How to Turn Your Product Usage Data Into Sales Insights

One of the most exciting parts of product-led growth is that it gives you additional, more accurate data about your prospects and customers. You can see much more than just firmographic data about who your customer is – you can check out what they’re doing (or not doing) in the product itself.

But while this is great in theory, in reality it can prove hard to execute. Getting this product usage data in a form your sales team can actually use, and making it easy for them to act on it, is challenging for many companies trying to go product-led.

Inspired by this great blog post from Correlated, here’s my take on how to turn your product usage data into insights your sales team can use to close.

Getting the Right Data

It’s exciting to live in a world where we have so much data at our fingertips about our customers and prospects. But right now, it’s often too much data for sales reps to sort through efficiently.

Combing through a pile of information about all the actions your customer took in their free trial is time-consuming. And frankly, that’s not how your sales reps should be spending their valuable time – they should be selling!

Also, just having the data doesn’t necessarily tell your sales reps what actions they need to take. Sure, they might see that a prospect has taken an action – but does that mean they need outreach right away, or they’re ready for the next part of the sales cycle, or they are just getting a little bit more qualified? It can be unclear.

Enabling Sales Actions

So what’s the solution? How can you get the right product usage data into the hands of your sales reps so they don’t waste time analyzing and understanding the information, but instead know exactly what action to take next?

This is really important to creating a true product-led sales team. If you’re just offering a free trial or a freemium product, that’s a good entry into PLG, but you won’t be able to harness the full power of it. You need to incorporate it into your sales motion as well so you can really put that product usage to its full use.

The Data Solution for PLG Companies

One of the best solutions for this out there right now is Correlated. You can set alerts, automations, and notifications for product usage data on accounts so your sales reps know what actions they need to take and when. And it integrates with Salesforce, Hubspot, Outreach, Salesloft, Slack, and more too so your reps get this info in a system they’re already using, in a format they recognize.

I’ve talked before about the importance of finding the product usage info that identifies your product-qualified leads. These leads are super helpful for your sales team because you’re not guessing about potential prospect behavior – it’s based on how they’re already using your product.

You can use Correlated as well to test out the signals for your PQLs as you’re coming up with your definition to see what’s really working and what’s not, and hone your PLG strategy effectively.

This is all part of your PLG toolbox – getting the right data to the right people at the right time.

Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash