Mastering the Art and Science of Product-Led Growth with Gainsight | SaaStr Software Community

Bottom line, if you're going to engage your user contextually and drive them to the next feature at the right time, you're going to see increase in adoption. We capture every event.

Gainsight PX is all about product experience and the integration between customer success and product. How can your product help them be better at their job? People want to know right away why they're here and what they need to do. You have to compete with the user experience of all of the consumer products that are out there.

Wanna look at features and modules that really care about. The early majority will give you 5 minutes to understand what the app does. We're gonna deliver you more analytics.

So important for morale for people to know why they're building the thing that they're building.

We wanna give you more than just page views and events. Happy to be here. I'll present myself first. My name is Miki Alon. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Gainsight PX, a product experience platform. Previously also led the Marketo global development team and also founded a company that mastered the website experience. And last, I would say, I'm co-author of Mastering Product Experience, a book that's available to download at gainsight.com. And with me, I have Sierra.

Thanks, Mickey. So I am coming to you from San Francisco and VP of product design currently at Gainsight and held some product roles here. Worked in SaaS my whole career— Box, BetterWorks, Salesforce. Love building amazing customer experiences. So that's what I'll be covering today.

Awesome. So in this session today, we're going to talk about product-led growth, define what product-led growth is, and why it is becoming a top priority for companies at any scale, from early-stage startups to an enterprise. We also cover cross-functional responsibilities about product-led growth and how you can really start. And we're going to finish with the really best practices to help you deliver exceptional product experience through a trial experience that CR is going to cover. So let's dive in. First, what is product-led growth? So first and foremost, it's a product— it's a go-to-market strategy, really using your product as a vehicle for conversion, customer acquisition, adoption, and growth, and really using your product to deliver these elements. And what the main focus here is really connecting your go-to-market strategy with your product execution due to a couple of factors you're gonna discuss. But definitely, this is really a go-to-market motion that bringing these two functions together. And really, in product-led growth strategy, if you look at the customer journey, is really putting the product at the forefront of that customer journey. If you think about that, customers today interact with your product throughout the entire lifecycle. The two teams that are leading the product-led growth effort, although it's relevant to the entire customer journey, I would say It's the growth marketing that start utilizing the product as a customer acquisition tool, uh, from top of funnel, optimizing the customer acquisition cost and also the marketing return on investment. So marketing is becoming, uh, designed as performance marketing, driving signups, nurturing top of funnel, uh, users to the signups, and then product growth team which is a new team evolving, handles the product qualified leads. And we're going to define what is product qualified leads. Their role is really to deliver exceptional experience throughout the trial to make sure that these users are getting to intrinsic value, experiencing intrinsic value with your product. And their role is really to accelerate time to value throughout the customer lifecycle. So really, why product-led growth is disrupting the software industry so dramatically. Number one, we see that every year millions, millions of software products are being produced. It's relatively easy to build and launch new products. We have a lot of factors for that— cloud computing, open source, all that stuff. It's making it very easy to deliver and build new products. The real challenge is really with scaling growth. And what we're seeing in the market is companies are trying, companies are trying to outperform each other through just marketing spend. In other words, outspend each other, and still it's very, very difficult. And there's a diminishing return in your marketing effort if you're just trying to use that the old way. So growth is becoming the big challenge, and product-led growth is a new way to optimize for your marketing effort, but also delivering better customer experience. And we are seeing, you know, the companies, new companies out of nowhere scaling very, very quickly using this strategy and disrupting the existing enterprises that actually in this market. There's also evolving customer expectation. We know that B2B buyer is becoming assuming a B2C type of experience, they prefer to try before they, they buy. The end user is becoming a decision maker. It's no longer a top-down approach. At the end of the day, at the end of the day, your product is helping them achieve a goal and they're gonna basically vote for or against your product. So ease of use, time to value is what they're going to focus on in the first mile of product. That's what you want to focus on when you really transition to product-led growth. And then also we noticed that the product experience is associated with the brand experience. So if you have an investment in your brand, but the product delivers a bad experience, that's going to influence your employees' decision, your customers' decision. So product is becoming the experience channel for your customers, and that's part of the customer expectation and part of the consumerization of SaaS. Also, there's unbeatable unit economics. If