What is product-driven growth: PDG focuses on turning your product into a tool for acquiring users, identifying best prospects from these users and moving them along the funnel towards conversion.
In principle, this is similar to how companies use inbound marketing to acquire, educate and nurture users by sharing valuable industry know-how. Or, how companies use direct sales outreach to engage prospects, educate and convert them. However, as opposed to the traditional approaches, product-driven growth is focused on facilitating potential users to experience the value proposition as quickly as possible, and encouraging them to navigate pre-designed buyer’s journey paths towards conversion while experiencing a series of value thresholds (i.e. A-ha! moments).
Why should you consider product-driven growth: We are experiencing drastic changes in customer acquisition landscape due to the following key drivers:
1. Email prospecting conversion ratios are on a rapid decline
The widespread use of sales automation tools that enable sellers to deliver personalized emails in large quantities has dramatically increased the inbound email volume for decision makers. As these sales outreach technologies and bots improve further, it’s likely for email based prospecting to show even poorer conversion.
2. Incumbents have a strong unfair advantage in inbound marketing
Success of an inbound marketing strategy wholly depends on the discoverability of your content. Search engine discoverability primarily depends on your domain authority and links — provided all the technical SEO optimizations are already addressed. Incumbents have a strong unfair advantage in domain authority and the backlinks count. In certain cases, these backlink counts are in double digit millions. It takes a great deal of time and effort for a new entrant to implement a predictable and repeatable inbound marketing funnel that can compete with incumbents for traffic.
3. Digital advertising is becoming prohibitively expensive
When used as an engine of growth, digital advertising often results in high customer acquisition costs that make the approach unviable in the long term. Furthermore, considering that the key cost variables are outside of your control, digital advertising is unreliable as a repeatable, predictable and scalable channel of growth.
Unlike the traditional approaches, product-driven growth puts the key variables within the control of the seller and does not depend on large volume top of the funnel sales activity to drive growth. This enables companies to boost their return on investment from traditional growth and position for hyper-growth.
How to Implement product-driven growth: There are three key steps for implementing a product-driven growth strategy.
1. Identify Value Thresholds
Value thresholds are a series of a-ha! moments that users experience as they start getting value from your product. Imagine the last time you felt excitement because a painful task was made easier by using an app. And, how that feeling convinced you to invest more of your time into using that app. If you look at your favorite apps and tool, undoubtedly you experienced value thresholds or a-ha! moments along your path to full adoption.
2. Design Buyer Journeys
Traditionally companies take a reactive approach to buyer journeys. At Hydra, we recommend taking a proactive approach. With this approach, buyer journeys are pre-designed to guide users through various value thresholds towards conversion, upsell and referral.
3. Monitor & Engage to Influence Buyer Journeys
The success of a product-driven growth strategy depends on a company’s ability to monitor, intervene and assist users as they navigate through the laid out buyer journeys. The telltale signs of whether someone is likely to buy, upgrade, refer or churn are scattered in the data generated through various user touchpoints along the way.
How Hydra helps with PDG: Hydra is at the forefront of PDG innovation. We help SaaS companies grow with PDG using our platform and strategy services.
1. The platform for product-driven growth
Our SaaS platform scans user touchpoints using A.I. to discover signals that indicate whether someone is likely to buy, upgrade or churn. This enables companies to quickly identify their best product qualified leads (PQLs) and engage them as appropriate to influence the buyer journey.
2. PDG strategy
Hydra works with select companies to design and implement their product-driven growth strategy. This includes identifying value thresholds, designing buyer journeys and implementing opportunity discovery using Hydra platform.
Want to Learn More? Always happy to geek out about product-driven growth and how you can implement PDG at your company. Send us a message.
