0:00:04 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to the Experience-focused Leaders! I have one of the ‘Godfathers’ of Product-Led Growth and thought leadership – Wes Bush. Over 500,000 people have read his book, ‘Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product that Sells Itself’. And you actually both read the book and listened to the podcast that he's created, Product-Led. You can find tons of resources on everything Product-Led, on productled.com. I'm one of the readers of that book. We have the source, himself, Wes Bush. Wes, welcome to the pod!
0:00:58 - Wes Bush
Thanks so much for having me here. This is awesome!
0:01:02 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, Wes, I think one of the reasons why our audience tunes in is we talk a lot about how you create experiences. We tend to focus on content experiences. But those content experiences support Product-Led Growth. They support Sales-Led Growth and, obviously, Marketing-Led Growth. They support employee engagement and growth through enabling your team and yourself.
You run a Content-Led business. You have defined the Product-Led category and authoritative take on it. What does that mean? And obviously, you're merging, because these things do not exist in a vacuum. Product-Led Sales is a combination of Product and the Sales-Led motions. So let's define what product is today and how it's evolving, how it's spreading and the various flavors that you're seeing for our audience. Because I think the definition helps us take this conversation further.
0:02:12 - Wes Bush
I published the book about four years ago. You use your product to acquire, engage, monetize users on its own. The subtitle of the book was “How to build a product that sells itself.” I thought it was crazy, but then I was like, “Actually, all the best Product-Led Companies do that really well.”
0:02:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Talking about this engagement component, typically historically you've been like, “You sell, you find somebody, you sell them something.” Then after you sell them, you have to hustle and engage them, make sure they get the value of the product. Then hopefully you renew them and expand that relationship.
That's a historical journey and it's an expensive journey because you have to hire either a lot of marketing to get the leads from inbound or outbound. You hire sales development reps, they book appointments for the reps and maybe at the end of the day you end up with a customer that gets value. So you're shifting that equation. But one of the challenges, the acquisition, is still there. You need to acquire different people, maybe the user is an ideal customer profile, ideal user profile.
When people are implementing Product-Led strategies, what is it changing? How does it impact their marketing and who are they getting? What are the dependencies around that?
0:03:57 - Wes Bush
I think the biggest difference between a Product-Led versus sales companies – how you sell is just as important as what you sell. We see that happening again and again. If you're a content business or software business, people want that experience. That's what matters. Now, what you outlined, there are these three pillars of any business.
Every business needs to acquire people. They need to engage people, provide value, and monetize. The big shift when it comes to being more Product-Led as a business is really just like you acquire people, engage and then you monetize. So you have to have a really good, exceptional experience when it comes to actually seeing the overall value. That's kind of the big shift. And what it changes, back to your initial question, is it changes everything.
Because as soon as you look at it from your acquisition angle – “How do I get people to my website?” – you start thinking, “Well, what are all the problems they would have before they even get to find out about a software solution like we offer?”
Maybe it's a content asset that we could create that would help to solve some of these beginner problems before they even find out about us. Wouldn't that be great? And then, it comes to the engagement experience, their first taste test of what you do. Whether it's a service, content, asset or software solution, it's like, “Well, actually, how do we blow them away with value?”
We help them do something meaningful in their life with our free option. That's actually what we use to build trust very quickly with these folks. When we do that, we over deliver on that experience. It becomes a natural extension of actually, “I could just pull up my credit card and sign up for this full trust. I get it, it's delivered on its promise, and so it really de-risks everything when it comes to this purchasing experience.” So, yeah, that's how it really impacts each core area of your business.
0:06:00 - Alex Shevelenko
What's the opposite of that? The opposite is I somehow get to your website and then I have to download some white paper asset. I give you the email. I then wait for my email details, my company size la, la, la, la la. I wait for something to download. Most of the time I get that I will not download it because I'm already distracted onto the next thing.
I'm out of that mode. And then I guess I'm waiting for some sales rep to call me. They're just a sales rep, they're not going to show me the product. They kind of qualify me, whatever that means. So I'll have one of those probably relatively annoying discussions where they ask more questions to make sure I fit into their mold. Then eventually maybe I'll get an account executive and a solution consultant demonstrating the product, if I'm a good fit, and some sort of a product, either PowerPoint or a product demo. But I still haven't touched the product, haven't experienced it, haven't imagined myself using it.
And what are the implications of that old process versus the new one that you're describing? Let's at least feel the product. Maybe see the video demo or an interactive demo and start feeling it versus having all these barriers before I get to experience what the product can do.
0:07:50 - Wes Bush
The biggest implication is like, “Is that what people want?” And the research shows it's not. Though every four B2B buyers would rather sign up for a free option versus just talking to someone. You're going to notice like 20 to 30% more people signing up for your free product versus a demo. Why? It's not because it just sounds better. It's because it's what people want. And back to some of the core differences. You show the value, you have to showcase it, build trust that way by actually delivering on your promise.
Some people are great at sales, but one of the big differences is the product. That is all about showing the value, being transparent about everything. Whereas a lot of that sales experience is not transparent, a lot of times when it comes to pricing, “how much it's going to cost me” kind of thing.
