B2B Product Growth — Your A-Z Guide

This article provides tips and strategies to help grow your B2B product.

A is for Acquisition Plan

To grow you will need to acquire new customers. You should develop a plan describing how exactly you are going to do this covering the next 12 months.

There is no fixed template, but your plan could include sections covering the following:

a) How to increase referrals from your existing customers.
b) How to increase your win rate for RFPs and bids.
c) A high level marketing plan — including channels and spend distribution.
d) Specific campaigns and promotions.
e) Events you want to host, sponsor and attend.
f) Plans for stealing customers from your competitors.
g) Possible acquisition targets.
h) Geographical expansion options.
i) Industry vertical expansion options.
j) Moving up market (larger firms) or down market (smaller firms).

These are just some ideas. Review the last few years and talk to you colleagues to get more ideas on what to include in your plan.

B is for Backlog

The product backlog is the prioritised to-do list for your product team. If you have more than one team, then each team should have their own backlog. But I would go further and create a dedicated backlog for growth activities versus general maintenance activities.

Every item in the growth backlog should link to an initiative documented in your acquisition plan. You can then figure out how you divide your available resource between growth activities versus maintenance activities. You may even want to make the case for a dedicated growth-focused development team.

Having a dedicated growth backlog allows you to demonstrate to your leadership exactly what you could deliver if the company decided to accelerate growth by recruiting and investing in a growth focused development team.

C is for Customer

Think of customers as the group of people at a company who purchase your product and users as the group of people who actually use your product. Sometimes these are the same individuals, but often they can be completely different groups of people. For a large Enterprise customer, the group of buyers could be a diverse set of roles — you will need to understand and cater for all of these buying personas.

If you already have some customers, it’s important to take the time to really understand them. Why did they purchase your product? Do they think it represents good value? What do they like or dislike? What other options did they consider? And ultimately why did they choose eventually to go with your product to get their job done?

Outside of these questions, the more you understand your current customer’s future plans, fears and goals — the easier it will be to craft messages for the companies you would like to acquire as customers.

Finally as you grow, it may be useful to start grouping your customers together to help you think about how you can segment the wider market. Do you have a sub-set of customers who were easier to sell to, or easier to service, or are more profitable. If this is the case, you clearly want to attract more of those types of customers and you should consider this in your acquisition plan.

D is for Deal Driven Development

Your roadmap should be driven by your product strategy not by adhoc requests from existing customers or competitive me-too features. However, there are times when you might consider developing something specifically to win a key strategic deal. But certain conditions do have to be met:

a) Does the development fit in with your product strategy.? You may have been considering these capabilities anyway — they may even already be in your backlog.

b) Can you complete the development in the time frames required?

c) Will winning this customer heavily contribute towards your acquisition plan — the reward needs to be significantly more than just the revenue of this individual account.

d) Can you get agreement from existing stakeholders on potentially slipping current commitments to accommodate this development?

e) Can you effectively communicate why you are making an exception in this case to your colleagues. Will they agree and buy-in to the reasons?

f) Once developed is the solution sustainable? Are these generic features that all customers can take advantage of? Can the product still be upgraded easily without custom development?

If the above conditions are met, then you should be open to considering specific development that might drive a key deal in order to unlock other growth. Capturing an influential customer in a new geographic region or a new industry vertical are both good examples of viable deal driven development.

E is for Experiments

If you have several growth ideas and you are not sure which ones to prioritise, then conduct experiments to help identify the most viable (and profitable) ideas. Construct a prototype for a new application and demonstrate it to your customers to get their feedback. Sponsor or speak at an industry event in a new county or industry vertical to get a feel if there is a new expansion opportunity in that area for your products.

Constructing several low cost, agile experiments allows you to quickly test your ideas, learn from the results, discard them quickly or refine them and move to the next stage of development.

F is for Future

It takes time to develop, test and release software. Are you just developing features to catch up with the competition or fulfilling customers’ existing expectations? If so, by the time you have finished, the world will have moved on to the next big thing. You will be trapped in a perpetual mode of playing catch up.

To avoid this, research your market and take some time to write down what you think your market and customers will look and behave like in the future.

For example,

“In 5 years time our customers will need to…”

“…ensure their operations are 100% sustainable.”

