Maximizing Value Delivery: Role of Product-Led Growth in Customer Success

The shift to product-led growth is a huge challenge for most companies. It impacts everything from culture to KPIs and organizational design.

It also requires a light and intuitive product that can solve customer problems without the need for marketing and sales campaigns. Think Dropbox, Slack, and Warby Parker.

A product-led approach creates alignment across teams–marketing, sales, CS, and engineering–that normally operate on different wavelengths. This prism brings them together for bright, focused results.

1. Creating a Personalized Experience

Many of the fastest-growing, most-loved companies are product-led—from Datadog to Slack to Zoom to Airtable. These products allow end-users to self-serve for most of their support needs, reducing the need for high-touch sales and customer success staff.

This product-centric approach requires a shift in how a business makes decisions, as well as how it collects and uses its data. It also necessitates a new mindset around personalization, since customers today expect personalized experiences and are likely to take their business elsewhere if they don’t get them.

To successfully implement a personalization strategy, start with behavioral analytics to identify what your users find valuable. This allows you to personalize the experience with recommendations, features and messages that speak to your audience at scale. Ensure you have a solid event-based analytics platform that lets you stitch together user data from any channel and in real time—for example, Adobe Experience Platform. This will give you the flexibility to create richer, more sophisticated personalization.

2. Creating a Shareable Experience

In Product-Led Growth, users discover, experiment with and adopt your product on their own terms. This can free up sales and customer success teams to focus on higher-value customers and activities, and enable the product itself to do more of the work.

To achieve this, cross-functional teams need to rethink the metrics that matter for your business and work together to develop a product roadmap informed by user behavior data and customer success best practices. This can require more alignment, effort and commitment from everyone in your organization, especially if your company is transitioning from a sales or marketing-led model.

For example, Canva uses a PLG strategy to allow users to create stunning graphics without paying upfront, then drives revenue by offering premium templates for those who want more customization options. This approach is more cost-effective than relying on a large sales team and allows Canva to deliver more value and build loyalty with their consumers.

3. Creating a Transparent Experience

Product-led growth requires a deep level of empathy and innovation. It reshapes the whole company around the product as the most important source of scalable user acquisition and retention. This creates alignment across teams that would otherwise be isolated in their departments. A product-led culture breaks down silos and allows for cross-functional collaboration and communication, fostering a transparent experience for users.

Transparency is key to building trust with customers and retaining them for the long term. This applies both to customer communication and the way a company presents itself to the public. Today’s consumers keep themselves informed, and companies that are not honest with their audiences will quickly fall out of favor.

To be transparent, a product-led company needs to have a strong understanding of its users and the value it is providing. This can be achieved through a combination of research, data analysis and the use of a well-defined user journey map. This will allow a company to understand its product usage at an individual level, and adapt the experience to each user.

4. Creating a Reliable Experience

Product-led growth shifts a company’s go-to-market strategy and impacts how sales, marketing, customer success (CS), and engineering teams measure and contribute to growth. It also puts extra emphasis on retention efforts and leveraging the power of user happiness to build brand and revenue momentum without the need for heavy outbound marketing or sales.

In order to maximize value delivery, a product-led business must understand its intended users and their needs. This is a challenging task that requires an investment of time, energy and money for the organization to implement behavioral analytics.

Unlike sales-led companies that must invest heavily in hiring and training a sales team and marketing teams that generate demand, PLG is a scalable model that leverages the product as the main source of customer acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention. In turn, this can significantly improve the efficacy of existing sales and marketing strategies. To learn more about this model and how it can be implemented, download our free guide: Product-Led Growth: The Complete Guide.