The missing link between PLG and SLG
Miro’s Dee Kapila on how scaled customer experience (CX) works
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and I’m back with a 🔥 edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups.
Most people pit sales-led growth (SLG) against product-led growth (PLG) like they’re staunch high school rivals. But Deepina (Dee) Kapila, global head of scaled customer experience (CX) at Miro, knows this “either/or” mentality is short-sighted. That’s why she figured out a way to blend SLG and PLG for the best of both worlds, and she’s added some new pieces to plug some gaps.
The new approach is called “scaled CX” – and it’s on the rise. It doesn’t hurt that it allows Customer Success teams to stay lean while serving more and more customers.
Keep reading to go deep into scaled CX at Miro and how to apply it yourself. (This post may be too long for email; read the full version here.)
Sometime during the pandemic, I grew tired of all the ongoing debates in the SaaS industry about which framework was better – PLG or SLG. It just didn’t matter to customers and it felt almost silly from a strategic perspective to be thinking within the limited construct of this binary.
So I started asking SaaS buyers exactly what they did care about. And I found out they felt extremely overwhelmed managing multiple vendors (most Enterprise organizations have hundreds of SaaS tools in their portfolio and we are just ONE of those), while figuring out how to integrate all of these into a seamless user experience and having only one way to engage with these vendors to get value from all of these tools (especially if that one way was always via a Zoom call with video ON, the standard).
What every single person I talked to said they wanted instead was something more seamless and elegant – a journey orchestrated just for them, vendors who felt like extensions of their team aka partners, and finally, CHOICE. Instead of jumping on a call, for instance, they wanted fast access to information when they needed it – or, better yet, be intuitively presented with that information at the exact moment they needed it.
Through these conversations it became clear that all of us in the SaaS world needed to stop paying attention to the PLG vs. SLG arguments. We needed to build something ELSE, something different. Something that brought the customer back to the center of it all.
At Miro, we wanted our customer experience to be what customers actually needed to drive their desired outcome. For us, that meant starting by taking the best of both PLG and SLG worlds and then systematically assessing and plugging any gaps in the methodologies to reduce friction across the customer journey. We also needed to bring the CX department into the mix, as the role of CX isn’t articulated very clearly, if at all, when looking at standard industry interpretations of PLG and SLG. But CX absolutely has a role to play and I’d urge everyone to consider what role modern CS motions, paired with customer education, professional services and support functions can play in your organizations to serve customers and grow your business.
Here’s what we did at Miro, and what worked for our hyper-collaborative culture.
Where to start
I started with an audit of typical SaaS PLG and SLG engagement ecosystems. I drew from my previous work at companies like Box and Visa, conducted market research and evaluated the current state of our CX offerings. That effort became this Venn diagram, which essentially showcases how PLG and SLG take customers through an engagement journey:
How scaled CX at Miro works
Miro’s mission with scaled CX is to engage, educate, equip and empower our users to do their jobs and achieve their business outcomes. We want to do that by unlocking value across every step of the customer journey through data-driven and automated on-demand, one:many content assets and experiences that are delivered at exactly the right time.
In the CX world there are functions that do this in bits and pieces – Customer Education as one example, Digital Success is another – these departments do work towards driving customer value and doing it at scale. However, they are usually separate, work on different parts of the customer journey (usually post-sales only, which is an antiquated practice if not an overall concept to say the least!), don’t have dedicated in-house content production and tend to use numerous tech tools that are cumbersome to operate and tough to integrate into a seamless experience for end users. They also largely stay out of the core product. Sometimes, this is a function of companies not thinking strategically about CX functions, sometimes it’s a function of the dogmatic PLG/SLG motions being historically exclusive of CX strategies and sometimes it’s because neither of the aforementioned CX teams have historically had the skills to be able to develop in-app experiences alongside product teams, or partner more deeply with sales in the “pre-sales” process.
At Miro, we have brought together and tightly orchestrated Customer Education, Content Production, and Scaled/Digital Customer Success into one team: Scaled Customer Experience (SCE). We live in the CX org, but honestly we are never home! We are always couch surfing, and by that I mean that, by design, our team has to be hyper-collaborative. We work super closely with various other CX teams, sales, marketing, product, analytics, operations, legal/compliance and business technology teams. This hyper-collaborative mindset is in Miro’s DNA – our ops and analytics teammates are embedded within the teams they support, meaning they attend all the same meetings, participate in all our team rituals and we plan all our work together, setting shared goals. Our team has folks who are embedded in marketing planning rituals, etc…you get the picture. It’s a truly cross-functional and united effort across all teams, something I think is pretty rare and special.
Here’s what each of the SCE streams does:
Scaled customer education. This team educates customers and users on all things Miro via 1:many and on-demand modalities.
Scaled content production. This team produces high-quality, multimedia content that lives in Miro’s in-app learning center, our academy, help center and other Miro surfaces.
Scaled/digital CS. This team automates success milestones across the customer journey, setting the foundation for all CS segments.
We set up a scaled success program for a few reasons. We knew customers wanted optionality and we knew that 1:1 conversations with CSMs weren’t sustainable across the customer journey. So we built out an end-to-end customer journey with digital and 1:many touchpoints at every key customer milestone from onboarding to renewal. We also worked with CSMs across various account sizes to understand their points of friction so that we could scale our internal operations as well, freeing them up to work more strategically with customers. Scaled models are not new in SaaS of-course, but when done thoughtfully and as part of broad PLG and SLG approaches, they can really provide an organization fantastic leverage.
Articulating customer pain points, desired outcomes and actions to take across each phase on a Miroverse template.
As our next step, after providing scaled coverage across the customer journey, we started to go phase by phase and optimize key parts of the digital experience. We started with our onboarding. We already had solid PLG onboarding but we needed to optimize the field motion. We had created a lot of scaled education content for onboarding different customer personas that was really resonating with them, so our scaled/digital CS efforts were really about sequencing out that existing content, distributing it more broadly and detailing it out more to ensure each persona hit their target outcomes for the onboarding phase.
We then built in trigger points to alert us if these outcomes weren’t achieved…thereby beginning to create a risk mitigation program that lived in parallel to our happy path journey, getting customers back on track if they veered off. We have iterated on our onboarding program so many times. We experiment, test, learn, refine, adjust, find new personas with slightly different needs and serve them, then iterate for them as well. This experimentation and iteration, along with the delight that our content provides, is key to our process – it is all part of our special sauce.
What success looks like
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