Deciding whether a free trial, freemium, or hybrid model will work best for your business is challenging — especially as choosing the wrong one could potentially dent your business’ performance.
In this course, you’ll learn:
Wes Bush:
So you're probably wondering wow, is now the right time to be product-led for my business or not? And so I just want to touch on and recap what we went through so that you can feel like you have a better decision of around is it the right time or not? So if you resonate with the four things I'm about to go through, I'm afraid it might not be the right time. Does that mean it won't be the right time at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, six months, or 12 months from now? No, obviously things can change. You can practically change these things, but these are just meant to be red flags to let you know that hey, if this is your situation, you should look into this and I'll leave it at that because I want you to make this decision, I'm not going to make it for you. So if you resonate with us, it might not be the right time.
Wes Bush:
Let's say you have a very differentiated market strategy. Your sales team provides a ton of value to prospects, you're consistently moving up markets, your deals are getting more complex, and your product as a result is getting a lot of technical debt because all of these deals coming in are requiring you to make these customizations. If that's the case, that's a red flag that really shows me that hey, maybe you should just stay down that sales-led path because it might be working and that's one way to go about it.
Wes Bush:
And so the second piece of this is your ocean. If you're realizing hey, we're in a blue ocean, we're creating a ton of new demand, and we have to just educate people so much on how our solution can help them. If you're realizing you're in that blue ocean, that's another red flag. Hey, we need to do a ton of education on this. Our sales team, once again, has brought in a ton of value. Okay? Red flag, just note it. Your ocean condition will change eventually, your market will become bloody red ocean eventually, so just bear that in mind. It might not be the right time, right now.
Wes Bush:
Now the other piece is audience. Now if your audience isn't tactical at all and they can't understand how to use your product on their own without any hand-holding, once again, maybe it's not the right audience, maybe you're just going after the buyers, and what you want to think about here is if you're just going after buyers and you're realizing hey, these people aren't technical, the CEOs of these Fortune 500 companies don't know how to use my software. What the heck? Well, when you make this decision to go down the product-led path and you go bottoms up, then it might be easier for you to change this audience. So both audience and time to value, you can change. Also, you can change your strategy. The only thing you can't really change is your ocean conditions right away.
Wes Bush:
All right, so the last piece and as it relates to not being the right time is really around time to value. So if it's really, incredibly long, it takes months for people to see value from your products, this might not be the right time. Maybe you start off with another product that's simpler to use. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you decide we need to just improve the current user experience of the product before we go down this path. So if you are resonating with those four things I went through, I want you to seriously consider if now is the right time to become product-led because each one of these has a huge impact on making this decision.
Wes Bush:
Now I wanted to go through the next four, and if you're nodding your head to these four points, it should be the right time for your business. Sure, like anything there's always going to be more things to consider, but I really encourage you to move forward with this as fast as possible because maybe it's too late already. Maybe you should've done this years ago for your business because it is already the right time.
Wes Bush:
So when you're looking at your market strategy, you're realizing it's dominant, it's disruptive, you want to conquer the maturity for your market and capture that market share. If that's you with dominant and disruptive, it should be a right time. And when we were looking at your ocean, it's a bloody red ocean, it's getting more competitive day by day, you're harvesting demands for your business already. If that's the case, then it should be all signs pointing towards product-led right now.
Wes Bush:
And once again, as it relates to your audience, if they're ready to use your product, they get up to speed very quickly, you're targeting users, then once again, this is another good sign. And if your product has a very quick time to value, yes, this is the perfect time. And one piece I do want to mention here, I know I've been on this slide for a while now, but is just the connection of it's never going to be perfect. And we can have all these conditions lined up and it could be the perfect thing for us to do right now, but a lot of times it's not.
Wes Bush:
There's going to be maybe your time to value is way off, it's really long, but everything else is looking good. We can decide I'm still going to go forward with this. That's okay because when we mentioned last week, there's tidal waves coming for your business right now. Your customer acquisition costs are consistently going to get higher. The willingness to pay for your product is consistently going to get lower and your buyers actually expect to have a self-serve experience and do as much education on their end as possible.
Wes Bush:
So there is these market trends that are brewing and if you don't take action now, then you risk putting your business at risk. And so are any of you still on the fence, and if so, why? If you're not sure if now is the right time to be product-led or not, I really do encourage you to either just think about this or also reach out to myself or someone on the product-led team in the [inaudible 00:06:08]
