Product-Led GTM: Letting Your Product Lead Your Launch

There’s a saying: a good product sells itself. Well, with product-led GTM (go-to-market), that’s the approach you take when launching a new product or feature. 

There are many different strategies you can adopt when getting your product out into the world, each acting as your chosen blueprint for how you’re going to go about the launch. By following product-led GTM, you’re putting the onus on the product itself and letting it do the talking.

Many things can drive users to a new product. Good social campaigns, outreach from sales, and personalized product demos. With product-led GTM, the drivers you use are going to be focused on your product, letting its features, solutions, and benefits act as the magnet that attracts users and builds acquisition. 

Product-led GTM can be a solid approach to get your product off the ground, but there’s a lot to know. Let’s dive deeper into product-led GTM and learn how to turn your product value proposition into delicious bait to hook users in.

What is GTM? 

Before looking at product-led GTM, we first need to grasp GTM as a whole. 

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is your plan on how you’re going to launch a new product into the market. It outlines the tactics you’ll use to get users engaged with your product or new feature. 

A go-to-market strategy focuses on customer acquisition and retention. It’s your blueprint for how you’re going to get early adopters to your product, and crucially, how you’re going to get them to stay. It’s a crucial part of your overall growth strategy. 

Your go-to-market strategy will cover many things, including your target audience, product value proposition, product pricing strategies, and what distribution channels you’re going to use to get your product out there. The goal of your go-to-market strategy is to make sure your launch is successful while minimizing the risks. 

There are multiple types of GTM strategies you can follow to get your product into the world, with product-led GTM being just one of them. 

What is Product-led GTM?

As we’ve said, product-led GTM is one of multiple ways that you can get your product to market. When launching a product or feature, you have the option of focusing on certain drivers that act as the main way to get customers through the door. Traditionally, this driver has been Sales Teams, reaching out to customers to drum up interest. Or it could have been Marketing, talking a big game about the product on different channels. 

In product-led GTM, you let your product do the talking for you. Here the product itself is the main avenue for driving acquisition, retention, and expansion. 

Essentially, this approach is where the product ‘sells itself’, doing so by providing immediate value to the customer. So, instead of having Sales or Marketing trying to convince users that the product is awesome before they even see it, the product shows this when it’s being tried out. 

But, how do you get users to come try the product in the first place? Well, with a product-led GTM approach, you’re typically attracting users with free trials, self-service demos, and freemium access, allowing them to try the product for themselves and reach their wow moment without the need for a sales pitch or Customer Support rep to talk them through onboarding. 

A product-led approach is very customer-centric, so requires a lot of initial research and product discovery to ensure that you’ve built a product that will attract users on its value proposition alone. You want your product to be a sticky Venus fly trap, ensnaring users because it’s so good. You’ve learned what users are crying out for in your market. You’ve built it. Now they should come.

Is product-led GTM the same as product-led growth?

Let’s not confuse product-led GTM with product-led growth (PLG). Product-led GTM is all about launching and introducing your product to the market. It’s a way of planting the seed, so to speak. So here, your product itself is the primary vehicle for acquisition, conversion, and retention. It’s only about early adoption, focused on the first stages of the Product Life Cycle. 

Product-led growth (PLG) is different as it covers the entire business strategy, where the company’s growth is driven by the product. Here, the product is the driving force of every stage of the customer journey and product lifecycle. 

To keep things neat and tidy, and to make sure we’re not thinking of the wrong things here, consider GTM as a subsection of product-led growth. 

Product-led GTM is about your product launch specifically.
Product-led growth is about your company’s development.

Got it? Good. If you’re interested in learning more about product -ed growth, you can read more about it below ⏬:

What are some Product-led GTM strategies?

So what do you need to do to adopt a product-led GTM strategy? Well, there are many things you can do. As long as you’re using your product as the main driver, you’re using a product-led go-to-market strategy. 

Here’s a look at some of the key characteristics of a product-led GTM. Now, you don’t have to be doing all of these things to be considered product-led. Think of it more as a menu of options to choose from when building your GTM meal. 

Freemium models

Your SaaS pricing model is a key part of your go-to-market strategy. To be product-led, you want a model that gives users catch-free access to your product where they can try it out and discover its value. 

A freemium model is a great approach for this. By offering a free-to-use yet limited version of your product, you’re making it easy for users to experience the core features you have to offer. If you’ve done your research and have a product that solves a customer need, this should hook them and encourage users to upgrade to the paid-for, premium version.

