For a B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) like ourselves, one of the main questions you often reflect on is: "

Do we want to focus on Product-Led or Sales-Led Growth?

If you're more like: "Product-Led what?" Let us explain:

: is a growth model where product usage drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. You focus on your users and the time it takes for them to experience value using your product. 

: is a growth model that uses a sales rep or your sales team and their processes to drive conversions and business growth. You focus on the value you create for the users of your product and the buyer and their needs.

this in-depth explanation by the Product-Led Growth Collective

) also mention Marketing-Led Growth as an own strategy, but we're not going to go deep into that one in this text, as it's not one we've ever considered.

But do we have to choose one or the other? Yes, and no. As we'll see, both growth strategies carry elements of the other. But it's helpful to reflect on which of the two directions suits you the best, as they both entail different organizational, sales, marketing, and product actions once you've decided. 

We'll dive deeper into each strategy and how we've worked with each of them over the last couple of years. 

What is a Sales-Led Growth (SLG) strategy?

If your SaaS follows an SLG strategy, a significant part of your organization will typically consist of people working with sales. You might call them Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Account Managers, and Business Developers. 

They'll typically work with lead generation, outreach, filling up your sales funnel, and work closely with your marketing or demand generation department (if you have one). 

it does not automatically mean you're following an SLG strategy

. As we'll get back to later, most of the companies following a PLG strategy 

 have sales teams, as most conversions, whether you're doing SLG or PLG, are sales-assisted and require human beings to do outreach and make sure your potential customers get what they want and need. 

Another thing that often separates SLG from PLG is that the Average Deal Size (also known as Average Contract Value, ACV) is larger with SLG, as you're talking directly to the person(s) with a budget, the buyer. 

When we were more on the SLG side of things, mid-2021, 

one of our sales processes could look something like this

SDRs would get lists from marketing, qualifying leads, and inviting them to meetings with our Account Executives and Managers. If you were lucky (and qualified), you'd sometimes get a demo account to test our product for a couple of days if you'd had a meeting or two with us.

But most of the time, our SLG conversions came after 1-3 sales meetings and product demos with our hottest leads. After signing a contract with us, they'd start using our product. 

With a PLG strategy, it's often the other way around. 

What is a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy?

Let's get a popular myth out of the way immediately: PLG strategies 

 rely heavily on having a working sales department of human beings making sales. As Sam Richard, VP of the Growth Team at Openview, an expansion stage venture capital firm, says in the webinar below, 

over 60% of the conversions of so-called self-service businesses are sales-assisted

, meaning one or more human being(s) have been involved in the sales process:

Then what separates an SLG from a PLG strategy? 

It's how early you get to use and interact with the product you want to buy. 

 PLG strategy often entails offering your product through some sort of freemium or free trial license. 

You let your leads sign up for your product as one of their first actions on your website. Then you trust your product to do the convincing. If it gives your leads value, they're seeing the business case for spending some money buying full access, either buying more features (if you offer limited functionality in your freemium/free trial licenses) or buying more time (if your freemium/free trial licenses only last for 7-14 days for example). 

If you also make larger enterprise sales (like we do), a PLG strategy can also help you 

which leads to get in touch with. Then you'll typically have some product metrics ("invited three colleagues to their workspace" or "returned to the product >4 times within a week") you've decided are good thresholds for which users to approach to ask for a more expanded agreement. 

Openview has a great blog post on Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

Some weeks ago, we started mapping out what our PQL process could look like in ShiftX. 

There is no right or wrong answer to which of these strategies 

 company should follow. Some factors to consider that have played their part when we've decided and discussed are:

: Do you have a group of employees with sales and outreach experience that are used to owning the full sales funnel, from lead to closed contract? Fitting them into a PLG way of doing things is always an option, but the downside of the change management needed might overshadow the upside of potentially succeeding with PLG versus just sticking with the SLG way of doing things.

: How quickly do you think a new user (that doesn't know your product) could experience value using your product without talking to anyone at your company? If your product is intuitive and not too complex, letting users "self-serve" should be doable. This again will take you closer to a PLG approach by letting your leads experience your product on their own, right when they want to. Need help building self-served onboarding? Check out tools like 

 if you don't want to build something custom yourselves, as we've done.

Why and how we're changing to more of a PLG strategy

Getting to a point where your PLG strategy is in full blossom, where your (mainly) self-served customers are driving your main income, can be a long road. Knowing when and if to go PLG is a very important business decision. Like global venture capital investor Gil Dibner writes, 

for some, it makes sense to go PLG immediately

As we are both rigged, organizationally, for doing PLG and have a pretty intuitive, user-friendly, non-complex tool to get you started as a user on your own (at least we like to believe we do), we feel ready to make a shift towards a PLG strategy. 

I'll continue telling you some more about what inspired us and what we've done in the last couple of months.

As PLG has started taking off in recent years and months, more and more resources are out there, sharing experiences and knowledge. Here are some that we've used:

"Product-Led Growth: What It Is And Why It’s The Future of SaaS", by Breyta

The Product-Led Growth Collective Community

What most of these resources often barely mention, though, that might turn out to be one of your main challenges (as it has for us), is 

With PLG, you'll not be making outreach sales at the same scale (or maybe 

). So, how will you get the new users (and paying customers) to come pouring in with your new PLG strategy? 

Some of us product heads live(d) in the illusion that if you just make an 

 product, people will find their way in themselves. Word-of-mouth, Viral Campaigns. These nice things will happen. By themselves. 

