How Dreamdata turned HubSpot into a Product-led growth CRM
In February this year, we decided to dive head-first into product-led growth (PLG). We threw open the gates and welcomed freemium and free trial users to savour Dreamdata’s product.
Apart from generating a lot of new users, it triggered a culture shift across our teams. Marketing had to start pointing towards the new free offering, Customer Success would now have to cater to these users, and Sales had to learn the art of up-selling. You can read more about what this meant for Sales here.
It also resulted in a sudden change of needs for our CRM.
PLG CRM needs
Although we hadn’t abandoned ‘traditional’ (non-plg) inbound and outbound activity, the pipelines on the CRM (obviously) didn’t accommodate the product side of things.
The good news was that we were sitting on all the necessary data to make this happen. That is, because we track user/account behaviour on our product, we had all the ingredients for turning our CRM into a PLG CRM.
The bad news was that we needed to get our engineers to push the data into HubSpot.
Well, until we got this solution off-the-shelf with Hightouch.
All of a sudden we not only had the data (thanks to our own data platform) but the means to send it back into our HubSpot CRM through the Hightouch Reverse ETL tool.
In this post, we’re going to share how we turned our HubSpot CRM into a PLG system and how it’s helped fuel our product-led growth since.
Contents:
How we set up a product-led growth CRM in Hubspot
Clean data from Dreamdata’s data platform
Sync data to the CRM with Hightouch
A word about off-the-shelf PLG CRMs
How we’re using our HubSpot PLG CRM
A changed pipeline and Sales process
A Marketing, Sales and Customer Success affair
How we set up a product-led growth CRM in HubSpot
“A PLG CRM is any CRM that contains data on how a customer is using your product and has workflows built around your product journey (rather than your sales journey).” Hightouch plg crm guide
Most readers are wondering just how simple (or not) the process to set up the PLG CRM in HubSpot was.
With the risk of sounding like a midday TV ad, it took us no more than 30 mins to have the PLG CRM in place.
This speed, admittedly, was down to having two crucial ingredients already in place:
A clean, standardised B2B database sitting in our BigQuery.
Access to a Reverse ETL tool.
“Thanks to our data platform and HighTouch our Hubspot is now a product-led CRM.”
Lars Grønnegaard, Dreamdata CEO.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Did you know Dreamdata is a HubSpot App Partner - check us out on the HubSpot market place.
Clean data from Dreamdata’s data platform
Dreamdata’s data platform performs the functions of customer data collection, extraction, loading, transformation and modelling. All of which is then freely accessible on BigQuery for you to activate with the Dreamdata app or your favourite BI, ML and/or Reverse ETL tool.
You can read more about use cases for Dreamdata’s data platform in this post, and what this means for B2B data teams in this interview here.
Apart from tracking all the touchpoints taking place on our site, we use the data platform to track customer - that is both user and account - behaviour inside our app. This means that we are able to collect details about what our free users are doing; what features they’re using, how frequently they use the product, and who’s using it. All sitting cleanly in our BigQuery. A treasure trove of info for Sales/Customer Success as we’ll show below.
What this meant for our PLG CRM project is that we had all the data we needed to send back into the CRM.
And for this, we turn to Hightouch.
Sync data to the CRM with Hightouch
As a reverse ETL tool, Hightouch can send the structured data sitting in data warehouses back into the tools on commercial teams’ stacks, not least the CRM.
“Reverse ETL is the process of copying data from a cloud data warehouse to operational systems of record, including but not limited to SaaS tools used for growth, marketing, sales and support.” - Tejas Manohar, CEO of Hightouch
For us, Hightouch meant eliminating the need to engineer the connection between BigQuery and the CRM ourselves. Enabling us to proceed with the project without having to rely on engineering - who are already busy enough working on our own product.
The syncing process is a simple two step process that looks like this👇
First, we query the data - here’s where that clean data in your warehouse matters.
Then we sync the relevant columns with the corresponding HubSpot fields.
And we’re done.
You can read more about using Dreamdata and Hightouch here.
A word about off-the-shelf PLG CRMs
There are off-the-shelf product-focused CRMs available. Correlated, Endgame, Pocus, Calixa, Toplyne could have filled our PLG CRM need in one swoop.
We did consider it, but here’s why we didn’t go down the path of purchasing one.