Freemium is one of many pricing models. Learn about all the different pricing strategies below, and what should influence the model you go for:

Reverse trials 

Similar to freemium models, a reverse trial is another pricing model that puts the product front and center. Here, users get access to all your premium features for free for a limited period of time. This gives them a chance to explore your product, experience what makes it great, and appreciate the solutions you offer. 

After the trial period ends, the user is then downgraded to a free plan with limited functionality. As they’ve experienced, and hopefully fell in love with, the full version, they’re more likely to sign up and pay for premium access. 

This pricing strategy can reduce your all-important time to value (TTV) metric, letting customers quickly understand what makes your product special. 

If you want to learn more about reverse trials, we’ve got a full glossary post available below.

Self-serve onboarding

Product-led GTM is more hands-off. Instead of organizing a personalized demo and walkthrough with your customers, you allow them to onboard themselves with a self-serve approach. The goal of this is to make things easy, offering an intuitive product that makes sense to use.  

By empowering the user to explore the product on their own, they’ll be able to find value without needing direct input from a Sales Team. 

There are various tactics you can employ to encourage users to journey through the onboarding steps, like gamified onboarding that incentivizes new users to explore the product and reach the user activation point. Here you can offer rewards or track their progress to make customers more engaged, leading them deeper into your product. 

Looking to create the best onboarding experience? You need to use the right tools. Check out our list of the 9 best user onboarding software tools to help you craft your product tours.

Self-serve support

In addition to onboarding, a product-led GTM approach should utilize self-serve support, so that users can find answers to their queries without needing to contact a Customer Success Team member. 

Here you’re giving your users the gift of autonomy, enhancing the experience as users navigate and learn the product themselves. Self-service support can come in the form of a knowledge hub, where you can include FAQs and interactive guides to ensure users can easily find solutions to their questions. This goes a long way to drive retention metrics.  

In-app guidance and tooltips

If you’re going to rely on a product-led GTM approach you will need to get a bunch of tooltips, pop-ups, and other walkthroughs into your product to give users the knowledge they need to understand how everything works. 

Remember, you know your product inside out, but new users don’t. So do not assume it’s all obvious – make absolutely certain visitors to your product understand how to get value out of it. 

This feature of product-led GTM helps to improve the customer experience while making sure that they can see the value of the product quicker and get won over by it. 

Again, there are tools that can help you easily create, publish and test different pop-ups, announcements and tooltips, all without needing to involve your Developers. Check out our list of the best product onboarding tools. 

Personalized onboarding and segmentation

A great way to drive acquisition through a product-led GTM approach is to take advantage of customer data – things like their role, industry, or goals, to create a customized onboarding experience. If you create onboarding flows specific to different customer segments you can make sure that the product can demonstrate the specific features those customer types will care about more, driving a quicker time to value that boosts retention and acquisition. 

By delivering relevant content early through this type of user segmentation, you’ll increase engagement and reach the user activation point.

Viral loop and referral programs

With a product-led GTM approach, you want your active customers to help with the growth of your product. This can be done by creating incentives for current users to refer new ones. This leverages existing customers to attract new ones, taking the stress off marketing and sales to attract new leads. 

This approach works great for communication products and SaaS tools that work best with multiple users. By using this tactic to create a high viral coefficient, you’ve created a product that sells itself. 

What are the alternatives to product-led GTM? 

There are two main alternatives to product-led GTM: 

• Sales-led GTM: A traditional GTM strategy where Sales Teams play a massive role in customer acquisition. 
• Marketing-led GTM: A strategy where customer acquisition is driven through marketing efforts. 

Let’s explore these different options to understand what makes them unique, and to determine which one is best – if any. 

How does product-led GTM differ from sales-led GTM? 

Sales-led GTM is the more traditional approach, especially in the B2B space, for taking a software product to market. Sales-led GTM couldn’t be more different to product-led GTM. A sales-led approach has the emphasis on building human connections with potential customers, using tactics like outreach and personalized product demos to build interest in your tool or service. 

So whereas the product does the talking in product-led GTM, in a sales-led approach the growth of the product relies on Sales people to build relationships and showcase the product to prospects. Instead of letting customers organically come to the product to see it for themselves, a sales led approach is more pushy and direct. 

This doesn’t mean that the sales-led approach is bad. In fact, depending on your situation, it could be the right call. If you have a super complex product that needs someone to walk customers through it, a sales-led approach can really help, as it ensures that customers are explicitly shown the value of the product. 

Plus, you’ll find that as your product grows, you’ll need to adopt sales-driven strategies to help with growth. Going product-led to begin with can be a cost-effective way to get a foothold in the market, but to drive success, outreach from sales to PQLs (Product Qualified Leads) can be a great way to support growth. 

