A Guide to Product-Led Growth for Saas Leaders

This article has been written for those Saas founders and leaders that are looking at solutions for the holes in the sales-led approach to product marketing. It is a guide to how to transform your business from sales-led to product-led and let your platform do all of the talking.

What is product-led growth?

Product-led growth or PLG is the process of software as a service or Saas companies letting their product do all of the selling and customer acquisition. This could mean that there is a large, small or no sales team at all, and that upsells and cross-sells are inbuilt to the system based on factors around platform usage. Sales teams are usually reserved for more complex enquiries under this approach.

In addition, it is far more than simply opening up your platform as a free trial, freemium model or demo introduction, and in some cases, if a product needs a demo it’s then hard to become product-led. These cases can happen in enterprise-level situations where the technology requires in-depth onboarding and or a lengthy sales process.

Furthermore, PLG should become a part of the culture of the business, as much as customer-centricity or an inbound marketing approach would be. But more than that, it’s about aligning the internal product, marketing, customer success and revenue teams to a defined approach. That being to let the product sell itself.

To achieve this goal, your Saas platform has to remove as much friction from the point of signup to time to value and enable your user to further delight themselves in a way shaped to their usage requirements. If you can achieve this, then you can expect shorter sales cycles, lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) and a higher revenue per employee (RPE).

Product led growth vs sales-led growth

HubSpot, a leading Saas software company, who also employ a product-led growth strategy have taken their inbound marketing approach and overlaid it with their product sales approach.

They offer a free CRM solution that is best in class in the mid-market space with a series of useful add-ons, upgrades and integrations. Time to value when signing up for the CRM is just a few minutes, making sure it’s easy to adopt the platform and get your reward.

But they have learned that just as buyers in the buying cycle are around 64% educated around the service or product they want/need to buy, they are now just as interested in achieving value in products without the intervention of the sales team.

No longer do they want or need a pushy sales rep interrupting their product experience, they want the support team to be there for them when they need them. Clever use of onboarding wizards and easy to use customer experience interfaces that help the customer try before they buy is where the action is now being fought.

Things like welcome messages, product tours (wizards), progress bars, checklists, onboarding tooltips all help your user find value and manage expectations during any period of assessment of your platform.

By operating with a product-led strategy, your platform will aim to use great inbound or product marketing with social proof to attract more individual users and open up the platform to easy adoption through the use of trials, freemium or demo led approaches.

It’s by adopting easy to use customer journeys, that deliver quick time to value, and that combine upsells and cross-sells in a timely fashion that product managers can expect to improve conversions and more paying customers.

Wes Bush, of the product-led institute, puts it down like this:

“Sales led companies represent the old way. It’s complex, unnecessary, expensive, and all about telling customers how the product will benefit them. These companies want to take you from point A to B in their sales cycle.

Product-led companies flip the traditional sales model on its head. Instead of helping buyers go through a long, drawn-out sales cycle, they give the buyer the “keys” to their product. The company, in turn, focuses on helping the buyer improve their life. Upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.”

For sales-led businesses, reasons to remain can be that your total addressable market or TAM is small and so being niche makes it better to lead with sales than your product. Often, when competing in larger, more competitive markets, leading with your product can make more sense.

Another reason for having a sales led model is launching a new product in a new market. If your product requires you to change the way users behave or approach a problem, that can often mean lengthy sales calls and education.

Beyond that, you have to look at your internal KPIs. Many companies ask their marketing teams to focus on marketing qualified leads or MQLs as the key indicator of opportunities but this takes away focus from learning what customers want, to discover what attracts them to sign up or convert.

That may sound like your CMO is doing their job, and they will be according to what they’ve been told to do, but it dismisses any opportunity to focus on why high MQLs may output low sales conversions.

A better practice might be to focus on converting more of the same type of MQL that actually convert into PQLs and expand on attracting more of those, aligning MQLs, sales qualified leads or SQLs and product qualified leads or PQLs to one goal. If not, high MQLs are a bit of a vanity metric to track.

So let’s dive deeper into your business model options.

