Getting your product to users for quick adoption doesn’t just involve traditional marketing. But also offering them the best version of your product to keep them engaged and spreading the good news to their friends and family. 

Choosing the product-led approach to acquire customers is one of the best ways because all you need to do is focus on offering your customers value, in the best way possible, when they use your product; while the rest follows.

Many B2B SaaS companies use product-led sales models today, one of which is Canva, offering a free version of their product with limited features; so users can try out and determine if they want to become subscribers.

TL;DR

Product-led sales is a business strategy that relies on using the product as a primary means of acquiring customers, in the sense that, if they have a great experience, they yell it to their family or friends – a free form of marketing. 

A lot of B2B SaaS companies employ a product-led sales model as a primary means of marketing their product. 

To adopt a product-led sales model; 

• You should ensure your team, across all departments, is prepared to develop a full product with a great user experience. 
• Understand your customer’s pan-points to offer them quality feedback. 
• Finally, build a great product demo for users to test and give feedback. 

The major reasons why businesses adopt a product-led sales model are because: 

• Adopting a PLS model costs less to acquire customers. 
• Using a PLS model, customers get offered a better user experience. 
• In a PLS model, users adopt products quickly. 
• By adopting a PLS model, you can increase your company’s revenue growth. 

Product-led sales or PLS is a business strategy that uses a product as the primary means of acquiring customers, making and keeping them engaged, and generating revenue. Businesses use this model instead of wasting their lead generation strategy on marketing and sales. 

Prerequisites to Adopting a Product-Led Sales Model

1. Make Necessary Plans 

Before adopting a PLS model, you should make key preparations to ensure your team is ready. This involves your team working and collaborating to develop your product fully. A major difference between a sales-led and a product-led strategy is that in product-led, every team works with one goal in mind, developing the product, as opposed to a sales-led model.

2. Understand Your Customers

You should understand your customer’s pain points and get feedback from them, especially when and after they use the product. Then, use that data to solve their pain points by developing your product in such a way that it solves their needs. 

3. Build a Quality Product Demo

To have a successful product-led sales model, you must develop an interactive product demo for your prospective customers. They should use it to understand its features and what it can do for them, as regards solving their problems. 

Your demo should be short and engaging because users have a short attention span. Also, your demo should highlight a problem your prospective users face, and then it should offer them a solution and the benefit they get if they use the product. 

Benefits of Adopting a Product-Led Sales Model

It costs less To Lower Acquire Customers

Adopting a PLS model to promote your product is an easy way to acquire customers. The reason is that you don’t need much effort on a marketing strategy. All you need is to develop a great product that users need. That way, users can try out the product before making a purchase. 

Better User Experience

Since PLS requires businesses or companies to show users the value of their product to customers quickly, they tend to reach their “AHA” moment quickly. Prompting a good user experience. 

Increased User Adoption

With the PLS strategy, users get to meet their needs. When they use the freemium and free trial model, it allows users to experience the value and benefits firsthand.

Accelerated Revenue Growth

Adopting a PLS model is an important strategy to grow your revenue. So in this model, users try out your product before making a purchase, and it increases the likelihood of them converting them into paying customers. Also, this model removes barriers to entry; like high startup costs. Thus saving costs to acquire new customers and this enables faster growth for product-led companies. 

How are Product-Led Sales Different from Other Sales Models?

The main differences between product-led and sales-led are: 

Product-led	Sales-led
In product-led, the product’s pricing model is usually self-service or freemium, that’s not the case in sales-led.	In sales-led, pricing models include competitive, penetrative pricing, etc.
In a product-led, usually, a salesperson is not involved in the sales process. Unless there is a need for it.	For sales-led, a representative guides users through the sales process.
Product-led involves a freemium self-service pricing model.	At the same time, sales-led doesn’t usually have transparent or flexible pricing tiers. Users can choose from.
PLS focuses on providing the user with a great experience	Sales-led focuses on providing users a great experience, but not so much as product-led sales.
Product-led requires less set-up and training.	Sales-led products require more work when setting up the sales process and training the user.

