If you’ve been in SaaS for a while, you’ll likely be overwhelmed with the endless stream of technical jargon in product marketing (product-led onboarding, user-centric growth, market-led strategies…) And now, a new popular term is starting to make rounds in the startup scene: Product-led Sales.
After days of research, chats with industry experts, and company deep dives, we’ve come up with a clear definition of Product-led Sales. Still, we’re not stopping there — we’ll also share six great strategies to help you implement product-led sales in your SaaS business.
Get your bubble tea, your snack, and let’s jump straight in!
What is Product-led Sales?
Product-led sales (PLS) is a sales approach where the product plays a central role in the sales process, letting it “sell itself” by using self-serve models like a free trial period, a freemium model, or a limited-access demo to attract, convert, and retain customers without the usual sales push.
Put simply, you give your users free, hands-on access to the product, and they can explore its value firsthand. When they’re ready to make their purchasing decision, those upsells, cross-sells, and upgrades drive your revenue. It’s that simple!
What adopting a Product-led Sales approach means for your sales team?
Now that we have established what a PLS is let’s get to know the positive impact it can have on your SaaS sales team. (Yeah, it’s positive!)
Follow a guiding method
Your sales team will shift their focus from pitching to guiding, so instead of making sales calls, sending proposals, and giving demos, their new role in a product-led sales model will be to support users as they explore the product’s core features.
But this is more challenging than it sounds. They must dig deep into user behavior to identify hot leads who have interacted with the product firsthand. Answer their questions, hit their pain points, offer them tips, and introduce them to additional features — basically, any action likely to trigger a purchasing decision.
Create a smoother customer experience
A product-led sales approach is customer-centric, and it’s easy to see why! Users will have the opportunity to recognize the product value by themselves, which improves initial interactions with them and allows them to reach out to salespeople only for specific usage needs.
So, what’s the takeaway from all of this, you ask? Customers will receive the support they need without being bombarded by aggressive sales pitches irrelevant to their current journey stage.
Adopt a scalable approach
In the PLS model, sales teams take a more consultative approach, prioritizing addressing technical issues for end-users over simply pushing sales.
Does this value-driven approach boost revenue? Absolutely. But it’s about more than just quick sales. What PLS does (unlike most traditional sales methods) is increase user retention, improve conversion rates, and lower churn rates for your SaaS business in the long run.
The use of product signals
PLS relies on product signals like session duration, user behavior, and support ticket volume to give go-to-market teams the information they need before reaching out to users. And as you expect, the more data these teams have, the better they can determine the right time to engage.
Saves on acquisition costs
Creating a sales pipeline from scratch requires time, research, and effort from a team of sales professionals — all of which costs money. And we mean a lot of money. But with the PLS model, you can bypass this whole phase by providing self-serve resources that help prospects witness the product’s value firsthand.
This doesn’t just save on acquisition costs, but it also reduces the workload of your sales team.
Faster sales journey
PLS is a strategy that makes the onboarding process natural by letting prospects test the waters independently with self-serve resources. Not only does this eliminate the constant reliance on sales reps, but it also helps users see the value of your product much faster.
And with faster product value comes shorter sales cycles and quicker deal closing.
6 Steps To Implement a Product-led Sales Model in SaaS
1. Build a user-centric product
It may sound too obvious to you, but the simple idea of building a product that’s both intuitive and user-centric and offers immediate value to your target audience is foundational in the success of your entire product-led sales model.
As we’ve emphasized throughout this article, the PLS strategy places the user’s needs and experience at the heart of the sales journey, so you want to make it a no-sweat for your prospects to navigate your product.
Design a clean and logical layout with simple instructions to guide them along the way, and only introduce a few functionalities at a time, as this can easily overwhelm your users.
Many people think SaaS companies need to build their entire product in-house. However, this isn’t set in stone. SaaS businesses can — and often do —outsource parts of their development to a software development company to speed up their development timelines and develop special UX features without overextending their in-house resources. And you can do the same.
Simplify the user onboarding experience
A long, complex signup process is not a great idea in a world where attention spans are short, and people are hit with ads everywhere. Even if you’re offering unique freemium options, they won’t do much for your prospects if the onboarding experience feels too overwhelming to them.
