How to overcome SaaS Growth challenges? ft, Amit Prakash
A CMO / GTM leader perspective
This is a guest post by Amit Prakash, a Marketing Executive with deep expertise in Demand Generation for B2B SaaS businesses, ex-AWS, Cloudflare, and SurveyMonkey.
End-users favor discovering the value independently through self-serve options
Let’s start with the end users of your product…
End users and buyers prefer to self-serve, try different products, and discover value. More often than not, a Sales-rep interaction at an early stage of discovery can be disruptive. Users prefer:
Simple account creation, service provisioning, and
Pricing transparency
Both of these are needed to incentivize them to Sign up, Try, and Buy.
SaaS companies should DECIDE early on their Go-To-Market motions
Acquiring customers and getting them to use your products are some of the biggest challenges for a business. This is typically accomplished in three ways:
Sales teams led (SLG) - preferred when your products are complex, require lot of customizations, and are typically larger deal sizes (typically >$30K ACV)
Product-Led Growth (PLG) - beneficial for higher velocity deals that land with lower annual deal sizes (typically <$10K/year ACV). Adding a salesperson to close such deals might become prohibitively expensive.
Hybrid - Acquire customers with PLG motions and then upsell/expand with SLG.
Successful companies typically will layer SLG over PLG to drive Hybrid growth.
However, the key is to enable self-serve capabilities within the product before layering GTM motions. Typically, this becomes the most critical decision.
Layering SLG over PLG motions take substantial resources and often fails, especially if all the relevant departments (Product, Engineering, sales, Marketing, Data Analytics) do not come together.
Why is GTM difficult ?
#1 Building a PLG-enabled product is non-trivial
First and foremost, the biggest one, building a PLG product is very different from building a traditional sales-led SaaS product.
Complex user onboarding: It is challenging to create a frictionless signup and onboarding process that allows users to quickly derive value.
Technology integration: It is time-consuming and complex to Integrate various systems like user authentication, tenant provisioning, trial management, product analytics, and PLG CRM. This almost seems like buying various components of an alarm clock and working to put it together and ensure that they never break - a really tough and time-consuming problem.
Pricing transparency and Billing integrations: It is difficult to implement clear, flexible pricing that aligns with user value perception. Companies often fail to differentiate their pricing tiers, which are necessary for end users to pick the appropriate pricing plan.
Product Usage Analytics: Product analytics helps understand areas where users are getting stuck/confused. This drives the need for UX improvements. Product Analytics plays an outsized role in PLG products, much more than SLG-first products.
Self-Serve drives business Scalability: Building a product architecture that allows the buyer to be in control of experiences (including Signup, trial, buy, upgrade, downgrade, join/merge tenants, cleanup on expiry, understanding usage etc) is significantly different than a traditional Sales-led SaaS product. Lack of self-serve processes can hamper customer growth and scalability. Adding salespeople to drive scale can often be cost-prohibitive and not that effective.
#2 Layering Sales on top of self-serve motion is all the more challenging
While Self-Serve can accelerate business growth the deal sizes typically start small. SaaS companies invest in layering a Sales approach on top of PLG - typically referred as Product-Led Sales (PLS) to further accelerate growth. This is more challenging for the following reasons and needs to evolve from traditional processes:
Sales role evolution: Sales teams need to adapt. Instead of traditional cold-calling, they need to increase their focus on understanding user behavior, interpreting product analytics, and delivering personalized value. They need to use customer signals like product usage, and marketing program engagement to drive pipeline and revenue.
Timing of sales engagement: One of the key challenges in PLS is determining the optimal moment for sales teams to engage with users. Engaging too early may disrupt the self-serve experience while engaging too late might miss opportunities for conversion or upselling.
Product usage data plays a crucial role in enabling effective Product-Led Sales enabling for account expansion and reduce churn.
Usage data allows GTM teams to identify opportunities to focus on accounts which are ready for expansion, upgrade, and reduce churn. There should be specific personalized motions at the right time set up for each of these account types. This data also informs product development based on usage and common bumps faced by customers (e.g. unclear UX, difficult to set up etc).
ThriveStack.ai accelerates Product Growth
As a GTM leader with previous experiences in driving Hybrid GTM motions at companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and SurveyMonkey, I found that ThriveStack provides a compelling and comprehensive suite of technology components, which enables various departments to focus on SaaS growth.
I spent some time with the product, and here are some of my thoughts…
Enabling Product & Engineering team: Most products that claim to enable PLG often are focused on enabling Marketing or Sales teams, often missing to enable Product. Product-Led growth typically should start from the Product. ThriveStack helps rapidly set up self-service businesses which includes the major technology components mentioned above. ThriveStack serves as a connective tissue between your marketing website and your SaaS application. Within an hour or so, developers can enable their products with a Signup and Login CTA and all the underlying technology components mentioned above are configured automatically.
PLG Analytics for Product and Analytics teams: There are many tools that help SaaS companies analyze their product usage. Developers have to do a lot of instrumentation with heavy coding to onboard these tools and growth teams need to author numerous charts to understand product usage metrics. ThriveStack (probably) is the only one I found to automatically bring in the self-serve telemetry and out-of-the-box PLG analytics. What I found interesting is the ability to track customer acquisition metrics, analyze retention rates across various cohorts, and measure virality. This provides marketers with the data-driven insights necessary for informed decision-making.
Self-Serve CRM for GTM teams: Traditional CRMs are built for Sales-led customer acquisitions. However, the self-serve acquisition is different. Users sign up for products without sales interaction. ThriveStack has built an intuitive PLG CRM, enabling sales and marketing teams to understand the users, the accounts they belong to and their associated account journey (based on usage events). This allows GTM teams to create sophisticated customer segments based on criteria such as industry, tenure, and usage patterns.
Checkout their Product Introduction presentation here
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— Amit Prakash
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Registration Link: Has SaaS lost its GTM? 2024 Insights on low-cost, effective GTM motions
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