Product-led sales is a sales approach where the product serves as the primary element for customer conversion and retention. In other words, sales and advertising techniques hold less weight compared to the product itself and its features when it comes to conversion. Product-led sales operates on the belief that a high-quality and easy-to-use product can generate customers on its own.
It's common to provide various pricing tiers with different functionalities, such as Premium, Business, or Beginner versions, to help customers understand price increases and value their purchases better.
Offering trials allows potential customers to experience the product before committing to a purchase, significantly improving the customer experience and potentially boosting sales. Some companies even opt for a free trial with limited features that users can access for a lifetime.
The key to product-led sales is offering a high-quality product, and achieving this requires thorough analysis of customer experience results. Understanding what needs improvement and what is well-optimized is crucial.
Encourage word-of-mouth promotion among users to foster organic growth. A common strategy involves offering discounts for each user invited to join the platform.
This not only helps improve the product but also provides valuable insights into necessary enhancements. Regularly seeking customer feedback is essential.
In traditional sales strategies, the interaction between the sales team and potential customers is crucial. Through calls or meetings, the team explains the product's key features and benefits before customers can see and test it themselves. Here lies one of the main differences with product-led sales: the process not only involves telling but also showing. Additionally, there is less dependence on the sales team, as potential customers have more autonomy in acquiring the product and can test it themselves before purchasing.
As a result, product-led sales significantly accelerates the agility in acquiring customers compared to traditional sales methods, granting customers more independence in the process.
However, this doesn't mean traditional sales should disappear from companies. There are organizations for which this system is ideal for customer acquisition. The problem arises when a company thinks this is its best option when it may not be.
Product-led sales strategies are common in companies that market digital products such as SaaS (Software as a Service), mobile applications, or cloud services. The nature of the product makes this strategy ideal for attracting customers at a lower cost and providing the best experience.
In recent years, many companies have chosen product-led sales over other sales strategies. This is due to various trends and factors in the market, such as:
If you've heard the term product-led growth (PLG), you might be wondering how it differs from product-led sales. You might even think they are the same.
Don't worry; it's quite common because the two concepts are closely related but have slight nuances that set them apart.
While product-led growth is a general business strategy that focuses on the product, product-led sales (PLS) is a part of that strategy—the branch of product-led growth that focuses on sales. Therefore, PLS is the approach that embraces the basic principles of PLG and applies them to sales.
This is why companies based on PLG often use PLS as well.