you think about it, customer acquisition cost and lifetime value can be super optimized. If I, as a user, as a buyer, can experience your product and understand how it solves my challenge and problem, that allows me to really take a quicker decision. And I can accelerate that decision and accelerate your customer acquisition. Also, the cost of opportunity. When marketing basically drives leads and opportunities to your funnel, normally in classic B2B, it can be few months until anyone can really measure that effectiveness. With product-led growth, what you're achieving is really the ability to narrow that timeframe and even turn that into weeks of from sign-up to experiencing value and taking a decision. And that really can optimize your marketing spend. We're also seeing a dollar net retention with better organic expansion. When you're allowing your customers to sign up and add other users and self-provision, you're unlocking that potential. And you want to look at that, you're going to see that expansion is much, much cheaper than the first deal or first land. So that also drives the growth rate you're able to do. If your growth always depends on sales processes, you're going to be bounded. If you're allowing your product to to have a free sign-up and you can master any type of trials, you can unlock that growth potential and allow customers to experience value and also have more predictable churn rate because you're gonna see and measure a couple of things with your product. You can measure valuable actions and you can also collect some sentiments so we can better understand if your product is delivering value. And if your product is delivering value, churn and growth are going to be much more predictable. So if you think about it, really in the age of the customer, much of the customer experience happens within the product. If you look at the customer lifecycle from acquisition, adoption, retention, and growth, your customers interacting with your products— so you should treat the product as an experience channel and identify which customers needs a push to move them forward to the next level. And the next— to experience next value, or which customers are at risk. And when you look at cross-functional responsibilities, this is where marketing, product success, and sales can really look at usage data and user sentiment to understand that through the interaction the customer is doing with your product. At Gainsight, we've built a framework around product-led growth. It's kind of looking at the customer-centric view at different stages of customer experiences. And from onboarding to growth, we have different product plays you can implement. Uh, in this session, we're going to cover the trial experience and with some best practices around that. So trial experiences tend to be part of the initial interaction with your customer. So in this session, we're going to cover the art and science, and we're going to just dive into that best practices. So looking at trial experience, we Normally is the first step towards product-led growth. You wanna really unlock the growth potential. So the goal is really to integrate your trial experience with your overall go-to-market strategy. You wanna make sure that the marketing is driving you the right type of leads, the product qualified leads. And then also within the trial, you wanna make sure that you're able to deliver intrinsic value of your product. So customers understand how that pain point they learned about for marketing is now translated to a product feature that can help them solve that challenge. And then also obviously generating sales opportunities, especially now when we are all working remote and sales are looking for more opportunities, your product can become that channel. So that's the trial goals. And we want to define a product qualified lead. What we can see is basically that it's a combination of 3 elements. One is the ICP. The ideal customer profile. You want to make sure that when you're driving the right signups, it's the right size of company, it's the right size of, uh, and firmographics and technographics. Sometimes you have competitive landscape. You also want to map the objectives and outcomes, uh, so you really understand if they're— if you drive this the right person to the product and you're seeing that they came for the right objective and outcome and can drive them towards that. And looking at the product usage. That combination kind of builds the product qualified leads, and you can really build a score around that. And when you pass these, uh, product qualified leads to sales, uh, or do some automation around that, you'll be able to predict what's going to look like a successful trial versus what's going to be looking at as a less successful trial. One of the elements is really also looking at pricing and packaging. So you want to make sure that you have the right balance between tech touch and high touch. If your product is price base is going to be very high. Most likely it's going to be high touch. You want to have a version of your product that is actually lower cost, and we're seeing in the market, for example, costs around $10K to $15K a year, kind of qualifies to a tech touch approach, which is kind of one-to-many type of nurturing you can, you can do to your trial. So pricing is part of the go-to-market and part of work product-led growth strategy. Keep it simple and transparent for customers if you are addressing the, the lower end of the market. Associate usage and value. Today the buyer is way more advanced, they want to understand exactly what's the differences. And, and really optimize for land and expand. It's really the, the new way to sell today, especially if you go upmarket, is to quickly have a land deal and then expand so you can really build that trust with your customer and allow them to really pay as they use, as they go. There's a