Emuparadise

Transforming your business is a big project that affects many departments and stakeholders. It is important to include them in the brainstorming and planning process to provide transparency and ease the transitions involved.

Product-led growth flips traditional Sales and Marketing-led models around by putting the product in the spotlight. This can bring many benefits to your organization.

Cost-Effectiveness

A key feature of Product-Led Growth is its ability to provide a more cost-efficient way to acquire and convert customers than traditional sales and marketing strategies. This is because PLG places the product at the center of user acquisition, monetization, and retention, and therefore creates a clear framework for internal teams to align on and measure success.

In addition, the adoption of a product-led strategy allows teams to leverage the information gathered through onboarding processes to better understand their users and deliver more personalized products. For example, onboarding teams can use feedback to enhance features and rework capabilities that aren’t getting the most user adoption, as well as prioritize new features based on customer needs and motivations.

For these reasons, product-led growth is quickly gaining momentum as the dominant software business strategy. It’s a model that offers a range of major benefits, from increasing revenue to improving user satisfaction levels. It’s a win-win strategy that should be considered by every company looking to scale.

Instant Gratification

The best part about product-led growth is that it lets businesses grow without spending tens of thousands of dollars on paid advertising or having salespeople call leads. Instead, the product itself becomes the main driver of acquisition, monetization, and retention.

For example, Slack, a popular instant messaging app for teams, allows users to sign up and start using their first base channel with minimal to no human intervention. Then, once they’re ready to communicate with their team more seriously, they can upgrade to a paid plan that unlocks advanced features.

Other companies, such as HubSpot, make it easy for prospects to try out different products with a free trial that automatically converts into a paying account. These tools, which are a great complement to more traditional marketing and sales tactics, help reduce lead and customer acquisition costs while enabling them to focus more on building a world-class product experience. Then, their customers and prospects are able to discover the value of those experiences themselves, reducing the need for marketing and salespeople to explain those benefits.

Self-Sufficient in Promoting itself

Companies embracing product-led growth are becoming more self-sufficient in promoting themselves as well, freeing up marketing and sales teams to focus on more strategic projects. As a business embraces product-led growth, it shifts the responsibility of attracting and retaining customers from salespeople to its digital product experience.

While the benefits of a great product and a strong user experience are irrefutable, many businesses struggle to make the shift from a sales- or marketing-driven mindset. But there are several ways a business can leverage product-led growth to achieve its organizational goals.

The most obvious way a company can move toward product-led growth is to offer freemium products and trial versions of its software. This allows the company to onboard users and convert them to paying customers with very little human intervention. Additionally, it gives the company an opportunity to collect feedback from users that can be used to inform onboarding and conversion strategies in the future.

Increased Product Feedback

Unlike traditional models that rely on salespeople and marketing strategies to drive acquisition, monetization, and expansion, product-led growth centers around a world-class product experience. It’s the product that does the heavy lifting of bringing in new users and converting them into customers, whether through a free trial period, a paid subscription model, or an initial purchase.

For example, Slack and Amazon are both examples of products that were built to solve real user problems — and did so in a way that was so useful that millions of people adopted them and became repeat customers. As a result, they didn’t need to spend money on ads or hire countless salespeople to help them scale.

To make product-led growth work, the whole company needs to buy into it and focus on outcomes. That’s why it’s important to align the C-suite on a vision for product management that includes cross-functional leadership. For example, the chief product officer should lead a change in culture from being marketing-led to being product-led and making sure that all of the teams are focused on driving customer outcomes.