Adopting a “try before you buy” product sales mindset provides better customer outcomes. In that sense, product-led growth isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity.
Product-led growth (PLG) has become a favorite go-to-market strategy that uses your product to acquire, activate and retain customers, and the concept is creating a significant buzz inside the B2B SaaS ecosystem. Especially as a rapidly growing number of companies find success with it, following in the footsteps of early leaders like Slack, Zoom and Calendly.
Why is PLG so successful right out of the gate? Honestly, today’s B2B consumer has zero tolerance for digital inconvenience and insists on getting value first. The mere thought of a company trying to acquire a buy-in before tangibly demonstrating their value kills deals in a product-led world.
According to Gartner, 43% of B2B buyers say they would prefer a “rep-free” buying experience if given the option. Product-led growth is enabling the new wave of sales teams who need to factor a low-touch, self-guided process, but still deliver a demo that is powerful enough to close the sale. Putting the buyer in the driver’s seat from the beginning of their journey opens the door for a product-led approach that makes the prospect happy while accelerating pipeline.
This all sounds great in theory, but will this method drive the pipeline for a more complex product? Absolutely.
Freemium Isn’t the Same as PLG
You may have noticed a commonality across Slack, Zoom, and Calandly is that they all offer a freemium version, allowing the product and the market to drive a majority of their pipeline. Another feature these companies leverage to drive pipeline is harnessing the power of virality and the network effect. The more people that use the product, the more value everyone receives.
Is offering a freemium version the only way to become a thriving product-led growth company and drive the pipeline? What if your product is complex or focuses on privacy and security? Free trials would be unrealistic and unpromising.
While product-led B2B SaaS companies can and do drive pipeline by offering free trials or freemium versions, it’s not a realistic solution for everyone. Most companies don’t have the engineering resources to build out a free trial or freemium model that can still be product-led.
PLG leverages the existing features of your product to grow your company. You can have a multilayered, complex product while still being product-led. Here are three ways that product-led B2B SaaS companies can drive pipeline growth:
1. Fill the Pipeline with Interactive Product Tours
The art of storytelling has been a powerful tool for increasing understanding and building engagement with complex issues for as long as humans have walked the earth. It helps to solidify abstract concepts and simplify complicated messages—and ultimately, a much more powerful way of uniting an idea with an emotion.
When a product-led company tells great product stories they can make a complex product easy to digest. Cloudera, a hybrid data cloud company is a great example of this. Cloudera incorporates guided interactive product tours on their website that allow potential buyers to test drive the product before ever talking to sales.
When customers take an interactive self-guided tour, they can envision themselves using the product and reach an “aha” moment quicker – making them more likely to enter the sales pipeline. A product tour doesn’t just tell the customer how a product will solve their problems; it shows them.
2. Create Scalable Personalized Interactive Demos
Gartner reported that 50% of buyers cite demos as one of the most valuable materials during the buying cycle. One of the main advantages of leveraging a product-led sales motion is that companies can align with this customer desire while simultaneously driving pipeline and lowering its customer acquisition cost (CAC). Win-win-win!
The bottom line is that you use personalized product tours to effectively drive your outbound sales motion. Because the prospect can “try before they buy”, this lets you book meetings with better-qualified buyers. Once they book the meeting, a salesperson can skip the annoying part where they ask what the prospect’s general pain points are; using the first call to discover more about the prospect’s identified needs.
By using an interactive self-guided demo during the sales process the salesperson can act more like a consultant, looking for ways to help the buyer decide whether to purchase the product or not. The most effective way for product-led companies to sell is not to do a hard sell or an old fashioned demo process, but to deliver information that helps buyers figure out how to solve their business challenges and make their own decisions.
3. Speeding Up the Sale: Enabling Teams with Interactive Demo Leave-Behinds
Like product storytelling, demos resonate when prospects can imagine using the product. What better way to empower your potential buyer to get hands-on with your product and share it with other decision-makers than an interactive, post-demo leave-behind? This is a custom product tour replaces the boring one-pagers that no one ever reads.
By sharing a guided, custom tour to your potential customer, you enable them to effectively internally sell your product to the rest of the buying committee. Having the rest of the committee receive a gated, self-guided tour gives your reps the added advantage of learning exactly who interacted with the product and is likely on the buying committee.
Having these insights at your fingertips is not only a powerful way to see who has accessed your demo but also give you a way to see what features matter most to the members of the buying committee. SaaS companies that incorporate interactive demo leave-behinds can accelerate pipeline and turn prospects into champions faster than a New York minute.
Successful Product-Led Companies
As you can see, B2B SaaS companies can drive pipeline growth throughout the entire sales funnel simply by using their product. While implementing a product-led approach isn’t always easy, it’s not reserved solely for simple products or B2B companies that look more like they are B2C.
You also don’t need to be fully product-led to be considered product-led either—achieving product-led growth is a marathon and not a sprint. Ultimately, the more friction you can remove, the better. Any B2B SaaS company can adopt the core principles of product-led growth to improve the user experience, drive pipeline and increase sales. And all your potential buyers that want to “try before they buy” and experience will be waiting to thank you with open arms – and wallets.
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