Product-Led Growth vs. Sales-Led Growth with Leah Tharin

Leah Tharin brings B2B SaaS to the product-led growth retention light. Advising organizations to bring growth, product, marketing, and sales in line, scaling to move down or upmarket. She works in the operational details and not the hypothetical clouds with her clients.

In this episode, Leah explains the differences between product-led growth (PLG) and sales-led growth, highlighting the benefits of usage-limited freemiums in PLG strategies. She emphasizes the importance of focusing on core value and customer experience when designing freemiums. She advises on pricing strategies, recommending minimal price changes during the early stages and frequent experiments as the company matures.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Find detailed definitions of key business concepts like product-led growth (PLG) and sales-led growth (SLG) that offer valuable comparisons to help you understand their differences, as well as applications.
• Learn practical and actionable advice on pricing strategies, emphasizing the importance of initial pricing for early-stage companies and the need for frequent pricing experiments as the company grows.
• Deep dive into effective business practices, such as leveraging freemium models and understanding the importance of customer value in pricing strategies.

"If you cannot convince people to use your stuff for free, then I think you should not have any price on your product."

- Leah Tharin

Topics Covered:

01:32 - Why she describe the relationship between pricing and value as stressful

03:09 - Defining a product-led growth

06:47 - Leah expanding the product-led growth definition to include interactive demos and automated marketing tools

08:49 - How companies adopt product-led growth to improve cost efficiency and compete with more agile, cost-effective competitors

11:22 - Sales-led growth defined

14:20 - What does a product-led growth focuses in getting into

20:02 - Understanding a Freemium product offer

24:10 - Why she prefers a Freemium model that is usage-limited

26:46 - An outcome-driven way of looking at the minimum viable product

29:31 - Leah's best pricing advice

Key Takeaways:

"Traditionally we talk about product-led growth in the terms of trials, freemiums, getting something for free forever until you buy it, and so forth. But I also talk about it in the context of getting an interactive demo where you understand what they now do inside of this demo." - Leah Tharin

"...what we try to do in product-led growth is exactly this. It's not so much about how much the customer spends in the initial payment with us or like even the first couple of months, maybe even year. It is about the lifetime value, how fast we can escalate this of course as well because this is also a sign of customer value." - Leah Tharin

"For commoditized markets, product-led growth, if it can be done, it's not always the right thing, but definitely the choice that you have to make. In new verticals with extremely complicated integrations, we tend to be more sales-led for sure." - Leah Tharin

People /Resources Mentioned:

• Netflix: https://www.netflix.com
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com
• Hubspot: https://www.hubspot.com
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com

Connect with Leah Tharin:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahtharin/
• Website: https://www.leahtharin.com/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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