Well, I hate to be the one telling you that this belief is a beautiful but also dangerous illusion. Distribution, spread, and awareness all demand hard, strategic, long-lasting work.  But there are a couple of things that could help you get things going quite quickly, though.

The one thing which has been the thing (so far) helping our distribution the most (by far) with the least amount of effort is 

. There are tons of blog posts about how to launch successfully (

I found this one, by Danish designer Michael Flarup, pretty helpful

). What (we think) turned out to be one of our most important preparations was letting one of Producthunts top "hunters",

, post our product, or "hunt us", as it's called. 

Overall, Producthunt gave us around 300 new signups, a lot of kind words, constructive feedback from SaaS-heads around the world, 

, and spread to other platforms and forums. 

We've also learned about the LTD (Lifetime Deal) forums like 

, where you'd offer lifetime discounts on your software and get hundreds of signups. As an experiment, we posted an offer for 

, and got some helpful feedback and about 100 signups (which was quite a lot for us) in about one day. A little experiment that gave us some valuable insights on our own customer journey and our product, but also realized these are not users matching our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Going forward, we're experimenting more with integration and partner strategies, connecting ShiftX up with other tools in our sphere, creating a powerful stack for streamlining your business administration and documentation.

With an SLG strategy, you'll most likely have a very operational sales team, following their prospects hands-on, full cycle, from cold lead to closed deal. With a PLG strategy, you'll have to rely more on tools and analytics to do the same jobs. A lot of these kinds of tools have arisen lately. 

To do PLG effectively, knowing your customers, what they like and don't like about your product, what they need in the future, and what will get them to love your product is essential. And, as mentioned above, knowing which customers to get in touch with, as a lot of PLG sales also are sales-assisted, is also key. That way, you won't waste time in meetings with leads that don't have real buyers' intent but still catch the big fish that do. 

There are a lot of new tools lately that want to help you 

get control of your full "lead to happy customer" lifecycle

. These are some we've considered starting using:

"CRM as it should be". Early-stage Norwegian-based startup that wants to help you get control of your entire customer lifecycle.

 – "Turn product data into revenue". A Product-Led Sales platform that helps you improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

 – "Turn signups into revenue". They want to give your sales team the product insights and workflows they need to prioritize, close, and grow accounts.

For analytics, we've considered and started using some of these tools:

 – "Build better products". They want to help you get control of your self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users.

 – "B2B Revenue attribution". Help you gather, join and clean all revenue-related data to present a transparent actionable analysis of what drives B2B revenue.

 – "The Leading Subscription Analytics Platform". A typical SaaS tool to measure, understand, and grow recurring revenue.

We've now also made it possible to pay your ShiftX license with 

And of course, we've used our own tool in making out our core processes, like the ones we've shared with you above in this text. Want to do the same? As we've now transitioned into more of a PLG SaaS, 

PLG is more of a long game than SLG. Building good self-service customer journeys into and around your product takes time. And, as we hope we've made clear in the text above, we're going to be in some sort of hybrid state where manual sales still play a vital role in growing the company's accounts, especially, as mentioned, the larger ones. But our PLG focus is here to stay.

How we're changing from Sales-Led Growth (SLG) to Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Here's a little mid-year update from me, Nikolai, CEO of ShiftX.

It's been a very active first half of the year, with some major 

 – a new way to add documentation to your steps in ShiftX, with Notes, Links and Images.

 – a new way to visualize time spent on each step in your process.

 – decide who has what access to which of the flows in your workspace.

webinars you're free to watch as recordings

Why involving 10x more people is key for continuous improvement and change

, with CTO Eigil Sagafos and me from ShiftX.

How Custimy.io prepare operations for rapid growth and change

, with SVP of Operations, Linda Hassellund.

Continuous improvement through employee inclusion

, with VP Global Head of Business Processes at Skuld, Andreas Sylthe.

A process' role in implementing a business strategy

, with Petrine Djupvik-Flaa, Ph.D. Candidate at BI Business School, and Process leader at Asplan Viak.

process work has gone from boring to fun at OBOS

How ShiftX helps Inselo close sales faster

OsloBuss handled spikes in Employee Onboarding using ShiftX

, giving us a lot of really great feedback from product lovers all around the world, and some interesting new connections. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you're considering launching something yourself, and want advice. 

As always, if there's something you're missing or want to ask us, 

don't hesitate to get in touch or join our Slack community

And if you need help planning your summer holiday, 

check out our Summer Holiday Planning process

Mid-year update from CEO Nikolai

In this webinar, you will hear about how Skuld is:

building a continuous improvement culture 

utilizing digital tools in combination with knowledge and experience

managing and getting people involved in the process work 

and why did they chose ShiftX as their new process tool to work with continuous improvement 


This webinar is part of our webinar series where we invite users and customers of ShiftX to talk about different topics related to continuous improvement, business processes, and innovation. 

Webinar: Continuous improvement through employee inclusion

Process documentation

Onboarding new hire

Implement new systems

Visio alternative

Use cases

Features

Templates

Integrations

Pricing

 Read more and see available positions ->

In this Webinar, we discuss topics such as:

Petrine's academic research on technology

how well-documented processes can help in implementing strategy, together with or instead of Goals and KPIs.

This webinar is part of our webinar series where we invite users and customers of ShiftX to talk about different topics related to continuous improvement, business processes, and innovation. 

Webinar: A process' role in implementing a business strategy

Try ShiftX for free

How we're changing from Sales-Led Growth (SLG) to Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Mid-year update from CEO Nikolai

Webinar: Continuous improvement through employee inclusion