Adding A Product-Led Growth Strategy To A Traditional B2B Organization
As the benefits of a product-led growth strategy become clear, many B2B organizations that have long leveraged traditional sales motions are seeking to integrate this strategy. While the traditional B2B approach relies on the sales team to move customers through their buying journey, product-led growth focuses on the product as the primary driver.
Benefits Of A Product-Led Growth Strategy
B2B organizations are seeking to add product-led growth components to gain the following benefits:
- Improved user experience (UX). Product-led growth strategies are successful when the product moves the customer along to value (sometimes called the “aha!” moment) prior to the selling organization collecting any payment. Companies that prioritize UX are more likely to create offerings that are intuitive and easy to use and allow the customer to quickly experience value.
- Customer needs mindset. For the organization to realize product-led growth, its products must address common customer pain points. Companies that are making the right move to pursue this strategy will naturally focus on talking to customers on a continuous basis, making the customer-obsessed mindset a habit.
- Lower customer acquisition costs. Product-led growth can lower customer acquisition costs through viral sharing of the offering. In a product-led growth strategy, the focus is on creating offerings that are inherently viral, either through incentives to invite others to use the product or through the improved value from network effects. This can lead to faster and less costly user growth.
These all help drive improved results, including the increased scale of product growth, improved customer satisfaction, and higher retention rates.
Steps To Add A Product-Led-Growth Strategy
Integrating product-led growth with the traditional B2B sales motion can be challenging and might be best initiated within specific product areas. Consider the following opportunities:
- Identify common customer problems. Identify a common pain point or problem that your organization already addresses — or might address in the future. Product-led growth efforts tend to work well when they address pain points that are broadly felt among many current or potential customers. When a common need is well met by a product, it is more likely to drive the word-of-mouth marketing, customer advocacy, and product sharing that is crucial to the success of product-led growth.
- Shift your focus to user pain points. B2B enterprises tend to focus more broadly on functional or organizational problems. Product-led growth strategies are successful when they focus on user problems or jobs to be done.
- Focus on simple solutions. Product-led growth offerings are more successful when they deliver value quickly and easily. Customers are more likely to experience the benefits from simple, easy-to-understand solutions, and quick value delivery fosters product sharing, retention, and customer satisfaction and engagement.
- Shift to a product-first mindset. This strategy requires a shift from traditional marketing approaches to focusing on how the product itself can drive growth. Organizations must focus investments on developing strong UX and in-product elements that will encourage engagement, cross-sell, and upsell.
- Build a self-service workflow. The economics of product-led growth rely on a workflow that attracts users and quickly gets them to realize value. Work on testing, iterating, and improving on a self-service process in which customers can sign up, onboard, and intuitively get value from the product.
- Be where the customer is. Product-led growth approaches often lead to products that integrate with other tools, platforms, or ecosystems that customers already use. Organizations leverage this by positioning the offering where the customer is already active and engaged. Consider how you can use integrations with ecosystems and marketplaces to position the offering in line with the customer.
- Identify the threshold for sales’ involvement. Once an account reaches a threshold of users and usage, initiate sales’ involvement to establish the business at the account level. Leverage user data and value delivered for upsell to an enterprise account.
For more about how to leverage product-led growth practices, join us at this year’s B2B Summit North America on June 5–7 in Austin, Texas and digitally.