Product
A strong sales pipeline is critical for every business. Traditionally, in a Sales-Led Growth (SLG) model, the sales motion is driven by the Sales Engineering (SE) team who champion the effort. Sales was thought to be directly proportional to the number of SEs you could hire, but this approach imposes a limiting constraint on product growth, especially for a SaaS company.
In this blog, we will explain why we decided to move away from SLG and how we implemented the new model.
Our observations revealed that 66% of the proofs of concept (POCs) conducted by SEs were for SMBs, generating only 14% of our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). This disparity highlighted the need for a more scalable and efficient approach.
The vision of Product-Led Growth (PLG) is to enable customers to experience the product from start to finish with minimal external assistance. This not only saves bandwidth of Druva’s Sales team, which was previously spent on provisioning tenants and helping customers understand the product, but also provides a better, simpler, and self-serve experience for our customers.
Expand Druva user base: Drive growth by securing Net New Logos (NNL) and increasing the number of active users.
Scale SMBs efficiently: Achieve growth in the SMB sector while reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Eliminate friction: Remove barriers to product adoption, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Complement SLG (Sales-Led Growth): Enhance the value of the existing SLG strategy, working in tandem rather than competing with it.
Our sign-up process is intentionally designed to be simple and frictionless. We employ a one-page form that minimizes required inputs, utilizing tools like ZoomInfo for automated field population. By eliminating unnecessary inputs such as storage region or timezone selection, we ensure a swift and seamless start for new users. Here’s the link to our self-serve signup page for reference.
Considerations:
Enhanced workflow reliability: Minimizing sign-up failures by handling unique customer name constraints with unique suffix additions and automatically generating new account activation links upon expiration.
Marketing parameters:
UTM parameters: Support for propagating UTM parameters present in the URL, helpful in tracking marketing campaign effectiveness.
Lead segmentation parameters: Collecting company name, size, job title, and country for effective lead segmentation.
Security and abuse prevention:
Email domain blacklisting: Preventing misuse by blacklisting public domain emails.
Captcha protection: Thwarting automated sign-ups through captcha on the UI.
WAF rules: Defending against Denial of Service (DOS) attacks with Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules.
Domain-specific sign-up limits: Enforcing limits on simultaneous sign-ups per email domain.
Secure error handling: Protecting user information by ensuring the UI does not reveal sensitive details to unauthenticated users (for example, avoiding messages like "an account with john.doe@email already exists").
Customer onboarding is the process of proactively guiding new customers through your product to help them get started, stay engaged, and find value. It involves a series of steps and resources designed to make it easy for new customers to incorporate a product into their routine. Effective onboarding can significantly enhances user satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, product adoption.
Here are some commonly followed frameworks which emphasize guiding customers through key milestones, ensuring their success and satisfaction, and maintaining continuous engagement to achieve product adoption and retention:
Bowling Alley Framework
C.A.R.E
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We liked the idea of the Bowling Alley Framework as it focuses on guiding customers through key milestones and aligns perfectly with our goal of structured and progressive onboarding. Here's how we approached achieving a great onboarding experience, drawing from the strengths of multiple frameworks.
An actionable dashboard with minimal distractions that guides users to take immediate next steps in order to quickly get started. Once users have completed certain steps, the dashboard automatically gets transitioned to Day 2 where they see an elaborated view of the product and current usage.
A checklist serves as a guiding light throughout the trial to tell users what are the key steps they need to perform in order to see the core value of the product. And it’s always visible on the UI or just a click away and shows trial status such as In-progress/Expired, number of days remaining, and list of milestones achieved and pending.
Considerations
Identify important key value metrics for the product. The idea is to keep the list minimal to keep prospects motivated to finish the steps. For us those key metrics were
Tenant registration
Backup configuration
First backup completed
First restore completed
There are ample tools for checklist implementation. They work well if checklist items are mostly user-action-driven from the UI. For us some of the checklist items were backend-driven like successful completion of the first backup and it was quicker to display the checklist using existing APIs rather than integrating the backend with tools to populate the checklist state.
