Group 9

How to turn your company into a Product-led company

Did you know that investors have found that product-led companies are twice as likely to grow fast than other models? 

A June study published by TechCrunch discovered that product-led growth models are “2x more likely to grow quickly than sales-led” growth models. To tap into this rapid growth opportunity, you’ll want to know how to transform your current growth model to follow product-led growth. Today we’ll show you how it’s done. 

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Understand your user journeys  

First, you’ll need to understand the path your users take through your product. Data that tracks the user journey through your product is essential here. 

By tracking user data, you are observing user interaction with your product. This gives you a clear oversight into a user’s path, what went well and what may have triggered difficulty. With this oversight, you can start honing in on improvements. 

Major companies such as Tesla gather user data to hone in on the “product experience” of their brand. By collecting feedback, Tesla ensures that it engages with real users to constantly improve the product experience. Tesla has been credited with “transforming car buying” into an ongoing experience rather than a one-off purchase. 

Create product experiences that push time-to-value 

Now that you’ve got a clear idea of the customer’s path, you’ll want to cut down the obstacles a customer faces using your product. Customers essentially search for a quick problem-solving solution when shopping for products. By trimming down obstacles, you can invest in the speed at which your product solves your customer’s problem. 

This rate of problem-solving speed is called “time to value”. When you reduce the obstacles a product user faces to reach their ideal solution, you accelerate the time-to-value ratio. Creating product experiences that push this speedy solution arrival time is an essential part of driving home a PLG model.  

User Guiding blog summarized PLG as the growth model where the product is the core of the business, and customers are the core of understanding the product. Customer experience and engagement steer data gathering to build a stronger core. 

Steer users to natural conversions with value

PLG modeling focuses on honing and empowering customer-to-product relationships. Steer users to conversions by letting them understand the true value of your product on their own. A free product with many key value features entices the user to experience the product further. This leads to a natural conversion to a higher value tier within your product. 

But while many companies have adopted this model and do let their users take the product for a ride before they buy it, they still treat the conversion stage as “one size fits all”, instead of following the actual user journey their users go through and offer them to purchase a plan only once they hit an actual milestone and are ready to make the purchase. 

Introduce new features based on customer usage

As you steer natural conversions through value, you will want to gradually work in new features and experiences. Using user data to hone this usage-based feature building guarantees that you are adding features customers are eager for, based on their needs.

 UserGuiding blog explains user data led feature adding works because the data “comes up” with new features based on user behavior, and conveys to the user their needs and expectations. 

Base pricing around customer needs

In order to become a full-fledged PLG model, you need to scale into flexible pricing packages that allow customers to subscribe according to their preferences. With flexible pricing, customers don’t feel pressured into making time-based commitments, and they can choose the plan that fits their needs the most. 

 Because PLG needs to deliver value and customer experience instantly, breaking down hesitation barriers is key to unblocking the user pathway to conversion.

Strategize the upsell

PLG experts advise strategizing the upsell after the product has delivered value. Users with access to a demo product already have experience with your product. A PLG company needs to base upselling on features that stand out as added value on top of the current experience. 

By focusing on delivering experience-driven products, PLG models break down barriers to monetization. When the time comes for a paid version, the user knows the current product value and is more willing to pay for added value. 

Overview

These steps are starting places. While product-led growth is easy to implement, there are also many intricate parts that make up a successful PLG growth model. These steps can set you up with an efficient PLG growth model to build from. 

Want to learn more? Follow our team of PLG visionaries at Coho for more insights or contact us.

Group 8

Common misconceptions about Product-led growth

It’s no secret that product-led growth strategies, abbreviated PLG, are all the rage right now. As a result of PLG’s go-to-market models, B2B sales have been permanently altered, making it an essential growth leader for modern companies. However, common misconceptions about PLG encourage growth leaders to dismiss it as a fad.

PLG misconceptions cost businesses who fail to understand the marketing and sales significance of product-led strategy. We’ve narrowed down a few of these common myths so you know why they cost you, and how to avoid them.  

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Myth 1: You won’t need a sales team 

Product-led growth marketing is the strategic arm of product-led companies. “Product-led” means that the company uses its resources to hone the power and appeal of the product it offers so that it can convert sales on its own merits. 

A product-led growth model still needs a sales team because sales teams can help identify key customers, wrote Forbes Council Member Vanessa Dreifuss. 

Myth 2: Your buyers will be entirely self-sufficient 

While a solid product-led growth model will seek ways to empower the self-sufficiency of the user experience, the buyer won’t be entirely self-sufficient.

 The PLG growth go-to-market enables customers to be highly self-sufficient but does eliminate the need for customer support. Customer experience support teams measure their success in their response time to customers, and the efficient support of the customer’s voice. 

Myth 3: PLG will drive revenue by itself 

PLG is often mistaken for a revenue-driving strategy by itself. Contrary to this belief, Darrow explained that PLG streamlines the potential conversion from free demos to paid subscriptions. PLG by itself doesn’t drive revenue or target the right user. 

Targeting the best users and closing sales requires smart use of KPI data and the combined effort of team support, which we’ll get into more below. 

