Ramli John

The Summary

What does ProductLed actually mean? 

Product led is something we've seen in consumer goods for a while. You can think of Spotify and Netflix. It's about seeing the value before actually purchasing the value. And this idea is slowly moving into the B2B world. Buyer mindset is changing in the B2C and B2B world so if you don't have the ability to try before you buy, you'll probably end up googling until you do! It starting with adoption from the bigger companies who are realising this type of buyer behaviour isn't a trend and it isn't slowing down. Product led is this concept that you create a customer experience of trying the product and becoming wowed by it which leads them to buy. 

Talk to me about the Eureka moment. 

Shifting from sales led to product led is such a huge change. It starts with the culture change across the business and it only takes the team to panic and think they are affected negatively to throw it off. The most important thing to know is that there's always a better way to deliver customer experience and that's at the heart of product led. You want to set your customer experience so that your users success becomes your success. So you get paid when the users have success. It's definitely a journey!

Product led will alter your sales experience, maybe making it longer right?

Yes and no. I've had companies that sign up on a Friday, spend 20 hours going over the product and come Monday they sign up for a big account. This is because most people have the budget but they are unsure of whether it works for their business. We're seeing sales cycles being shorter and CAC is lower. 

In sales led companies there's often some friction with sales and marketing. Do you think going product led brings the two together?

100% one of the things we've seen is that it for product led companies working well they have to be cross functional. If it's not, the customer experience becomes fragmented. It's like running a relay race and every step is an opportunity to have a smooth or mismatched customer experience. If the team is fragmented then users will drop off. So being aligned in going product led is so important for it's success.

Before ProductLed where did it all begin? 

I've been doing SaaS marketing for 10/15 years and he loves marketing. I got into consulting and would see the data whilst he was getting more users that they weren't being retained. So VC backed companies were excited for the amount of users that were signing up but they slipped at retention. That was the beginning of the product led approach and he got connected with Wes Bush to implement ProductLed strategies in their companies. 

I've seen you've got a new coming book out?

Yes, it's coming on June 8th. It's focused on the whole user onboarding experience which is like an incubator space. The first few years of adoption is often neglected. For a lot of companies marketing is focused on getting new users, the product team is focused on implementing their product growth map, sales is trying to pursue new leads, customer success is trying to help new people out and this middle ground that is the user onboarding experience is often neglected but getting that right can improve your revenue 2-3x. So the book goes over our framework. 

What's one tip you can give from it as a teaser? 

One of the things is that onboarding needs to be a cross functional team effort. It's often that the product team owns it and no one else. One of the myths I busted in the book is that people think the user onboarding starts when the user signs up to the product. But you're missing a critical part before that because the marketing will have an impact on onboarding the user too. For example you see some messaging around a product, sign-up but the tool is not what you thought when you signed up for it. That onboarding experience would then be completely off. So if there is a disconnect from how they are onboarded from their first touch point until they become a paying customer, it's going to be very hard for the team to work together. 

Do you think ProductLed leads quite nicely into having a RevOps team? 

I love ops! Even from the team it's the glue that glues all of the teams together. I think having a RevOps team is one way to create that seamless experience. In Drift for example, the product team own that experience and in Facebook their growth team do. So whether it's the growth/ product or marketing team they need to make sure everyones pulled in together so that the experience doesn't have any holes. 

How do you think ProductLed can help businesses recover from COVID-19?

The companies that will win are the ones that can hold onto their customers. So adjust your pricing based on the usage of the user, that's one thing you can adjust because you can change the pricing level you are on if you want to cut back for example. Someone downgrading their pricing might not be a bad thing it could be a seasonal thing, their success again becomes your success as their business adjusts to the pandemic, but they haven't churned most importantly. That's the beauty about having a usage based pricing. Check out Kyle Poyar's blog here. 

Who looks after the marketing for ProductLed to help you acquire new business for you guys?

Some of the top of funnel activities include the summit and the books which offer entry into the brand. One of the things we've been thinking about a lot is how do we apply ProductLed to ProductLed as a company! And we've tried a free trial product but now we're onto a freemium model without even providing us an email address - we call it 'drinking our own champagne' so there will be free ProductLed certificates. 

What role has LinkedIn played in that?

It's having a love for social media and engaging in though leadership and that's where LinkedIn and Twitter come in. We eat sleep breathe ProductLed and that's why the community stays so active.

For people that want to join how do they get in touch?

For everything from the community to the blogs you can see it all here.  Or drop me an email: [email protected] or send me a DM on the slack channel.