For starters, we were going to carry on with our ‘traditional’ inbound and outbound activities. Which meant, we were going to keep our current CRM, HubSpot. Knowing that HubSpot could be double-purposed to also handle product-led activity, meant it would better meet our multi-purpose needs. Besides, sticking to the same CRM would mean not having to re-train the team, etc.
We were also attracted to the Reverse ETL option as it too is multi-purpose. That is, we are able to use Hightouch not only to connect our product data to our HubSpot CRM, but any data to a host of tools.
How are we using our HubSpot PLG CRM?
So how are we putting this all into practice?
From the outset, our PLG CRM requirements were driven by the need to identify which freemium users could become paying customers.
This meant measuring product use and activity, in terms of both quality and frequency. Additionally, we wanted to see if there was continued interest in our offerings (outside the product) after starting Free use. So we added web sessions, web users, and channels.
Using our Dreamdata platform, we can then identify and scrutinise these sessions more closely. For instance, are they looking at the pricing page or some of the paying tier features? You can read more about Dreamdata’s customer journey mapping here.
The result is that every company in HubSpot is now enriched with the following info for the last 7 days: product sessions, product users, web sessions, web users, total engaged users, channels (as in, direct, paid, organic, etc).
We are then able to lead score and rank the accounts by coupling this data with our ‘ICP’ (Ideal Customer Profile).
This is how it’s looking 👇
Another obvious flag that is not accounted for here as this is flagged on another dashboard, is exceeding the Free monthly visitor limits (set out on our pricing page).
A changed pipeline and Sales process
In so far as conversions are concerned, since launching our freemium offering, it’s become the primary inbound conversion.
The impact is being noticed further down the pipeline too, with Free users accounting for just over 37% of our SQLs.
This has meant a restructuring of our pipelines to process both lead ‘types’: those coming from our traditional inbound/outbound pipeline with those on our PLG one.
Our PLG pipeline focuses on Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), i.e. those scoring highly in our table (above). Here early-stage outreach consists mostly of highlighting product features and the benefits of an upgrade based on actual product use. Before moving them onto the late-stage SQL pipeline.
Our traditional sales pipeline has also changed as a result of introducing Free. Most notably, we now account for a number of early-stage SQLs that opt to run a free trial of the product instead of immediately proceeding with the purchase.
What’s more, because of the highly focused ‘product’ element, with some leads now using the product for over half a year, our Sales team has had to ensure expertise in all the product’s features - priorly the reserve of Customer Success. Conversely, as we’ll see below, Customer Success has had to refine its sales pitches.
The result is a hybrid AE.
Actually, this is the case across all the commercial teams.
A Marketing, Sales and Customer Success affair
As mentioned in the intro, setting up our product-led growth CRM also represented a culture shift across all our teams.
Typically, Sales is the main team connecting with customers before they sign a contract, and Customer Success is strictly post-sale (after a contract gets signed). This doesn't quite work with product-led growth.
With a freemium offering, Customer Success is as much involved pre-sale, starting from the moment a customer signs up for the product seeing them through the onboarding process, as through post-sale. And ditto with Sales as set out above.
Marketing too has not only had to learn the ins-and-outs of the product in detail (to best communicate its power) but has also tailored it’s strategies, especially in the ABM realm, to PLG - with the CRM serving as the source of truth.
But what does this all mean for ownership over the pipeline? Well, despite there being engagement from across the teams, we have still kept Sales ownership of the pipeline.
You might be interested in this article on how Dreamdata helps Sales close more deals.
Conclusion
Our processes and engagement have changed markedly since opening our revenue attribution platform to free users.
Product-led growth feels like a more honest way to sell. The sales process is no longer one where you just make a sequence of promises and risk overselling. The product, open to all, is now living proof.
And the benefits, as we’ve set out above, have so far been many:
An explosion of companies with a Dreamdata account.
A more tangible and logical sales process led by product and proof instead of salesmanship and luck.
Higher conversion rates from sales qualified leads to won deals.
Accounts being far in the onboarding process already on the day where they sign the contract.
With that said, we are still very much in the early stages of our PLG journey. Processes and engagement will no doubt continue to evolve to meet our product-led needs. But one thing seems certain, for now at least. Our Dreamdata-hightouch-Hubspot PLG CRM solution will sit at the centre of our product-led growth strategy.
Are you a HubSpot user? Dreamdata is a certified HubSpot App Partner. See how you can connect your HubSpot data to Dreamdata here.