couple of trial strategies for gating strategies. We're seeing in the market, for example, 3 main elements. One is time-based, which is very, very popular. You're trying to get into a momentum with your customer. The other, which is more common in a more developer-oriented solution, is value-based. As soon as they are able to build something, launch something, launch a campaign. That's where the trial actually ends. And there's the classic freemium model that is free and has limited features, which is the third element. Things to watch for when you really decide about trial gating, and you can really experiment with that, is really— number one is, can your product really deliver meaningful results during a trial, or should you kind of funnel them in towards a a sandbox and things like that. I would also again strike the balance between enough value and price. And last is really addressing the market segment. Product-led growth is fantastic, but if you're, if you're addressing an enterprise market segment when they have a lot of question integration, security question compliance, this is where you're going to have a balance between the tech touch when you're allowing to experience the product, but you're allowing them to reach out to you as soon as they need to. So really addressing that market segment is important. From product management perspective is really align your product with your go-to-market strategy. We want to create that interlock between products and your go-to-market. So really focusing on the first mile of product, prioritizing for that experience, because right now your product is opening the gates for signups and it's no longer kind of high touch where customers are manually onboarded. Also, always think about your ICP when you design that, that product and you design the next feature. Always think about the ICP you're referring to. If it's an enterprise, obviously, versus SMB, totally different assumption and totally different priorities should be in place. And the most important part, doesn't matter which ICP you have, is really to empower your user to self-serve. You want to unlock again the way they can signup and invite other users so you can expand more efficiently and allow to deliver more value as you grow. And that type of experience should be part of your product from day one. A very common element is really to reduce any friction onboarding. So frictionless onboarding means really reducing the number of tasks I need to complete before I sign up and experience value with the product. So many— the best practices would be really easy signup, minimal input fields, use more interactive progressive profiling, allow your customers to experience things before you actually have any email activation. So create that relationship for them from day one, measure, see where they drop off, and optimize. Also looking at retention, but at early stage it's really important to look at retention. This graph is really going to be your, your day-to-day reports. You want to make sure that as soon as they sign up, they're coming back. It measures how many are coming back and how much your customer— your product is retaining these customers. You want to— if that line drops to zero, you know that you have a leaky bucket issue. They're signing up and after a few days they're never coming back. You want to solve that, understand, reduce friction there. You want to also make sure that you know why are they coming back. If they're coming back for your basic features, it's also not a a totally good sign. You want to make sure that they're going to the right set of features so they can experience value. And you can also measure the days that they get to that value. And eventually, once you get into a proper place, which is this line should be above 30 or 40%, you want to also start collecting some user feedback to drive into the next level. So let's talk about really the cross-functional responsibilities. The growth team is a new team that is kind of evolving in the B2B enterprise space. So growth marketing is really optimizing acquisition channels, driving signups, generating product qualified leads. They need to really tie that pain point to your product, and you want to hand off that to the growth product management. Normally growth marketing will look at the funnel that way. They're going to optimize and see which is the best channel is optimized for your customers. Are they looking for stuff online? Is it virtual events? But you want them to really focus on these key metrics— pipeline generated, customer acquisition cost, number of weekly signups, product qualified leads. This is the handshake between marketing and product and revenue attribution. If I look at the growth product manager, as opposed to a traditional product manager, these guys are actually focusing on product experiences that drives business metrics. It's really driving usage of these features that are delivered by the product. They do tend to have engineering and designers as part of their team, so they can really optimize that experience. But their goal is really drive business metrics and drive experience in your product. The key KPIs for growth product manager would be really accelerating time to value, measuring that conversion rate all the time, obviously weekly active user, but also the golden features type of usage. So they want to make sure that they are not just coming back for the product, for the simple stuff, you actually are achieving the desired outcome you expected from the product. And they can measure that by product behavior. And they can also really listen to the user sentiment as part of that process. But they own the entire experience from sign-up to growth. And what they really think about is really how to drive and push users to the next value within the product. So with that, I'm going to pass over to Sierra to speak about both experience.