Saas business models: Trial, freemium or demo

Product led businesses that have reached the “aha moment” then often need to decide how to proceed. By now you would have worked out the benefits of a PLG approach which include:

• Your platform becoming a dominant growth engine
• A wider top of the funnel
• Lower customer acquisition costs
• Faster or shorter sales cycles
• Compound growth over linear growth
• Rapid ability to scale globally
• High revenue per employee
• A better user experience

If marketing’s job is to closely align sales and marketing (smarketing), then product-led growth is to align “smarketing’’ with product and customer success. Successful products have acknowledged a transition toward PLG, but would have had to address the following business models to knit it together properly:

• Free trial — Usage-based free trial
• Freemium — New product-led arm of the business
• Free trial then freemium — Sandbox model
• Freemium then free trial — Hybrid

* productled.com

But to fully develop an “open-top model” you need to have a solid

1. Pricing strategy
2. Onboarding approach
3. Customer acquisition strategy
4. Upgrade strategy

But whilst this list covers many of the options available it isn’t exhaustive. However, the usage-based free trial is often adopted, as data from usage drives data for further sales and learning, both intrinsic to the success of your business. But do not assume a single model will be the ultimate choice for your product-led organisation, combination models are sometimes employed when upselling and cross-selling new products too.

When looking at your business model, how you open the top of your funnel is one thing, finding the right pricing model is completely another.

7 out of 10 companies do not research their pricing research — Profitwell

In line with your trial, freemium and demo decision, you need to align a pricing model. There are four you can choose from:

1. Best-judgement pricing
2. Cost-plus pricing
3. Competitor-based pricing
4. Value-based pricing

Each option has to be considered, but to do so you need to know the pros and cons:

1. Best judgement pricing is the least effective because you make assumptions on what buyers will pay based upon consensus amongst your team.
2. Cost-plus pricing means calculating your cost to sell and deliver the product and add a margin on top. The issue with CPP is you could cap your earnings and leave money on the table without realising it.
3. Competitor based pricing is really risky as using what your competitors are charging for their value and benchmarking that assumes they did their pricing research and have earmarked a healthy profit line. If they don’t and you do the same, you can find yourself out of business pretty quickly.
4. Value-based pricing is an optimal choice. According to Patrick Campbell, CEO of Profitwell , VBP is the only viable option for Saas. The sole purpose of your Saas business is to provide value to your customers and find out how much they are willing to pay for that product.

Combining your open-top model with your pricing model is the basis of your product go-to-market strategy, which is a key element of your product-led framework.

Build your product-led strategy framework

So far we’ve covered a lot of what needs to be done to kick-off your product-led initiative for your Saas business. We’ve explained what PLG is, the differences between a sales-led approach and a product-led approach, available business models and pricing strategies too.

So now we need to look at how you can define a framework that you can use to build a road map to implement your PLG goals.

Choose your open-top model

• Free trial — Usage-based free trial
• Freemium — New product-led arm of the business
• Free trial then freemium — Sandbox model
• Freemium then free trial — Hybrid

Choose your pricing model

1. Best-judgement pricing
2. Cost-plus pricing
3. Competitor-based pricing
4. Value-based pricing

Decide how fast you can show value to your users

Ask yourself the following questions when assessing your product experience:

• Do you have an immediate “quick win” with your product experience? Something meaningful, specific and relevant?
• Are key tasks completed and indicated clearly to the user?
• Are high-value behaviours clearly indicated by social and directional cues?
• Do wizards and tooltips drive meaningful actions in your product?
• Is all unnecessary friction removed from your products critical workflows?
• What outcome does your product help people with?

Choose your product-led growth model

1. Pricing strategy
2. Onboarding approach
3. Customer acquisition strategy
4. Upgrade strategy

Build your product led foundations

To capitalise on your PLG initiative and drive success from your chosen model after your product’s designed, you need strong foundations. To achieve this consider the following:

• Do you truly understand the value you provide to your users?
• Can you communicate the perceived value of your platform to potential users?
• Does your product deliver on its promise?

If you can master these three things you are well on your way to continued success…

Define your ongoing optimisation process

Finally but not all, you need to define your optimisation process. Things you need to consider when doing so are:

• Define the length of your sprint cycles? One month, 6 weeks, 8 weeks?
• Adopt the triple-A sprint methodology
• To Analyse: list all of the inputs that drive desired outputs. Track things like:
• the number of signups,
• number of upgrades,
• the average revenue per user,
• customer churn
• ARR
• MRR
• To Ask: consider these questions to optimise your business:
• Where do you want to go?
• What levers can you pull to get there?
• Churn
• The average revenue per user
• Number of customers
• Which inputs should we invest in?
• To Act: you have to action your findings

A summary for Saas product-led growth

In closing, I’m sure that this article provides you with a lot to think about, apply and recycle. The article is designed to help you move into a product-led mindset and then give you oversight and insight into how you would take this initiative forward and become your PLG champion within your organisation.

For more information about our PLG services click here.

At Digital BIAS we are certified experts in product-led consulting and can guide you through PLG initiatives in your Saas organisation. Our consultants are always open for informal discussions so please do get in touch.

Originally published at https://www.biasdigital.com.