In the last article, I discussed how collaboration between CPO and CMO and their teams can unlock new revenue opportunities.
Now let's take this one step further and expand the role of product to drive growth not just through alignment with marketing, but as a core business strategy.
This brings us to product-led companies, which is different from product-led growth (PLG).
There is some intersection between the two but they are not the same. A Product-led company places its products at the center of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. It uses the product itself to be the main driver of user adoption, engagement, and expansion. In today’s enterprise landscape, customers expect the same seamless, intuitive experience that they encounter with B2C products.
This makes customer empathy at the core of product-led companies.
While product is central, they still utilize significant marketing campaigns and sales teams to reach potential customers.
Companies like Slack, Atlassian, Hubspot, Zoho, Zoom and Datadog are some great examples of enterprise companies that have adopted a product-led approach.
Here are some key strategies of building a product-led B2B tech company.
Self-Serve Product-Led Experience
Creating a self-serve experience throughout the customer journey is essential to becoming a product-led company. This includes everything from the initial sales and onboarding to customer support and even sunsetting product features.
Each of these touchpoints should be designed around the customer pain-points, ensuring the users can do their job effectively and efficiently without relying on human intervention as much as possible..
Free trials and Freemium models
Allowing users to experience the core value of the product without requiring a sales call is the fundamental aspect of self-serve growth. Instead of just cold calls. Sales teams can now target top users with personalized experiences, encouraging them to initiate the sales conversation.
Slack, Hubspot, Infor have successfully leveraged this approach. Even large enterprise companies that are generally seen as requiring high touch sales can adopt similar strategies, companies like Zendesk, Zoho, Dropbox even SAP have 14-day free trials.
This approach empowers the sales team to be the trusted advisors, reduces the sales cycle and enhances customer trust.
Frictionless Onboarding
A smooth and intuitive onboarding process is critical. Using simple in-app guides, tooltips, and automation helps users get started quickly. Moving towards conversational AI agents would enhance engagement throughout the product life cycle.
The goal is for users to reach “aha” moment quickly without a lengthy onboarding process and training.
Product Managers should continuously experiment with onboarding flows, pricing tiers, and feature releases to optimize both conversion and retention rate. Leveraging user behavior and adoption patterns for data-driven decision making and refining the product experience.
Using Usage Data to Drive Engagement
Product adoption and usage data are invaluable in optimizing onboarding and reducing churn. Identifying drop off points allows companies to proactively address friction areas and refine the user journey.
A Persona-based journeys approach - customizing user experiences based on behavior patterns helps keep users engaged. Embedding generative AI powered personal assistants can provide real-time, in-product assistance and guide users through the platform effectively.
As one of my customers succinctly put it: “Provide information within the product where I am working and stop sending me emails”.
This statement is what drove the importance of embedding help, insights, and feedback loop within the product, rather than only relying on external channels that disrupt the user flow. A well-integrated in-app support experience ensures that users get the help they need exactly when and where they need it.
Make The Product Your Salesperson
Deliver instant value, even in traditionally complex enterprise ERP, CRM or SCP systems.
As I often told my teams, “It is not your parents' ERP anymore”. Customers expect the same seamless, intuitive experience they get with their smartphone - no training required. Your products should be so easy to use that it naturally drives adoption.
Minimum viable becomes maximum valuable product every time you deliver new functionality or products.
Value-based Experience
Users should see immediate value without needing an extensive setup or integrations. Reducing friction is key - provide pre-built integrations and enable one-click partner plug-ins to simplify the onboarding process and minimize obstacles, and get the customer live and using the product quickly.
Think of Figma’s browser-based collaboration, which removes barriers and makes teamwork a breeze. Users can instantly collaborate without the need for complicated setup or asking for admin approval, making the product feel intuitive and efficient from the start.
By focusing on delivering value right away, users are more likely to stay engaged and adopt the product long-term.
Enable Networking
Embedding collaboration and sharing features throughout the product fuels word-of-mouth growth. Even something as simple as allowing customers to share video of how they use a feature can enhance customer experience.
