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Scaled CX: Combine PLG & SLG to Accelerate Growth

Learn a systematic approach to empowering and retaining your customers, giving them consistent white-glove value as you grow.

Scaled Customer Experience (CX) is a systematic approach to empowering and retaining your customers, giving them consistent white-glove value efficiently as you grow. 

It focuses on creating a seamless and efficient customer journey by joining automation, analytics, and integration of both Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) principles. 

This approach enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty, drives sustainable revenue growth and reduces operational overhead. We’re going to make you a CX master by the end of the post and give you a game plan for implementing these principles at your company.

Why Scaled CX?

The gurus and cognoscenti of LinkedIn would have you believe that you’re either building a product-led company or you’re relying entirely on your sales team to generate revenue.

A blind choice between PLG and SLG can be limiting, and sometimes dangerous to your survival. Integrating both strategies gives you a much bigger set of tools to deliver value. 

PLG emphasizes using the product as the primary driver for growth, allowing users to experience its value firsthand, while SLG relies on proactive sales efforts to engage, convert, and retain customers. By combining these methodologies, scaled CX ensures that every touchpoint in the customer journey is optimized for maximum impact.

How Scaled CX Combines PLG and SLG

  • Product-Led Growth (PLG) Elements to Use
    • User-Centric Design: Ensure your product is designed with the end-user in mind. Intuitive interfaces, easy onboarding, and in-app tutorials can significantly enhance the user experience.
    • Freemium Models: Offer a free or low-cost version of your product to attract users and provide a clear upgrade path to premium features.
    • In-App Engagement: Use in-app messages, tooltips, and guides to help users discover features and derive value from your product.
  • Sales-Led Growth (SLG) Elements to Use
    • Targeted Outreach: Use data-driven insights to identify high-potential prospects and tailor your outreach efforts.
    • Consultative Selling: Focus on understanding customer needs and providing solutions rather than pushing products.
    • Customer Success: Implement a dedicated customer success team to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes and remain loyal.

Best Practices for Implementing Scaled CX

  1. Automation and AI
    • Balance the use of automated engagement at scale and 1:1 interactions when the customer wants them 
    • Automate all  repetitive tasks to free up your team for those higher-value 1:1 activities:
      • Customer Onboarding
        • Automated welcome emails and onboarding sequences
        • In-app tutorials and guided tours
        • Scheduled follow-up emails to check on progress
      • Customer Support:
        • Chatbot responses for frequently asked questions
        • Automated ticket creation and routing
        • Self-service knowledge base and FAQs
      • Customer Engagement
        • Automated check-in emails
        • Customer health scoring and alerts
        • Personalized usage tips and recommendations
      • Feedback Collection
        • Automated surveys after key interactions
        • Scheduled NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys
        • Real-time feedback analysis and reporting
      • Renewal and Upsell
        • Automated renewal reminders
        • Personalized upsell and cross-sell emails based on usage data
        • Predictive analytics to identify churn risk and upsell opportunities
      • Reporting and Analytics
        • Automated generation of customer success reports
        • Scheduled performance dashboards
        • Real-time tracking of customer satisfaction metrics
  2. Unified Data Systems
    • Centralize customer data to ensure all team members have access to up-to-date information.
    • Use integrated platforms like HubSpot to streamline data management and enhance collaboration.
    • Ensure your data is clean and well-structured 
  3. Focused Analytics
    • Track indicators across the customer journey
      • Onboarding:
        • Activation
      • Adoption
        • Retention
        • Addiction
      • Maturity
        • Customer Satisfaction Score
        • Gross Revenue Retention
        • Churn
    • Build a churn prediction engine to find the user behaviors that correlate to future churn
    • Take advantage of new tools like Julius.ai to analyze data rapidly and prototype different insights or dashboards until you build a clear narrative that all teams can follow 
  4. Scalable Processes
    • Standardize and document processes to ensure consistency as your business grows
    • Ensure information is flowing clearly between the Sales, Customer Success, and Product teams to facilitate customer handoffs, services, and development of revenue-driving features that are most likely to encourage upsells and expansions 
    • Favor solutions that can adapt to increasing customer demands without a proportional increase in costs
  5. Customer-Centric Approach
    • Create detailed customer journey maps and understand the friction and value of every customer touchpoint 
    • Continuously gather and act on customer feedback. Make sure Sales, Customer Success, and Product teams are all coordinated to gather and review feedback in a single central location that’s easy for everyone to access 
    • Prioritize customer needs and experiences in every strategy
    • Give users a choice on how to engage with you
      • Don’t force them into calls and always let them provide their preferred check-in regime
      • Provide fast action to the information they need at all times
      • Equally as important, give users information they need at the exact moment they need it. 
        • Put set up guides in front of them during onboarding,
        • Surface feature guides directly in the platform during usage
        • Provide extended training async in video format and real-time in 1:1 sessions or 1:many webinars
  6. Experimental Approach to Customer Experience
    • Test your Customer Success team’s programs like they’re product features you’re building. A/B different approaches, different messaging, and different workflows 
    • Cut low-performing experiments ruthlessly and elevate the winners rapidly 

How to Implement Scaled CX

  1. Establish a CX working group with 1-2 key representatives from Customer Success, Sales, and Product – they’ll own your implementation process
  2. Ensure all of your key data systems have clean, consistent data feeding into them and are integrated to pass information between teams. For example, if your product analytics detect an event that’s a useful trigger for a Customer Success team check-in, make sure that a Slack alert goes out when that event fires 
  3. Ensure your key Customer Success systems are all configured to share information: help center, chat bots, learning management systems and other components should be integrated for scale. 
  4. Map every persona using your platform, especially their pain points, needs, fears, and jobs to be done
  5. Map every single touchpoint each of these personas has with your company along their customer journey. Understand the value they’re getting at each of these points and the friction they’re experiencing. Empathize deeply!
    • Create a document that captures every message, email and other interaction across every channel – you’ll be referencing this constantly
  6. Create an initial experimental plan to assign different types of engagements to each touch points. Engagements could include:
    • An automated email
    • An in-app message
    • An interactive guide 
    • A help center document
    • A Sales call
    • A Customer Success check-in
    • A webinar
  7. Create workflows for generating all the content you’ll be creating. Guides, messages, videos, and emails can take up a sizable amount of hours if you don’t regiment their creation and take advantage of tasteful AI to create first drafts
  8. Audit all of your customer feedback loops to confirm you’re getting the maximum amount of input for your teams with the minimum amount of imposition on your customers 
  9. Establish a regular review process for your CX group to iterate on what’s working and what’s not working, as measured by your onboarding, adoption, and maturity indicator metrics 

Ready for Blast Off

The really interesting aspect of scaled CX is how it enables you to maintain the personal, 1:1 relationships that are the foundation of any business while providing value and wide-reaching support at a rapid pace. The idea is to augment your revenue-driving capabilities and let your in-house experts do much more with what they already have today. That’s how you accelerate growth sustainably while staying nimble in the face of market changes.

At Praction, we specialize in helping B2B businesses implement these strategies through our automated Chief Revenue Officer platform and consulting services. Our tailored solutions are designed to increase revenue, refine GTM operations, and enhance customer value, accelerating your path to an exit, acquisition, or IPO.

Ready to scale? We’d love to meet you.