So the big question to always ask yourself is whether your sales person is adding value or friction? If it's adding just friction, you could probably remove it at that stage. So always think about that question and that will allow you to simplify. Because a lot of times when you're early in your industry, a lot of people are still learning about what Product-Led is. Is it right for their business or not? So we actually, although we advocate Product-Led, we have what you call “glorified sales call”. Why? Because we added a ton of value when it comes to that. We help people sort through if this strategy is right for them. We help them make big decisions when it comes to their entire go-to-market motion.
0:09:52 - Alex Shevelenko
So it's like you have a decision journey that you take people on in your call because the whole notion of product led is still relatively in the early phase of understanding. It's not like you but you don't need to do a product education call to do zoom at this point because that has been around Everybody. It's a much relatively mature category and then COVID made it more mature If it wasn't even though there are people competing selling enterprisey versions of zoom with sales call folks at the beginning of the video conferencing journey. So what you're saying is as the category matures it may have more room to be product led because it's already well known.
0:10:42 - Wes Bush
Yeah, it's usually not even a question of like. Should we be product led? It's like when? Because, like every category, if you have a great market it's going to mature, saturate, get a lot of competition and when that happens, what go to market motion do you want? Do you want the most scalable one, the one where you can scale the easiest, fastest, or do you want the more inefficient one, which is usually the sales at one, where it's easier to get started in business, or the sales side motion, but it's way harder to scale, a lot more expensive to scale, because it's like hiring a lot more salespeople to kind of scale up that motion versus product emotion. It's like on the inverse. It's like it's really hard to kind of get started, get right, but it becomes infinitely easier when you are scaling it up.
0:11:31 - Alex Shevelenko
And so let's dig in. Why is it hard? Right, because once so you brought up you have to it's immature category, so you need to help people define the problem, right? Is that that's sort of they don't have the problem set in their head.
One thing that we see and I'm wondering if you're seeing that is that people start creating, at least using was real, some of related to customers, are creating the sort of decision you know, self guided journeys, and those are interesting because they're still pretty complex. Right, there's a lot of options, right, like you have a lot of business goals, right, but it sort of captures three or four main goals that you would have, let's say, as a marketer, in that company's ecosystem. You know that you would then choose, choose like, click that, adventure that along one of those goals, and then you will drill into this, and so, if the company scales, if it has maturity, it could create content that mimics some of the conversations I think that you're describing. But if you don't know what that content is at the beginning, right, it's very hard to remember. Like you know, if you don't know that what's the right conversation, then you're going to be just kind of trying to automate something that's not yet ready to be automated.
0:12:44 - Wes Bush
Is that kind of yeah, no, that's exactly it. So, like a lot of times in those like sales calls you just kind of look out for like what are some of the recurring things that people have. Like one of them for us is like we use this in the qualification, like what are your qualification? Kind of questions are really important as far as like that content journey, because it's like if this person isn't 100% convinced product list right for them, we can't sell them anything we should not sell, because it's like, okay, we have to start there, getting them to understand how to think through this and see if it's actually right for them. And so back to that content journey.
That's actually what we're working on now. It's like part of even applying for some of these calls is like okay, great, we actually recommend starting here. This content asset will help you think through this big decision, so you can get a lot more clarity on that. So, absolutely, I am all for that and I think there's really great ways you can do that with content to kind of accelerate that and make sure that if you do talk to them, these people, they are kind of embedded and they understand, like what are some of those big kind of decisions they have to make before they even make sense to use your product.
0:13:55 - Alex Shevelenko
The problem that we see and this is sort of maybe back to kind of what's the underlying idea of product led is that you want people to start experiencing the value, start engaging with the ideas, right, so you can't bore somebody with your book on product led growth, right?
You have to make it be exciting, make it feel like it's a product. And I think it's sort of ironic that I think some companies have maybe a good product, right, like, actually, like, let's say I have a great product, but when it comes to educating, which is the first step, as you said, like, hey, let me learn about the problem. I don't know if I you know how to think about that problem. So in the process of framing that, they tend to fail because they're still using maybe old school marketing techniques that are not worthy of their product or worthy of the kind of getting the mind share for customers.
What are you seeing? Like, if you're playing product led game, you can't get away with that anymore, right, because if you're like selling some Soviet era UX, fine, right, you could hide that, you know, behind complexity up front. But if you're like, if you're complex to even understand what you're doing and you're saying my product is very simple, you can go try it, you're kind of losing people before they even get started. Do you see like these sort of embarrassing mess ups that are happening where maybe marketing is still operating on the old paradigm but product team is operating on the newer paradigm, but they're just like not aligned, you know or do you see the opposite, right.
Do you see people really get it Like what's what you know? Your observer of most innovation in this area, your thoughts?
0:15:39 - Wes Bush
Yeah, no, I see this a lot where it's like okay. I still remember I think the worst instance of this was Marketo. I remember I was on Marketo's website. This is about eight years ago. I was like, wow, this thing, slick, like best website I've seen at this time. And then we purchased this product.
