|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
At some point, every SaaS company needs to consider its growth strategy.
How will you attract and retain new prospects? Who should have ownership of your lead generation, sales enablement and customer success efforts? Perhaps most importantly of all, what is your core selling point, and how do you intend to communicate that to prospective customers?
Product-led growth represents arguably the most compelling answer to all three of these questions.
What is Product-Led Growth?
Also known as product-driven growth, product-led growth (PLG) makes your software the focal point of your company’s go-to-market efforts. While your sales and marketing team may still play a role in identifying and attracting leads, it’s your product that ultimately drives customer acquisition and retention.
A product-led sales strategy differs from the traditional sales-led approach in a few key ways:
- In PLG, experience and engagement are prioritized above all else.
- PLG sales funnels are characterized by having more self-service touchpoints and less direct interaction between prospects and the sales team.
- PLG strategies are generally built on continuous improvement and hands-on experiences.
Some examples of companies that have successfully executed a product-led growth strategy include:
- Slack, which spent several months after launch asking companies in its network to try its software and provide feedback, then used that feedback to zero in on exactly what its audience needed. From there, it largely relied on word-of-mouth to eventually grow to over 10 million daily active users.
- HubSpot, which focused on providing a range of free options and trials to users in lieu of relying exclusively on its sales team, which primarily engaged with higher-end customers. The company has also fully automated its purchasing and onboarding processes, allowing users to sign up and deploy the product entirely on their own.
- TypeForm, which creates the “aha!” moment as early as possible by having users create and customize their deployment through onboarding.
- DropBox, which incentivized its users to share and market its product through perks such as increased storage. The company also made it incredibly easy for Dropbox users to share links and files with non-users.
A well-executed product-led strategy can improve the user experience, increasing retention and satisfaction. It also tends to have lower acquisition costs when compared to other growth strategies, which also improves margins. Lastly, it promotes deeper collaboration between your company’s customer-facing teams, including sales, marketing and customer success.
There are a few caveats, however.
Product-led growth requires that you fully understand your audience, particularly with regards to why they might find value in your software. It also may not be well-suited for companies with particularly complex software or that lack the capabilities for self-service. If your product has an incredibly steep learning curve, sales-led growth may be your best option.
We should also note that you don’t have to exclusively focus on a product-led strategy. You can (and likely should) apply multiple growth strategies.
The 7 Best Product-Led Growth Software Tools
Now that we’ve discussed the basics about product-led growth, let’s wrap things up by going over a few product-led sales platforms your business could potentially use.
AirTable
AirTable is a powerful all-in-one digital collaboration platform that’s part relational database and part content management tool. While not strictly a sales platform, it can be immensely helpful in keeping your various customer-facing teams organized. Its drag-and-drop interface and customizable fields even allow you to repurpose it into a CRM tool.
ClickUp
Another powerful workflow and project management platform, ClickUp is built on the philosophy that the first step in any successful growth strategy is to bring down data silos. Intuitive and fully customizable, the platform is also supported by a role-based AI assistant that can be used for everything from creating sales content to reviewing code.
Chameleon
Billing itself as a digital adoption platform for SaaS teams, Chameleon enables the seamless creation of no-code, self-service user onboarding, feature adoption and feedback collection solutions. With support for hundreds of software integrations, it connects seamlessly with other workflow and project management tools, all while making it easy to showcase product changes, feature updates, and more.
ZenDesk
ZenDesk is well known in the customer success world, and with good reason. It offers an incredibly robust portfolio of products and services designed to improve customer relations, including proactive outreach and self-service support.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a full-suite customer relationship management platform, enabling seamless management of the customer journey from first contact through to final sale. With an intuitive interface, automated data collection and sorting, and robust tracking and analytics, it’s everything your business needs to support a customer-focused growth strategy.
InterCom
InterCom serves as a combination helpdesk and lead generation tool. Backed by sophisticated artificial intelligence, it helps teams keep costs low while still offering proactive outreach and support for prospects and customers alike. More importantly, it’s entirely plug-and-play while also being incredibly simple to use and understand.
FrontEgg
It doesn’t matter what market or segment your SaaS company serves — you cannot afford to ignore cybersecurity. FrontEgg is built with that fact in mind, positioning itself as a user management and identity solution built for an era of product-led growth. It’s basically an intelligent, all-in-one Identity and Access Management Solution designed specifically for SaaS companies, and well worth a look if security is on your mind.
CloudShare
Hands-on experiences are arguably at the core of any successful product-led growth strategy. That’s exactly what CloudShare enables. Designed for ease of use, our centralized, cloud-based platform makes it brilliantly simple to create high-impact virtual training and product demos.
Leading enterprise organizations and Fortune 500s use CloudShare to optimize their sales and training environments, creating user-friendly, scalable virtual software experiences that truly impress.
Why not see for yourself? Book a demo, and we’ll show you how CloudShare can serve as the foundation of your SaaS company’s growth.
Recommended for you
Blog
