Take a page out of Figma’s Product-Led Sales Playbook!
The company reportedly grew 100% year-over-year, from $200 million to $400 million in ARR. What was the key to Figma’s rapid growth? The company’s seamless Product-Led Sales motion.
Here are three takeaways:
1. Use product-qualified accounts (PQAs) to flag which prospects to reach out to, and when
In a PLS motion, the last thing you want your sales team to do is waste time chasing non-opportunities.
To avoid a false start, Figma’s sales team leverages a combination of account data and product usage data to force rank the best prospects.
2. Target the team leads and the power users to build momentum in the sales process
Figma uses a classic multi-threaded, go-to-market motion to drive deal velocity and size.
The sales team will kick off the sales process with the champion user, while marketing will engage the influencer/decision makers with content and events (e.g., webinars).
3. Equip your sales team with the right product data and messaging to increase their conversion rate
To increase a rep's success rate at creating new deals, Figma had its product marketing team create a messaging framework to help sales reps personalize their outreach.
The team bucketed which data signals correlate with a pain point and a value prop that could help increase a rep's reply rate.
Sam Blond, a partner at Founders Fund, offers his advice on accelerating SaaS revenue growth in 2023. His advice starts with understanding your GTM performance metrics, then identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement. There are a ton of great insights to explore in this SaaStr Workshop.
Amidst a challenging economy, five enterprise SaaS executives share their top strategies and tactics for thriving. One key takeaway stands out against the rest: leaders must be ruthless when prioritizing their business goals and abandon low-priority initiatives. One way to surface the top things is setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align the org on what matters most.
Late-stage startup valuations bounced back in Q2 2023 following a slump in 2022 and Q1 this year, with Series E and beyond valuations rebounding by 105%. This revival, taking place against a backdrop of rising interest rates and economic uncertainty, hints at a return of VC investors. But with two more possible interest rate hikes by year-end, we may not be out of the woods yet.
Over the past 18 months, the software market has changed. Economic pressures and slower growth have led to lower Annual Contract Value (ACV) and fewer discounts. In response, software vendors are adopting transparent, standardized pricing while buyers focus on consolidating their tech stacks.
In this article, explore the tactics that can help your sales team optimize their response rates. As a primer, here are five key factors that influence your responses:
- Subject Line: Is your subject line eye-catching?
- Offer: Do you have a compelling offer?
- Timing: Is your outreach timely?
- Personalization: How personalized is your messaging?
- CTA: Is your call to action clear?
Sales professionals anticipate that most software they use will have built-in AI capabilities by 2024. And products aimed at enhancing prospect outreach and improving data organization are at the top of their list. Discover the trends from HubSpot's recent sales & AI study.
Start by establishing your product-market fit using the six Ps framework, then leverage this foundation to build a thought leadership and distribution strategy. Next, focus on creating niche content that is relevant, valuable, and clear to your audience, and provides them with new insights and motivations to act. Lastly, make your brand memorable by borrowing B2C strategies like storytelling and entertainment, which can help you stand out in a crowded B2B landscape.
The landscape for SaaS PR has shifted in 2023. There are fewer media outlets, and those who remain are less excited by SaaS and Enterprise companies nowadays. But despite these changes, proving your company has real value (in terms of revenue/ profitability) is still a winning strategy to get covered. At the end of the day, a journalist is always looking to pick up a good story.
Building an effective B2B SEO campaign is no small task, but it boils down to executing only a handful of things well. For example, leverage strategies such as guest blogging, digital PR, and content promotion to generate high-quality backlinks. These backlinks increase your website's domain authority, improving your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
You may have heard the new mantra of ‘profitability over growth.’ But what impact have SaaS companies seen in this market environment? Economic headwinds have slowed new logo growth and steered companies to rely on customer expansion to keep their growth rate afloat. As a result, customer success is now in the spotlight for having an outsized role in defensible growth.
Securing the future of Customer Success! Gainsight, a leading Customer Success (CS) company, acquired Northpass, a top Customer Education (CE) platform. Why is this important? This acquisition could signify an industry trend toward consolidating platforms for a more unified customer experience.
A match made in heaven! CJ Gustafson and Kyle Poyar team up to discuss the pricing model of AI-as-a-service and AI-powered products. Two themes emerged from this write-up: 1) there is a trend towards product-led growth and 'try before you buy' models in the AI industry, and 2) the community surrounding an AI product can become a competitive advantage.
Claude 2, a new AI assistant developed by Anthropic, is rivaling OpenAI's ChatGPT - and the prompted outputs seem promising. There is a lot to like about the model including being trained on recent data, having no usage limits, and the ability to accept longer prompts. But the biggest blow to OpenAI is that Claude 2's API is significantly more cost-efficient than the GPT-4 API.
Explore what these five SaaS companies have in common. Here’s a preview: they all effectively use social media for content distribution to expand their brand reach and engagement.
These are my highlights.
- Effectively repurpose content across different social media platforms. Like Hootsuite, tailoring your content to each channel’s specific audience and format can help optimize your distribution on those platforms.
- Build online communities to foster direct interaction and stronger relationships. Slack is a great example of how fostering communities on platforms like Reddit can provide valuable feedback and create stronger bonds with your users.
- Never underestimate the power of non-traditional platforms for content distribution. Shopify's innovative use of Pinterest demonstrates that non-traditional platforms can be effective channels for engagement and content distribution.
