Accelerate B2B scaling with product led growth

Wiz, a company less than 5 years old, turned down an offer of $23,000,000,000 from Google. Amazon became the largest compute infrastructure provider in less than 10 years in a market dominated by cash rich tech giants. Slack was the fastest growing enterprise software company in a market already flooded with Instant Messaging platforms. How did these companies grow so quickly?

I have witnessed many B2B start-ups drifting in the “enterprise sales cycle valley of death.” Drudging through 24 month sales cycles while they have a crushing monthly cash burn. 2 years is a lifetime in start-up years.

The knee-jerk reactions are often “hire a commercial focused CEO to drive more sales” (I personally fell into this trap) or “increase sales people and spend more on marketing” or the latest spin “invest in AI sales automation tools.” These tactics usually increase the burn rate without getting the short term deals needed. They may drive the top of the sales funnel and land a couple pilots, but not increase the deal velocity at scale.

Don’t get me wrong, you NEED some compelling marketing that is as provocative as your game changing product. You also need a strong sales leader who thrives on the hustle and knows the art of enterprise sales. So what can you do?

Go to market is a full team sport where product led growth should be a key part of your roadmap. Read on for some proven B2B product alternative distribution led strategies that will accelerate your growth.

Customer First Innovation Culture:

Go to market is a team sport which requires collaboration across the whole organization. To institutionalize this. The leadership team, customer success, sales and product teams should have regular meetings to discuss real customer needs and review product usage data. Not just “personas” in Notion, but named customers and prospects who are willing to spend their precious money and time with you. This will be the structural foundation for perpetual innovation and agile product development. When you think your product is done, you are done.

Go Viral:

There are many B2B success stories where sharing is a key driver of customer acquisition. The Dropbox founders incorporated sharing as part of the early product design, which differentiated them from being just another back-up service. Calendly is a more recent example whose growth is “exploding” via it’s natural sharing capabilities.

Collaboration:

Miro is a good example of collaboration software where virality is a core part of the product. They designed their products to quickly get adoption in an organization and then go viral. The Miro user experience engages many different types of stakeholders across the whole organization. With features for design thinking, organizational structures, mind mapping, product roadmaps and software deployments. The product usage itself drives reach into a large variety of stakeholders.

?Closing large enterprise deals requires multi-stakeholder buy-in and approval. Miro has many features tailored to the needs of corporate decision makers and gate keepers. “My org chart is bigger than yours.”

?While your sales team is working on a big strategic deal, the Miro users are “Inviting + Upgrading.” Making sure that Miro is the default collaboration platform and will be hard to replace. Not to mention driving short term cash flow.

Reporting:

“I wish I spent more time on reporting,” said no one ever. Companies spend WAY too much time reporting. In large organizations, people from the shop floor to the CEO need to repeatedly report on the value they are generating and Key Performance Indicators.

Develop “one click” value reporting that links back to your software solution or has your branding on the export. Not only will your customer be ecstatic about the hours you saved them on reporting, they will make their managers proud and peers interested. Building more awareness and demand just by using your product. ??????

API is the product: ?

There is more than one way to bundle your product, but this is where the strategic product? decision should include a go to market plan. At SoftLayer (acquired by IBM for $2,000,000,000) we had our own IaaS portal for direct sales. But our portal was “just another API” client. Our core product was the underlying API that opened up the market for partners to build things we didn’t have the resources or imagination to build. Early on we established a partnership with Unity who integrated their gaming engine onto our platform. We rode the wave of their growth with 0 direct sales and marketing to their customer base.

Snyk a leader in cloud security, took this concept to the next level with a CLI level integration in addition to off the shelf integration into the market leading developer workflow tools, cloud providers and platforms.

Consultants:

Yes you read that correct. In the early days you probably are not going to get the attention of the big consultants. Start with the smaller ones who need innovation to compete with the big dogs. In the early days AWS grew through boutique consultants. More recently DataDog and Databricks took the same approach. If you look at their partner list it is dominated by smaller agile consultants. The large system integrators will come later, but to get quick traction, you need partners that match your speed and urgency.

Community Integration:

I saved the best for last. A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur turned investor. His VC fund will NOT invest in any company unless they have a go to market strategy that includes a developer engagement. Obvious? Everyone doing that? Yes, so you need to level up your game and go deep into your community as part of your product strategy.

AWS mastered this approach to become the biggest infrastructure company on the planet in less than 10 years. AWS sent their developers to sit shoulder to shoulder with their strategic customers. They had daily direct contact with their powers users where they co-developed products that met developers’ needs for specific industry workloads.

These were not custom software builds. AWS focused on strategic industry verticals and fundamental technologies to build repeatable products. After integrating industry specific foundational software, they could access entire developer communities with pre-integrated solutions. Now they are the biggest cloud company in the universe and continue to leave others in the dust.

A more recent example and one of the fastest enterprise software adoption ever is Slack. They had a different approach with building tools for themselves, yet still focused on integrating their product into targeted technology communities.

With so many communities, how do you prioritize? Not all users are created equal so they took a data driven approach to focus on their power users. This helped them refine their product and marketing strategies on the people most passionate about their product. In their own words “we are laser focused on how best to support this community”.

Once they had some scale, they didn’t wait for organic word of mouth or invites to chat, they took community engagement was a product and go to market strategy. They integrated 1,800 apps into their platform….then one click to pay with your credit card. Their enterprise sales team had an easier time qualify leads by looking at the data on which companies were already using and growing the user base.

Google made a bid to acquire WIZ for the $23,000,000,000. This is a company that is less than 5 years old. How did they pull this off with a product that is so critical for the enterprise?

They have one of the best community programs I have seen. Integration into the largest cloud platforms, check! Middleware integrations, check! Documented resources, check! Learning academy with certifications, check! Events, check! Open source frameworks, check!

Oh then they went to the next level of community support. They developed an open source data base of security threats where the community can identify and recommend solutions. They open source their research to keep their community up to date of the security threats and the actors behind them.

Great so now you are a certified Wiz security expert and have a channel for perpetually learning. Let’s make it fun. Wiz has some games where you can build your skills and show off your capabilities. Who said cloud security is not fun??

But wait there is more. Now that you’re a well-educated and a certified Wiz expert. Wiz created a job board so you can find a job in security. This created a bottoms up groundswell of users in some of the biggest global enterprises. There are many doors into the enterprise, which way do you want to get in? 2 years of discussions with purchasing, legal and the c-suite. Or coming in to a company who already has a large community of users advocating your product.

If you want to learn more about how to apply these and other guerrilla go to market strategies reach out for an introduction session.

If you are a start-up focused on digital infrastructure or distributed compute platforms, let’s talk financing.

?