As prospects do not have help from AEs/SEs, it's crucial to provide up-to-date interactive tours where they can explore how the product works without needing to provide input data, facilitating quick learning and usage. Refer to our product tours here.
We chose Storylane for building tours due to the following reasons:
Easy creation of interactive tours/experiences using HTML snapshots, with a no-code option to customize HTML content, blur sensitive information, highlight key details, and zoom in on important details.
Integrations with Marketo for pushing leads along with the tour progress, assisting in lead scoring and nurturing through personalized follow-ups and engagement.
We provide both automated and manned assistance through chat support while users independently explore our product. This includes sharing inline documents, playbooks, and offering real-time support. Users can engage in discussions for feedback or further assistance, and receive proactive guidance with timely information.
In our evaluation, Intercom stood out based on these criteria:
Rich Salesforce integration for retrieving necessary information and storing chat transcripts under Salesforce contacts, facilitating support case management.
Capability to hand over to technical support engineers from automated bots.
Support for chat conferences and customer-facing documentation creation.
Context-sensitive suggestions, like offering relevant documents and playbooks when users encounter specific issues.
Customizable chat UI with embedded documentation, product tours, and video capabilities.
Integration with calendars for meeting scheduling.
Context-aware customized email support.
Standard nudges for user engagement.
Ease of development, deployment, and evaluation.
Scalability, stability, and security features.
In-app product notifications.
Feedback collection mechanisms.
Robust reporting capabilities.
Lead generation involves capturing product interest during signups, product tours, and in-product interactions within marketing systems like Marketo and Salesforce. The core objectives of lead generation are:
Capture product interest: Record product interest and engagement levels in the system to identify high-confidence leads. These leads can be nurtured by AE/SE teams to explore potential opportunities.
Assess campaign effectiveness: Use UTM parameters to evaluate the success of various campaigns. This helps determine what's working and what needs adjustment.
Segment leads: Organize leads by parameters such as country, company size, and workload of interest. This segmentation helps identify potential leads and ensure alignment with PLG goals.
Integrate with SLG: Allow SLG to leverage PLG by enabling prospects to quickly try the product while correctly tagging the lead owner using UTM parameters.
These strategies ensure a structured approach to lead generation, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Telemetry is a critical component of our PLG strategy. By tracking user behavior, we can identify drop-off points and areas where users face challenges. For example, if users configure workloads but could not reach the state of completing their first backup or restore, we investigate potential gaps in the product and streamline the backup and restore processes to reduce friction points. Telemetry helps us make informed decisions to enhance user engagement and retention by understanding how users interact with the product. Additionally, we monitor PLG-influenced leads, which originate from sources like SLG or partner-driven self-serve sign-up experiences, to optimize our marketing and sales strategies effectively.
Our checkout process is streamlined to ensure a smooth transition from trial to paid subscription. By offering a clear and straightforward path to purchase, we reduce friction and encourage conversions. Reminders about trial expirations and prominently placed purchase options keep users well-informed and motivated to upgrade.
We aim to provide our MSPs and partners with the tools to fully leverage the potential of PLG. This includes offering a self-serve way of signing up, managing leads, enhancing the onboarding experience, and chat support. Additionally, partners and MSPs will be able to send personalized signup links to ensure leads are tracked as partner leads. These resources and support will enable our partners to drive product adoption and growth effectively.
Our shift to Product-Led Growth (PLG) has demonstrated strong success with our iterative "crawl, walk, run" approach, ensuring rapid value realization and continuous improvement. Through streamlined onboarding, effective lead generation strategies, and insights from telemetry, we enhance user experiences and drive growth. Looking forward, we're focused on refining our checkout process, empowering partners with self-service capabilities, and leveraging these insights to further strengthen customer success. These initiatives align with our Sales-Led Growth (SLG) efforts, positioning us for sustained growth and leadership in the competitive SaaS landscape.
Experience our Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy hands-on by signing up for our free trial.
