Over the past few years, PLG has gained the interest of startup founders, product managers, sales teams, and other stakeholders. However, implementation of this concept by the founders is largely agreed upon on paper.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business strategy that prioritizes the product itself as the main driver of acquisition, activation, and retention, relying on its inherent value and user experience to attract and retain customers rather than heavily relying on traditional marketing and sales techniques.

By focusing on delivering a superior product experience, product-led growth aims to empower users to discover, adopt, and derive value from the product, leading to organic growth, user advocacy, and long-term business success.

To help you understand the key aspects of PLG, here are the most important learnings that capture approximately 80% of the concept:

1. Understand Product-Led Growth (PLG):

Make sure you have a clear understanding of the PLG model and how it aligns with your business goals. PLG emphasizes understanding and catering to the needs and preferences of users by creating a valuable product experience.

2. Build a Strong Product:

The success of a product-led growth strategy heavily relies on having a product that delivers value and solves a real problem for your target audience. Continuous iteration and improvement of your product based on user feedback to ensure it meets their needs is a long-term commitment.

3. Implement Self-Serve Onboarding:

Enable users to sign up and start using your product on their own without needing assistance from a salesperson. Simplify the onboarding process and provide clear documentation, tutorials, and resources to help users understand and adopt your product quickly.

4. User Education:

Educate users on the product’s capabilities, potential use cases, and best practices through various channels, such as blog posts, tutorials, and webinars.

5. Focus on User Engagement and Activation:

Design your product in a way that encourages user engagement and helps them experience the core value as soon as possible. Provide in-app guidance, tooltips, and proactive messaging to guide users through the product and drive them towards key features or actions.

6. Collect User Feedback and Data:

Actively gather feedback from users to understand their pain points, challenges, and needs. Utilize analytics tools to track user behaviour, identify bottlenecks, and optimize the user experience. This data will help you make informed decisions about product improvements and identify potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

7. Implement Viral Loops and Referral Programs:

Leverage your existing user base to drive organic growth. Encourage users to invite others to try your product by implementing referral programs, offering incentives, or creating viral loops that incentivize sharing and collaboration.

8. Provide Exceptional Customer Support:

While the focus is on self-serve, it’s important to offer excellent customer support for users who need assistance. Implement a knowledge base, live chat, or ticketing system to address user questions, concerns, and issues promptly.

9. Enable Product-Led Sales:

Empower your sales team to leverage the product as a sales tool. They should be deeply familiar with the product’s features, use cases, and benefits to effectively communicate its value proposition to potential customers. Provide training and resources to help sales reps understand how to navigate the buyer journey in a product-led environment.

10. Optimize Pricing and Packaging:

Experiment with different pricing models and packaging options to align with your target audience and maximize conversion rates. Consider offering free trials, freemium plans, or tiered pricing to allow users to experience the value of your product before committing to a paid plan.

11. Measure, Analyze, and Iterate:

Continuously track key metrics, such as user acquisition, activation, conversion rates, churn, and expansion revenue. Use this data to identify areas for improvement, test hypotheses, and iterate on your product-led growth strategy.

12. Cross-Functional Team Collaboration:

Foster collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams to align efforts and drive PLG effectively.

By understanding these key principles, you’ll have a solid foundation to grasp the fundamentals of a product-led growth strategy and a commitment to putting the user’s experience at the forefront.

Remember that successful implementation requires a deep understanding of your target market, iterative experimentation, and a relentless focus on delivering exceptional value through your product.

About the writer:

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At the early stage, when startups are competing primarily for product fit and traction, founders should be willing and able to lead by example.

A startup CEO should take the lead on the company’s sales directive, and everything else can then fall into place.

Here are some recommendations that a SaaS startup founder can use to help the sales team achieve early-stage sales growth.

What is a Founder-Led Sales Strategy?

Founder-led is the term used to describe a sales approach where the founder of a startup is responsible for qualifying leads, engaging the leads to identify their pain points, pitching the product or service, and completing the sale.

An approach that greatly differs from a product-led strategy. However, both strategies can be applied for unlimited growth.

This approach works wonders because of the unalloyed passion, confidence, and product knowledge the founder infused into the sales engagement. Even without sales experience, the founder of a startup is the best person to sell their idea. They have a deeper understanding of the product than anyone else and have a good idea of the pain point they’re trying to solve.

Formalizing a sales team too early could stall startup growth by creating friction in a still-developing sales pipeline. A founder-led sales strategy fully develops that pipeline and creates a strong sales process to build on.

