Customer Success

The Hidden Power of Customer Success in the Shift to Product-Led Growth

Shifting from Sales-Led to PLG requires Customer Success (CS) as a growth driver—guiding pricing changes, optimizing onboarding, and driving expansion. In PLG, CS shifts from high-touch to data-driven, scalable strategies that boost adoption, retention, and revenue.

Rick van der Werf

21 Feb 2025 — 5 min read

Credits: User Onboarding Vectors by Vecteezy

TL;DR:
👉 Shifting from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth (PLG) requires deep customer collaboration.
👉 Customer Success (CS) plays a critical role in guiding users through pricing changes, onboarding experiments, and product evolution.
👉 CS builds strong customer relationships, helping to retain users during disruptive transitions.
👉 Companies that leverage CS for co-development, product experimentation, and growth see stronger long-term growth.

Why CS is Critical When Shifting from Sales-Led to PLG

Ever feel like you're pouring endless resources into demos, cold calls, and lengthy sales cycles—only to see lackluster user adoption? Many companies assume that moving to a Product-Led Growth (PLG) model means users will adopt the product independently, eliminating the need for Customer Success (CS). However, transitioning from a Sales-Led to a PLG model isn’t as simple as flipping a switch—it’s a culture shift that requires ongoing collaboration with customers to test new pricing structures, onboarding experiences, and expansion strategies.

Customer Success teams are uniquely positioned to work hand-in-hand with customers to co-develop new features, experiment with monetization models, and guide users through change. Their deep relationships with customers help keep engagement high, even during disruptive transitions. Without CS acting as the bridge between customers and product teams, these transitions can lead to churn, confusion, and missed growth opportunities. In this article, we'll dive into the question "What is the role of customer success in product-led growth?" in more detail – let's dive in!

CS in PLG: The Customer-Centric Growth Engine

In a PLG model, CS shifts from white-glove onboarding and high-touch activation tactics to a proactive, data-driven approach that scales–CS becomes an experimentation partner of product. Instead of hand-holding, CS works alongside product teams to refine onboarding journeys, improve adoption flows, and drive expansion by building growth loops into the product. The best PLG companies use CS to:

Facilitate Pricing & Packaging Transitions – Working closely with customers to refine pricing models.
Guide Onboarding & Feature Adoption – Continuously experiment with product and design to ensure users quickly get to the "aha!" moment and drive user activation.
Strengthen Engagement During Disruptions – Keeping customers engaged when introducing new PLG strategies.

Instead of relying solely on automated self-serve systems, PLG-focused CS teams co-develop solutions with customers, using:

Customer feedback loops to iterate on pricing & product changes.
Proactive outreach to drive adoption among power users, and share successes with soon-to-be power users.
Collaboration on new features, integrations, and workflows to ensure customer-driven innovation.

👉

Do you want to bring your level of customer centricity to the next level? Dive into this guide that walks you through the essential steps to putting the voice of your customer at the heart of everything your organization does.

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Read this blog post I wrote on how Customer Success should aim to make customers less dependent on their human interactions – in a way, why CS should aim to fire themselves from their job.

How CS Accelerates Key PLG Metrics

1. Activation: Partnering with Customers to Refine Onboarding

Successful PLG companies didn't make this move overnight. They did not just wake up one morning and launched an amazing, high-converting, self-serve onboarding flow. Instead, they continuously optimize it based on real customer interactions. CS helps by:

Running experiments with new user cohorts to refine activation strategies. Figuring out what tactics, nudges and messaging works is key.
Providing direct feedback loops between users and the product team is vital. In an ideal world, anyone in the team can self-serve on customer insights. We built NEXT for exactly that.
Leveraging customer input to improve onboarding flows, pricing models, or building features for their specific use cases ensures faster time-to-value.

2. Retention: Keeping Customers Engaged During Transitions

Moving to a PLG model–and as a result often making drastic product changes in the process–has the risk of disrupting existing customer relationships. Customer Success teams safeguard continuity by:

Keeping customers engaged in changes and product updates, creating a "we did this together!" atmosphere.
Providing hands-on guidance to key accounts during product shifts.
Using customer data to personalize retention strategies.
If necessary, quickly find new user groups with better-fitting use cases in existing customers.

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Example: If a company moves from a sales-led onboarding model to a fully self-serve flow, CS can identify users struggling with the change and intervene proactively.

3. Expansion: Driving Revenue Growth with Co-Development

Expansion revenue is king in PLG, but upsells and cross-sells don’t happen by just like that–unless you're extremely lucky. CS owns the generation of up- and cross-sell opportunities by:

Identifying and work with power users ready for premium features, new use cases, or increasing volume–that is, if you're on a volume-based pricing model.
Involving customers in beta programs to build new offerings, activation tactics, user flows, etc.
Collaborating on integrations & workflows to increase adoption. Deeply understanding use cases of your users help you build a product users love and make it "stick".

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At NEXT, we launched such a "beta program", which we called a "Pioneer Program". Our leading customers were invited for a weekly session with our CS team to share feedback on new features, dive into their use cases, or test new flows with one of our designers. Our customers became our growth engine, fueling product every single day, while our customers truly became part of our journey to a new reality.

From Support Function to Strategic Partner

Many companies mistakenly assume CS is purely about reactive support, white-glove onboarding or, possible worst of all, running hundreds of QBR sessions every year nobody wants to attend. In reality, CS in PLG is a proactive driver of growth and customer-led innovation–deeply engrained in product.

🔹 Traditional CS vs. PLG CS:

Traditional CS	PLG CS
White-glove onboarding & hand-holding	Data-driven experimentation & automation
Focus on renewals	Focus on expansion & co-development
Manual outreach	Customer-led growth strategies
Sales-aligned	Product-aligned

How to Use CS as a PLG Growth Lever

🔹 1. Involve CS in Pricing & Packaging Experiments

Run small-scale pricing tests with CS feedback.
Use customer insights to fine-tune subscription models.

🔹 2. Make CS a Central Player in Onboarding Optimization

Involve CS in designing user journeys in the product.
Continuously test and refine self-serve onboarding flows.
Identify high-friction areas and introduce guided interventions.

🔹 3. Use CS to Keep Customers Engaged During PLG Transitions

Communicate product and roadmap changes transparently–or better, let users shape your roadmap and prioritize together.
Provide hands-on guidance for enterprise and power users, working with them to share success forward.

🔹 4. Leverage CS for Expansion & Co-Development Initiatives

Invite power users to beta programs, testing and feature development.
Align CS incentives with product growth and expansion goals.

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At NEXT, we went beyond focusing on the basic CS metrics, such as User Activation percentages or Time-to-Value. We wanted to make sure our customers objectives were so closely aligned, that they basically became our own objectives–especially as we revolutionized our product and GTM strategy. We picked our leading customers, defined quarterly goals with them tied into their strategic objectives with our platform, and reflected them in our own OKRs. Every week, we'd update the core team on these goals and used it to fine-tune the product, inform new feature decisions, and user activation tactics.

Final Thoughts: CS as a Growth Driver in PLG

Shifting to Product-Led Growth isn’t just a pricing or onboarding shift—it’s a true transformation of how you go to market and engage with your customers and end-users. To make it work, you'll have to work closely together with your customers. Customer Success is uniquely positioned to partner with customers through these transitions, ensuring long-term engagement, retention, and expansion–they act as the glue between customer and product

The most successful PLG companies, position Customer Success–which they might start to name differently– as a core driver of growth, experimentation, and customer advocacy.

If your PLG strategy doesn’t yet integrate Customer Success deeply, now is the time to start.

What’s Next?

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