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Installing the ProductLed System – A Simple Step-By-Step Roadmap
Surface-level PLG isn’t going to cut it. Ninety-seven percent of buyers want to try before they buy. To succeed with PLG, you need to create the right environment for it to succeed.
It’s not enough to just be good at PLG or have a good product-led organization. It’s about integrating the two. Becoming product-led is how you make it happen.
The ProductLed System is your fastest, simplest way to do this.
With the nine components dialed in, you will grow faster with less effort. There’s a strategic order to install the ProductLed System. Follow the roadmap laid out in this book:
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Stage 1: Build an Unshakeable Foundation
The goal is to transform your business from “scattered” to “streamlined.” You achieve that by rolling out these three components.
Craft a Winning Strategy: You need a strategy that makes your company the obvious choice in your market. Align your company, team, and resources around a clear theory on how you will win. Without this alignment, success is unlikely. The Bullseye Strategy Framework is how you make this happen.
Identify Your Ideal User: After locking in your strategy, the next step is to understand your ideal user better than anyone else in your market. This deep understanding is crucial for creating an intentional model and irresistible offer. The User Endgame Roadmap Model will guide you through this process.
Design an Intentional Model: It doesn’t matter what free model you use. What matters is identifying the challenges your users need to overcome to feel like they’ve reached the “next level” in your product and giving them everything they need to beat those challenges. The DEEP Model guides you through this.
Collectively, these three components give you the foundation you need to build a product-led business. If you skip one or do it in the wrong order, you risk building your business on a shaky foundation.
Stage 2: Unlock Self-Serve Customers
The goal is to shift from “high-touch” to “zero-touch” customers. This gives your business enormous leverage to scale—you don’t have to hand-hold each customer. The following three steps unlock self-serve customers.
Build an Irresistible Offer: Your users are inundated with so many different solutions to solve their problems. You must have an irresistible offer that speaks to them and differentiates why your solution is the best. When you have an irresistible offer, you’ll attract your ideal users and increase their motivation to use your product. The 5-Star Offer Generator is how you make this happen.
Design Frictionless Onboarding: Users need to experience the value of your product on their terms to feel confident purchasing it without a sales call. To get the majority of users to experience a First Strike, you must craft an experience that is effortless to sign up, get to value, and upgrade. The Bowling Alley Framework is how you do that.
Unlock Powerful Pricing: To turn users into high-paying customers, you must align your pricing with the value users receive when using your product. Without this win-win scenario, you’ll aggravate users and kill your chances of automatically growing customer lifetime value. The Value Ladder Framework helps you achieve powerful pricing.
These three components help you unlock self-serve customers. Each one builds on the other, so don’t skip ahead if this is your first time implementing the ProductLed System.
Stage 3: Ignite Exponential Expansion
The goal is to transform your business from “linear” to “leveraged” growth. You achieve that by rolling out these three components.
Access Actionable Data: Not all data is created equal. You must know what your #1 bottleneck is at all times. To do that, you need to build a ProductLed Scorecard and update it weekly to understand exactly what’s happening in your business and where you should focus. The True North Framework helps you pinpoint those critical metrics.
Adopt a Growth Process: You and your team need regular, structured meetings to stay aligned with your long-term vision and focused on your most important short-term projects. This discipline is key to achieving sustainable growth, which you can unlock by implementing the Predictable Growth Process.
Build an Elite Team: Create an environment where your team consistently improves the skills they develop and the value they bring to your organization. To develop world-class capabilities, design a lean team, regularly audit their performance, incentivize what matters, and help them grow to their full potential. You can unpack this in the Elite Team Flywheel.
These tools will become essential to your daily operations, compounding your growth over time and positioning you as the obvious choice in your market.
Only the Paranoid Survive
What makes the ProductLed System unique is that it’s a GTM-operating system—not a one-and-done effort. The minute you update any component, it starts to decay.
Your strategy is most relevant the day it’s created. Your offer is most unique the day it’s crafted. Your pricing is most powerful the day it’s launched.
To stay at the cutting edge of your market, you must constantly update each component. At the very least, you should go through a full cycle of the ProductLed System once every year. For faster-growing companies, you might complete between 2 to 4 cycles annually.
Your GTM strategy needs to evolve based on market insights, changes in customer behavior, and the competition. It pays to be paranoid.
But let’s put the paranoia aside for a second and unpack how to get the rest of your team on board to implement the ProductLed System with you.
Quick Start Action Plan
- Educate Your Team on the ProductLed System
The whole premise of this book is that you must build a product-led organization that can support world-class PLG. To do that, your team must understand what the system is all about and the reasoning behind it. You want a team that can push back and debate with you on every one of these components.
To make it easier for your team to learn about the system, they can:
- Listen to The ProductLed Playbook for free on the ProductLed Podcast.
- Pick up a copy of The ProductLed Playbook on Amazon or wherever they can purchase a copy.
- Watch our free ProductLed Masterclass at ProductLedPlaybook.com. It’s easy for you to share and align your team on what the ProductLed System is all about.
- Benchmark Your Company
Implementing the ProductLed System will take some time. We created the ProductLed Assessment to assess your progress and learn which component(s) you need to dial in to scale faster.
By analyzing your business on the nine key components of the ProductLed System, you get a heatmap of your business’s current strengths and weaknesses. You’ll receive a free report that breaks down where you need to focus. The goal is to progress every 90 days, and your overall score should increase each time you complete the assessment.
The assessment should be taken multiple times throughout the year, but taking it now will serve as a benchmark for you to refer back to and see your progress over time.
🎁 Take Your Free ProductLed Assessment
Benchmark your business in less than five minutes online at ProductLedPlaybook.com.
Once you complete the assessment, we’ll help you scale your product-led business faster by offering you a complimentary one-hour growth call with one of our Senior ProductLed Implementers.
During this high-impact session, you’ll craft a powerful, 30-day game plan that’s focused on one core component of the ProductLed System that will have the biggest impact on your company’s growth. This isn’t just theory—it’s a practical roadmap tailored to help you get momentum and start seeing results quickly.
This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a genuine opportunity for us to better understand your business. If, at the end of our conversation, we believe we can significantly impact your growth, we’ll show you how we help clients become the obvious choice in their market with the ProductLed Implementation Program.
In this program, you’ll work closely with a ProductLed Implementer who becomes your strategic partner by offering the expertise, accountability, and execution power to bring your vision to life.
🎁 Claim Your Personalized Game Plan
Book a high-impact session with a Senior ProductLed Implementer at ProductLed.com/gameplan and create your 30-day game plan.
Let’s start taking massive action today.