What Is Product-Led Growth? The Whats, Hows, and Whys with Kyle Poyar

Kyle Poyar is a product-led growth expert who worked for Simon-Kucher & Partners for six years where he was a consultant, senior consultant and manager, and director. Currently, he is the operating partner of OpenView, a firm that helps build software companies into market leaders by helping them hire the best talents, acquire and retrain the right customers, and partner with industry leaders so that they can dominate their markets.

In this episode, Kyle talks us through the details of product-led growth and how it became popular in the recent years. He also shares some tips on how to make it work on businesses in certain industries.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn the definition of Product-Led Growth
• Find out if Product-Led Growth model is suitable for your business
• Learn how to shift from Sales-led model to Product-led model

"With the reverse trial, your customers land in a premium version of your product, have a time-limited period that they can access it, and then they can either convert and essentially purchase, or they can keep using a free version of the product. What ends up happening is you get the best of both worlds between freemium and free trial, and so you don't actually have to choose between the two"

– Kyle Poyar

Topics Covered:

01:17 – How Kyle got into pricing

03:04 – More than just about numbers pricing has qualitative aspects as well

04:12 – What is product-led growth?

06:50 – Product-led growth is more than just prioritizing product over sales and marketing people

08:17 – Most companies strategized product-led growth from scratch until it was standardized

10:04 – Can companies do freemium that is not product-led growth?

11:47 – When product-led companies bring salespeople into the process

14:49 – Salespeople in product-led companies are not prospecting

15:28 – Self-serve sales work most of the time, but some transactions require salespeople

18:40 – The types of companies that does and doesn't work for product-led growth

22:26 – How Kyle would coach a sales-led company who wants to shift to product-led growth model

25:50 – Does it make sense for PLG companies to spend more on the expand side of "land and expand"?

27:07 – Kyle' pricing advice

28:33 – Connect with Kyle

Key Takeaways:

"In my mind, why product-led growth has taken off is because end users, as opposed to just executive buyers, have more and more power in bringing software into work. And so, you can actually make your product discovered by those users, show value to those folks and enable them to become champions in your buying process" – Kyle Poyar

"Freemium is a subset of PLG. If you're doing freemium by default, you're taking steps into product led growth. But freemium isn't required to be a product-led company by any means." – Kyle Poyar

"I advise companies to think in terms of where there's the most friction in their current motion and what are product-led solutions that can help solve that friction and improve upon a KPI that we want to improve on right now, and that takes us on this path to doing more PLG in the future." – Kyle Poyar

Connect with Kyle Poyar:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mailto:mark@impactpricing.com