Product-led growth is a strategy that relies on features and usage as primary drivers for customer acquisition, retention and expansion. Mastering growth is an iterative process that involves measurements, user engagements and experimentation.
Mickey AlonVP Engineering & Head Of The Israeli Innovation Center
Why Product-Led Growth is the most effective GTM strategy
1. Leading With Your Product is the
Most Effective Go-To-Market Strategy
Mickey Alon
CEO & Founder
Aptrinsic
Helping you build products that drive growth!
2. 2
About me
• Always been a product guy, passionate about innovation
• Former founder and CEO of InsightEra (acquired by
Marketo), GVP of Engineering @Marketo
• Co-author of “Mastering Product Experience”
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“
34%
of product features
go unused by customers
65%
of B2B buyers prefer NOT
to interact with a sales rep
52%
of users said that a bad
product experience
made them less likely to
engage with a company
Did you know?
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What is Product-Led Growth?
A go-to-market strategy that relies on product features & usage as
the primary drivers of customer acquisition, retention and
expansion.
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What is a Product Qualified Lead?
In a nutshell PQLs are qualified leads that demonstrated buying intent based on product interest,
usage, and behavioral data.
LEAD
PQL
Opportunity
Revenue
LEAD
Revenue
Opportunity
MQL
SQL
User and Account
demographics and
firmographics
Usage and frequency metrics
Engagement metrics
Package limits
Support metrics
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What are the benefits of a
Product-Led Growth Strategy?
Aligned with how
customers want to buy
Able to personalize experience
earlier in buying cycle
Product usage is better
correlated with buying intent
Focuses sales, product and success
around solving customer problems
Build innovative products that people
love to use
Another key thing that is happening with SaaS companies, is scale challenges from customer acquisition costs.
If you think about it as us coming from a very Sales-led process during the SaaS 1.0 era, and that during our time at Marketo,
we helped pioneer less expensive Marketing-led approaches with broad demand-gen for generating leads that were funneled
into Marketing Qualified Leads during the SaaS 2.0 era.
We made improvements to the expensive Sales-led approaches but that wasn’t enough.
Next
And so, in the SaaS 3.0 era, we believe that to get more cost effective, you will need to harness the product itself as the tool to help you get lower touch and more qualified leads.
We are calling these Product Qualified Leads that ware based on the behavior of prospects during a trial to understand and guide customer to see the initial value of your offering.
There are three key ways in how a product-led GTM strategy is different from what we do today.
First, in the current model, companies tend to gate their content in order to generate leads and sometimes hide their product
until after first sales contact.
In product-led, we believe you need to get customers into your product earlier and provide more
personalized, self-service journeys.
Second, in the current model, companies are focused on marketing and sales funnels and the size of these funnels.
In product-led, we believe that you get better sales efficiency by focusing on the customer in the product throughout the lifecycle.
And third, in the current model, we saw product teams playing a more limited role in customer acquisition and adoption.
In product-led, and what makes me happy, is that product leaders are becoming more responsible for these things, including the ROI of R&D spend.
The other I like to use is Slack. Everyone knows the story here, but their freemium model has allowed
them to become the fastest growing company of all time. This is very much a great example of a
product-let company that has great onboarding, aided adoption and upsell capabilities.
The North Star metric is the one that shows the true success of your product. A good North Star metric is driven by the value your product provides to your users.
This metric differs from business to business. Uber might focus on the number of drivers hired and the number of rides given, whereas an operational app like SFDC might measure Daily Active Users (DAU)/Monthly Active Users (MAU) focusing on retention and expansion. Then again, a fast-growing startup will usually focus on New Users (i.e., customer acquisition). In most cases, the North Star metric is a combination of user behavior correlated with core feature usage and business results.
The North Star metric is the one that shows the true success of your product. A good North Star metric is driven by the value your product provides to your users.
This metric differs from business to business. Uber might focus on the number of drivers hired and the number of rides given, whereas an operational app like SFDC might measure Daily Active Users (DAU)/Monthly Active Users (MAU) focusing on retention and expansion. Then again, a fast-growing startup will usually focus on New Users (i.e., customer acquisition). In most cases, the North Star metric is a combination of user behavior correlated with core feature usage and business results.
Product-qualified lead (PQL)is a prospect that signed up and demonstrated buying intent based on product interest, usage, and behavioral data. PQLs provide a more accurate method of tracking customer journeys from signup to x-sell/upsell. This is a key metric for any company that’s transitioning to a product-led GTM strategy.