How to turn your best customers into a predictable revenue flywheel
Combine Product-Led Growth with Sales-Led Growth to maximize efficient outbound
“Only a few hundred companies have ever truly nailed the pure PLG motion. Eventually, almost everyone pivots toward a hybrid or sales-led growth model.”
- Jordan Crawford on Florin Tatulea’s podcast this week
PLGTM Conference is coming up, and everyone is talking about Product-Led Growth.
If you are building a business, which would you prefer?
Option A: Higher revenue and higher churn
Option B: Higher LTV and lower churn
A well-known SaaS company just downsized its business because it relied too heavily on Option 1. The attached image is a screenshot of DMs with their former Head of Product (with her permission).
Here is the common scenario of Product-Led Growth strategies:
1. Rapid user growth and initial revenue spikes.
2. Raise significant funding based on these exciting metrics.
3. Six months down the road, the first cohort of users churns because freemium users rarely match the profile of high-LTV customers.
4. Now the team is scrambling, realizing they need a sales-driven approach to acquire better customers, but hiring a sales team prematurely is risky and expensive.
💡 What’s the happy medium between product-led growth and sales-led growth? Why not turn your best customers into a predictable revenue flywheel?
maximus greenwald, CEO of Warmly, generated $500K last month by treating the customer journey as a closed loop.
“No one trusts G2 anyways, but they will trust an actual public post with their name tied to it” - Quote from Maximus (no relation to the Gladiator or the Transformer)
Every company needs a referral channel to activate its best customers.
Referrals remain the highest-performing channel and yet the least predictable one.
Here is how two companies turned their best customers into a repeatable referral channel:
🧪 Experiment #1
✅ A Series C SaaS company identified its most active product users.
✅ Instead of asking for a referral, which creates bottlenecks, they referenced the names of their power users in outbound emails to their former colleagues.
"Hi James - Saw you worked with Scott at Figma. Scott is one of the most active users of our product for automating marketing ops. Want a link to check it out yourself?"
✅ Within 24 hours of launch, 4% reply rate and 2% of leads booked a meeting (4X higher than the status quo).
✅ Every month, they activate a new cohort of power users to become referrers.
🧪 Experiment #2
✅ An invite-only membership organization asked 10 members to opt-in as referrers.
✅ They tested the outbound referral campaign against a target audience of lapsed leads (people who submitted a web form but never converted).
✅ The referral campaign had a 3.5X higher conversion rate of lead-to-MQL than the audience of lapsed leads.