Gainsight's Product-Led Growth Strategy

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Gainsight's Product-Led Growth Strategy

Building Product-led strategy to drive customer growth.

What Is Product-led Growth

Product-led growth is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion.

Why Product-led Growth Is Disrupting The Software Industry

Evolving the Customer Acquisition Process

Changing customer expectations, along with consumerization of the business buying experience, are ushering in a new customer experience era in SaaS. A number of factors have converged to elevate

PQLs⁠

to the top of the heap for SaaS companies:

Economic realities of the SaaS business model

The rise of the empowered buyer

The consumerization of business software

The ability to track and analyze buyer intent during a trial or proof of concept

Before the introduction of the SaaS business model, enterprise software businesses called upon a high-touch, sales-led approach to developing leads. They relied on customer meetings, demos, proof-of-concept deployments and the like to convert prospects to customers.

Show Me Don’t Tell Me

The SaaS model enabled companies to ship software more often, iterate faster, and develop a more effective customer acquisition strategy. However, after the introduction of the SaaS model, customer expectations changed because of the confluence of two new realities:

Their ability to validate it’s the right solution for them by simply trying the software using only a web browser

The lower risk associated with SaaS because of the smaller upfront investment and the customer’s ability to opt-out without taking a big financial hit

Superior Unit Of Economics

The ability try the products with smaller upfront investment led to a rapid uptake of self-service options for buyers of business software. These realities forced SaaS companies to rethink their sales-centric customer acquisition model because it wasn’t delivering the necessary margin to balance customer acquisition cost (CAC) with customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is becoming lower having optimized spend for sign-ups as optimizing sales discussions farther down the funnel. Delivering sign-ups and building a world-class trial experience leads to optimized marketing spend, improved conversion rate, more qualified opportunities and revenue.

The bottom up model enables natural expansion with existing accounts by having users invite their colleagues or users from the broader organization without investing additional sales and marketing dollars leads to stronger Growth Retention Rate (GRR) and Net Retention Rate (NRR).

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Learn more about:

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GTM Essentials 4 must-have elements of a GTM strategy⁠

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Product Market Fit An experimentation process of finding customers in a target market with a problem that your product can address⁠

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Gainsight’s Product-Led Growth Framework

Best-Practices to drive growth using recommended product plays:

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Customer Lifecycle

Customer Lifecycle

Onboarding

Onboard users at scale to realize the first moment of value, apply user and feature activation tactics. Deliver in product experience based on acquisition channel and goals User Onboarding: Orchestrated Email, in-product guides and closed-loop feedback Analytics: Measure the path to the first moment of value. Learn about key retention metrics through retention analysis. Feedback: Net Promoter and Customer Effort surveys presented in real-time

Adoption

Data driven approach to learn key adoption patterns covering product health, user engagement and customer health for best-in-class adoption playbook. Make more Informed roadmap decisions using feature usage, revenue and customer outcome Analytics: Measure user and account retention, usage patterns, funnel completion, product adoption, conversion, and revenue Engagements: Guides, sliders, dialogs, and hotspots presented in real-time, when and where users need it. Feedback: Net Promoter and Customer Effort surveys presented in real-time

Retention

Proactively use usage data to identify customers at risk and re-engage inactive users to reduce churn Analytics: Measure user and account retention, usage patterns, funnel completion, product adoption, conversion, and revenue Engagements: Guides, sliders, dialogs, and hotspots presented in real-time, when and where users need it. Feedback: Net Promoter and Customer Effort surveys presented in real-time

Growth

Trial conversion, Up-sell and cross-sell of new or additional products and services through gated features, paywalls on the lower-end as well as human-touch sales driven cross-sell Analytics: Covering product health, depth and breadth of adoption as well as health score, customer & product 360. Engagements: In product, web & desktop offering driven by usage and customer health Feedback: Get visibility into the most active customers including their responses to NPS & CSAT surveys

CUSTOMER STAGE

Onboarding

GUIDELINES

Onboard users at scale to realize the first moment of value, apply user and feature activation tactics. Deliver in product experience based on acquisition channel and goals

User Onboarding: Orchestrated Email, in-product guides and closed-loop feedback

Analytics: Measure the path to the first moment of value. Learn about key retention metrics through retention analysis.

Feedback: Net Promoter and Customer Effort surveys presented in real-time

GOAL

Ah-Ha Moments

Users realize value (ah-ha!)

Skeptical, curious and need to be convinced this will solve their top pain points.

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Lifecycle Stage

Play

Template

Onboarding

Trial experience

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See template

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Contextualized User Feedback

User Enablement

Customer Onboarding

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See template

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Adoption

Data Driven Roadmap

Release Experience

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See template

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Feature Activation

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See template

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Adoption Journey/PVP

Retention

NPS/Advocacy Program

Support Ticket Deflection

User Re-Activation

Customer Health & Product 360

Growth

Experimentation

Customer Marketing

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See template

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New Product Launch

Paywalls/Upsell Sales Alerts

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What’s in this doc

This doc is organized by the various plays in the product-led growth framework. Each play has a template you can use to execute that play as well as a crawl, walk, run workflow. To get a bird’s eye view of all the plays you are executing, see

Program Tracking⁠

. View the

Data⁠

page to see the main tables driving this doc.

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