I was working at Bidiard and I just remember going into this product I was like what the like, is this the same company? Even Like it was just like really clunky, powerful, clunky as hell. So like that was a definitely like a shell shock. But that was a sales that experience. So they were able to get away with that because they were selling to my boss, who was the VP of demand generation. Now I was just the user and the one going to use it in the company.
So that was an instance where I was just kind of like, oh, I guess this is what we're using Now in a product-led world that that doesn't fly anymore. Because I'm the one testing out what are some of these tools and I'm going to recommend it to my bosses. Or if I'm the CEO, I'm just going to make that decision and be like, okay, yeah, we're going to use this tool. So it has to be easy to use. And back to your why this is so important. I'll ask you a question. What did you do the last time you downloaded an app on your phone and you couldn't get the value?
0:17:11 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I mean, I think we ignore it. That's the shortest answer. I mean, the apps. That's one of the reasons why we're so. First of all, the apps is generally, like you know, harder because, like, who has to download an app? But, like I think, one of the most you know, there's another type of download that we see all the time, which is the sort of the reason we started, relate to them, but I think it sort of tells it's a lines was what you're describing. So, basically, people are paying ads to get, get me to discover, download some kind of content asset, right, or they are investing a lot of money into outbound kind of outreach to get me exposed to that asset, or they are, you know, paying for some events to get again exposure to this after event or something like that. So there's like they're investing in either content that leads to the product or some sort of content that educates about the problem.
I, let's say, I download it. It takes me out of a web form into a Adobe acrobat format and then I have, like the way it's set up, I'm like immediately like shrinks the format of the PDF to like a tiny part of the page and it's like it's this sort of like really low font thing. You know, it kind of completely takes me out of my flow and I tried to click on something it's not clickable, like a web experience, and I'm like, okay, whatever, I forget, and that was sort of our. That's like. If that's my first impression, you know I'm already gone, like I don't care about how easy your product is. I'm like I'm already like underwhelmed by your very top of the funnel investment which, which is expensive. And then the same thing back to your stories.
Like, let's say, I have a complex product right, like not everybody can get away from this, but I want to be more product like I want to have virality inside that account or at least positive word of mouth. So what am I going to do? Well, my, my onboarding materials are just as dense as my product, because if the product is complex, odds are the onboarding is also complex and I can't navigate for that. Or I have very partial kind of text driven instruction, but I'm a visual person and I need some more context. So I think that's where we see, like the, the success materials as well. Maybe you could talk about kind of the role of the impact of product led across the buyer journey because obviously one of the amplifiers is you probably expose the total number of users to you know in the product, like companies, is much larger than historically kind of niche. You know niche products that have a very small number of users. Is that kind of an accurate assessment or what are you seeing?
0:20:09 - Wes Bush
I mean, yeah, in a lot of cases it's like okay, if you're product led, you should have a decent sized market. I know like just Jasom Lemkin would always say like, oh, yeah, like have like a million plus people in your market. I disagree, like I don't think it depends what your goal is as a business. Is it like a lifestyle? Is it something where it's like okay, venture scale ready, maybe in that case it's like okay, yeah for sure we need more than a million people to make this work. But yeah, I don't think like too much about those numbers. Depends on what is your overall kind of outcome for that. But, like back to what you're mentioning, it's like how does it change the overall kind of like go to market motion? It's like that acquisition, engagement, monetization, those three pillars, it's like the engagement piece.
If you don't fix that, if you don't have a really good capability around that as a company, it won't work. And it won't work because it's like people they don't get the value, they're just going to leave, they're going to ignore it. Like you said, you never come back. And so that's really where I always say, like this one quote which is like your user success will eventually become your success Because they're not going to upgrade unless they have a really great experience. And so if your first impression is very, you know so, so it's confusing you will lose people and that will be the bloodbath of your free motion. So that's something that I think, when it relates to content and even what you give way for, the free content and everything else like that too, if you don't engage, if you don't make it engaging, then you lose. So I think that's like right now, the harder part is like everybody can build products, everybody can build contents, but can you truly create an engaging experience? No, that's that's the hard part, that's the next level.
0:21:55 - Alex Shevelenko
Right and engage. So I guess what you were saying is the engaging experience. It's really across the journey, right, and that's sort of the experience we have a saying experience is the message, right, but it probably for you it would be like experiences the product right, like on the on the product led side. So let's talk about you know maybe you know broader concepts which is like, what is this doing to the overall business model and kind of cat new category creation, if you have this product led motion right, like, is there, like you know the classical example actually I want to read it from your book history tells us that how you sell is just as important as what you sell. Blockbuster couldn't compete with Netflix by selling same digital content. You need to decide when, not if, you'll need to innovate in the way you sell.
So let's talk about is product led, more about innovating on the sales motion. Is that a combination of a sales to you know motion together was a product together was obviously go to market, supporting that sales motion right, like, whether it's marketing or other kind of channels. But is it also about designing a new category, right, like, because I think what you're designing, a you're in the category of, you know, like niche that you own is content led expert or, sorry, product led expert. Right, we're maybe in the we're designing a category of content led growth, right, could support people like you and kind of your customers, could support sales led with content. So let's talk about like this interplay between a new trend right around the go to market motion and broadly like is this chain creating completely new categories, creating new winners in the categories? What's? What have you observed, especially in the success stories that came out of the product led disruption?
