Communicating your value is the unshakeable core of a successful product-led growth strategy. If you have simple pricing tiers and plans, users will upgrade on their own. If you have complicated pricing or users have to reach out to understand your “unique” pricing model… game over, you’ve lost a ton of sales you didn’t even know you could win.
In this course, we’ll cover:
Wes Bush:
So, the last piece here that I'll touch on, as it relates to the bowling alley framework and how you can get people to upgrade very quickly, without much handholding, it really just comes down to your messaging. How are you prompting people to upgrade? Think about it.
Wes Bush:
So, someone experiences the value of your product. They've got to the desired outcome. Now, what do we do? And this is where a lot of people, a lot of companies, not to pick on people, but a lot of companies, I'll pick on companies. A lot of companies forget that whenever people experience that desired outcome of their product, they forget that that's actually when their product sold itself. That's really why I called the book "Product led growth, how to build a product that sells itself." It wasn't the fact that your sales team just becomes irrelevant. No. It's fact that whenever you deliver on your value, that's when your product has quite literally sold itself.
Wes Bush:
And so, to get it to the finish line for that deal, we need to figure out what is the best way to get these people to upgrade? And so whenever it comes to, let's say you have a very high ACV or contract value, there might be a sales outreach that you could do. Someone has experienced that value. You might label this person as a product qualified lead internally, sales will outreach them and try and offer some more value or help them out to get more value from the product and build out internal business case. So they're adding a ton of value in this case.
Wes Bush:
You could, if you want to have more of a touchless experience, you could send them a case study with the main call to action of really just being to upgrade. And in those case studies, what I always recommend is well, focus on what are the biggest objections that someone's going to have? Because for the majority of the people you're going to be upgrading, you're not going to talk to them.
Wes Bush:
And so, that's crazy to think about. A lot of people are just going to purchase your product without ever talking to you, but do they still have objections? A hundred percent. Their thinking to themselves, "Oh my goodness, this product is very expensive." Or, "Oh my goodness, this product, I mean, I don't know, there's some other problem with this product."
Wes Bush:
So, bring a customer and find someone who said that exact same thing. And they said, "I thought this product was going to be so expensive, but I just didn't know how valuable it was." Show them that case study, put their face and let your customer sell the product for you as well, to really resonate with them and conquer those objections before they get to that upgrade experience and they say, "Oh no, it's too expensive. I don't care about this right now."
Wes Bush:
And so, that's what you have to do and think about as it relates to your conversation bumper, and this can be done in email. It can be done in in-app experience, but it just has to be communicated to these people in one of those methods.
Wes Bush:
Then there's your trial expire email. If you're using a trial, yes, you can have that. I usually don't have these in a lot of the customers and clients we work with, but let's say for instance, you have an opt-out free trial. So you ask for a credit card before someone signs up. And so, in that case, you absolutely a hundred percent, I encourage you to have a trial expire email where you let people know maybe three or seven days out before the trial expires. Hey, just a heads up. You have this amount of time. If you do not want to continue with this product, click here and we'll not bill you, because that stuff's super annoying and really hurts your brands When someone wastes a lot of money on your product without knowing it, because they just forgot, because he didn't remind them.
Wes Bush:
And then there's also, you could have a trial extension. If people don't convert at the end, you could ask them for a survey. And all of these conversational bumpers are focused on how can we help you become a paying customer. Even the post-trial survey, a lot of people think, "Hey, that's just a opportunity to learn and see what we could have done different differently." And I beg you to think bigger. That survey can be the difference between someone just never coming back to your product and someone having a second reason to come back and check out your products.
Wes Bush:
I'll give you an example, because I feel like the team at Autopilot has completely changed my perspective on surveys. So here's what they did.
Wes Bush:
Whenever someone doesn't convert for Autopilot's free trial, what they'll do is they'll ask you a very specific question. Like, "Well, why didn't you upgrade? Why didn't you convert to Autopilot's premium account?" And they give you about six or seven different options.
Wes Bush:
So one of them will be the product's just too complex. So if you click that, guess what happens? They're going to actually connect you with one of their customer success reps who's going to go through and book a free call with you to make sure you understand how to use that product. So it's proactive. That survey is actually useful for the company and for the user. And that's the best kind of surveys.
Wes Bush:
If it's too expensive. Okay, they're going to shoot you a one-time discount so you can see for yourself how valuable it is because maybe hey, if we offer them this one-time 25% discount for the first three months, that'll be enough for them to justify hey, it's a really good discount. I can see if I can get the value from it and go from there.
Wes Bush:
So think about the survey and what are the questions you're asking and how could you reframe that to get people back onto why they should upgrade your experience.