Yeah, thanks, Mickey. I know it's only 7:22 here on the West Coast, but that TOFU acronym was making me really hungry as a vegetarian. Anyway, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about the user experience and sort of how to appeal to the people that are actually in your trial. So first I want to talk about the value gap. When somebody comes to a trial, the trial needs to match up with what they think it's going to be. If it doesn't match up, they'll pretty quickly lose interest and probably not end up following through. So one thing to think about is many of— so in a sort of a consumer case, there's probably going to be somebody looking really closely at the end-to-end from the maybe marketing website. Maybe the marketing website is the product. But in the SaaS world, often if you're a product manager, you're not talking to the marketing team every day and you may not actually know what's on the marketing site that will lead to your trial. So make— just make sure that the copy that's there matches up to what you have within your app. And then, you know, once they get in, make sure that, uh, the things that they're able to do will drive them to value. And we'll talk about how to get there. So once somebody is in your product, it's really important to provide specific instructions. One of the things that sometimes we forget to do is remind people of the value and why they're there immediately. So for somebody that's coming into your trial, from your website, it's pretty clear that they probably know why they're there. But one of the biggest success metrics or success indicators of a trial is potentially if you're able to bring in other people from your organization to that trial. So imagine you're the person in the organization that was added, and maybe you didn't get to sync up with the person who added you, so you just receive an email. You don't really know what it is, but you click on it. And then you go in and then you have no idea why you're there. That would really, that would be a really big miss. And so communicating that value right away is important. Obviously you want that content to be exciting looking, but as you start to scale this program and you get more comfortable with in-app engagements and in-app messaging, create, create templates, create things that you can reuse over and over again so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. And then it's important to think about how you can do this in such a way that it doesn't, that it doesn't block the actual experience that they're going through. So one is, is it right to, is it the best idea to put in an overlay that will block the experience experience. In some cases, in some cases it is, especially when they must take an action. Let's say the trial is ending, that, that could be an approach that you decide to take. But sometimes, sometimes it's not. And it's important to think about how many engagements you want for each experience. And that's something that we call throttling, but really making sure that somebody is not bombarded by a bunch of instructions when they when they land, just the appropriate amount. And speaking of instructions, some people, some people really want guided tours, some do not, but an onboarding checklist is great for reference for those who do want a very specific way of navigating through the app, or to come back to if they have questions. So this sets the expectation for things that they need to do. Now, I think that the image that we're showing here is probably a good kind of maximum amount, maybe, of things to have in the onboarding. It's important for people to feel a sense of accomplishment. And so that's why showing the checkboxes, being able to mark certain activities as complete, or maybe the system knows that they're completed, is really great. But you don't want to make the experience too intimidating. And potentially you can use progressive disclosure. If the user completes certain actions and maybe they advance to the next level, then you can give them the next level of onboarding. But, you know, these kind of trial experiences are usually— they have some kind of a gate and some kind of a limit. So, you know, keep it relatively simple. With that, this isn't— this is intended to be, as Mickey mentioned, something that has, um, has a broader reach and, and doesn't always require a human to be there to close the transaction or close the deal. So in that case, you may have someone that's available for a call or a chat, but in many cases you may not. So make sure that that you have— make sure that you give people access to knowledge, your knowledge base articles, FAQs. Let them search for things. Don't, don't block that just because they're in the trial experience. I think that's something that may be carrying over from, you know, the, the older days of SaaS software where we've seen documentation sites where you have to be logged in with your user information to access it. And I think that in this age of transparency, of shorter attention spans, you really need to give people what they want when they want it. All right. Another really important concept is progress. So we want people to feel that they have accomplished something every time they come into our, our trial. Going back to the point of why are we here, your trial may have— your product may have varying levels of complexity. You may have a product that requires some setup. And so for that, you, you really want to provide specific instructions to help them get— to help them walk through that setup. You don't want to— if you're an analytics product, you don't want someone to land on an empty dashboard and then go try to figure out what to do. And so getting through maybe some first set of setup could be a big accomplishment. You also may decide to pre-populate information if it is that use case. You might just, you might just have some kind of dummy information so that they can walk through and sort of simulate their experience, but they can also still make accomplishments, especially like we mentioned in the onboarding widget, even if it is that type of experience. Virality is also really important. So there are many, many studies and statistics out there that say— that let you know that if you have 2, 3 people joining your trial, you're much more likely to convert. And so inviting people— you can see in this, in this example, this, the far left, it's from Monday, and they show the faces. And I invited these two people to my trial. And I feel like I've accomplished something. We're part of a team. And if I, if I leave this experience, I'm going to be leaving my team and letting them down because they might be using it. And so the human connection piece is pretty important. And then making sure that the experience stays pretty consistent. You'll also have opportunities to highlight feature activation. There are two, there are two ways to really think about this, I think, in the context of trials. The first way is when, when they come in, if they have accomplished certain steps and you see that they are getting a little bit more advanced, then you can expose, you know, larger features and provide instructions on how to use them. If somebody expresses interest in a certain feature or maybe they are navigating around, having these sort of videos and contextual discovery is really important. And, uh, and also, as you use analytics, as you study your product experience, you hopefully will start to know what are the couple of things that people need to do on the first time, the first couple of times, within, within 30 days, within a certain period of time, in order to correlate them to a likely likely conversion or retention. And those are the things that we call the golden features. Those are things that you might want to stand out a little bit more than some of the other features within your app.