0:24:00 - Wes Bush
Yeah, I'm for sure. So, when you think about, like, the three pillars of business have not changed, but the priority in order of them has, so engagement is now really, really important for a lot of companies. So how do you do that? How do you make it easier to engage your users? How do you understand which ones need help? How do you understand which ones you know should like you reach out to and actually apply a bit more like uh, not pressure, but like, yes, service, let's call it that, Uh, so each of those is its own category. I mean, there's like the product led sales category that's coming out now, which is like okay, how do we make it easier for people to really, um, you know, proactively find and identify those accounts? There's the analytics side. That's really important, especially in the BDB space, which is like you know what, um, you mixed panel and all these other kind of like product analytics suites are great, but it's like it's missing.
0:24:57 - Alex Shevelenko
They weren't designed. They weren't designed for that era.
0:25:00 - Wes Bush
It was designed for like B to C kind of companies. And now it's like well, actually, I want to understand the accounts at the account level. Now that's interesting. So that's a whole nother category of products. And then you start looking at well, actually, uh, what else is really important? Oh, actually the marketing, uh, trigger based emails and like all that stuff is very clunky with a lot of tools town.
So it's like, how do we think about, um, not just bombarding users for the same like 14 email sequence when they sign up for free, but we start to go through and really proactively identify, um, you know, what should we be sent out at what time, based on what they have done, and create more of a just in time kind of like onboarding experience versus something that is all there.
And I mean there was already some other categories, like product adoption. That's been kind of like there from the beginning. It's just like now it's more important, um, to kind of test some of these new flows and see how you can get people to value more. And then there's overall like the data infrastructure of like how do we make understanding this user more accessible? And then I mean the user feedback kind of stage and category. Um, that's getting a lot more attention and love, because it's like, well, yeah, we were kind of guessing a bit more. And if you have a horizontal kind of application like you do, in that case it's like it becomes a lot more important to understand, like, who are those like users you should double down on and which one should you like? Not kind of bother so, um, it's a ton of different categories.
0:26:29 - Alex Shevelenko
Uh, if you will, yeah, and it's one of the interesting things that we're we're seeing is it requires a change in mindset, um in in how teams are organized, right. So if, if there was like a historically like you know, there's product people, there's sales people, and then, like you kind of joke a little bit about people who connect product and sales, and like some movies that are kind of comic characters, uh, you know, the here it feels like the nature of the teams need to be a lot more multi dimensional, uh, meaning that, um, you know, you kind of need to have a sales person who is also kind of familiar with the product, familiar with the value that could be done through the, through the product itself, and so they, they're a little bit different than, like traditional stereotype or quarter carrying enterprise rep, even the one that could do the demos much less kind of the, the old traditional. What are you seeing? How are you seeing organizations change?
And this may be like probably a big part of your coaching uh, a platform that you've built. You know what are, what are the biggest challenges in implementing these, these strategies? Obviously, the new tooling we talk created a lot of opportunities, but even if you got the tooling right, the mindset must be a challenge and, um, you know, are you finding that you have to kind of just really people have to grow up in this product led world to be successful and think multi dimensionally, or you're finding that you could teach, uh, some older dogs, uh, new, newer tricks, tricks in this department.
I mean, I think for me it was like one of the reasons I read your book is like I wanted to. I grew up in the enterprise world. I believed in the power of the product, but I'm not sure I understood all the. You know could easily explain it to my team, even if I understood some of it myself. I could. It would take me too long to do it and you did a great job of clarifying it. And even if you clarified it doesn't mean that everybody's on board. So what are you seeing as kind of the biggest challenges in implementing the strategy or mixed, hybrid strategies?
0:28:41 - Wes Bush
Yeah. So I'll tell you from one of our customer stories as well. So, like the CEO and founder of this company, he had read everything about PLG, like he knew it really really well. Uh, then I asked him I'm like, hey, like why did you like send your entire teams are training, just wondering? Um, and he's like, well, you know what the biggest thing for us is? We need everybody to understand this. We need to build a common language, we need to all understand this. Uh, get on the same page.
But what is PLG? And then, more importantly, how do we actually do it? So that was kind of the beginning when we were doing like these cohort programs, and then we realized you're like, actually there was something there when it came to teams uh being involved in training, going through all this. It's like because what's really going on and what you need to do in a business that's making this transition is you need to build a new capability. And how do you build a new capability? Uh, that's one. And then the second piece is like okay, uh, it can't just be in the CEO's head as far as this new direction, it has to have that the entire go to market leadership team kind of bought into this as well. So it's like there's those two things you got to build a capability, you got to have the go to market team alignments, uh. So that's kind of like step one.