The main differences between product-led vs partner-led: 

Product-led	Partner-led
In product-led, the main focus is on product development.	Unlike in a partner-led strategy, businesses usually collaborate with partners to drive business.
product-led partners are not needed to generate leads.	In partnership, partners play a crucial role in identifying leads and closing deals for businesses. At the same time, businesses offer the necessary resources and training for their partners to succeed.

Moving From a Traditional Sales Model to a Product-Led Sales Model

Start By Designing The New Customer Journey

To start moving from traditional sales to product-led, you need to understand your various users and their personas, then map them out in a flow chart. Also, identify friction points within the user journey and define potential touchpoints. 

Build Out New, Product-Led Experiences In Increments

Then build product-led experiences, thereafter, analyze the user product usage, and assess what aspect of the product-led experiences can be improved, such as web pages, product demos, etc. Your teams can begin to improve the journey and product experience by testing, making improvements, and measuring effectiveness. 

Key Components to Include in Your Product-Led Sales Strategy

Minimise Barriers and Friction

In PLS, the goal is for customers or users to use your product as early and quickly as possible. To make that happen, you need to remove all friction from the sign-up process. For example, avoid asking too much information, such as payment details or questions about intent, before they can use the product. 

Demonstrate Value Early 

Users must see the value in your product as quickly as possible, especially when executing a PLS strategy. So you must deliver them a good user experience for when they start to use the product.

This can lead to a high adoption rate, and your users will likely become customers at the end of the trial. To demonstrate value quickly, set up an email sequence to guide new users through a few essential tasks to help them see value quickly and achieve success quickly. 

Offer Users Feature They Need 

In adopting a PLS strategy, the features of your product, and how well they use it, determine how successful the product is. So it’s important to offer customers the tools and capabilities they need. It drives greater adoption, engagement, and referrals, which in turn builds your user base.

Ease-of-Use With The User Experience 

In PLS, when your customers use your product, it should be easy for them to use it. So, in general, the overall user experience should be an easy process, without friction, in such a way that it helps them achieve their goals. 

Your Product Should Have The Potential To Go Viral And Boost Organic Growth

Virality is important in PLS since you are not spending much cost and money on traditional marketing. So develop your product in a way where customers can share it with others through word-of-mouth. Referrals are a great way to boost virality, resulting in a self-sustaining growth cycle.

How product-led companies start with PLS

Before implementing PLS, your product should be suitable for this business model.

• Without a sales representative, can users identify its value quickly?
• What are the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors’ products?
• What makes your product stand out from the competitors?
• Is your product scalable? Can customers upgrade their plan on demand?

Gearing Your Organization For PLS Success

Once you ensure your product is ready for PLS, data is what you use to transition to a product-led growth model. Getting data-driven insights from metrics like activation rate, expansion revenue metric, user retention, and churn rate data will help you align your organization toward product-led growth. 

A Solid Techstack to Support Product-Led Sales 

Data Warehouse Tools

• Snowflake: With Snowflake’s Pocus platform, you can analyze data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

• BigQuery: With BigQuery, you can analyze your customers’ data and understand their preferences to create personalized recommendations.

• Amazon Redshift: With Amazon Redshift, you can analyze your sales data efficiently – sales transactions, product catalogs, and customer profiles.

Product Analytics Tools

• Mixpanel: You can use Mixpanel to understand if your product’s value aligns with what your customers expect from using the product. It’s mainly for product analytics.

• Amplitude: With Amplitude’s PLG features, you can analyze and visualize your customer journeys, identify engagement features, and pinpoint monetization journeys. 

• Heap: Using Heap’s analytics, you can get and visualize customer interactions with your product to evaluate user journeys. And identify areas where customers find value in your product, so they experience more value.

Data Enrichment Tools

• Clearbit: When using Clearbit, your team can use product signals to determine when and how to engage with customers by analyzing your active users and which features they are using. 

