Learn how combining Ecosystem-Led Growth with Product-Led strategies can transform your SaaS approach and drive results.
There’s no better match in heaven than a sandwich of peanut butter and jelly, a duo better than Batman and Robin, or a better color combination than black and white (and no, orange isn’t the new black).
But in the B2B SaaS industry, you can’t make money from peanut butter and jelly [Ed. note: I’m sure someone has tried], so we asked ourselves: what are the two pieces of the puzzle that are needed to drive more revenue?
According to Kristen Habacht, CRO at Typeform, the winning combo is Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) and Product-Led Growth (PLG).
In this article, Kristen shares:
- When PLG and ELG can play nice,
- How to talk about integrations from a PLG POV to your CRO
- How to grow your revenue by delicately balancing both
- Typeform’s success story: how they drove 40% more revenue with ELG
First things first: What’s ELG and PLG?
For those who aren’t familiar with these terminologies, here’s what ELG and PLG mean:
If you want to learn more about it, get Bob Moore’s (our CEO and Co-Founder,) book “Ecosystem-Led Growth: A Blueprint for Sales and Marketing Success Using the Power of Partnerships.
It’s important to highlight that PLG’s main feature is the ability of your prospects and customers to explore some components of your tool without needing your sales or customer success teams’ guidance. “It’s how much value can your customers get without somebody physically walking them through that experience,” said Kristen.
ELG + PLG
Right now, when you look at any product in SaaS, what do you see? Integrated products.
It’s hard to find a product that is completely siloed. “Most product-led growth (PLG) companies fit in together with another tool,” Kristen said. “Very few things exist alone in an ecosystem, they almost always have some connection point to others, whether it is transferring data from one place to another, using Zapier to make things happen.”
PLG is not mutually exclusive of ELG. Yes, they are different strategies, but in the end, you’ll need ELG to boost your PLG efforts because your tool will always need to interact with other tools.
“PLG is all about ensuring that your customers can easily access your product, extract value from it, and become loyal,” said Kristen. “In a PLG motion, you’ll need to focus on how seamlessly your data systems communicate with each other, as that’s what will create the stickiness.”
When tools are connected to each other, your customers are less likely to churn, and more likely to expand:
- Rollworks found out that their customers with four or more integrations are 35% less likely to churn compared with those with just one integration enabled.
- Companies that partner have a 28% higher compound annual growth, attributed to the fact that partnering improves retention and expands your customer base.
- According to Canalys, companies with strong partner programs enjoy a 15% higher renewal rate and a 20% increase in upsell revenue.
PLG focuses on achieving a fast time-to-value, retaining active users, and without ELG, that’s not always feasible. “PLG and ELG have to work together,” said Kristen. “When I was a PLG strategy consultant, the first thing I did was identify which stage of their ELG strategy those companies were at. ELG is a critical component for both the product and your GTM strategy.”
How to talk about integrations from a PLG POV to your CRO
Whenever you’re trying to pitch your tech partners to your CRO, there are some points you have to consider:
- How easily do you set up the integration?
- How quickly can you realize the value of it?
- Would you need your services team to set it up?
- What’s the discoverability of your integration?
- How are you planning to onboard your customer on that integration?
- Who is your ICP? / Who will be your main user?
- What tools do they already use?
“The product perspective isn’t just to ship an integration for the sake of having it, but to consider the customer journey,” said Kristen. “That’s why ELG and PLG are most effective when they work together.”
Whenever you pitch your integration to your CRO, make sure you don’t just spray and pray.
DON’T say that X,Y, and Z companies can be a good match for you because you read it in an article — they have to at least match your ICP, then you can start building a business case.
And always, ALWAYS, share with your CRO any potential revenue stats, persona overlap, your ICP’s technographic data, how their team can leverage ecosystem data as purchasing signals to close deals faster, etc.
Combining your PLG and ELG motions
Whether you launch a PLG or ELG motion, you need to have the support from your go-to-market (GTM) team.
So according to Kristen, here are three points to perfectly combine your PLG and ELG motions:
- Evaluate your GTM maturity: If you don’t have any marketing, product marketing managers, or a solid customer success team, you’ll have a hard time trying to get buy-in outside of your integration strategy — because you have to rely on external sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
- Prepare external material to enable your partners: When you have a solid GTM team, you can rely on them to help you build strong enablement material for external consumption — in order to activate your partners.