“…attract, retain and manage a hybrid workforce.”

“…increase automation to replace manual processing of paper.”

Now note down some innovative solutions to those needs. Innovation might mean applying existing solutions to a new problem domain, not just creating completely new solutions.

By all means experiment to gather further information and test your ideas, but sooner or later you may need to make one of these bigger bets to stay ahead of the existing competition and to keep new market entrants at bay.

G is for Growth Mindset

You have to maintain and encourage other to adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset focuses on opportunities using both good and bad experiences to learn and go again. Soon individuals who cultivate a growth mindset will be able to recognise situations where new opportunities can be found. They become exciting to be around — things just seems to happen around them.

This looks like chance or good fortune, but the reality is that the growth mindset is pushing that person to ask one final question or introduce two folks to each other or to try something for the first time. Every small company needs at least one person with a growth mindset (often the founder in the first instance). But if a company can propagate this attitude across functions and departments (especially sales, marketing and product development), then that is where the magic happens.

H is for Hard Work

There is no question that years of sustained product growth requires hard work. Sometimes this manifests itself in prolonged and unsociable hours. Or the work may be mentally tough with curveballs or set backs that make you feel that you have lost ground or worse that you are not going to make it at all.

Perhaps others don’t share the passion that you have and you are carrying this heavy burden yourself. When that happens ask for help. Rally the troops — hold a team building event. Get out of the office and generate some energy and enthusiasm.

I is for In-App Guidance

Make the most of your users’ regular interaction with your product. Provide useful tips and callout new features within your application and use in-app analytics to see how your users are responding. Pre-announce new features and products to relevant users at the most optimum time.

J is for JIRA

Lots of firms use JIRA to track the backlog and work items as they transition through the development lifecycle. But consider using JIRA to track your Go To Market initiatives using the business project template.

Use labels on JIRA tickets to track the items that will have the most impact on growth. Use custom JIRA queries to easily view these growth related tickets and utilise Confluence to generate a Growth Dashboard to demonstrate work in progress to others.

JIRA isn’t great at tracking and visualising product growth strategy and so consider investing in a specialist product tool like Aha! or ProductBoard.

K is for Kano Model

The Kano model involves mapping the level of impact of a feature against the effort required to release it. There are basic features which are expected but offer no differentiation from the alternatives. Performance features are not strictly necessary but are enjoyed by users. Delighters are not expected but trigger a very positive emotional response from buyers.

Think of the products you have bought and love to use. What delights you about them and how strongly did these features drive your decision to buy the product? The key here is the consideration of the emotional aspect to new features within your user base. The theory is that users can’t just be satisfied, they have to be delighted at least by some aspects of the product.

Being delighted is going to drive a recommendation or a positive online review. A good product manager makes room to develop some “delighters” even if the cost or level of effort seems high.

L is for Long Game

Play the long game for sustained product growth. Your roadmap should be a mix of short, medium and long term initiatives. When you get that initial traction, users will demand more complex and sophisticated features. These take time to design and develop.

You will also need to accomodate scaling requirements and uplifts around security and performance. Planning for these things earlier will ensure they are ready when needed during subsequent growth phases.

M is for Marketing Team

Work closely with the marketing department (if you are lucky enough to have one) to synchronise on the delivery of new capabilities. Design and refine key marketing messages for your products. How do your products help users? What evidence have you collected that you can share?

Every piece of marketing content should support your product strategy — any misalignment here will create confusion and potentially turn off potential buyers.

N is for New Use Case

Stay alert for examples of customers or users who are using your product in new, innovative or unusual ways. Perhaps a customer from a different industry vertical or geographical area is showing interest. Explore these scenarios in detail. Is it just an outlier or could there be an untapped growth opportunity across similar firms?

O is for On-boarding

On-boarding is the process by which new customers and users become active on your product. The goal is to reduce as much friction as possible and to provide engaging relevant guidance at the appropriate time. This is especially important if you use a subscription pricing model. You don’t want your users cancelling and posting negative feedback because the product was too hard or users couldn’t find and use key features.

P is for Product Led Growth

Product led growth is a business methodology where acquisition, expansion, conversion and retention are all driven by the product itself. For this to work, the product onboarding has to be slick and in-app messaging needs to direct users naturally down the paths you desire.

