Learn the fundamentals of Product-Led Growth from the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth in this practical, no-fluff course.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
✅ What it truly means to be product-led
✅ Why product-led growth is becoming of rising importance
✅ What the main benefits of product-led growth are
✅ How you can become product-led
✅ The role every team plays in creating a successful product-led business
And more!
Best of all, if you pass the exam at the end, you’ll get a PLG Fundamentals Certificate that you can show off to your colleagues. ????
Wes Bush:
How do you become product-led? Here's the thing, being product-led doesn't just mean: give your product team the reigns to run the entire business their way. Or you fire your entire sales team because the product now sells itself. Not at all. Being product-led actually takes an entire organization to make the strategy work. In a product-led organization, every single team plays an important part. A product-led marketing team, for instance, needs to ask themselves: well, how could we use the product as the number one lead magnet for our business? A product-led sales team needs to ask: how could we use our product data to qualify our prospects for us? That way we're having conversations with people that are already understanding what our value is all about. And a product-led customer success team might ask: how can we create a product that helps customers become successful without our help?
Wes Bush:
But how do teams work differently? That's what I'm excited to share with you today. As I go through this section, I want you to start writing down how your role might change as you make this transition to being product-led. So let's dig into the differences across these four teams. If you have more teams than this, that's totally fine. Just want to cover the bigger ones here. And then if you find your team, specifically, fits into a different box, that's okay. Just start thinking about how you can start using the product to help you accelerate your own grow and growth.
Wes Bush:
So, for marketing, how does a marketing team operate differently in a product-led versus a sales-led organization? There's a few things you might want to think about. What is the main call to action on your website? What are you measuring success by? Is it just marketing qualified leads or could it potentially be looking at product qualified leads? Which are leads that are using product data, as well as, still, firmographic data, to understand who might be a good potential customer for our business. And one of the other big shifts you need to make as a marketing team is really focusing on, not just the buyer, but also the user. How are you targeting them? What campaigns do you have to target the actual user of your product? Because sometimes, the user and the buyer are different people. We've all been taught in marketing to really focus on the decision makers and the buyers, and get them into your funnel. But, in a product-led world, we're really focusing on: how can we help our users become successful? And that actually starts with targeting users, so you can help them within your product. So, that's marketing.
Wes Bush:
When it comes to sales, think about: how does the sales team operate differently in a product-led company? Few things. Your pricing, that's a big change. A lot of companies going from sales-led to product-led, need to think about is: how do we charge our users? And oftentimes this comes down to creating a value metric, or something, to really make it easy for users to understand how much they're going to get charged for your product, as that might mean they have less discussions about pricing. And your sales team might also need to have more onboarding and experience around understanding what the product does and how it helps people. And maybe even doing some part of support, so they can be the customer or user's advocate throughout their journey.
Wes Bush:
And a big shift for sales teams is, really, instead of just focusing on marketing qualified leads, which is people who might've filled out some content on the website and absorbed it into their brain, they might be focusing on people who have actually experienced the value of the product and are, more so, helping them build an internal business case within their company. And so, those are some of the bigger fundamental shifts for sales.
Wes Bush:
And when we think of support, supports a really fascinating team within a product-led business. Because a lot of people think, "Hey, there's not much going on there in a product-led business." But, long and behold, support needs to operate a lot more efficiently. Just think about this: you go from just having demo requests and maybe not too many signups or new customers needing supports help. But if you switch from that to a freemium model, long and behold, it could be almost overnight, and within weeks, where you're realizing the amount of tickets coming in for our product, amount of support free users need, is skyrocketing. So support really needs to be a strategic part of this solution, because they have to do less handholding and be more proactive, versus just simply being reactive in this whole movement.
Wes Bush:
And then, from a product team, you really need to start thinking about the difference. Features, for instance, can be thought of as growth levers. How could a specific feature, maybe you release entirely for free, just help you hit your marketing goals? And the self-serve product team might have revenue target internally. We've seen that again and again, in a ton of product-led teams. And they have to be more engaged with all teams to really help the rest of the company understand how they could use the product to hit their goals. And one of the big, last, fundamental shifts here, is that you really need to be focusing on creating products that drive usage, and not just service big accounts and build features for those big accounts.
Wes Bush:
So the biggest difference between all this, when we're looking at sales-led and product-led organizations, it really comes down to: how do we define success? And in a traditional sales-led company, success is often defined as closing a deal. We ring that bell to signify success. We've closed a deal. It's exciting. Whereas in a product-led company, success takes on a whole new meaning. Product-led companies live and die by user success. If your users can't figure out how to get value from your product, game over; you won't be able to make the model work. But deliver value upfront before a paywall, and you won't just have a new customer, you'll also have an advocate. And that's because your users success will eventually become your success.
Wes Bush:
That's the secret behind product-led growth. When you align your company's success with your users success, something incredible happens. It sends signals to everyone on your team that this is an organization that believes its product isn't just something you sell, it's how you serve others. And in the next lesson, I'm going to dive even deeper into how you can build a successful product-led business. I'll see you in there.