Using referral incentives to invite others from the team to join. Involve power-users to be part of the product council to shape product innovation.
Recognizing and celebrating customers who influence feature development fosters deeper engagement. Give a shout-out to the customer who inspired a new feature as part of the product launch or in-app assistant.
This goes a long way in strengthening relationships and builds a community that does the selling for your product.
Leverage Usage and Consumption based pricing
Allow customers to start small and scale as they grow, where it makes sense. Use adoption data, design a tiered pricing model that aligns with the usage pattern. Iterate continuously to improve and optimize for both you and the customer.
Follow the approach of enterprise companies like AWS, Microsoft, Snowflake, which charge based on consumption. This flexibility makes it easier for customers to justify starting with your product and expanding over time.
Follow Apple’s “Think Different” approach - sticking to the status-quo has never led to success.
Align teams around product mind-set
Consistency in messaging not only builds recognition but also strengthens trust and loyalty, setting the brand apart from competitors. Establishing consistent brand voice and story across all channels, reflecting the product's value proposition that embodies personality and values of the company - no matter who touches the customer.
A unified narrative ensures that the brand resonates with the target audience, creating a memorable and credible identity in a competitive landscape.
Shift Towards Product-assisted Growth
Sales teams should focus on expansion & enterprise deals, while smaller teams self-serve. This shift ensures that high-touch sales resources are allocated effectively while allowing the product itself to drive adoption and growth for smaller accounts.
This allows sales teams to now use product analytics in addition to the traditional outbound sales methods. Instead of targeting every customer segment, sales teams can now focus on users who have already engaged deeply with the product.
They can conduct contextual outreach based on real user behavior, set up automated nurture campaigns triggered by user actions, and identify expansion opportunities driven by customer usage patterns. This data-driven approach makes sales efforts more relevant and efficient.
Incorporate PLG Metrics
Traditional sales and marketing metrics alone aren’t enough in a product-led company. Instead of relying solely on revenue, MQLs and Support-data are often siloed, track metrics that reflect actual product engagement and business impact like:
Time to Value - Measures how quickly users experience the product’s core value with adoption rate and time. This should include adoption rate and time , not only in production systems , but also in development and staging instances, as early adoption in testing environments often signals future production usage.
Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs) - Identify users who reach meaningful engagement milestones, indicating they are ready for expansion and sales engagement. PQLs provide a great addition to MQLs for both the product and marketing teams. By tracking PQLs, teams can refine the product to better the user experience and tailor marketing campaigns to attract similar high-value users, ultimately driving more targeted growth and enhancing both product development and marketing effectiveness. to enhance future products and campaigns.
Expansion Revenue - Tracks growth from existing users through upsells, cross-sells, or increased usage. A well thought out product experience is important. When releasing new features, the focus should be on seamless adoption—ensuring that users can naturally engage with new functionality without requiring retraining. Intuitive product design, in-app prompts, and contextual onboarding help users unlock value effortlessly, leading to higher expansion revenue and deeper product engagement.
Using product analytics to drive decision-making ensures that teams prioritize initiatives that enhance user adoption, retention, and expansion—ultimately fueling long-term success.
Final Thoughts
To become a product-led B2B company, the product needs to be easy to adopt and onboard, in addition to being value driven - so that customers want to use it, advocate for it and increase their consumption. Blending the 3 main factors - Self-serve experiences, data-driven growth, and consumption-based scalable pricing models to drive sustainable growth.
A customer once famously told me years ago, "You gave me cocaine, and I just keep coming back for more." While I didn’t like the drug reference, it highlighted that we had built something truly compelling—something that kept our customers coming back and engaged with us.
Until next time, when we talk about the challenges and resistance to becoming a product-led company and how to overcome it.
About The Author
Uma Welingkar
Fractional Chief Product Officer
Uma is a strategic product leader with extensive experience in driving innovation, leading global teams, and delivering customer-focused solutions.
Read Uma's bio or book a time with her.
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