How does product-led GTM differ from marketing-led GTM? 

A marketing-led GTM strategy uses marketing efforts to drive demand and awareness of your product. In this approach, you kick up a big song and dance about your product before customers get to interact with it. 

This will usually be done through marketing campaigns and brand-building initiatives to educate an audience on your product and to generate leads. For example, you can build MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) who are people who have interacted with your marketing and match your ICP, who are then handed to Sales to follow-up and bring down the funnel. These people could have downloaded an eBook, registered for a demo or completed any other CTAs that captures their details and transforms them from a visitor to a lead. 

With this approach, demand is generated through your messaging, not the product itself. A marketing-led approach will lean on social media, paid ads, and email campaigns to get people aware of your product to entice them to give it a go. 

Much like sales-led GTM, you’re likely to lean more on marketing to supplement your product-led GTM approach, blending it all together to obtain the benefits of all. 

Should I use a product-led GTM strategy?

There are so many benefits to using a product-led GTM strategy. For starters, it can:

• Lower customer acquisition costs: In a product-led model, the product itself attracts and converts customers. Free trials and intuitive onboarding allow potential users to explore the product’s value on their own, reducing the need for costly sales demos and marketing campaigns.
• Create efficient resource utilization: Product-led GTM focuses resources on product development and user experience instead of large marketing and sales teams. This optimization ensures that efforts are concentrated on building a product that continuously attracts and retains users, leading to leaner operations and more efficient growth.
• Build shorter sales cycles: Product-led GTM enables end users to explore and adopt the product independently, bypassing the need for lengthy sales pitches. Self-serve resources and free trials allow for faster product adoption, reducing the time it takes to convert users.

BUT, and it’s a big but, these benefits will only happen if the product you’re launching suits this approach. For starters, product-led GTM is only really suitable for SaaS products. This is because their cloud-based nature makes them easy to access and are typically designed with self-service in mind. 

With a SaaS product, users are able to sign-up, onboard, and get started independently, making them a much better fit for product-led GTM. These types of products can be adopted without friction, unlike traditional software that needs to be downloaded. 

You also don’t want to use product-led GTM for a product that’s too complex, where users need a fair bit of education and guidance to fully understand how to use the thing. . Product-led GTM really only works if your product is simple to use and understand. If there are a metric ton of features and complicated user flow, you may need to adopt a sales-led approach to ensure that customers are walked through the product and know how to use it. If you’re not confident that they can work it all out on their own, then product-led may not be the best idea. 

Of course, none of these GTM strategies exist in a vacuum, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to use just one approach and that’s it. The question shouldn’t be ‘Should I use product-led GTM over a different type?’ Instead, you’re just trying to figure out which approach should be your main approach as you blend different methods together. 

The best approach is to take a hybrid strategy, where elements from different GTM models work together. You can have a product-led GTM at the core, allowing users to experience the product on their own, but still supplement it with marketing efforts to drive awareness and Sales Teams to close larger or more complex deals. Marketing can fuel demand and nurture leads who aren’t ready to dive into the product, while Sales can engage high-value prospects who need a more personalized touch. In the end, the most successful companies blend these strategies to create a balanced, scalable, and effective go-to-market approach.

Examples of great product-led GTM strategy

Does product-led GTM really lead to a successful product launch? Yes. Let’s have a look at some of the best examples to see how you can utilize product-led strategies yourself. 

Monday.com 

The project management software company Monday.com uses product-led GTM to reduce friction when new users are signing up. When first signing up, you quickly choose the features you’re most interested in, helping to create a personalized onboarding experience. Based on your answers, you’ll learn about the features that matter most to you through tooltips and in-app education.

As well as that, once you’re through the super quick sign-up process, you’re prompted to share Monday.com with your wider team, helping the platform create referral loops. 

Slack 

Slack has been a key shining light in product-led GTM, demonstrating this by adopting a freemium model that allows users to experience the core functionality of the communication tool. You don’t need to commit to a paid plan, instead, adoption is driven through usage, where the value of the product is apparent the more you use it.

Slack is also the master of using in-app onboarding and tooltips to demo the product and help you explore new features. 

Dropbox

Dropbox remains a quintessential example of a product-led GTM approach. The file-share software uses the freemium model perfectly, allowing users to experience the full suite of features until they run out of storage space. This lets users experience the value right from the off, making it hard to walk away from the service once you’ve reached your limit.

They’re also masters at creating a viral loop. With the app, every time you share a file with someone not using Dropbox, they’re promoted to give the tool a try. By making it so easy for users to use, they minimize the barrier to entry, as you can start sharing files instantly. 

