Unraveling the Five Pathways to Amplify Client Expansion via Product-Driven Advancement
Unraveling the Five Pathways to Amplify Client Expansion via Product-Driven Advancement
Product-led growth (PLG), commonly used in startups, is often touted as a quick method for B2B companies to expand their customer base. Its cost-effective nature stems from its reliance on straightforward products that allow self-serving purchases, eliminating the need for business developers or sales teams initially.
Small businesses, even traditional sales-driven ones, can benefit from this approach. By incorporating PLG strategies alongside their sales efforts, companies can accelerate growth and boost profitability. Here are five strategies to drive customer growth with PLG:
Step 1: Propel user growth to initiate the market.
PLG can foster rapid user growth by leveraging users as promoters. Offer free trials and create a product with a network effect, as users gain even more value as more individuals, teams, and even companies use it (e.g., Jira, Slack, or Calendly). Launch user referral programs to encourage users to share the product. Network and viral effects can drive "exponential growth" across various markets and accounts.
Step 2: Convert user-filled companies into product-qualified leads.
With users distributed across multiple companies, market sectors, and regions, PLG organizations can easily identify the most active accounts. Companies with a substantial number of active users can be transformed into new sales opportunities. This method tends to be less expensive than conventional top-funnel marketing efforts, and these product-qualified leads are deemed to be more valuable than typical leads.
Step 3: Leverage product analytics to improve the user experience and boost loyalty.
A product with a swift time-to-value is essential for PLG success and ultimately drives growth and retention for all promotional strategies. Integrate product analytics to pinpoint user challenges, optimizing the effort and time users invest to reach their desired outcomes. This product telemetry can be applied to both straightforward and complex software modules, enhancing the user experience and fostering ongoing loyalty.
Step 4: Use in-product, targeted messaging to upsell customers to higher tiers.
In PLG motions, the product acts as the primary marketing and sales medium. Craft contextual, personalized messages to present tips for specific tasks and showcase additional offerings that can enhance user value. Within existing workflows, alert users to new features, product extensions, or higher-tiered offerings. Offer trials of premium functions to help users explore new value before upgrading their purchase.
Step 5: Unite product- and sales-led efforts to expand into new buying centers.
Now that you've implemented a PLG strategy, leverage it to expand into new buying centers with traditional sellers' support. Account teams should discover new buyers and spot new use cases for offerings within existing accounts. Generate cross-selling opportunities through PLG motions using trials and referral programs to incentivize users to share across different buying centers.
PLG methods have produced positive results not only for smaller companies but increasingly for larger B2B firms as well. Combining bottom-up PLG strategies with traditional sales efforts has been shown to drive rapid and scalable revenue growth. Brands like Atlassian, Airtable, Dropbox, Calendly, HubSpot, and others have seen significant success from this PLG and sales synergy.
This post was penned by VP, Principal Analyst Beth Caplow and it originally appeared here.
Given the text, here are two sentences that contain the words 'enterprise', 'tech', and 'innovation':
The success of PLG in driving growth for brands like Atlassian, Airtable, Dropbox, and Calendly shows the potential for this innovative enterprise tech strategy to revolutionize B2B growth. As tech innovations continue to shape the business landscape, more and more enterprises are exploring product-led growth as a means of driving user adoption and accelerating revenue growth.