And then step three is, like you all go to be aligned, like this is the direction we want to go, uh, and then what we kind of do. And this goes back to like our overall kind of like product led, go to market system and how we roll it out. Uh, is you really got to focus on these nine core components of like how do we operationalize this? And so when I initially wrote product led growth, that book, that was talking a lot about how to think about this from a product standpoint, like what does that look like? How do you do it? Uh, from a product standpoint. Now, this upcoming book in this system I'm working on, is really about how do you, you know, think about the product side of this kind of business if it's product led, but also the company side, how do you blend?
them together, right, uh, so the very first thing is like think about your vision and your strategy. How does that connect to potentially even being product led? So a lot of like product led companies. As an example, it's like let's think of Canva Okay, they want to make design accessible to anyone. Okay, that's easy, simple vision. How are you going to do that? What's the best? Like, go to market motion for that. It's like product led, for sure. It kind of makes things easy.
Now we're kind of companies get in trouble is if your vision is vague and then it's like well, I don't know what is the best way to do that. Um, and so getting clarity on that is really important. And then the strategy piece is second, which is like well, how are we going to win as a business? What does that look like? Um, is it winning through having the best user and customer experience? Is that it? Is it winning through, I don't know, uh like, our education modes, our contents, uh, experience, what are some of the core things of how we're going to win? So when you start there at the vision level, everything cascades from there. It's like okay, great, that's our strategy. We're not even really calling it product led. That's what it is.
0:31:52 - Alex Shevelenko
It's just so, it's basically so, yeah, and I think the the. Actually, I will say one of my pet peeves was the word product led. Is that it almost which? Because I don't think that's the way you use it, because you actually want to create it. It's almost user led, right, like. It's almost like you want to create delightful experience for the user. So they experienced the, the value, right, like. But the branding is what it is. It's product led, um, but the.
The problem is, like most traditional marketing messaging, is product led, right, it's like our product is me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Our features, be me, me, me, me, me. Our messages, be me, I. You know we were founded and here are our cat quarter pictures and get it, yeah, so it's all the sort of self absorbed, you know, egocentric marketing and product tends to be a manifestation of that and as a product marketer, I was probably guilty of that as much as anyone. So I'm looking at that Um and what you're saying is um, actually the way you envision it is like you know you start with a your mission, right, and whether your mission, you know it could be product as a core part of it, it could be not, right. I like maybe you could use some elements, but that sort of is one really important dimension. And then I, if I'm hearing correctly um the, the product led is not like the uh religion, right Like it is a it is the vehicle.
Right, we talked about different varieties, different emphasis. How you implemented in the B2B maybe different. Maybe you started with one division using product led and then migrate the rest, like the way Hopspot has done this right, like they started with product led, more on the sales side of things, and then eventually they migrated that to other parts of the business. Is that kind of what you're seeing, kind of how people are structuring this, like through, like more vision, like, oh, if our vision is to support all these businesses, product led is a better strategy. Let's, step by step, move in that direction.
0:33:59 - Wes Bush
So, yes, I think like the high level, that's kind of what it is. But I think the part where it gets a bit tough for founders and like they don't think too much about this is okay. So we create this strategy of like how we're going to win, where are we going to play? But then where it gets a lot harder to kind of roll out is these two next questions, which is, what are the capabilities we would need to have in order for this to work? So let's say, how we're going to win is like an amazing user customer experience. Now just think about like a Olympic runner, like are they going to be the one? Like bench pressing every day because they want to have the biggest chest and strongest chest is like no, they're going to be running a lot. So it's like but yet when you start to go through some of the company or charts and everything, you're like wow, this company is really good at this one thing. Like I was just talking to a founder and there are 10 people eight people on that team are developers. Yet they already have like decently converting funnel. They just don't have the marketing muscles. So it's like oh, okay, you got really meaty legs, we got to even some things out here, and so the capabilities of the next part and then the last part is like what are the strategic choices we must make?
And so, just like SouthWes Airlines, I love this company example from strategy perspective. It's great. It's like they specialize in point to point flights, short distances. So in order to make that work for their business, they have to be really good. That capability is identifying the best point to point flights, and they're not going to offer meals or anything else, no frills to keep the prices low. So it's like for your business, you got to make some of those hard cuts too. What are we not going to do? What are we truly going to commit to? And I just find a lot of companies, even some ones that are at some great revenue numbers. They just lack a really compelling strategy that is tied to where they're going to go, and the capabilities and strategic choices are just not in alignment with what they actually want to do.
0:36:08 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah. So I think this really aligns because if you think of this first triangle of like here's your product design, here's your company design, and maybe like broadly, like category design, like product led X, right, like product, like you know, like that's, maybe, like you know, let's, let's say whatever, whatever that is. And if they don't, if they are like some pieces sound like they're out of joint, you know, and they're like company designers want to know. That now raise my hand and maybe should have gotten your coaching earlier.
We had this sort of vision where we actually you brought up example of conva. I kind of love the sort of the conva democratizes graphic design, you know Figma democratizes product design. I was like relate to we're democratizing interactive content design, right, to create these great experiences. They could be coming out of Figma or coming out of conva, but we're democratizing them. And then we built this really powerful platform together with some of our early enterprise customers. It was, you know, joint collaboration, but we were the ones that were originally the big users of this and you know, there was no DNA in the company of like amazing user experience, designer that walks through the kind of like first time you land on it, and so that's sort of, to your point, exactly the opposite of kind of aligning the resources right and then we realize, oh my God, until we solve for our own onboarding journeys and our own things and we build that into from an area weakness into an area of strength, we're just, this vision is not going to be executed because there's going to be people are going to not not get there and that was a painful adjustment period.
