Unlocking the Key to Sustainable Business Success

Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy that funnels most resources into delivering a world-class product experience. When all digital-facing teams—marketing, customer success, analytics, and more—are aligned around this goal, companies can drive customer retention through their top-tier products.

Traditional growth methods like marketing and sales support this strategy, but only to augment the value of a best-in-class product.

Getting Started

Whether you’re in the early stages of implementing Product-Led Growth or already fully ingrained within this growing model, you need an analytics platform that offers direct access to raw event data for sophisticated analysis. This ensures that your teams get the real time insights and powerful features they need to achieve success.

A core principle of Product-Led Growth is to prioritize creating a product that acquires users and onboards them into the product, reducing reliance on traditional marketing and sales tactics. This approach reduces costs and allows the product to accelerate the flywheel, driving user retention and expansion.

Companies like Facebook and Amazon faced skepticism from Wall Street and business analysts for years before becoming profitable, as they gained massive user bases but did not make any money from advertisements or sales. However, these businesses eventually became profitable because their products solved actual consumer problems and encouraged user stickiness. This helped them become a habit for many users, which ultimately drove monetization and growth.

Insights

For product-led companies, insights from customer experience are crucial to growth. The most successful product-led companies are able to identify the features that resonate with customers, drive adoption and engagement, and increase revenue.

Many of these insights are discovered through analyzing user behavior and data from internal and external sources. They also use customer feedback to improve their products and create an experience that is incredibly easy for users to use and love.

A product-led approach allows the company to scale without being limited by high marketing and sales costs. This makes it easier to reach a healthy growth pattern with a shorter timeframe to see a return on the cost of acquisition.

For example, software development giant Atlassian has a self-service trial and freemium model to allow prospective customers to evaluate their product without charge or functionality limitations. They also encourage user sharing and provide a clear pricing plan to ensure the success of their product.

Data-Driven Decisions

In a product-focused company, teams must work together to set and measure success metrics. This requires breaking down silos and leveraging cross-functional teams to make better, more informed decisions and enact coordinated change throughout the organization.

Companies that follow product-led growth can scale without expensive sales or marketing. Instead of hiring sales reps to sell a product, they can rely on their users to promote the product, and create a product adoption flywheel that does the selling for them.

To do this, teams must leverage data on product usage to identify potential customers. Citrix, for example, targeted potential buyers of their freemium product based on the reasons they created an account, and used strategic in-product prompts to convert them into paid customers. In addition, they monitored churn to prioritize customer needs and ensure a positive user experience. Ultimately, this approach has led to many of the most successful and beloved tech products in the world.

Integrations

Using product-led growth as the primary go-to-market strategy requires a significant shift in how you think about your products, your customers, and their interactions. It requires more alignment, more dedication, and (at least initially) more effort from every member of your team.

The benefits of PLG are powerful, however, and many companies have made the leap. Warby Parker became a $4 billion company by embracing product-led growth and relying on its omnichannel consumer experience and free Home Try-On program to drive conversions. Slack, Trello, Salesforce, Datadog, and Expensify are other examples of companies that grew quickly without hiring a dedicated sales team or investing in traditional marketing programs.

Behavioral product analytics can track user behavior and help teams make the most of their products, reducing customer acquisition costs and improving retention rates and customer lifetime value. These insights can also inform the product roadmap and reveal virtuous growth loops like virality that are already occurring within your app.