Product Marketing in Enterprise SaaS vs. PLG organizations

There are significant differences in the role of product marketing (PMM) in an enterprise SaaS company (where sales is driven by traditional models of SDRs, inside and outside sales) and a Product-led-growth (PLG) company, where the product is typically offered as a freemium model and growth is driven by increased adoption and conversion of free offering to paid version.

In a traditional enterprise SaaS company, the sales organization owns and drives revenue. PMM is a key part of the go-to-market process and works closely with the sales organization to deliver content and market insights they need, to be successful. PMM starts with identifying target personas and their pain points and then creates persona-based messaging.  PMM then uses it to create sales decks, collateral, white papers, campaign content (emails etc.), and other content for sales and field marketing organizations. PMM also works very closely with sales, their primary stakeholder, to create win-loss and competitive analysis, as well as to ensure GTM alignment. Field owns demand generation and works closely with SDRs to qualify leads as they come in and convert them to sales opportunities.

On the other hand, the PMM role in a PLG organization is very different. A PLG organization leverages product usage, to drive acquisition, conversions, retention, and expansion. Product is the experience at a PLG, and it drives revenue.  Think freemium models such as Dropbox or SurveyMonkey. In a PLG organization product and growth team are the key stakeholders for the PMM organization. PMM works very closely with these two stakeholders to understand adoption patterns of key features by customer segments, as well as the value they generate, and then uses that information to place the dividing line between free and paid features. They also work very closely with the growth team to create specific campaigns that drive adoption of the platform – getting the customers to cross over into the ‘paid’ model. They also deep dive into analytics on a weekly basis or more often to understand customer behavior and use it to fuel content development (think SEO blogs that drive inbound leads or address roadblocks to drive adoption), as well as articulate feature value propositions better.

A marketing organization typically has their DNA for one of these models based on their company’s go-to-market strategy for their products. The biggest challenge is when an organization adds some products to their portfolio that create a hybrid model – such as an enterprise SaaS company introducing a headless self-service product OR a PLG company introducing a sales-driven packaging for the enterprise market. In such a scenario, you are better served by splitting the marketing organization into separate groups, so the PLG team is not imposing their approach on the SaaS marketing team or vice versa.  Otherwise, one of the GTM models will suffer and you will not see the full extent of the success that your product deserves in the target markets. Unfortunately, I have seen that happen too often. The two approaches are very different need to be driven independently.

If you have more questions on this topic, please reach out to me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/applicationsmarketing/