So do you see what? These happen a lot Because I think in the course of a lifetime, company tries many models right and has to adjust as the competitive landscape changes as well. So what are you seeing? Kind of that that facilitates ability to make these adjustments faster or slower. Is it like whole team alignment? Is it, you know, like real? You know, signing up to your program was the broader team, so that it really like signals to the team that we are making the change. Is there like one or two structural wins that you identify in this as part of the coaching? That is actually like more, hey, look, until you do this, like it's not even worth joining the coaching. What do you find helps people move? Make this was less pain.
0:38:49 - Wes Bush
Yeah. So I think if you're going to make this with less pain, it has to be collaborative with your go to market team. So, like the way not to tutor on horn, but like I've tried every other model.
0:38:59 - Alex Shevelenko
Okay.
0:39:00 - Wes Bush
I'm still the consulting thing. I tried the one on one model. I tried like the you know more, your more standard consulting thing, and I'd always meet with a lot of resistance of like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. But like, I got my thing here and you know we're going to keep doing some of this, maybe we'll take an idea or two and I was like, oh, it's, why is it meeting resistance? Because it doesn't have their buying. They weren't like a core contributor to this.
And so what I found and the way we structure it is, when you join, it's like every week it's a 60 to 90 minute kind of workshop with your team, your whole go to market leadership team, where we go through these questions together, and so that's actually something which opens up a lot of these great ideas and, for everybody's listening, you can actually, if you want, to self implement this this is our free model heads up Okay, great.
So, like auto gladcom slash system, you can get access to like everything for doing this on your own too, if you want to give it a shot. But the yeah, that's the structure. You go through this. We just facilitate it and make sure, like by the end of the like three, four weeks for crafting your vision strategy. It's like everybody's on the same page. You've all the time to think about it. We can commit to it for the next like 12 months, and that's really what kind of drives a lot of that alignment. And then when you, as the CEO, make some of these changes, like, okay, we let go of like this person because you know what they were like maybe a user experience designer that was like a junior, and it's like this is like literally the way of how we're going to win. We can't have, like you know, just a junior person at this level.
0:40:32 - Alex Shevelenko
We can have a team on the most important area for the I got it, yeah, so.
So, yeah, something that's less important in the enterprise motion becomes much more important than the product led or product that sales motion and you need to allocate you know talent appropriately. And so what do you see was these companies that are trying, you know, to do product led sales in particular. This is sort of a very common theme, right, and I think it's. You know, if you have, if you already have some sort of a mid market motion, right, and then you have a mid market and enterprise. Mid market is sort of like a good in between right, because it has elements of sales, but you can't have to clunky of a product and because just the economics may not work.
So how would you recommend for companies to combine two things? Because obviously the conventional wisdom is you can't, you know it's too difficult, you know everybody's got to be like Dropbox could go very bottom up, start was a great product and then try to expand, even though I don't think they've succeeded, particularly in the you know enterprisey kind of expansion when they did try it. But in reality, I think a lot, of, a lot more companies are sort of trying to merge the two disciplines, especially in the B2B universe. Have you seen great success stories there?
0:41:53 - Wes Bush
No, here's why Because I think the stages of the company matters a lot more than you think. So one of the reasons why we decided, okay, we want to focus a lot more on companies that are between six and eight figures is because within that range a company will define their go to market motion and everything else that habits the culture, kind of as a reflection of that as well. So, yeah, you can change it, like I have helped some companies go from sales lead to product lead, but it's very hard.
So when they're too late, it's too hard, it's too like, or you can do it, no chance obviously, but like you know, the way Oracle would roll it out is not like, okay, the whole company's product lab today. They would start off with like a very specific product and then eventually rolled up to the portfolio products and then, okay, great, we'll try and integrate it, see what we can do. So like, yeah, at that scale it's very different. But yeah, for your average kind of companies who's probably listening here what I would always recommend if you're below, like you know, at least let's draw the line here around like five mil. You're below five mil, stick to one, go to market motion, because if you try and be fancy, I call it being cute. Okay, try to like, I get this all the time.
So I'm recently obsessed with pickleball and so it's like this cross between tennis and ping pong, and all the time I see some people and I know this because I would do it too occasionally like adding fancy spin to the ball. Look at me, cool, but like, then I'm hit the net. I always like mess or something like that. I'm like why am I trying to be cute here? Because it's like just get the ball over the damn net. That's how you play the game. You master the basics, then you go get fancy product, let's say, is a fancy zone, and I see a lot of companies who don't have the basics of product led. They try and be cute and like oh yeah, we do product, we do product sales and we do enterprise. And what's your scale? Oh, you're like still under eight figures. How's that working? You're trying to manage too many capabilities here to master it, and so that's like the big thing where I see a lot of companies really struggle because they're trying to do too much and they can't actually become great at any of them.
