feel the need to regularly refresh that post, add to it, keep it up-to-date, and maybe create a pillar page out of content like that. But that's not what a founder cares about, right?
We actually even had an internship-oriented post that was in our top five. There can be misaligned goals. If you're oriented around these top-of-funnel classic marketing metrics, you don't end up driving influence with the people who matter in your target audience.
We do things like direct email automation for high-value content. We'll do LinkedIn retargeting within specific audiences. We do a lot of data enrichment to personalize direct email so that we send the right content to the right types of founders based on what we know about them. We look for influencer partnerships with other people who have relationships with the founder audience that we care about.
That could be early-stage VCs where we can co-partner with them or do events with them to get in front of similar founders. We do local marketing tactics around some of the geos that have a high concentration of founders in this audience. So the marketing tactic is content ends up being the fuel for all of those efforts. We need really high-value content and thought leadership to resonate with the founders. But then, our engine is about getting that fuel in front of the right audience at the right time.
AS: Let's share with our audience how they can get in front of that fuel of amazing content that you've put together. What are the channels where they can find you, Kyle?
KP: Follow me on LinkedIn. I write three to four posts a week. I'm pretty prolific on LinkedIn. And then you can subscribe to the OpenView newsletter by just going to our website. It's relatively easy. And then my personal newsletter is called Growth Unhinged, and it's on Substack.
AS: Amazing. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for building great insights around the topics that we've addressed, from PLG and PLG fuel sales. Really, pound for pound, very interesting discussion. I hope the world starts following your thought leadership on these topics and that of OpenView. Thank you again.
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