I think that that's also very important in a B2B platform. We have a ton of features and a customer comes in and we need to realize there's a kind of really learning curve for the customer. So feature activation allows you to really highlight the right feature at the right time and push that customer to the next level of value.

Yeah, and we mentioned, we mentioned access to knowledge, but also the ability to give feedback is really important. The user doesn't necessarily know whether somebody is there monitoring their trial or not, but often, often they are. So if you give feedback, you ask a question, you file a ticket, that will most likely, um, that will most likely reach the person that is on the other end. And so don't think that just because you're in a trial that it's only robots behind the scenes. Um, you know, giving that, giving that full communication loop that you may see in a full deployment of a product is a great way to also make people feel a little bit more committed to your product. All right, um, so another thing to, to think about is testing. So there's a kind of a myth in the B2B SaaS world that A/B testing is dangerous and it's not really okay. It's kind of only okay for consumer products. That is false with caveats. So things related to conversion from the, from the, let's say, customer-facing or marketing website to the product, absolutely okay to test, just like they would be in a consumer experience. Onboarding flows are also okay to test. Those are not things that are core to the experience. Copy is also good to test. There's a great example from one of our larger customers where there's a trend towards making copy really friendly and saying hello and personalizing it, which in many cases works well. But for this customer, they had an instructional version, which is, here are the instructions on what to do. right? They just kind of went into it. And then they tested a different version which said, "Hello, Jim," then the exact same instructions. And the users actually perceived the friendlier version to be more of a kind of a hello message or a marketing message, and they missed the instructional piece of it, and that actually performed lower. So that's why A/B testing these kinds of messages is so important because it differ so much in every context. All right, let's talk about the things that are a little bit more risky to test. Core workflows. So when somebody is in a trial experience, they are learning, they have to learn quickly. They need to feel like what they came for has been accomplished, and they need to feel like they know the value, they're able to maybe sell that value to someone who will be paying for it, if they're, you know, if they have a stakeholder like that. And anytime anything changes in the core workflow, you're kind of potentially back to zero. And so that is really dangerous. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't change the core workflows ever, but ideally you can do that in a way that it doesn't impact existing trials. And if you must impact the existing trial, be very, very clear about what those changes are. It's a best practice and it's recommended to have in-app guidance no matter what when you change a feature, but especially when people are learning. They will feel like, they might feel like they did something wrong and they forgot something and, ooh, this is going to be a, this could be a difficult product to learn. I'm not so sure about it. Similarly, movement of features, addition and removal of features, just really things that have to do with the workflows. It's all about that sense of accomplishment and, you know, confidence in the ability to use the product.

Yeah, we just add like that we saw that very interestingly that the instructional one is you're showing a message saying, here, learn how to operate a feature was outperforming the friendly welcome as hello, Jim was really, really dramatic difference. I guess users are trying to learn something, they're not trying to create a chat with you. And also, when you do deliver completely new features, this is where you can really use any kind of feature flag mechanism to A/B test and expose a new feature, see how many users are actually touching it before you GA it. So this is where I think testing is okay. But you want to be very cautious and also making sure that you also keep a control group that you're not engaging in any way. So you can really scientifically say, this is a group that I didn't engage with versus the one I did. And also, you can run them later on in multivariate testing as well. So I think the top takeaways from this session is product-led growth is really about go-to-market. It's about connecting your product experience to the go-to-market effort. Even if you're a B2B enterprise customer or vendor, this is becoming a top priority next year. Putting the product at the forefront of customer journey, you can really see the financial implication of that and also the experience of the customer, the way they experience your brand and the way they interact with your product is going to affect the adoption, growth, and scale potential of your company. Also really have— what we saw is you have to really think about adoption and growth seriously. You want to have people that own that A to Z. If it's still going to be partially on marketing, partially on product, it's just going to fall between the cracks. You want to make sure that this is owned by a growth team. And as we saw before, we have like a growth marketing and growth product management that they do the handshake and they make sure that the customer experience at the center of what they do. And you can start with product qualified leads. This is relevant for trials, but again, this is relevant for the entire customer lifetime value. Most of the things we realize companies suffer from churn eventually because customers did not utilize the full value of their product. And you want to start making sure that your product is delivering that value. You want to focus on time to value, usability, and also messaging to these users.

And on the user experience side, it absolutely— even it is the most relevant in these kind of product-led growth experiences. People need to always be reminded what is the value, why are they there. They need to have specific instructions so that they can find success with every touchpoint and interaction in your app. And they need easy access to knowledge so that they can feel accomplished and confident in the future use of your product.