- Build your partner team: Once you start your ELG motion, you might need to hire a tech partner manager or partner manager — you need at least a person who is capable of establishing a relationship, driving pipeline, and co-selling / co-marketing motions.
“When your solution is easy to use and get up and running, the challenge when you start looking at ELG is that you feel like you have to give menus to your partners,” said Kristen. “You need to be clear on how they can make money out of your solution, detail the professional services they can help you with, show them how they can set up the integration, and build workflows.”
This ELG and PLG combination process depends a lot on your company — for some, this process is going to be a piece of cake, for some others it will be a tough nut to crack. “For example, some tools will naturally show you that there’s an opportunity for a services partner, and for some others, you will have to create that opportunity for them,” said Kristen.
The Typeform play to increase revenue 40%
For Kristen and her team, the key to increase revenue was “focus” — a crucial element for a PLG strategy.
“Deciding when and where to allocate energy and resources is the first step towards increasing revenue,” said Kristen. “Even in PLG you try to avoid jeopardizing the number of economics you have.”
Fortunately, Typeform already had a very PLG-oriented strategy, where they base their integrations on data like customer insights. However, these insights weren’t ICP oriented.
Here’s when Kristen and her team decided to create a strategy to leverage ELG more thoughtfully. The first question that popped up into Kristen’s mind was: What is our ICP and how are they using Typeform?
“The point of that question was to help our customers make the most out of our integrations and identify what was our customers’ ecosystem,” said Kristen. “What if every integration we have with companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo were more than just a tech play.”
To achieve that, they followed these steps:
- Find your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): You have to narrow down your audience — you can’t “go after” everyone. Identify and prioritize:
- Who do you want to talk to? (include demographics and behavioral data)
- Who retains better?
- Who converts better?
- Who expands better?
- What is your ICP doing?
- How are they currently using your product?
- How would they like to use your product?
- What other tools are they using? (technographic data)
- Who do you want to talk to? (include demographics and behavioral data)
“Once you have found those five potential profiles, to narrow down your options, you have to overlay ecosystem data,” said Kristen. “From those profiles, identify who has integrations and which ones do they have. That can lead you to define your ICP.”
It’s as simple as stating that your product is for marketers who have a lead generation customer acquisition use case. “This doesn’t mean you’ll stop talking to your other personas who have other use cases, but for now, you’re focusing your resources on that specific ICP,” said Kristen.
- Find the gap in your GTM motion: Identify those moments where your marketing, product, sales, and customer success teams need a bit of help to boost their motions, and find the perfect opportunity to include a partner.
- Focus on a handful of your tech partners: Just as you identified your ICP, you also have to identify your Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) and focus on those three to five partners that complement your product the best, or the ones that can bring more value to your customers — and eventually will bring more revenue to your company.
- Create your professional services “menus”: Identify how you can best satisfy your ICP with your IPP. Create assets to onboard your partners on how they can benefit from that opportunity.
- Invest in your data and RevOps team: They are the ones who will integrate and set up your ecosystem data in your existing tools so the rest of your GTM team can leverage it too.
- Track your results: If after some time you don’t see an improvement in growth rate, revenue retention, or average contract value, you should prioritize your PLG strategy rather than ELG. This doesn’t mean that you have to kill your ELG motion, but instead of allocating 50% of your resources to each, you might want to do 40% and 60%. Be data driven as much as you can.
In this case, ELG in your PLG works like this:
The data you get from the integration you’re building with your partner will help support your services motion, which at the same time will help identify which other integrations you have to build to make your product stickier — making your PLG motion a success.
“The ELG data layer is like a flywheel,” said Kristen. “Ecosystem data will help you identify what are your next steps and priorities regarding your PLG strategy.”
Are you ready for ELG?
It’s okay if for now you’re just building up your GTM motion, but keep in mind that the most important thing is that you listen to your customer.
And whether you’re building a product-led, event-led, or any other of GTM Partners’ 6 go-to-market motions, the key to success will always be knowing your customers as much as possible.
Being ELG ready doesn’t mean you have to leave aside any of the other GTM strategies, but once you start building those integrations, you will realize how much leverage you’ll have.
ELG turns your partner ecosystem into your company’s most efficient and scalable source of revenue growth. Learn how it works, and why it's transforming SaaS GTM here.
