There are plenty of young, flashy startups that seem to be overnight successes, bursting onto the scene, grabbing headlines and growing at a break-neck pace — Atlassian isn’t one of those stories. Atlassian relied on product-led growth before anyone coined the phrase, so let’s unpack how they are so tactical about running their business: the self-service funnel, a global network of channel partners, and enterprise upselling.
Let’s be honest: creativity is a nebulous landscape. With the evolution of digital technologies, we’re now exposed to other people’s opinions, ideas, and work on an almost minute-by-minute basis. But here’s the thing: humans can’t have new ideas without prior sensory input. It’s not me; it’s science, and it’s how our brains work.
John Silverman (Etsy CEO) talks about the very clear but not-as-recognized fact that you can’t really manage what you don’t know. It doesn’t mean you should go out trying to do everything, but instead, as a manager, you should allow and incentivize experts to solve problems the way they believe is the best (input), while you focus on the result (output). Setting up a system where failure is affordable and picking when you can fail are two important things.
Freemium is back. Atlassian, New Relic, Zoom, Slack, etc. have all found tremendous value with freemium. But having built a partly freemium service that hundreds of millions use … I’ve learned one thing: almost everyone gets the math wrong in Freemium. Freemium is great. Freemium forces you to have better onboarding and a slicker, easier-to-use product. Freemium is the way you and I like to try and often buy.
Learn how to measure, analyze, and improve your retention rates to turn your SaaS business into a success. Every time I think about how SaaS companies grow, I come back to the idea that: Growth is the result of engagement, retention, and monetization. But at the same time, retention is also the most crucial factor that drives acquisition and monetization. What that means is that retention plays a role in all three elements of a successful growth engine.
Your prospective customers are faced with a mountain of choices and content. When they’re making a decision about whether to engage with a brand, customers—in every demographic, B2B, B2C, and across industries—are overwhelmingly signaling that they prefer personalized messaging that is relevant to their needs. One of the easiest ways to boost content marketing relevancy is through personalization.
One way people make buying decisions is through tradeoffs. Simply put, a tradeoff is when a customer thinks through a decision and eliminates the inferior choices to come up with the right product or service to buy. It’s choosing the best way to make progress, as opposed to just a compromise. In sales, a tradeoff is more about helping people make better decisions than coming to a compromise.
Everyone, from engineers to accountants, can benefit from getting a better pulse on customer insights, imbuing the data they use to make decisions with more meaning. I have a challenge for you. Everyone in your tech company should spend time with customers weekly. Yes, weekly. Helping everyone in your organization regularly engage with customers—specifically team members in non-customer facing roles—is powerful and even transformative.
Software buying has evolved. Long gone are the days of executives choosing software for their employees based on IT compatibility or KPIs. Employees now find their preferred software products and start using them, usually for free. Then they tell their boss what to buy. This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing.
Every buying journey -- from buying a $2 toothbrush to $2M enterprise software -- is an extremely complex and unpredictable path. And to make it even more complex, each prospective buyer you’ll meet will have a different set of life experiences, education, biases, and expectations (to name a few). In other words: A concept that makes perfect sense to you may never have crossed the mind of your buyer.
You are in trouble if you’re trying to hack sales — unless you lay a foundation first. By hacking, we mean trying out loopholes and tricks and ways around doing the hard work. The hard work that every company and every sales leader needs to do cannot be hacked. Sure, you can buy some tools and lead lists and send out thousands of emails, but that won’t get you very far.
“Show, don’t tell” is a time-tested rule in writing and filmmaking that helps viewers draw their own conclusions rather than relying on a spoon-fed version created by the author. Yet, when it comes to product demos, many marketers and sales teams fall short in creating demos that convert. How do some of the most successful SaaS companies approach their demos?
Beautiful design, beautiful pricing, and ultimately, just a beautiful business. We’re talking about Xero. And I’m going to be talking about what they’re doing really well, and what they’re not doing so well, at least in the past couple of years. And we wrap up all of those lessons into a nice little case study, so you can improve your own monetization strategy.
Product marketing is taking over the world. Everyone seems to be hiring a product marketer. And for good reasons: Product marketing covers a broad set of skills that are instrumental to the growth of a business at any stage, and Product-Led Growth (PLG) keeps gaining more and more momentum. But what exactly makes a good product marketer?
The dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that most great product teams follow a system that resembles waterfall (gasp!) to launch new innovative features/products repeatably. The system starts with high conviction based on judgment, intuition, and instinct rather than relying on iterative customer feedback to build conviction over time. The process of going from 0 to 1 with a first product is an innovation.