What is Product-Led Growth (PLG)?
A business strategy where the product itself drives user acquisition, activation, and expansion rather than traditional sales teams.
Definition
Product-led growth uses the product as the primary vehicle for customer acquisition and revenue expansion. Users sign up for a free or low-cost version, experience value, and upgrade to paid plans or enterprise tiers. The product handles onboarding, feature discovery, and upselling that would traditionally require salespeople. Companies like Slack, Zoom, and Figma popularized this model. The data stack for PLG companies looks different from sales-led organizations: product analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel) matter more than sales engagement tools, and CRM enrichment focuses on identifying which free users represent enterprise opportunities.
Why It Matters
PLG companies use different tools than sales-led companies. Instead of outbound prospecting tools, PLG companies invest in product analytics, user behavior tracking, and enrichment tools that identify which free users work at target accounts. Clearbit (now HubSpot) and 6sense are popular for this: identifying anonymous website visitors and enriching sign-up data to surface enterprise leads from the self-serve funnel.
Example
A PLG company offers a free tier. 10,000 users sign up monthly. Clearbit enriches each sign-up with company data (size, industry, funding). The RevOps team uses enrichment data to flag when 5+ users from the same company sign up, triggering a sales-assisted motion for enterprise conversion.