By Janus Boye
Andrius Knispelis is Product Director at social media suite vendor Brandwatch and based in Copenhagen
Brandwatch, like many others, is a sales-led software organisation where customers are acquired by marketing and sales and later onboarded.
Lately, they've been moving more and more into the product-led domain, having free trials, letting people onboard themselves. This requires the product team to think very differently than before.
In a recent member call, Product Director Andrius Knispelis dived into product-led growth, advised on when to do free trials, how you can better use onboarding and shared quite a few helpful examples. Let’s start with the promise of a product that sells itself.
What is product-led growth really?
As a part of the opening of the call, Andrius shared the below slide to clarify what we are talking about. It’s all about scaling the green boxes in a smart way.
Product-led growth is both about acquiring customers as well as upselling them onto larger plans and adding more users.
Andrius has worked with product-led growth for almost a decade and used this quote from Wes Bush, the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth to set the stage.
Wes Bush initially published his book on product-led growth in 2019
“Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers.”
In the call, Andrius further elaborated with three important steps:
Understanding your value
Communicate the perceived value of your product
Delivering on what you promise
The product-led growth is in particular in the 2nd bullet, with things like free trial, minimising friction, continuously educating and delivering a great user experience.
Let’s move onto the popular free trial.
Making the most of a free trial
Brandwatch currently offers a 2-week free trial of their social media suite and while this is popular, they do push prospects through an initial meeting to get things started and to help qualify their leads.
For Andrius one of the specific product-led challenges has been how to make the product pretty on day #1 where there is still limited usage data.
Andrius gave a highly rated talk at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference titled: Challenges of building a product that sells itself
Sample KPIs for the free trial
Working with free trials has also transformed his relationship with sales. To some product managers, working with the friends in sales is, let’s just say, difficult. Sometimes sales strongarm new features, sometimes they sell something before it’s ready and then product managers have to sort the mess and the list continues.
To make free trials more successful, Andrius worked actively with sales to learn about what he called ‘aha moments’. He defined it as:
The pivotal moment when the user discovers value in the product
A moment of sudden insight or discovery
Andrius has been implementing tracking of those ‘aha moments’ in the free trial, so that they know which trial users to focus on.
He’s also focused heavily on communicating the value of the product during the trial as shown on the slide below.
Specifically, the product interface has been rearranged and simplified to make free trials more valuable. They’ve also added empty states and dummy data to illustrate how the product can be put to full use and added more alerts, notifications and guides to help the customer be successful.
This all leads to an experience where you deliver value during the trial. It also becomes an effective sales funnel with a conversion rate you can improve on as Andrius illustrated with the slide shown below.
Finally, on the topic of free trials, Andrius also shared his advice on when not to do a free trial. To quote Andrius, don’t do a free trial if:
1. The Product Doesn’t Deliver Results in a Reasonable Period of Time
2. The Product is Too Complicated
3. The Free Trial is Giving Away All The Value
Use onboarding to unlock the next level
Ramli John published Product-Led Onboarding with Wes Bush in 2021 as a follow up to the book on product-led growth
Onboarding is all about making the customers successful. Specifically it’s about onboarding them to the platform, so that they can learn the product and gain value from it.
Today, Brandwatch is mostly focused on onboarding decision makers, but they do want to onboard everyone.
Initially when Andrius worked with free trials, onboarding wasn’t a part of the equation, but now using insights from the colleagues in sales, onboarding has become much improved. It’s like going from just focusing on the transaction, to really thinking about the long-term relationship with the customer.
Andrius also mentioned onboarding expert Samuel Hulick, which has this famous quote on the topic:
“Ideally, your product is something that people will crawl through broken glass to get to, but it doesn’t hurt to get rid of the broken glass at the very least”
Again, as Andrius advice: Remember to communicate the value. For more on this topic, see the excellent User Onboarding site.
Notable examples of product-led growth
Towards the end of the call, Andrius shared a few notable examples of product-led growth. He started with popular music streaming service Spotify, which fits perfectly for a free trial - it’s not that hard to get value, it’s not that hard to communicate, yet after some time of building your own lists, you don’t want to move away.
Productboard helps product teams understand what customers need, prioritise what to build next, and align everyone around the roadmap. As you can see below, they offer a 15-day free trial.
Intercom has a software solution for customer engagement or as they say: A direct channel between your business and your customers that's in your product, app or website, in the moment, and on their terms. They do have a free trial, but it’s not that easy to find! You can easily get a demo, easily fill out a form to talk to sales, but only when you look inside pricing and say that you are very small, then you can get a free trial.
Popular collaboration solution Slack used the freemium model, where you can start for free, but then pay more money as you unlock more features or reach more users.
Mixpanel offers product analytics. They do let you start for free, but it’s not so much a free trial. It’s rather a bit like Slack, where you pay as you grow. They do have the option to explore sample data, so that you can get a sense of the value of using the product at scale.
Finally, Andrius mentioned marketing automation vendor Marketo. They don’t offer a free trial. You can get an interactive product tour, you get in touch with sales and you can download an 8-page pricing list, but you can’t get a free trial. As pricing is based on database size, you can’t even get a price without getting in touch.
Learn more about product-led growth
We’ll continue the conversation in our growing product management community, where Andrius is also currently an active contributor. There’s also our annual international Boye Aarhus 23 conference in Aarhus, which once again features a product leadership conference track with world-class speakers. Why not consider joining and networking with peers?
You can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the 29-minute video from the call