Does a SaaS Enterprise Need A PLG-Based CRM?

A popular notion is that the solution for every problem associated with a product-led growth enterprise is a specialized CRM for PLG. In today’s marketplace, time is crucial. The famed multiples of the SaaS industry are fading rapidly, and investors are starting to support ARR-based SaaS enterprises over the traditional PLG ones. A SaaS company can sail through this by converting more free users into premium subscribed customers.

If you decided to switch to the otherwise heavily advertised PLG CRM in the market, it does not mean that change is inevitable. The industry is fast evolving, and your competitors have already realized that focusing on the fundamentals of PLG SaaS, like investing in fast-paced exploration and iteration with superior conversion techniques and channels, is far more significant than playing with a new CRM software.

This post will highlight the real-world problems in the SaaS industry and how you can tackle them without the product-led growth CRMs.

The Underlying Problem

Today, every SaaS player envisions being a product-led growth company after viewing the immense success garnered by companies like Canva, Figma, Grafana, and ClickUp. But beyond these success stories, there lies a hidden fact. Most PLG aspiring SaaS start-ups miss. Even successful PLG SaaS enterprises have a large user base with woefully poor conversion rates (typically less than 1%). Simply put, the funnel has shifted from consumer acquisition to client conversion because the market has grown. And, every exchange in PLG board meetings revolves around monetization. Conversion rates must improve for businesses to succeed.

With SaaS multiples plummeting, a new category of tooling- PLG CRM – has begun to make its way up the social feeds, into mailboxes, and onto the google search SERP of every PLG business.

A PLG-based CRM highlights a few elements that a traditional CRM does but differently. It did display many fancy techniques and made lofty promises. However, the issue does not lie with the CRM system, so changing your CRM will not help your conversion problem.

The primary problem is that new PLG aspiring SaaS start-ups are not heavily focused on ARR to achieve conversions. Simple, effective synchronization of product usage data into your traditional CRM will solve your qualms with your existing system and eliminate the need for a unique PLG-based CRM.

How Can You Boost Conversions?

SaaS is a discipline, and there are a few tried-and-true ways in which PLG businesses may use it to boost conversion rates. They are:

• Using inside sales agents to perform a high-velocity sales-assist action to win small and medium-sized customers.
• Increasing organic conversions by experimenting with the self-serve paywall.
• The enterprise’s sales force should be focusing on big clients with sales cycles of a few weeks to months.
• Introduce a “Growth Team,” which will be an independent department. This product can turn this disgruntled, hand-tied cross-functional collaboration team into enforcers of change with the capacity to adjust metrics at any time.

So what are you waiting for? Now that you know that your CRM is not problematic, it is time to fix the underlying issues, and a PLG-based API solution can be your starting point.