A product-led GTM strategy requires a complete alignment of product, marketing, sales, and success teams in an organization. Key to this approach is being hyper-focused on delivering personalized customer experiences based on in-product behavior and usage patterns.
Just as it was marketing automation’s mission to better align sales and marketing as we moved from a sales-led to a marketing-led strategy, it will be the job of product experience platforms to align sales, marketing, customer success, and now, product. This creates the triad needed to really improve customer experience and efficiency.
Note: To be successful with a product-led GTM strategy, it must become part of your organizational DNA. A leadership team should lead this change in your company, providing all necessary guidance and resources to align all key departments. If the CEO can’t ensure this alignment, is there another C-level role tasked with solving this?
Let’s consider how teams have to adjust their playbooks to succeed with a product-led GTM strategy.
Because product teams are part of the customer acquisition process with a product-led approach, they can make key decisions about what product features to build next based on in-depth customer behavior taken from the product.
SaaS companies release updates and new features on a weekly, daily, and in some extreme cases, hourly basis; but a product team’s success is no longer measured by simply delivering features on time and on budget. Today, product success can be measured based on product adoption and customer engagement metrics. This is why the role of product leaders is changing, and they are viewed more as the mini-CEOs of the product, as McKinsey & Company pointed out in the article “Product Managers for the Digital World”.
Some product teams will need to make a huge mental shift to execute on a product-led strategy. SaaS companies who sell into sales and marketing organizations have always understood the need to support growth from a product perspective, but it’s not nearly as obvious to some product teams, who mostly think about selling to personas. More product teams need to think about making customer growth a much larger priority in the roadmaps. A product-led approach can help them do that, guiding them to understand which personas actually use the company’s product and the profitability of these personas.
By maintaining a unified customer profile with detailed in-product behavior, product teams can better understand their customers, what features they actually use, and how often they use them. Customer journeys provide insights into how users navigate through your product and what new features or updates will encourage higher adoption. By leveraging capabilities such as a feature heatmap, product teams can identify the most valuable features that directly impact revenue. This allows the product organization to align its development efforts to increase sales and market acceptance. A product-led GTM strategy enables product teams to create what Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden referred to in their book Sense and Respond (2) as outcome-based roadmaps. In a nutshell, these are focused on driving product engagement metrics, rather than delivering certain features.
You can improve product adoption by using customer segmentation based on behavioral and product usage data. This enables your product teams to create more personalized onboarding experiences, foster initial value with various cohorts, and get new features adopted more quickly.
With a product-led approach, the product itself becomes a primary method of engaging and interacting with customers. In-product engagements are highly contextual, and create a nearly real-time feedback loop between companies and their prospects and customers. This two-way communication process makes product teams more agile and enables product experimentation by releasing new features for specific segments.
Product teams can then determine the effectiveness of their strategies by reviewing in-product surveys, triggered feedback, and the Customer Behavior Index (CBI). (CBI is a metric that helps you determine how engaged your prospects and customers are based on their in-product activity and usage. More on this in Chapter 13.) Together, these provide a clear understanding of customer satisfaction and the overall health of the account.
In most SaaS companies, marketing operations and sales operations teams are responsible for setting up technologies and processes so the larger marketing and sales teams can handle everyday tasks more efficiently.
We believe that a shift to product-led strategies may lead to the creation of a product operations role. This role will be responsible for supporting the product, marketing, and sales teams by setting up processes, workflows, and technologies to streamline user segmentation, engagement campaigns, and product experimentation. It’s conceivable that some of the existing operational roles in the organization will be repurposed to better align marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams’ responsibilities. This will help ensure that all departments have access to the same unified customer data to create consistent omnichannel experiences for customers.
We believe that, as a new organizational culture emerges geared toward generating PQLs, this new customer-centric approach will fuel the next evolution of GTM strategies. This will move marketing away from mass lead demand generation, to tactics focused on creating and curating customer experiences. This approach is more efficient and more CAC-effective, and increases CLV for companies.