• FullContact: If you want to segment your customers and prospects based on their age, name, location, etc., to create an actionable audience for targeting, personalization, and insights. Then, you can use FullContact’s data elements to do so. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

• Salesforce: You can use Salesforce to capture information about your user journeys and how they use your product before payment. 

• HubSpot CRM: if you want to track how customers interact with your product, identify key touchpoints, and communicate with customers, to nurture your leads and increase conversions. Then you should use HubSpot CRM. 

• Microsoft Dynamics 365: You can use this platform to manage your sales cycle and create sales quotes, marketing campaigns, orders, and invoices.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) Tools

• Segment: You can use segments to track how customers use your product so you can identify areas for improvement. The segment tools can also be used for creating personalized customer experiences. 

• Blueshift: You can use Blueshift to create automatic marketing campaigns to deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

• Optimizely: You can use Optimizely for A/B testing, content management, and marketing. In all, it helps create great digital experiences for your customers. 

Marketing Automation Tools

• Marketo: it’s important for lead generation, and you can also use it to manage customer lifecycle campaigns.  

• ActiveCampaign: You can use ActiveCampaign to automate sales pipelines, and email workflows, manage leads, and monitor email analytics. 

PLS Metrics To Be tracked

Time to Value 

Time to value (TTV) is a metric that measures the amount of time it takes new users to see the value of your product. To have a good TTV value, focus on introducing key actions in your user onboarding experience – inviting colleagues to your platform and importing customer data.

TTV = TIME IT TAKES FOR USERS TO REALIZE YOUR PRODUCT’S VALUE. 

Product-qualified Leads

Product-qualified leads (PQLs) are users who have completed a key action when using your product. Most importantly, they have seen the value of using your product long-term. PQLs are typically activated users. To identify product-qualified leads for your product, you must set your product’s activation event and the actions that users take within your product. 

PQL = ACTIVATED USERS WITH A FREE TRIAL ACCOUNT. 

Expansion Revenue

Expansion revenue is a metric for measuring the revenue generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, and add-ons.

EXPANSION REVENUE = REVENUE GENERATED FROM EXISTING CUSTOMERS THROUGH UPSELLS, CROSS-SELLS, AND ADD-ONS.

Net Revenue Churn

Net revenue churn is the amount of money lost after accounting for new, expansion, or reactivated revenue. It’s important to keep your net revenue churn value, as low as possible, and this means not losing too many customers.  

REVENUE CHURN = REVENUE LOST IN A PERIOD – NEW AND EXPANSION REVENUE/ REVENUE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PERIOD. 

Virality

Product virality measures the rate at which users adopt your product. If your product’s virality is increasing, it’s a sign that users enjoy using your product and are sharing it within their networks.

VIRALITY = C(0) X K = NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS AT THE END OF A PERIOD. 

Is Product-Led Sales Right For Your Business?

If you need to scale your business quickly and increase its user base, then a product-led growth strategy can improve your business’s growth. While not all businesses will benefit from a full-scale PLS strategy, you can still incorporate it to be more product-led in your approach to growth. 

FAQs

1. What Makes Product-Led Sales?

A product-led sale is when a business turns prospects into customers by offering them a product for use without paying a dime or still offering them to use it for a limited time. Ultimately converting them to paying customers through a sales-led approach. 

2. How Do You Transition From Sales-Led To Product-Led?

The key to transitioning from sales models to product-led growth is to train your team to work on developing the product and ensure users adopt it. The product should be developed in such a way that people adopt it.

3. What Is Product-Led Content For Saas?

Product-led content is made to solve specific solutions offered by a SaaS product. Educating customers on the product’s features, benefits, and use cases, guiding them towards purchasing.

4. What Is the Goal of Product-led?

In Product-led sales and growth, the goal is to create a viral loop of organic growth, which is done when users share your product with their networks. 

5. What Is Product-led Content Marketing?

In product-led content marketing, you communicate the value of your product by creating content. Some common product-led content examples are how-to articles.