B2B products with PLG and open source models often don’t know who is using their product. Here are three ways how savvy growth teams solve this problem.
Most B2B and B2D PLG companies allow sign-ups via 3rd-party providers such as Google, Github or Microsoft. This reduces friction but also attracts a lot of personal (or what people call “gmail”) signups.
For certain customers, we have seen 80-95% of signups use personal emails.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to identify the work context of these users from their personal email. Where do they work? What is their title and team? This information is critical to not only provide a good product experience but also helps your sales and customer support prioritize signups from high-value accounts. While signups from students and hobbyists are great, you might want your GTM team to focus on accounts that are within your ICP (which might not include students/hobbyists) and have greater expansion/revenue potential.
Unfortunately, without this context, growth and sales teams spend hours trying to research these signups. It becomes extremely difficult to qualify them as product-qualified leads (PQLs) for their sales-assist motions.
Knowing your users
So how do most companies solve this problem? We have seen three approaches:
1️⃣ Incentivize signups with work email
Capsule prioritizes early product access for work email signups. HeyGen offered extra credits with a work email signup. Weights & Biases makes it clear that certain features such as teams and invitations require a work email. Get creative based on your offering!
2️⃣ Build a profile during onboarding
You can ask the users about their role and company during onboarding.
has a great framework you can use for this.3️⃣ Enrich email signups
With a stack of data providers and public data, you can enrich a significant fraction of signups. We see upto 90% success with work emails and close to 25% with personal emails at Syft with this strategy.
Putting it all together
We recommend layering these three approaches to get better identification rates:
1. Nudge for work email at sign up. Be Creative!
2. Enrich emails during signup with an enrichment waterfall.
3. Augment non-enriched profiles with onboarding questions.
This will ensure that you get good coverage on the firmographic information about a user once they sign up.
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