Lucid is the leading provider of visual collaboration software with over 70M users worldwide. Stephanie Couzin, the VP of GTM Strategy and Ops, and Roderick De Greef, the VP of Sales and GM EMEA, share Lucid’s transition from a PLG company to a PLG and Sales-Led company.
As we know today, a strong product-led motion starts with a strong product. Lucid launched in 2010 (before PLG was a term), and their team had an intense focus on product early on, so much so that the COO at the time read through hundreds of thousands of customer support tickets to hear directly from customers. In their first year, they had their first paying customer.
Do Something Unscalable to Do Something Scalable
Reading through over 100k support tickets isn’t scalable. Of all the unscalable things Lucid’s COO could do, why that? There is no substitute for the voice of the customer. The PLG principles that are foundational to Lucid were defined, but what these customers needed was:
- An easy, fast path to user value
- Simple pricing and seamless expansion
- Widespread discoverability
Lucid employs a freemium model, converting users to paid plans early on. As they began to differentiate the product and add more value, that meant upselling customers and creating an expansion path. To do this, Lucid invested in a growth team tasked with iterating on all aspects of pricing, packaging, click pathing, and CTAs.
They became true champions of their internal culture of experimentation and defined Lucid’s PLG model. That third principle, widespread discoverability, drives distribution. For Lucid, this meant a few things.
- You must be found where users are looking
- You must work where users work
- Your users can discover you through their colleagues
Investing in SEO early on, ranking for over a thousand keywords, joining ecosystems, investing in integrations, and driving that discoverability through their product were the keys to Lucid’s commercialization efforts. It wasn’t long before they landed their first Enterprise customer in 2012.
Your First Enterprise Customer
Lucid’s first Enterprise customer was a large publishing house in the U.K. It required Lucid to change its product, process, and overall user and administration systems to be able to scale with the customer.
It also required them to:
- Negotiate their first Enterprise customer contract
- Undergo deep security reviews
Once you land your first Enterprise customer, it might be time to build that first sales team. Lucid hired someone with a business background under a special project. They talked to customers and peers in the industry to build an inside sales motion.
That person flew solo for a while, trying different sales strategies to find the right formula before hiring four salespeople. Your first hire wears many hats, but as you scale, you start building out more specific roles.
Building a PLG + PLS Motion
Lucid’s products are generally considered horizontal. Every knowledge worker can use them, so they have a scaled and diversified user base. With PLG, you think about the user’s needs, discovery, the path to value, and more. But for product-led sales, you incorporate the customer’s needs based on the characteristics of their industries, geographies, languages, etc.
Those characteristics determine how the customer purchases, adopts and engages with your account team to derive value from the software. Of course, it becomes more complex in larger organizations. This is where product-led sales comes in.
As Lucid layered in product-led sales, they stayed true to their PLG principles. Customers still needed simple pricing and seamless expansion.
For a PLG motion, you have standardized documents, terms of services, and security documents. With a PLS motion, it involves addressing more complex purchasing behaviors like enhanced legal, security, and compliance measures, and you need to train your team on those complexities.
You’ll be tempted to facilitate every customer’s wishes, but you can’t do that at scale. You can only handle a limited amount of hand-holding and customizations.
Complex Adoption, Usage, and Engagement
Onboarding and training look different for a customer vs. a user in PLG. With PLG, you’re onboarding your users, and their journey is defined on day zero. But in product-led sales, every user’s day zero is different.
Instead of a single user journey, you have a collection of user journeys, making it more complex. And, as your sales team engages with larger organizations, customers have more complicated and technical needs.
You’ll want someone internally who can handle those queries initially, who you can lean on to attend customer meetings and help develop pattern recognition. That’s not scalable, but you glean valuable information on how to add value and scale the function.
Expanding Internationally
A major milestone of scaling from PLG to PLS is expanding internationally. Let’s look at Lucid’s timeline. They had to invest a lot upfront to make sure they were ready to meet the needs of a global user. All PLG principles still apply to global users, so they needed to expand their language offerings and improve the user experience of the product.
They made the following adjustments:
- Find the easy, fast path to user value for the non-English user
- Keep pricing simple
- Local was key with expanded currencies and discoverability in new locations.
The core to your product is understanding your customer’s complex needs. How do they purchase software, adopt it, and engage with account teams to derive value? Customers’ needs also differ from region to region, so how do you solve this complexity?
- First and foremost, you want to have proximity to your customers
- You want to speak and have as many languages as possible to serve customers
- There are specific rules in a local space, so you want to be able to adhere to regulatory compliance based on location
- You want to operate in the most efficient way possible, with a fast customer feedback loop
Where to Expand
When expanding your team, you have to think about 3 key factors
- Attracting top talent
- Cost
- Ease of operations
From there, you need the original landing team who will expand the team. Those people are usually seasoned leaders in sales, customer success, and revops. They should be highly cross-functional and know how to navigate your sales motion.
Now, 33% of Lucid’s revenue is from EMEA. Adding regional teams means you scale faster, operate more efficiently, and achieve your goals. It doesn’t happen in a day, but it is worth the effort. International expansion is only possible when you have a strong partnership and internal alignment between product, marketing, and sales.
The Sales-Led Customer Journey
The customer journey in a sales-led motion creates a lot of blurred lines of ownership internally, so you have to be tight on objectives between product, marketing, and sales. The special sauce is establishing how you’ll integrate sales. The first sales hire at Lucid wasn’t a salesperson, and they built out the sales function because they were deeply familiar with PLG and had strong relationships with the marketing and product teams.
To scale PLS, you need a strong feedback loop for the entire company. As you layer on sales, that motion requires a good amount of evangelism, integration, and disruption to evolve the company into two different motions.
Signal Optimization
When thinking about a partnership, there’s no better way to internally reflect than talking about signal optimization. You might be familiar with product-qualified leads, accounts, and users, which means identifying the right people on the right accounts at the right time with the right actions.
That also means product, marketing, and sales must be tightly aligned on the definitions of each because they’ll constantly evolve as you iterate, launch new products, and evolve the motions.
In the early days at Lucid, the most important thing to be aligned on was who wasn’t the customer rather than who sales should engage with. This process of elimination helped them calibrate and leverage the chief advantage of PLG, volume.
Key learnings as you iterate.
- The bigger the sample size, the faster you learn
- Start with actions and then build signals. For lots of PLG companies with a strong motion and culture of experimentation, they often over-calibrate those signals
- There’s more to this than lead and account scoring. You need a democratized set of information for your sales team to leverage and inform how they can add value to customers
Key Takeaways
You need to be tightly aligned with your people, processes, and systems. Team-based selling is at the core of alignment because it’s as much a PLG motion as a sales-led one. The key takeaways for scaling from a PLG to PLG+SLG motion are:
- Experimentation must be at the core of how you operate
- Doing something unscaled can enable you to scale faster
- As you layer in product-led sales, you must stay true to the business model and PLG principles