Product led growth is well suited to productivity or speciality apps rather than complex Enterprise applications that may need to integrate with other applications or have high security and data privacy requirements.

Q is for Quantify

Good quality data from trusted sources is one of your primary tools to confirm your acquisition plan is on track and your ideas are working out in the field.

There are several key sources of useful data including:

a) Usage analytics from the product.

b) Traffic on your public web site — particularly the product and blog pages.

c) Customer survey and voting data.

d) Win / Loss information from your sales team.

If you are missing data for the key questions you would like answer, think about constructing an experiment or designing a survey to collect it. For example, you could write a blog article discussing a possible new feature and capture the number of views and comments to gauge the level of interest.

R for RFI/ RFP Management

Larger more expensive products will often be purchased via an RFI/RFP process. RFI stands for Request for Information and RFP stands for Request for Proposal. The RFP documents themselves give valuable insights into what buyers currently care about and will tell you who the real stakeholders and decision makers are within the organisation.

Review every incoming and outgoing RFP and track your win rates carefully. Answers to frequently asked questions can be collated and you could consider using a specialist RFP tool such as Loopio or RFP365 to further optimise your response process.

S is for Sales Team

If you have a direct sales team, then product management has some important responsibilities as described in the list below:

a) Ensure there is an effective product demo. There should be a script available and a demonstration site populated with relevant data that is always ready and available to use. You may wish to create demonstration scripts that last 5 minutes, 15 minutes and 30 minutes to fit the time allocated.

b) Attend as many sales meetings as possible, especially prospects that would be strategic wins, are using competitive products or are considering a new use case. These meetings are also a good opportunity to check on how the sales team are delivering your product messages and how they are landing with your target clients.

c) Set up effective mechanisms for your sales team to provide feedback from their prospects, customers and the market. Pro-actively seek feedback and speak to your sales team to understand their challenges and successes.

d) Collate and distribute a weekly or monthly digest containing relevant industry news, new customer information, competitive intel and new product innovations and features.

T is for Training

Consider how best to train your internal colleagues and your external users. Keep documentation up to date and deliver in a range of formats to ensure everyone engages with the material. Pro-actively ask for feedback and make improvements and adjustments as required. Train key people in person where possible — investing now will build future product experts and champions in various departments, functions and locations.

Use gamification, competitions and awards to provide incentives to employees and users to complete training. Users will see value in gaining certifications in your product that can be listed on a CV or Linkedin profile. These certifications can also position your product as a credible industry baseline tool.

U is for Unite with a Shared Product Goal

Rally your team and in fact every member of the company by defining and communicating a product goal. The product goal should inherit from the company vision and values. For example,

“Our product helps doctors by decreasing the chance of an appointment no-show.”

Or

“Our product helps car manufacturers increase battery life by 20% whilst reducing battery production costs by 30%”

The goal should be simply stated, tangible and measurable.

V is for Versatility

A good growth product manager is versatile. Your team will need very different things from you at different times in the product lifecycle. It’s one of the things that makes the job interesting. Expand your skillset and knowledge across multiple areas: marketing, development, data science, sales and simple financial modelling.

X is for X-Factor

Consider what the X-factor is or could be for your product. Are the features deeper or more sophisticated than the competition? Are there more integration options? Is the product easier to use? Keep building on the primary strength of the product and promote it heavily. Try to pick and nurture an aspect of your product that is difficult to reproduce.

Y is for Year End Review

Pick the same time of year every year and write a review of the last 12 months. What worked well? What did you learn? Is the product heading in the right direction or do you need to pivot to something else? Write down your predictions, thoughts and hopes for the next year.

Get out of the office and away from your usual work environment and plan a reward for when you complete your review. Something you enjoy and will look forward to — product growth can be difficult and so you will have definitely earned it.

Z is for Zzzz

Manage your energy levels and ensure you are keeping fit, health and getting plenty of rest. Sustained product growth is a marathon not a sprint and it is important that you find activities that will prevent burnout and will maintain your motivation to succeed during the difficult times.

You will make better decisions if you are awake, fit and healthy and these ultimately will have more of an effect than those extra few late night hours.