PLGTM: The Self-service "Happy Path"
The Product Must Carry Water
In all modern go-to-market (GTM) motions, the product must carry water.
What does that mean?
It means the product does work to contribute to the GTM motion itself. The product is its own means of distribution, or at least contributes thereto.
Think about all the software products you experience in your life. Who sold them to you? Who taught you how to use them? Who helped you when you got stuck?
Netflix
Slack
Uber
Zoom
Instagram
LinkedIn
Calendly
Chances are, you may have difficulty thinking of any software you regularly use that was “sold” to you by a sales team and “implemented” by a PS team. That is a model that is destined for the history books.
No—in the future, software will sell itself. Software will activate itself. Software will make itself useful. It will educate us on how to use it, how to achieve Impact with it, and how to pay for it.
Even B2B software?
Even complicated software?
Even highly inter-connected or configurable software?
Yes… even those.
The Self-service Happy Path
Imagine a world where the product sells and activates itself.
Imagine your mom could use it—at least for the first steps of the onboarding process.
Imagine it is difficult to not succeed with the initial tasks associated with setting up an account and accomplishing a first objective.
We all know this software—we’ve used it. We also know software not built this way. It’s frustrating to use, and we find ourselves looking for 3rd-party tutorials or videos or guides to help us cut through the clutter and get to the promised Impact.
Now imagine your company has the “good” kind of software—the kind that makes itself easy to understand and use. Software that doesn’t confuse users with a plethora of features up front, but rather guides them to a First Impact in a way that feels fool-proof. Imagine that is the software your company sells. Let’s call this the “self-service happy path.”
The self-service happy path is essential for all PLGTM. Why? Because humans are smart. We have self respect. We don’t want to do menial tasks.
Salespeople don’t want to chase signatures and manage transactions
Customers don’t want to sit through classes or read manuals
CS people don’t want to train on buttons and features
…and the product can do all this and more!
So why would we ask people (our people or the customers) to do menial tasks that the product could do? The only explanation is that we haven’t had time to build “ease-of-use” into our product yet, and that is a terrible reason.
If we don’t take time to focus on ease-of-use… if we can’t “afford” to spend product and engineering resources on the self-service happy path... if there are other things more pressing than getting this right, what are the competing priorities?
Often the development priorities that compete with ease-of-use are more features, and this just exacerbates the problem. Will more features make it easier for your mom to succeed? It may be something a power-user wants, but at the expense of all other users’ (and especially new users’) sanity?
Get the Product to Carry Water
In PLGTM, the product carries GTM water. It does the “work” of GTM, and the self-service happy path is a big part of this.
What is GTM?
GTM includes all functions that help your customer proceed from Discovery to First Impact to ultimate Expansion.
Typical GTM functions include: Marketing, Sales, CS and Account Management.
But why couldn’t the product do some of this work? Why couldn’t the product help with marketing, sales, CS and account management?
It could!
And it should!
This is what we mean by the product carrying water. We need to insist that the product be central to as many of these functions as possible. The product must carry water. Humans have short attention spans. They don’t want to do menial tasks. If we lose our customers’ or employees’ attention, we will be in a world of hurt.
We must ask the product to carry water in the GTM process.
Imagine a world where your marketing team just has to get a customer to the product, and then it can demo itself.
Imagine a world where your salespeople work with customers on how to better achieve Impact with the product—not talking about how they might achieve Impact in the future, but how to expand the Impact they already have.
Imagine a world where your CS people aren’t doing onboarding calls or training sessions, but rather master classes and strategy sessions.
Imagine a world where your account managers are helping champions discover additional use cases where the capabilities of your product could create significantly more Impact for your customers.
This is Prodcut-led GTM.
Product-led GTM
In Product-led GTM, the product does the menial, repetitive, and automate-able work in the GTM process.
Demoing, trial account provisioning, transaction processing, intake interviews, configuration, initial project guidance… all this can be done by the product.
The product can do it more reliably
The product can do it less expensively
The product can make itself beloved…
If it is easy to use. If you have dedicated product and engineering resources. If there is a self-service happy path.
And now, when your people engage with the customer’s people, it’s anything but boring.
The conversation revolves less around transactions and functionality and more around strategy and Impact.
Now our teams are pushing beyond the basics and working on higher-order problems: how to attack certain use cases or business problems, not how to use a certain feature.
This is product-led GTM, and it all starts with a self-service happy path.
If the product can carry the water of making itself easy to discover, use, purchase, and expand… then our people can operate at a higher level.
If you don’t have a self-service happy path, you are behind.
Ask yourself if the features your product team is working on are more important in the grand scheme than having a product that is easy to use.
Yes, you may have promised new features to this customer or that. And yes, their loyalty may hang in the balance. But is that your business—making and keeping feature development promises one customer at a time?
Or is your business serving the market with easy-to-use software that can reliably deliver Impact?
It’s an important question. An existential question.
What are your competitors doing?
Who will get to the promised land first?
Here’s sending you positive vibes and wishing you all the courage and resolve to win! Head up and eyes forward. This is why we got into this. It’s fun!
-db