![Elena Verna](https://carlyobrien.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Elena-Verna.png)
Elena’s interview with Lenny blew me away. I literally stopped what I was doing and started taking notes. I also started researching wanting to know more!! Because I had so many juicy take-aways I thought it may be easiest to share my notes with you on this one!
Product led in the growth model — orgs need to answer these questions…How to acquire?
How to retain?
How to monetize the customers?
The product itself generates the pipeline in product led. A sales person or rep generates the pipeline to sell the product in sales led.
Product led must start with retention. Activate and engagement are the two KPIs to watch.
https://userpilot.com/blog/product-led-vs-sales-led/
- A product-led growth involves using your product to drive business and revenue growth.
- Sales-led growth, on the other hand, uses your sales processes to move customers along the funnel.
- The major difference between both strategies is in the business processes.
- While product-led growth offers customers a self-service model to experience and learn the product for themselves, sales-led companies provide 1-on-1 assistance to guide all sales-qualified leads through every stage of their journey.
- They are, however, both relevant growth models with varying benefits.
- Product-led companies, for example, use free trials and a freemium model to get customers to experience their perceived value.
- This widens your top-of-the-funnel acquisition and results in product qualified leads who fall in love with your product early, and are more likely to convert.
- Sales-led however, is a great choice for software companies that are more complex and target enterprise organizations.
- Customer success under a product-led growth approach depends on your product experience which must be as contextual and engaging as possible.
- The lack of human guidance in this model means your product must be able to convert customers easily.
- This is where segmenting all users based on characteristics or job titles comes in. With this, you can create a personalized onboarding flow relevant to each user’s journey.
- Onboarding checklists can also serve as a guide to help users reach the activation stage immediately.
- Collecting feedback from users including those in the trial stage is important too. This gives you insight into areas of your product flow or the customer experience that need to be worked on to increase adoption and conversions.
Follow up reading:
Product led sales will outpace SLG — Elena’s prediction.
Focus on user value.
Cost of acquisition — acquiring a user vs buyer is cheaper.
Can charge for Usage vs the # of customers.
Atlassian — users will self serve $20K deals without talking to a human.
Product led generates usage without a human interaction.
Scoring users based on usage = personas = organic users that sales can use to create an outbound sales pipeline.
Usage based freeium model — expires at a a usage rate vs a timebase expiration
Where to Listen: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/elena-verna-on-why-every-company
Where to find Elena:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/elenaverna