0:44:15 - Alex Shevelenko
So so that's kind of really interesting. So let's kind of dive into this. So the product led sales and maybe it's sort of also let's agree on what the definitions are. You could say like, hey, the product could be a lead gen tactic, right, or some portion of the product, and let's not call it freemium, but like let's some some, some portion of the product kind of builds the confidence, creates a sense of value, and then we're still back into the sales mode, right, like we're.
We really are like an SM, like a mid market sales motion. We just have one channel, which is our product, like one some were all components of our product portfolio and we can control that. You know it's sustainable. It gives us some quality of product educated leads or product product led leads in addition to our content. You know folks that went through a marketing automation and kind of consumed enough of our content, or or folks that are just booking appointments directly, right?
So do you think that is more scalable that where it's just one of the marketing tactics to, you know, versus you're trying to turn that? You know those folks and they become a revenue. You have revenue expectations from them, right, versus from your sales teams like, is it sort of it's too easy to say you can't do it all, as, especially like if you're in the early stages, you kind of want some scalability, but you also need the sales, sales touch right to educate people. You kind of by the assumption you will have a little bit of both. So what's the way to have a little bit of both? That's productive versus value and what's the way to be?
0:46:01 - Wes Bush
destroyed. Well, I think, yeah, it depends what your business is like, where your strengths are, what your traffic looks like and all those things. I'll tell you a couple scenarios, so like one scenario or I would say like clearly avoid it In both cases is like you are a sales like company, mostly just target like big enterprises, like six figure plus deals is kind of your average in your own contract value, and then you have on your website like barely any leads. It's mostly just coming through like outbound and maybe you get like five, 10 people a month or something like that. It's not a lot. And then they come to me and they're like I want to be product led because I thought this thing, the product will sell itself and I just want to like do it. Yeah, I'm like wow, okay, red flag.
0:46:44 - Alex Shevelenko
That's a non starter. Okay, so that's not. That's pretty obviously not starter. Let's go to some hairier areas where, like you, could work more.
0:46:54 - Wes Bush
So you have one which kind of goes your like product, that marketing example. Let's say you do have some good scale. You do have like you know, I don't know this random numbers like 1020, 30,000 kind of Unix on your site at least per month. So you got like some things going for you already. Now you're thinking, okay, we have the sales emotion. What are some things we could add to this kind of accelerate it? So a great example I love the HubSpot website, greater.
Think about all of like your ideal user and then think about all of the problems they're going to have to solve in order to be successful. And then you just try and find like are there any opportunities like that? Which is like what would everybody need to kind of like solve one of these core problems and what's the fastest way of doing it? Now some of them could turn into those kind of like spin off kind of products which are really great marketing opportunities because it's like everybody could get the value with it pretty quickly. It gives you some great insights and data and it's easy to get started. So, like that's a really great spot to be and because that can actually help grow your traffic as well.
And maybe a later point. This is what we did at Vidyard is we have like our initial kind of like enterprise, you know, analytics video tool, and then we decided actually the biggest problem people have is just creating the video. So how do we make that easy? And so we created a simple Chrome extension and you can download. A few clicks and boom, you got a video. Somebody watched it. You get a notification. Wow, alex, you only watched 50% of my video. What the hell?
0:48:37 - Alex Shevelenko
And this was the. This is where you even went for different target customer because it was like more sales person was going to be the individual user there's a way more sales people than there's marketers buying Vidyard enterprise marketing solution. So it sort of played really nicely because it helps you get into a new, very adjacent demographic. It didn't conflict with your core enterprise business and so the idea here is like if, let's say, we had relate to like just applying, we were like our main customers and marketer and then we had a product for sales that was PLG driven, this would be like a like a lower risk strategy, provided you could kind of allocate some, you know, allocate the resources and you don't plan to monetize from that product and then the marketers will get exposed to it. Is that kind of the process that I'm getting?
0:49:32 - Wes Bush
that is and like I know we talked about the vision component like the first part of the product, go to market system. But like this next to like it makes that easy and how it basically works is like. The second. One's all about understand who your ideal user is. You can say have like this, so ideal user journey. You get like your end game. What does success look like for them? Where do they start?
And then you map out like hundreds or thousands of like challenges that will get in their way and then you bucket them where it's like what would this kind of ideal journey look like? What's milestone one? What's milestone two for this person? So in my case it was like milestone one is like you create a video and you share it with somebody and so I sound like three or five is like okay, we actually implement this across all of our website from the marketing side. So you map out all of those kind of milestones.
And then the model part, the third component, is all about where do you draw that free line? Where does it like actually make sense? Where you're like yeah, getting this amount for free would feel like a meaningful for me. If I solve this milestone, that would be amazing. So we call that like your beginner milestone everything to get that person to value for free. So that's really kind of insightful. In that way it's not so much like debating like should it be a free trial, should it be a free model, it's like actually just what is the thing we're trying to accomplish?
0:50:54 - Alex Shevelenko
here and that's the value from the strategy and that's for backwards.
0:50:58 - Wes Bush
Let's reverse engineer that sucker and give them everything they need to do that.
