If you’re running a SaaS company with a free trial, freemium model, or self-service onboarding, chances are you’ve already dipped your toes into the world of Product-Led Growth (PLG). And why wouldn’t you? When your product usage directly correlates with revenue, PLG feels like a no-brainer. More engagement = more conversions... in theory.
But while many SaaS teams love to talk about the concept of PLG, the execution often falls short. We see this all the time: the product team obsesses over UX tweaks and onboarding flows, while marketing, sales, and success are left in the dark, staring at a dashboard full of product activity they can’t interpret or act on. And as a result, you’ve got users in the product, but no clear way to turn their activity into actionable sales or retention signals.
And if the PLG fails, it doesn’t necessarily mean your product isn’t good enough. More often than not, it fails because the revenue engine behind it is missing. You don’t need more heatmaps or login data, but you do need a machine that turns product behavior into something actionable. Something that lets your GTM teams see what users are doing and know when to engage. That’s the difference between having users in the product and actually driving expansion revenue.
Let’s walk through how to build one that doesn’t just measure engagement, but turns it into actual revenue.
At its core, a PLG machine is a system that collects behavioral signals from your product, scores them based on their relevance to your business goals, and automatically triggers responses based on that activity. These responses might include sending an educational email, creating a task for customer success, or flagging a product-qualified lead for sales outreach.
When built well, the machine creates a feedback loop between your product and your go-to-market teams. It ensures that user behavior isn’t just being observed, but actually being acted on in a way that drives adoption, retention, and expansion.
This is where most teams get tripped up. You can’t just start syncing every product event into HubSpot and expect magic to happen. If you’re not clear on which actions predict real business outcomes, like paid conversions, churn, or expansion, you’ll flood your CRM with meaningless noise. That’s a great way to burn out your teams and bury the few useful signals you do have 😉
The starting point here is your revenue model and success metrics. Work backward and think:
Often, high-signal behaviors include completing onboarding flows, adding teammates, integrating third-party tools, hitting usage limits, or generating reports. Signs of trouble might look like stalled onboarding, reduced activity after the first week, or escalating support requests without meaningful feature adoption.
But don’t forget that negative signals matter just as much as positive ones. But because they’re less glamorous and harder to act on, most teams ignore them. Don’t make that mistake. A user skipping onboarding is just as valuable a signal as one who invites five teammates.
If you’ve got a meaningful amount of user data, now’s the time to dig in. Run a correlation analysis on early behaviors that tend to predict conversion or churn. It’ll help you filter out vanity metrics like “number of logins” and hone in on what actually moves the revenue needle.
Knowing what to track is step one. Getting that data into the hands of your marketing, sales, and CS teams is step two. And if all your product signals are trapped inside Mixpanel, Amplitude, or your internal dashboards, your GTM teams are flying blind.
This is where integration becomes critical. There are a few routes depending on your setup:
However you do it, speed matters. Signals lose value if they arrive a week late. Your goal should be real-time, or as close as your infrastructure allows. But don’t fall into the trap of perfectionism here. You don’t need to build the entire integration in one go. Start with five high-impact signals. That’s enough to validate whether your scoring and automation logic works. You can scale from there.
Once your data’s flowing into HubSpot, the question becomes: who gets attention, and when?
This is where scoring comes in. Without it, you’re leaving your GTM teams to guess which users are ready for a sales touch or which accounts are quietly slipping toward churn. A solid scoring model cuts through the ambiguity and gives your teams a clear, objective way to prioritize.
We recommend assigning point values to both positive and negative behaviors:
It’s important to score at both the user level (contacts) and the account level (companies) . One active user doesn’t necessarily justify a sales call, but if three users from the same company are integrating tools and adding teammates, now that’s a buying signal.
Define a score threshold that turns a user or account into a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). This might be 50 points, or something more nuanced depending on your business model. The key is that when someone crosses that threshold, the machine triggers action automatically and immediately.
Also, don’t forget to build in decay logic. Behavior from three weeks ago shouldn’t carry the same weight as something that happened yesterday. Stale scores mislead your teams and clog the pipeline with users who’ve already checked out.
You’ve got signals flowing in. You’ve got scoring to surface the good stuff. Now the real magic starts. It’s time to automate the follow-up so your team isn’t chasing every lead manually.
Inside HubSpot, use workflows to trigger outreach at key moments:
The goal is contextual relevance, not robotic automation. Avoid the generic nurture spam that makes users tune out. Your follow-ups should feel like a natural continuation of their product journey, not a mass email blast.
And once automations are live, revisit them regularly. Just because a workflow worked two months ago doesn’t mean it’s still relevant. As your product and audience evolve, so should your automation logic.
This should go without saying, but PLG isn’t a “set it and forget it” system. Once the machine is built, your job becomes keeping it healthy.
That means tracking key metrics:
It also means asking your GTM teams whether the leads being flagged are actually valuable. If sales is ignoring PQLs or CS is drowning in false-positive churn alerts, something’s off in your scoring or signal logic.
Don’t wait for quarterly planning to revisit your setup. Make PLG performance a standing item in your GTM meetings. And build a dashboard ideally in HubSpot (or your BI tool) that shows engagement bands, high-risk accounts, and conversion trends. If the data’s visible and tied to revenue, it gets attention.
Remember: the machine is only as valuable as your team’s willingness to use it. So make it visible. Make it useful. And make sure it evolves as your company grows.
It’s easy to think of Product-Led Growth as something that happens organically. You launch a great onboarding experience, build out your help docs, and let users explore the product at their own pace. And we wish it worked like that too. But in reality, PLG is a system that connects what users do in your product to the teams responsible for driving revenue.
When it works, it works because you’ve built the infrastructure behind the scenes: clear signals, smart scoring, seamless HubSpot integration, and contextual automation.
And no, you don’t need a data engineering team or a custom-built GTM stack to pull this off. If you can track a handful of meaningful behaviors, sync them into HubSpot, score them with intention, and trigger thoughtful follow-up, you’re already on your way.
If you want more, Varda Caspi recently shared some insights about building PLG in HubSpot to nurture complex user journeys without annoying marketing emails or a traditional SDR team during Envy's HubSpot Summit, an online webinar for HubSpot Legends. You can watch the recording here:
Need help getting started? At Envy, we work with SaaS companies to design and implement PLG systems inside HubSpot, from data integration and lead scoring to lifecycle automation and reporting. If your team is drowning in product data but struggling to make it actionable, we can help you build the infrastructure you need.