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Founder and CEO of Whistle, with over 10 years of selling technology to hundreds of SMB and Enterprize companies across multiple sectors.
If you’re planning to implement a PLG marketing strategy but still have reservations about the significance of including a sales team in the process, keep on reading.
Product-led growth marketing has not only generated millions for businesses but has marked its spot amongst the best marketing strategies out there. In a “try before you buy” era, many businesses tend to focus most of their resources on the self-selling product to attract potential users through free trials. Does this mean that the sales team has become redundant?
Product-led growth is a consecutive user-experience growth strategy where the product is the key to driving customer acquisition, engagement and retention. This go-to-market strategy has massive potential to attract users and convert them into customers.
How does it work? A PLG market strategy entices users to engage with the product directly – it focuses on helping rather than selling. A good PLG go-to market strategy answers questions like; who, where, why, and how people buy a product. This is where the sales team plays an integral role. Let’s find out why.
You know how a catalyst speeds up the rate of a chemical reaction? That’s what a sales team does when integrated with product-led growth.
Big PLG revenue-generating enterprises like Slack, HubSpot, and Dropbox understand the value of a sales team in driving the growth of a successful product.
As a PLG enterprise, the goal is to close as many deals as possible at your highest-tiered plan in order to boost growth. To this end, even the most innovative try-before-you-buy product model has its limitations. More often than not, there are issues that prevent users from upselling to higher subscriptions. These may vary. The simple answer to preventing upsell barriers is a sales team with an excellent understanding of your customer’s needs and challenges, as well as common friction points in the user journey.
In the product-led-growth system, the function of your sales team is to guide the process of adopting new features and upgrading the post-trial funnel. In a freemium model that targets the end-users, the sales team plays a crucial role applying the right touchpoints at relevant stages of the user journey.
Traditionally the focus of the sales team is on closing deals, while the product team concentrates on improving the product based on customer needs.
In a PLG ecosystem however, the sales team is much better positioned to identify qualified leads and convert free trial users to high-value clients. They are also able to gather invaluable user feedback relating to product experience and possible churn factors, which they then share with the product team. This type of collaboration between sales and product teams can be a game changer. The data and context provided by the sales team enable the product team to tweak their development initiatives or add additional features and updates that take your users to that aha moment – where they discover the value of your product faster.
To wrap it up, a sales team is at the heart of a successful product-led business. At Whistle we help PLG companies to power their expansion through product-led sales. How? We support your PLG model through our highly skilled sales team that acts as the point of contact – as a “concierge”, so to speak – to drive and assist commercial adoption through each stage of the user journey. Whether it is to ensure that every new trial user has the opportunity to work with an onboarding specialist, upsell existing users, or to recover closed lost opportunities, our team has got you covered.
Need help with your PLG strategy? Let’s chat.
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