Product-led growth (PLG)

In a PLG motion the user finds the product, tries it, and buys it without talking to anyone. Acquisition costs are low, the sales cycle is short, and growth compounds through usage rather than headcount.

It requires the product to be genuinely self-explanatory, the purchase to be low-risk enough to make without procurement, and provisioning to be instant and unattended.

PLG in B2B is almost never the whole story

The common pattern in B2B SaaS is PLG as the entry point rather than the entire motion. A team adopts the product self-service, usage spreads inside the company, and at some threshold the buying decision moves to procurement — at which point they want an invoice, an MSA, security review, SSO, and a negotiated rate.

That transition is where PLG businesses get hurt operationally. The self-service customer lives in a billing system built for card payments; the negotiated contract needs quoting, approvals, invoicing and revenue recognition. Companies commonly end up running both, with the sales-led half in an accounting package, and no consolidated view of revenue across the two.

The consequences of splitting the motion

When PLG and SLG revenue live in different systems:

• Total ARR has to be assembled by hand from two sources.
• NRR cannot be computed across the whole base, because a customer who converts from self-service to contract looks like churn in one system and new business in the other.
• Nobody can measure how well the PLG-to-SLG conversion actually works, which is the single most valuable thing to know about a hybrid motion.

Keeping both motions on one platform is less about billing convenience than about being able to see the funnel end to end.