At Ledger Bennett, we’ve been helping our customers accelerate their revenue engine for many years through a focus on the evolving best practices in sales and marketing processes and technologies. Over the last several years a new go-to-market methodology and practice has emerged that we’ve become fascinated with. It is called Product Led Growth.
It is clear to us that the concepts underlying product led growth should be part of considerations for any go-to-market strategy so much so that we’re developing consulting offerings that help our customers understand what product-led growth is and to apply principles as appropriate to their business. We are very excited to be introducing these ideas to you here.
What is Product-Led Growth (PLG)?
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is an intentional component of a company’s go-to-market strategy designed to deliver accelerated growth and increased profitability. It’s about efficient cash generation. It is about how all of the functions organize in new ways under an emerging practice called PLG to make this happen.
In a more practical sense, Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy that centers on your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers.
Compared to the broader universe of companies, PLG companies grow faster, with higher margins and stronger retention
Every executive in a for-profit company should become very curious when hearing this statement. The metrics surrounding the degree to which a company is efficient at generating profits are what is reviewed in the boardroom. This is nothing new. When the metrics are good more investment can be made. Companies that have the best efficient cash-generating metrics can outpace and outlast their competitors and win.
If you are a for-profit business this is what you want. PLG is a practice designed to get you more of it.
Marketing & Sales-Led vs Product-Led Growth Strategy
More traditional marketing and sales-led go-to-market strategy efforts are largely focused on leads, opportunities and closing the first deal. Marketing materials, sales enablement content and sales motions focus on describing the value the company delivers. The focus is on “the buyer journey.”
Under a PLG model rather than sales and marketing focusing on “the buyer’s journey” all of the functional organizations are designed and staffed such that they are highly focused and tightly aligned on optimization of the entire customer lifecycle.
Value Described vs Value Experienced
Under a PLG strategy, the customer experiences value quickly with less effort.
Marketing has a set of roles under the area of “growth marketing”. Content is hyper-focused on helping the customer get to that value experience without dependence on others. User personas are deeply understood and communicated with through the entire customer lifecycle.
The product and engineering teams now have “growth product squads” who focus 100% on optimizing growth metrics by delivering features that deliver value quickly and lead to the use of the core product use cases, guided onboarding, viral in product features, self-service payment, etc.
The sales organization (often disguised as customer success reps) starts the customer relationship AFTER the customer has experienced product value.
The customer is already a FAN and helps the sales team expand the use of the product and they share their enthusiasm outside of their company effectively doing sales and marketing work for you.
Data and data science is a heavy part of this entire picture.
Product Led Growth Concepts Are Not Only for Self-Service Products
Perhaps the most exciting part to us at Ledger Bennett is that so many of our customers can benefit from thinking about the principles of PLG and applying them to their business, even if they do not have self-service products. Having appropriate focus on the customer lifecycle, thinking deeply about their ease of adoption, time to value, ease of expansion, and renewal are the right things for every tech company to continually evolve.
How Can Ledger Bennett Help You on Your PLG journey?
About Ledger Bennett Revenue Engine
Ledger Bennett is led by a team of experienced SaaS executives, commercially driven marketers, sales professionals, product management leaders and technologists. We believe that in the next 5 years Marketing, Sales, Customer and Product functions will be replaced with a single Digital Revenue Team offering frictionless, transparent, recurring revenue growth, we exist to drive that change.