Despite the fact that the term "product-led" has been tossed about a lot recently, it is not totally accurate to argue that the idea is true in its entirety. The product-led strategy has been utilized by SaaS business owners of Dropbox and Slack, and they have provided a model for how to dominate the industry by focusing on the product as the engine of expansion.
The possibility that PLG (product-led growth) may not be for everyone has been raised time and time again. The majority of SaaS organizations who have used the strategy, nevertheless, have benefited from it.
Teams are brought together under the PLG model to work on the product's ongoing improvement. For instance, because the customer success team is familiar with the product and the customers' perceptions of it, they may offer insightful information on what is and is not working. In a similar vein, sales teams might offer suggestions on how to improve the functionality. All of these factors work together to improve the product over time, making PLG a successful means of attracting new clients and keeping existing ones.
Product-led growth became a buzzword in 2021 due to its effectiveness and rising popularity. While some product businesses started implementing it, others were still debating whether to do so. These projections may be useful if you're in the gap or thinking about switching to product-led growth:
A Product-Led Growth Forecast for 2022
1. Competitive expansion to influence PLG
With a better product or new brand emerging every week, the markets are becoming more competitive. In order to engage with the target audience, this has compelled businesses to become more digital. At the same time, we are observing a trend in which consumers are reluctant to engage with marketing initiatives or sales representatives. Instead, they favor actively connecting with and utilizing the product.
Businesses must adopt the product-led strategy in order to remain competitive. They should align their customer-facing teams in accordance with this and rethink their sales, marketing, and service procedures and tactics. Additionally, PLG has extremely minimal entry barriers, and as its primary objective.
2. An increase in product-led sales
Companies using a product-led growth strategy may observe more adoption of product-led sales (PLS) in the future. The sales teams spend less time on unqualified leads as a result. They can instead concentrate more on prospects that are qualified based on Product Qualified Leads (PQLs).
3. Making it simpler to run marketing experiments to help PLG
On various digital platforms, we have seen a rise in the number of marketing trials in recent years. Additionally, the number of analytics tools and no-code tools has dramatically increased, making marketing experimentation simpler. With this kind of marketing experimentation, product-led growth actually works fairly well, making adoption much simpler.
4. Accelerated time-to-market is the main focus of PLG
If the current SaaS settings are taken into account, speed is an important component that affects a company's performance and expansion. From the standpoint of the customer, why would they wait three months to receive a product and determine whether it meets their needs? What happens if, from an entreprenuer standpoint, you have a great concept, but your rival comes up with something similar immediately before you? Wouldn't you forfeit the benefit of being first to market?
Given these, a product-led growth approach is the best choice for assuring your product's time-to-market because it focuses on creating and releasing the most crucial features first, followed by consistently working on enhancements. You don't have to wait three days if you use this method.
5. The distinctions between the teams
The Sales & Marketing, Product, and Customer Success teams must collaborate in order to adopt the product-led growth strategy. The distinctions between these teams will become even more hazy as PLG and self-service distribution take center stage, and there will be more collaborative effort.
6. Distribution by self-service continues to grow in popularity
This was undoubtedly a trend in 2021, and it will continue to be prominent in the upcoming years. Self-service software usage is expanding at the same time as enterprise software adoption. This tendency can be ascribed to the fact that individuals are exhibiting interest in testing new things without needing to know about them from a salesperson first. In order to ensure that their product speaks for itself and promote product-led growth, SaaS organizations can take advantage of the rising popularity of self-service.
7. Using data to drive product-led growth
Because advanced analytics are now accessible, businesses may receive quick and useful client feedback on their products. This data is useful because it enables companies to make more informed investments and adjust goods and services to make them as user-friendly as possible. Analytics also makes it easier for the organization’s goals to be aligned, leading to an improved, more collaborative cross-functional output. The route to PLG can produce enormous benefits as long as it is constructed with the correct data.
Conclusion
To sum up,product-led growth is critical for business through 2022 and beyond. Although businesses have already begun using the strategy, if your company is not one of them, now is the ideal moment to start.
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