Product Led Growth Part 2- Maximizing growth with ACRE’s

PLG Part 2- Maximizing growth with ACRE’s.

What is ACRE’s and how to maximize on ACRE’s by focusing on customer usage.

• ??????Acquisition- ensure frictionless acquisition.
• Conversion- maximize on conversion by showing value to customer based on usage.
• ?????Renewal- Retain your customers by continually demonstrating value realized from usage.
• ????Expansion- Earn the trust of the customer over time by clearly articulating the business ROI from the initial investment and becoming a trusted partner.

There is nothing new above and each company has this in numerous ways, some more complex than others but broadly the customer journey falls in these buckets.

The bigger issue comes with the fact that companies are not focused on usage and are not able to deliver on the promise stated above.?

More commonly seen than desired is the fact that, companies get caught in doing basic activities in each of the phases described above to check on a box and fill the funnel.

How does ACRE land in non-product led growth companies?

Acquisition can be all about ensuring that there's a trial or a freemium process, the baseline of fill the funnel.

Conversion is thought of as of the ability for the customer to buy/transact and that could be through sales or marketing web pages through some form of licensing, packaging, pricing. Pricing is especially used as means to generate volume/growth while it may or may not have anything to do with perceived value.

Renewal is more often than not based on the ability to somehow retain a customer, sometimes through the heroics of a csm team.

Expansion is more often than not a very desired dream state which is an unnatural sales motion typically where sellers try to go to adjacent departments to be able to make a sale of an ancillary product line/workload. the basics of a customer journey - what and why aren't rooted in data insights but based on what can be fit by sales and sometimes based on basic financial historical sales data.

Product led growth brings a new meaning to the same terms. Please see my first writeup around product led growth which was prelude to this- link here.

ACRE in Product Led Growth Companies

Acquisition is all about trials/ freemium but the focus is not on just the offering and terms around the offering but a frictionless experience. How can a company ensure a easy onboarding as well as ensure the customer gets to the first set of actions easily and drive some meaningful value from the interactions. This is about have an amazing user experience but even beyond that is understanding usage to ensure you learn from every interaction with a customer to iterate and get to a frictionless experience.

Conversion in a product led motion is the ability to charge a customer for usage beyond a certain point of basic usage threshold. In this case is seamless and the business does not need to again restate or sell the benefits as the customer is already using the product set/features and knows as well as fully understands the value. A seller may get involved to do a site wide license using baseline usage information to help a company utilize the platform or the customer may request it to get better licensing terms though ideally the user base should expand exponentially over time because of the value realized. The more natural the motion the stickier the product. This is rather complex being said too simply here as it involves having the right systems to allow for seamless expansion of users, ability for sharing product with other users, ability for a simple transaction system, easy and simple to understand licensing terms, simple packaging and pricing that is transparent ensuring the customers don’t feel charged for unnecessary reasons and more. When done right is magic but has a lot of behind-the-scenes functions and parts that need to just work right and in this system the assumption isn’t perfection but is all about understanding, being in the know, utilizing the data to learn, iterate and create the best and least friction environment with the customer in the center of it all.

Renewal is a different ball game. It doesn’t start after a customer buy but it starts with the very first interaction the customer has with the product. Retention is about showing value realization to the customer and capturing the same value from each phase from trial/freemium to conversion to renewal.

This is the art being able to share value realized from usage of the product /product features, the ability to get an ROI from this interaction. In a product led motion- product usage is at the heart of it and continually using the data to be able to measure on impact delivered utilizing customers input is the key. This can be done either with a third part system involved which helps in capturing the before /after scenarios or can be done craftily designed within the product to continually show value with the use of nifty dashboards which capture impact.

Impact analysis delivered as ROI across time from the start of trial/freemium process smoothens the customer journey making conversion easier and renewal a simpler continual process vs a once-a-year type of an event. Renewal becomes the right to earn your customer business on a daily basis where the business shows value from product usage utilizing impact analysis.

Expansion in product led is also not a single moment in time activity but is based on usage patterns and typically the next best workloads/products based on certain thresholds the customer reached of the first workload/product in use. Typically, when as a business you start, the baseline mechanisms to propose other workloads/products is based on a hypothetical customer journey as customers hit usage thresholds of the current product in use but over time as you have a richer data set around usage across various customers, the business is able to derive patterns of the next best workload/product to recommend to the customer.

This is in continuation of the first write up product led growth misconceptions and is base line info on the framework for product led growth.

The key is usage data across the entire customer journey that truly matters, and the mantra is learn, iterate and deliver growth for your business using data insights to especially thrive in the current environment.

Would love to hear, if this helps in designing your product led growth journey in the SaaS world.