Here’s how you can flip the script and reduce customer friction: implement single sign-on (SSO), just like Tally, a prominent SaaS application, does, and it does it brilliantly.
Tally lets users access the platform without any signup (yeah, you heard it right). They can jump right in and start building their forms. And once they hit publish, prospects are asked just one simple thing: sign in with their Gmail. And voila, they’re good to go. See? Super easy!
The moral of the story is that you should make the sign-up process easy and seamless for all trailers to access and navigate through your product because what’s PLS really about? Driving revenue through user upgrades, right?
Offer a customized in-app onboarding journey
People love personalized in-app experiences, so instead of trying a one-size-fits-all solution (which doesn’t exist in the SaaS world), go the extra mile and create a user onboarding survey for first-time users and collect insights about their challenges and preferences.
This content marketing strategy is pretty common among popular SaaS apps like Akiflow, which even uses AI capabilities to optimize the onboarding experience of their users:
Once you gather the questionnaire responses, you’ll have plenty of data to work with. Group your leads into different segments and customize the onboarding experience for each group.
You can then use embedded videos, interactive tutorials, in-app messages, and other interactive elements to help your prospects easily and quickly navigate through the different functionalities of the app and discover your product value much faster.
Interactive elements used in Encharge during the user onboarding process.
Provide Self-Service Resources
Your job doesn’t stop at providing a customized onboarding experience because your users may still have a ton of doubts and questions — and that’s normal during their first time using the app.
Now, you’re probably thinking things like, “How can I help these new users find the support they need on their own”? Well, your best bet is to offer self-service resources, and it’s easier than you think. Create helpful tools like knowledge bases, FAQs, and help centers.
Notion — who doesn’t know Notion? This big productivity and note-taking SaaS company does a fantastic job with self-service support by featuring a little question mark in the bottom right corner that links to a ton of resources (video tutorials, FAQs, guides, templates—you name it) covering all the possible questions and inquiries new users might have.
Boost demo requests and upgrades with product data
One of the best parts about self-serve resources is the product data you gather on user behavior and preferences, and this data will help you connect the dots and offer personalized solutions for all the in-app walkthrough challenges your users are facing.
To do that, you’ve got to break down the data you’ve collected and segment your prospects by common activity patterns, job positions, demographics, and the onboarding survey results we discussed earlier.
And while pop-ups and automated in-app messages are perfect for addressing user concerns, you can do better. Why not use targeted sales messages to encourage upgrades or demo invitations after users interact with or use a specific feature?
You can even take it a step further and customize your demo outreach based on the positions and roles of the users. The higher someone is in the company, the better your chances are of closing that deal.
Need some ideas to get you started? Airtable does a great job of recommending upgrades to a paid plan when users need features like extensions and advanced filtering. And guess what else you can find in the screenshot? A team badge for users with corporate emails.
Keep track of your customer journey map
We are not here to sell fantasies or suggest that the product-led sales model is a one-and-done deal and that you’ll start generating SaaS revenue overnight.
You need to understand that it’s a long process where you will need to assess the effectiveness of your customer journey map to figure out what’s working and what isn’t in your product-led sales model.
To do that, you first need to establish and analyze a conversion funnel that directs users through specific steps toward a goal. The point of doing this is to indentify any bottlenecks in the user journey. Not only that! You can also run a path analysis to see how users navigate the app’s features and functionalities.
You will definitely need some more help here! So, share these insights with your sales and customer success teams to fine-tune your product-led sales strategy, help users get on the right track, and recognize product value without missing a beat.
Build a Killer PLS with Encharge
And that brings us to the end of this post! We can safely say that we have told you as much about the benefits and takeaways of the product-led sales approach as you should know before you start adopting it.
We hope this helps with your product-led sales model— we’d love to hear what you implement!
And if you’re looking for even more tips on how to build a product-led sales strategy, Encharge is a tool that can help you create automated onboarding, send behavior-based messaging, and segment users based on their lifecycle stages. Book a demo with Encharge — you’re only a click away!