Myth 4: You won’t need marketing 

A PLG-led growth model still needs a marketing push. Believing that PLG can take care of itself without any push from marketing costs teams because they rely too broadly on PLG, and essentially don’t understand the outcomes PLG can generate. The basic outcomes from PLG are: 1) Acquisition and 2) Conversions.

PLG provides a pipeline to draw in customers and streamline their product-interaction process. The same rules of marketing that apply to previous growth model leaders still apply to PLG because marketing drives brand awareness and other outcomes that boost PLG’s efficiency. 

Go-to-market research finds that PLG works best when it is aligned with the revenue marketing team efforts. 

Myth 5: Self-service is the only buying experience customers want 

While it’s true that the modern buyer wants the convenience of self-service, they still need help with sales questions sometimes. The sales teams help to make products better by addressing customer needs.

 In the same way that PLG speeds up the buyer’s journey process, sales teams accelerate closing deals. Sales teams in a PLG supportive role can “supercharge” sales growth.

How To Implement PLG The Right Way 

You can take the next step towards an informed PLG implementation by dispelling common misconceptions. Here’s where Coho comes in. Our platform helps you target and optimize key KPIs and orchestrate your customer journey flow. 

With Coho’s platform, teams can apply data to their PLG growth model, generating the correct hand-in-glove use of team support for the streamlined user journey. 

Streamlined data, focusing on key customer retention paths, support the tactical implementation of PLG. By honing in on focal points in the data, a team can eliminate redundant data gathering and focus on data streamlining their revenue funnels.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.

5 Importance of KPI tracking

Why Seamless KPI Tracking Matters

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the metrics that businesses use to see how they are doing and where they are going. Without KPIs, teams struggle to find ways to move forward. That’s why tracking KPIs—the right ones—is mission critical. 

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Forbes points out that businesses can waste precious focus on the wrong data. In a list of 16 signs that a team may be tracking KPIs incorrectly, the Forbes Council explained what “wrong data” looks like. The wrong focus happens when the revenue impact or goal for tracking a data set is unclear. The team might start with data they already have on hand, and fail to gather new info relevant to a new direction. 

This is why seamless KPI tracking is essential to growth. With tools that comb through data and hone KPIs, teams can track data sets that make sense for goal-oriented tracking. 

What KPI Tracking Means For Product-Led Growth

Building a “product-led” growth model means building a product that sells itself over time. The Product-led Growth Collective calls “product-led growth” the future of business growth. 

Product-led models focus on the buyer, why they buy your product and the factors that make your product trustworthy and ready to solve the user’s pain points. Boiled down, a product-led growth model focuses on designing a product that is so well made its value speaks for itself in user experience scenarios such as free trials.  

With the product-led market model, seamless KPIs are essential because they give actionable insights into what makes your product relevant to your ideal buyer. 

The right KPIs put product designers on the same path as the buyer’s journey and help you understand where improvement can meet the pain points best. Product-led growth is a design-led commitment to making a product function with ease and efficiency, according to the Product-led Growth Collective. 

How Seamless KPI Tracking Helps Steer Growth Opportunities 

KPIs highlight “key performance indicators”. That information can show the things that make for a positive impact, but it can also show negative things that need improvement, according to Indeed.com. 

Sometimes key performance indicators show problem areas rather than expected outcomes. This data helps teams crack down on areas that need work. 

Seamless KPI tracking that shows the right data in real-time is an asset for steering opportunities. When a team leader sees from the mission-real KPI what areas should be highlighted, they can hone in on opportunities. 

Seamless, Timely, and Relevant KPI Tracking 

Tracking KPIs should include time frame factoring. The KPI information may be interesting, but irrelevant to the near future goal. A seamless KPI tracking system will allow for goals to adjust to their order of current relevance. This means that information that is most important now is ready for the task at hand, while information that will be important for a later target goal is queued according to its need to appear. 

Why Tracking User Behavior Is Key 

When your product is your leading point, focusing on user behavior data is the key point to kickstart customer success. This data lets you walk a mile in your user’s shoes, follow their journey, and understand their needs and wants. With this understanding, a team can orchestrate user journey paths to drive more meaningful product engagement. This self-service path translates into conversions and can reduce churn. 

User Journey Data and Targeting Ideal Customers 

Rather than taking on a bunch of new tools, teams can focus on data and use their toolkit in informed and efficient ways. This is why Coho.ai helps teams optimize their existing tech stack. The Coho system seamlessly integrates existing tools to cut down the time between product insights and Go-To-Market actions. 

Using your current tools data in a timely way, you can reduce the time-to-value of a user’s experience with your product. Analyze how consumers are engaging with and using your product. 

Watching these interactions, you can create workflows in your existing toolkit that target the roadblocks to user paths. By doing this, you are cutting down the work your users have to do to understand the user experience or UX flow. 

Earlier we talked about six steps to optimize your user’s journey. Once user journey paths are identified through data, you’ll need to target your ideal customer. Focus special attention on building client relationships by upselling services to highly engaged users. 

Want to seamlessly track your KPIs? Contact us!