What is a SaaS Subscription Revenue Model for Startup?

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service subscription) is the term used to describe a business model where users or customers pay monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription (recurring) fees for as long as they want the product or service (customer lifetime value).

In different forums, the SaaS business model has been cited as a model that experiences at least a 10% month-on-month churn rate, unlike the pay-as-you-use or one-time fee models. Although there are a lot of contributing factors, a paying customer could stop subscribing to a product or service at will.

In Nigeria, we have a peculiar issue beyond economic reason where the majority of customers prefer to dictate the next cycle of subscription, and this would be a key metric for growth.

Benefits of a Founder-Led Sales Strategy

There are many benefits that SaaS startups can gain from implementing this strategy. Some are instant gratifications, while others could be delayed or ongoing. A founder-led sales strategy offers:

1. Clear and Direct Feedback: While some founders solely rely on the product manager’s feedback reports, a CEO engaging warm leads gets a unique opportunity to receive one-on-one feedback from those willing to hear them out.

The founder should use the time to learn more about the interests of their customers regarding the key problem they are trying to solve. A CEO who learns through on-the-spot feedback can create detailed and authentic sales training manuals for tomorrow.

2. Initial Revenue:  Revenue may seem like an obvious benefit of sales. So while you celebrate those first sales, they don’t signal success yet, but what nothing. Some sales professionals put the threshold at 1000 sales.

As this can be beneficial at the early stage, a founder wearing all the hats in a company could be a recipe for micromanagement.

3. Product Refine: There is no better time to fine-tune your product or services than during the first few months of launch.

It is nearly impossible to bring a perfect product to market on the first try, which is why those sales calls are so helpful for a founder willing to listen to feedback objectively. By taking time to refine some aspects of the product to better meet the needs of potential customers, you are laying the groundwork for improved customer service, satisfaction, and retention.

How to Approach a Founder-Led Sales Strategy

To get started with a founder-led sales strategy. Here’s a concise and candid step-by-step guide for reference.

Create an ideal customer profile: Go as narrow as possible. Consider your ideal customers. A business-to-consumer (B2C) SaaS startup should only focus on competitive buyer personas. While a B2B startup operates differently considering the diverse factors in determining ICP.

Create a small, targeted list: We’re getting specific because we want to start small. A startup’s initial sales goal should be quality over quantity. A “spray and pray” approach to sales in the startup phase guarantees a low closing rate.

Develop an Elevator Pitch: How can you communicate your product or service’s solution engagingly to potential customers? Find it and develop it.

Start qualifying prospects: With the help of your team, lead generation and qualification are an important part of the sales process. A sign you’re qualifying correctly is you say no more than yes when exploring a potential prospect.

Build a sales process: Every process starts with uncovering pain points. Next, demonstrate the solution and propose a business relationship. Finally, negotiate as needed and close the deal.

Tips for Success

While implementing a founder-led sales strategy is beneficial, it’s not always as easy as it looks. Remember the following:

Learn the science of sales: Knowing what potential customers think and feel throughout the buying process can significantly affect closing rates. Add empathy and a consultative selling approach to your sales meetings.

Embrace tools: A leader-led sales approach is beneficial but often filled with time-consuming tasks. Instead, automate as much of your sales and other day-to-day processes as possible with automation tools and streamline your workflows.

Case Study: Klas, an online teaching platform, recently launched a founder-led sales generation programme called Klas Launch Accelerator for educators. And being championed by its Nigerian founder and CEO.

Conclusion:

Being a successful salesperson requires a tremendous skill set. It’s okay if you’re still developing yours as a CEO. However, remember that no one else can bring the same authenticity and passion to sales activities as you can, so your chances of success are likely higher than those of a trained sales team member who wasn’t part of the product’s developmental stage.

A leader-led sales strategy is the best approach when a company is small. By spending time with early adopters, a CEO can fine-tune their product and process to serve as an unwavering foundation for their future sales team to build upon.

About the Writer:

Ayorinde Ajayi is a tech product sales specialist and consultant for B2B and B2C startups in Nigeria. He currently works at Sales Factorial Consulting, a one-stop-shop agency for product-led sales. With his diverse skills in product management, technical sales, and IT recruitment both in the Tech and Oil and Gas industries. Ayorinde has overseen 10 projects and managed over 500 high-ticket clients in the last 7 years. Combining two industries in which he has passion: tech startups and sales, Ayorinde is open to collaboration and opportunities in product distribution, lead generation, B2B sales content development, tech sales team coaching, and corporate LinkedIn page optimization.

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