Product-led growth/product-led sales (PLG/PLS) is the goal of most tech companies, especially in the SaaS space, and for good reason. Free users leading to paid users leading to enterprise deals that Sales can execute on with a level of confidence that they don’t have through cold outreach or other GTM strategies leads to better revenue and growth when done right.
At the heart of product-led anything is data. You cannot be product-led and not use the data you’re collecting. Your usage, support, interaction, and other data points drive your pipeline. Yann Sarfati talks about the focus on data in this recent Product-led article. The article covers the differences between PLG and PLS, which is interesting on its own, but what I particularly like, and haven’t seen as often in articles/blogs, is the focus on data informing development.
Data informing development can lead to better customer onboarding and easier navigation of the product. Features that are the hook of the product can be put into focus and drive better conversion rates, so you can focus on driving stickiness longer term.
There are limits to what this sort of analysis can offer from a product perspective. A CPO we met with last week offered that perspective; they are concerned about losing innovation focus at the expense of frictionless experience. The information you’re collecting is going to tell you what parts of the product are driving adoption or drop-off. What you’re not getting is an idea of what your next big feature needs to be. The data may reveal where there is friction, and you can develop a feature to address the friction, but that isn’t the next big feature. This post by Toby Davidson, a long-time product executive, talks about the need to bring innovation and GTM together, regardless of your strategy, to ensure your product is evolving and continuing to identify and address customer needs.
So what’s the takeaway here? It’s that data analysis and predictive modeling are tools within your product-led strategy. These tools do not reduce room for innovation and creativity within the product space. Rather, when that new idea is ready to be shipped, data and predictive modeling can help fine tune the idea and inform how it can best drive revenue.
Dacture can help you get into and excel with the product-led approach, and help you understand how you can use the data you already have to get started. As your data strategy matures, your results will improve, but there are likely things you can do now with the data you have.
If you’re interested in a demo of how this works, schedule some time with us. You can also sign up to be notified when we launch our beta.
