1.
Product Led Growth Strategy
Mickey Alon, CTO & Founder – Gainsight PX

2.
About Me
2
• CTO and Founder of Gainsight PX (Aptrinsic) - A Product Growth
Platform
• CEO & Co-founder of InsightEra (Marketo RTP), GVP at Marketo
• Co-Author of “Mastering Product Experience”

3.
THE GTM
EVOLUTION
• Sales Led: high ACV, high touch, limited growth
velocity
• Marketing Led: lower ACV high-med touch,
scaling efficiency
• Product Led: low touch/tech touch, ultimate
growth efficiently, competitive advantage.
Incremental ACV
3

4.
MARKETING LED GROWTH
• Scaling using marketing automation,
focused on top-of-funnel to MQL for
increased sales efficiency
• Marketing & sales owns customer
acquisition and growth metrics
• Handoff from marketing to sales
using buyer intent and from sales to
success – less customer experience
focused
4
Sales driven buying
experience

5.
PRODUCT LED GROWTH
• Scaling by providing access to the
product earlier in the buying cycle for
increased sales efficiency
• Product teams increasingly more
responsible for customer acquisition
and growth metrics
• Customer experience delivered by
the product throughout the customer
lifecycle, (Awareness -> PQLs)
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Consumer grade buying
experience

6.
Why Now?
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Consumerization of customer expectations,
experience counts
Economics behind fast growth – it’s a
competitive advantage
Proliferation of SaaS vendors and low
switching cost
The TAM is constantly growing – sales,
marketing & success need to scale.
Shorter cycles to launch new features,
experiment & learn = faster innovation

7.
Growth
Case Study
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8.
[Case Study] Slack – Exceptional Product Launch
• Delivering better communication experience for
companies
• Great product experience
• Strong messaging / PR: “Email Killer”
• Strong execution of online content, videos,
podcast to target different buying stages
• Iterative, data driven, growth process
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9.
[Case Study] Slack – Exceptional Outcome
• Record high usage 8 million DAU (free & paid)
• Having the highest conversion rate (30%) among
B2B freemium software products
• Being used by 43% of Fortune 100 companies as
well as reaching corner markets
• Reported valuation of $7.1 billion (08/2018)
9

10.
[Case Study] Slack – Product Strategy
• PLG: Using features & usage as primary drivers of
customer acquisition, retention and expansion
• Transparent pricing – freemium, no upfront
commitment, differentiated by premium features
• Viral - Slack is used as part of the daily routine. Easy
to onboard new users.
• Frictionless onboarding: ungated and quick time to
value
• Sticky: adds value over time and hard to replace
with enterprise grade ecosystem.
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11.
LONG TERM PRODUCT STRATEGY IMPACT
• Tech touch/low touch
• Usage driven upsell
• Multi-product expansion
• Transparent pricing
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$7.75B $4.7B $871mm
• Medium touch/demo
• Usage driven upsell
• Multi-product expansion
• Gated Pricing
• High touch
• Enterprise sales
• Single product
• Gated Pricing
*First mover, enterprise focus,
strong branding, highly complex
product
*SMB focus moving up-market,
strong branding, simpler product,
advanced features
*SMB focus moving up-market,
strong branding,
simple/modern UX product

12.
B2B ENTERPRISE SAAS UNICORN
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13.
7 Principles for
Product-Led Growth Strategy
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14.
Define the North
Star Metric
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Measure the success of your product by the
value it provides to your users
#1

15.
#2 Accelerate time to value
• Understand & Optimize the first mile
of product towards the moment of
value experienced by the user [Initial
Value]
• Identify challenges and improve the
usability and discoverability for core
features.
• Prioritize product roadmap to
support exceptional product
experience – demo/trial/onboarding

16.
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#3 On Boarding Experience
• Master The First Interaction: set user expectations as they
onboard to your product, engage & guide users consistently
to the first moment of value
• Capture the desired outcome: understand the customer’s
desired outcome as part of onboarding.
• Nurture track: map the user journey and nurture with best
practices / webinars / community

17.
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18.
#4 Feature Activation
• Raise feature awareness through
outbound/inbound efforts
• Promote in-context based on who they are
and what they do
• Increase discoverability using shortcuts or
in-app engagement

19.
Feature Activation

20.
User Activation

21.
The TRUST framework
• Timely: trigger engagements based on what they do, be contextual. Guide and
feedbacks should be tied to a desired action performed.
• Relevant: trigger engagements based on who they are, address different roles
and desired outcome with different product journeys
• Useful: help users learn something new, reduce time to value.
• Straightforward: be clear and concise - “Verbosity is the enemy”.
• Track results: validate your hypothesis, measure the impact on feature usage
uplift, iterate and experiment.
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22.
#5 Focus On Product Adoption
• Adoption is the best cure for retention, helps drive sustainable
growth and advocacy
• Understand product market fit (PMF) & go-to-market fit (GMF)
• Tie usage to retention analysis of the different cohorts

23.
Avoid The Product Death Cycle
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https://brianbalfour.com/landing/p-100m-frameworks

24.
Behavioral Retention Analysis
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25.
#6 Closed Loop Feedback
• Capture user feedback to connect directly with end users rather
than extracting feedback from multiple layers.
• Stay close to users and close the loop instantly using tools like
Slack/Calendly.
• Capture the desired outcome (survey) as part of the on-boarding
experience
• Targeted NPS driven by usage
• Feature/release rating

26.
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The Cross Functional
Team Effort#7

27.
Marketing Focus
• Product Launch & positioning
• Driving trials/demos
• SEO & Paid media channels
• Social/Podcast/G2Crowed
• Product oriented PR and thought leadership

28.
MQL to PQL
• Product-qualified lead represents a lead that signed up and
demonstrated buying intent based on product interest, usage,
and behavioral data.
• PQLs provide a more accurate method of tracking customer
journeys from signup to x-sell/upsell.
• PQL is a key metric for companies that’s transitioning to a tech
touch / product-led GTM strategy.

29.
Sales
• Show me vs Tell me – using the product to demonstrate value
• Product oriented sales team – where the buyer tends to be in
control of the process
• Using usage and features as levers
• Land & expand strategy, incremental spend
• Strong understanding of the competitive landscape

30.
Success
• Scaling Onboarding through the product
• Focused on outcome and expansion
• Drive Adoption Plays

31.
Product
• Product road-mapping is shifting from feature-
centric to outcome and growth driven
• Drive cross functional alignment around growth
• Prioritizing usability enhancements to drive
adoption

32.
Thank You!
Mickey Alon, CTO & Founder – Gainsight PX