0:51:04 - Alex Shevelenko
So fundamentally and this is sort of really in line where it can feel like we're brothers from another mother on this, like we call this kind of human-centric experiences. So you're kind of saying, like the user is your human right and so you want to say, like how do you delight this human through interaction with you in the way that supports your overall strategy? But you're focusing on that versus. Is this two-week freemium and this is a month freemium? Is this, like you know, is this going to mess up this strategy or that strategy? So you want to maybe separate them out so it doesn't cannibalize, whatever is working, doesn't confuse and, you know, get your sales team mad. But like you kind of have to still start with, like what is the? You know it's sort of values first, right, like how do you deliver value? And I love it because it's about giving right. In a way, it's about giving first.
Now, giving was easy in the world where everybody had big VC checks, right and sort of, and they were, they were really eager that you could spend them to kind of show some growth potential or or some sort of maybe slightly vanity driven metrics. Let's just say the world has changed and you know, I think, you know, let's say every like we're sold, that we want to do it, we want to commit the resources to it. But you know there's this kind of but, like you know, it's not free because I'm a deliver, investing upfront into those users, and then I also need to find the audience to over to. You know, discover the product, maybe improve my CEO game, maybe community game. Those are all investments as well.
So what's your take on? You know, and you brought up, that it's expensive to get the product led right upfront, right, like it's easier to kind of have these conversations. So what have you seen? You know, let's like I want to do it, you know, but I'm on a budget right, I'm bootstrapped or I'm, you know they don't want to increase my spend if I'm VC backed or I'm an enterprise business and I need to prove an experiment before I go all in Any ideas for quick wins. That gets momentum rolling behind this strategy change.
0:53:18 - Wes Bush
Yeah. So I think the first thing you could do is really just think about, like, what could be done better with the product. So when I was, when you were chatting in Sastar, one of the talks I gave I was like what is the difference between a four million dollar product that business with three employees versus a sales of business that has 40 employees, that's at two mil. So the biggest kind of like kicker here is it's just leverage. So the product, that company is leveraging the product a hell of a lot more than the sales of business. How are they doing that? Well, whenever they have an issue, they solve it with the product. Oh, my goodness, we got a customer's board ticket. Somebody has a problem. Let's see that as a bug. Why did they have a problem? Why did they have to even reach out to us and like questions?
0:54:06 - Alex Shevelenko
Friction. Thoughtfully reducing friction is a quick win, Okay.
0:54:12 - Wes Bush
Totally yeah. So removing friction, making it easy to get to value, will save your customer success, customer support, folks a lot of time, energy, so you can actually scale up, have more customers without increasing headcounts. You can start looking at well, okay, when it comes to upselling, okay, maybe that's been all manual, but what could we do in the product to make that better when people log in, okay, wow, okay, there's, I'm ready for an upgrade, or something like that. When it comes to, where do people typically get stuck in your product? If you've mapped out your user journey of, like, a successful customer needs to do these three things, let's say where's the one which most of them suck at? And it's usually because of your product. Now, in that case, it's like well, okay, if they have to go to that page, they get stuck on that page as soon as they try and leave, boom exidents and pop up hey, I want to talk to like, can we set this up for you? It's your customer support. It's like it's a simple thing in the product that actually just helps your conversion rates overall, because you caught them right where they were like begging for help and they love you for it.
I had this happen to me when I was using data box, I was trying to set up like custom scorecard for our business and I had to make this custom metric and I was like I don't know, not the best to excel or like some of these things, and so I was like I don't know what to do and boom pop up Great, I'm going to utilize your services so you can set this up. For me. That sounds like a great idea. So it was awesome and we were able to just upgrade to the pro plan. So that's like how you can think about how can we be product led and really make our business more efficient.
0:55:55 - Alex Shevelenko
So that's like the quick ones, that's really helpful and I think that's very actionable and I, like, I love this conversation. I've gotten a few takeaways from me and my team from this and it sounds like there's a new book coming out. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about where can people find you again and, you know, keep consuming, because I love. I love what you're doing and how you're evangelizing the category and helping everybody do it, and it sounds like it's a broad range of businesses, from smaller, you know startups, to mid-sized startups, to teams inside the enterprise. Died us a little bit about how we can engage with us.
0:56:37 - Wes Bush
Yeah, done for sure. So if you just want to learn like daily kind of product, that growth tips every single day, including weekends, follow me on LinkedIn, just Wes Bush. But if you want to dive more into that product led good market system that I was referring to, that is our free model. Like we want everybody to be product led If you can for your business. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to do it. So the self implementation kind of guide is free. So you just go to productcom forward slash system and that will get you access to everything we do, Like the exact same stuff we do with our paid clients that pay us like tens of thousands of dollars every single month. Just implement this inside their business so you can get it all for free and implement it inside your business.
0:57:21 - Alex Shevelenko
Love it. You heard it here Content led as a tactic to get to product less. Product led mastery Wes, thank you so much for coming on, Thanks for sharing the nuggets and thanks for leading the revolution in the product led direction. I think you know it's in the name of the customer and the user that you're doing it and we salute you and support your efforts. Thank you. Thanks so much, Alex, All right.