How can a product-led growth company leverage account-based marketing to accelerate enterprise sales?
Product-led growth (PLG) companies often have it good. A company is so focused on creating a quality product that is so useful, creates immediate value for users, and continues to build features and functionality (and more products) with the user experience front and center that word of mouth drives sales and the business scales. Users simply have to try it, often within a freemium model, and the proof is in the pudding. But is there a way to scale faster by layering on an enterprise-focused go-to-market strategy and really take it to the moon?
The challenge with the enterprise sale in PLG
Leveraging a freemium model, community building within a target persona, and word-of-mouth, PLG companies can definitely get users within enterprises. However, that doesn’t necessarily lead to the big annual contract values SaaS companies bank on to scale revenue. At least not quickly.
Why? The users of typical PLG companies are often not decision-makers. They are not looking to solve organization-wide problems, but rather look for tools that help them with their day-to-day work. Of course, one free-version user can become a power user and lead to two users and beyond, and then their domain may require an upgrade for more users or team functionality. That leads to these users convincing budget owners to dish out some cash for paid licenses, which is exactly the strategy PLG companies deploy, and it is successful.
It becomes more challenging to convince the customer to sign an annual contract in the tens of thousands of dollars and higher (even at a discount). And the monthly recurring payments for a tool that isn’t exactly necessary organization-wide are often on the chopping block during budget cuts. Overall, the sales team – if there is one – is on their back foot.
Combine ABM with PLG for an enterprise go-to-market strategy
Think of product-led growth as the tip of the spear when it comes to enterprise account acquisition. Users can be acquired with a traditional digital marketing strategy to generate enterprise inbound leads for the sales team. These users become power users to be champions for the product within their organization. Then what next?
Looking at this from a different perspective, the company has identified its target enterprise accounts, based on an ideal customer profile (ICP). If the ICP has not been identified, looking at the existing user base is a place to start, meaning some of the target accounts may already have users of the product as the ICP is defined (this is often the case). The marketing and sales teams can then work together to build account-based campaigns to acquire users in target accounts (for the accounts that don’t have users), accelerate the conversion to paid users, then expand the user base and get the attention of decision-makers by telling a story of cross-functional and organizational impact with return-on-investment at the core of the story.
Inbound to outbound, outbound to inbound
This leads to putting PLG-focused companies to be in a unique position to combine inbound and outbound tactics across marketing and sales from the get-go.
As mentioned earlier, traditional digital marketing sources inbound leads through new user acquisition, typically free product users, and some of these leads will be from target enterprise accounts. Account-based marketing and outbound sales teams target potential power users (champions) and decision-makers across multiple departments in the ICP accounts with messaging and content relevant to the account, department, use case, and persona.
Inbound to outbound, outbound to inbound ABM in a PLG company
The goal of ABM and sales teams is to connect users and decision-makers across multiple departments with similar problems that the company’s products solve, showing them how it can be done. This starts with one user, including the free product version, in one department that ABM and the sales team must also focus on sourcing – it can’t solely be left to chance with traditional digital marketing.
Inbound to outbound – If a user from a target account comes in inbound, immediately pass the lead to the outbound sales team to work, leveraging the ABM assets built for the account, and adding the account to account-based targeting within digital channels. Often, new users within an account will sign up from digital marketing sources that already has users from the same department or not. This is PLG at its finest – one person tells another and another. Speed up the process with ABM acceleration tactics to convert users to paid accounts and by having the sales team demonstrate the capabilities of the paid product when multiple users and teams work together with it while providing relevant content in digital channels throughout the process.
Outbound to inbound – It is not a waste of time or resources to deploy outbound sales and ABM to acquire the first free product version user within a target ICP account, or additional users. It’s a wasted opportunity, as these are the accounts that are expected to provide the highest ARR to the company in the long run. Use SDRs, account-based targeting with digital channels, and creative field marketing tactics, to communicate with personas the benefits of the product, with the call to action to try the product at no cost to them. Once users sign up (there’s the inbound), move on to acceleration ABM tactics, keeping the sales team involved, as mentioned in the inbound to outbound bullet above.
Overall, this is an acquisition, acceleration, and expansion cycle with the product, and the whole company behind the product, that identifies what is happening with the product usage (or lack thereof) in the account and deploying the right tactics at the right time.
It's a marketing and sales go-to-market strategy
Any ABM strategy requires alignment and strong relationship between marketing and sales. This ABM-PLG strategy combination is no different and consistent, constant communication and collaboration between marketing and sales teams is critical to its success. Marketing must pivot its messaging to the account and its personas throughout the customer journey as sales works the account, while sales must provide feedback to marketing on the assets and messaging, as the messaging must be consistent across sales and marketing.
No company is the same, so no one ABM strategy works for every company. If you’d like to discuss how an ABM strategy could accelerate revenue growth from enterprise accounts, send me a note at yuriy@ymiconsulting.com.