Plus, by offering free storage to users who have shared Dropbox, it creates an incentive for active users, boosting their viral coefficient. All this combined shows that a product-first approach with a compelling user experience can be a massive driver for success and initial growth. 

As we’ve established, product-led GTM is a section of more broad product-led growth. If you’ve been inspired by these examples, you may be keen to turn your entire growth strategy into a product-led approach. Take a look at these 8 PLG companies who are nailing it to give you some pointers. Check out the full list below: 

How do you measure the success of product-led GTM?

When measuring the success of your product-led GTM, here are some key metrics you can track: 

Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

PQLs are users who have engaged with the product and demonstrated a likelihood to convert based on specific actions or usage patterns within the app.

Tracking product qualified leads is essential for understanding how effectively your product is converting users into potential customers. 

You’ll decide what makes a user a PQL, and it will usually be a certain action a user makes to indicate a strong intent to buy, such as using key features frequently, reaching certain milestones within the product, or inviting team members to collaborate. Monitoring PQLs helps identify which product experiences drive conversions and informs decisions about feature enhancements or marketing efforts aimed at nurturing these leads further down the funnel.

PQLs can also be contacted by sales teams to be nurtured and from there converted into customers. 

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC measures the total cost of acquiring a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses.

CAC is a critical metric for assessing the efficiency of your go-to-market strategy. In a product-led GTM model, a lower CAC indicates that the product is effectively driving user interest and adoption without heavy reliance on traditional marketing and sales tactics. 

By analyzing CAC in conjunction with your PQLs, you can evaluate the return on investment of your customer acquisition efforts and make informed adjustments to your strategy.

Churn rate

Churn rate tells you the percentage of customer churn – users who have stopped using your product over a given period.

Monitoring your churn rate is helpful in assessing customer retention in a product-led GTM strategy. A high churn rate may indicate that users aren’t finding ongoing value in the product or that your onboarding processes aren’t cutting it. 

Understanding why customers leave can tell you where you need to improve your product to enhance user engagement, ensuring that your product continually meets customer needs. Lowering churn not only helps retain customers but also boosts overall profitability by reducing the costs associated with acquiring new users to replace those who have left.

Time to Value (TTV)

Time to Value (TTV) measures how long it takes for a user to realize the product’s value after signing up. Time to Value is a crucial metric for understanding the efficiency of your onboarding process. 

In a product-led GTM approach, the quicker users experience value, the more likely they are to continue using the product and convert to paid plans. Reducing TTV can involve optimizing onboarding flows, improving in-app guidance, or providing better resources and support. By focusing on minimizing TTV, you can enhance user satisfaction and drive higher conversion rates from free to paid plans.

User activation rates

To assess the success of your product-led growth, you want to keep an eye on your activation rates as well as other product adoption metrics. By tracking activation rates, you get a clear idea of how many users are using your product to the point that they reach the milestone that indicates that they’re an activated user. 

An activated user is one who is most likely to stay and become a customer. Reaching activation is an event that indicates that they’ve used this product enough and are unlikely to jump to another. This activation point is different for each product type and tool. For example, an activation point for a communication platform like Slack could be when users send a certain amount of words. 

The main goal of product-led growth is to get your users to reach this activation point as quickly as possible, so by seeing your activation rates, you get a clear idea of how successful your efforts have been. 

Viral Coefficient 

If your product-led GTM strategy involves customer loops and referral programs, you want to track your viral coefficient. This metric shows you how many new users a single user is bringing to your product. To be considered a viral product, you want a positive viral coefficient, as it shows that customers feel incentivized to share the word and get other people on board. 

Letting your product walk the walk

Product-led GTM strategies offer a dynamic approach to launching new products, where the product itself is the main driver of customer acquisition and retention. By letting users experience the value of your product firsthand, without heavy reliance on sales or marketing, you create a situation where your product is selling itself for you. Free trials, reverse trials, and freemium models are just a few of the tactics you can use to get customers hooked on your product’s unique offerings.

But success with product-led GTM isn’t just about showing off features. It’s about having a well-thought-out, customer-centric product that delivers real solutions. Simplifying onboarding with self-serve models and personalized user experiences can fast-track users to their “wow” moment. By understanding your audience and continuously refining the product, you can reduce customer acquisition costs, shorten sales cycles, and increase retention – all with the product taking center stage. 

We think ProdPad is a great example of a product that sells itself. Once you try it, you won’t want to go back to your old way of working. Why not see for yourself with a free trial, and learn firsthand what ProdPad can do for you?