Does delivering first and selling afterwards sound tempting?
If you sell software services, I imagine you have at some point had an uneasy feeling in your stomach once the contract was signed. Because now you have to deliver. And you do not know when that will happen, or whether it will happen the right way. It is entirely possible to make that experience far more comfortable.
Product Led Growth is one of the pillars of Enin's sales strategy. Using products and solutions to attract users does something exciting to the sales process: it turns automatically into a buying process. That makes the sales function far more efficient.
When the timing is right, the customer buys the product they have already tinkered with, contributed ideas to and recommended to others. By letting customers use you as a sounding board whenever they need it, they will give you valuable input on your value proposition.
Here we explain a little more about what it means to use products and services as your primary go-to-market tool:
What is Product Led Growth (PLG)?
In this strategy you target users rather than buyers. When users are happy and find your product useful, they will spread it and recruit new users far more effectively than traditional sales processes or marketing can.
Why does Product Led Growth make the sales department more efficient?
When the sales process becomes a buying process, it is the user who decides what value they are buying and which features matter most for solving their challenges. The sales department gets to talk to customers who are glad to hear from them, who see the relationship as a partnership and who have a degree of commitment. That in turn gives a higher hit rate and far less time spent on inaccurate forecasts and wasted activity with completely the wrong timing.
Which companies are suited to this strategy?
PLG is particularly well suited to SaaS (software as a service) companies, or to services where access to the product can be granted quickly, ideally automatically and cost-efficiently. It also helps to have either an intuitive service or training in the form of short videos, for example.
An FAQ section, or somewhere customers can talk to others in the same situation, is also part of the strategy.
How do you get more users, and what is the benefit?
If you have a feature that lets a few super users add other users internally in their own company, usage can grow in scope without you having to be involved. That does of course require the service itself to deliver value after as few keystrokes as possible. It has to be easy to understand how the service solves time-consuming, risky or difficult tasks.
More users means you can gather more valuable experience, statistics and data.
What does it take to succeed?
For your product to be prioritised, it has to deliver more value and have a better user interface than your competitors. Or be completely unique. That simple, and that difficult. Once the user has experienced enough value, a targeted and friendly approach from the provider has to be so easy to say yes to that it becomes hard to find excuses to decline.
Want to know more about how this works?
We have taken a lot of inspiration from OpenView's blog and you can certainly do the same.
We like talking to smart people and are happy to share our experience. Get in touch with us if you want to work together, use us as a sounding board or have questions. We would love to learn more about how you work.
For a long time, the value propositions put to management decided software purchases. Availability and technology have made the end user steadily more important. So the trick is to speak to them and deliver value. Development can be costly and slow, but the delivery does not have to be.
