Product is the Future of Growth - Here's Why
Kieran Flanagan is the VP of Growth at HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company.
Product is the Future of Growth
How HubSpot Experimented Its Way Into Freemium Growth
The first step in adding freemium to our go-to market strategy was setting the overarching vision of where we wanted to go.
We wanted customers to be able to get started with our marketing, sales, and customer success products for free, and upgrade to different packages as their needs grew.
Here’s the high level process that worked for our growth team:
- Get wins on the board to build trust with leadership and other teams, such as product and engineering.
- Prioritize growth experiments you can execute quickly to demonstrate results.
- Once you start to see a high-level of test failures or non-results, move on to tackle more complex growth opportunities (take big swings).
- Eventually, tell your CEO you want to test pricing
Building a Product Qualified Lead Playbook to Get Early Wins
To start, we categorized all our experiment ideas as easy, medium, or hard. Then, we prioritized and executed on the easier experiments to get ourselves our first quick wins.
Initially, we noticed two important things about our PQLs:
- Tests to optimize capturing them generally fell in the easy or medium category for resources and time required.
- They converted 3-4x higher than our marketing qualified leads.
To help us figure this out, we segmented our PQLs into 3 buckets:
- Hand Raise PQLs: We would show free users call to actions within the product for paid only features or the opportunity to get assistance with a particular task, those users would interact with the CTA to reach out to us. We used them sparingly.
- Usage PQLs: We triggered a call to action based on product usage, for example using all of your free call minutes or email templates would trigger an option to upgrade or talk with sales.
- Upgrade PQLs: These were features only available to paid users, they would send users to an upgrade page.
What You Need to Know About Taking Big Bets
We identified two key ways to hone in on the right big bets:
- Speak with other growth teams experimenting with the same types of things you’re considering so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel - gather learnings to help you produce results faster.
- Do the math to make sure that, if successful, the big bet will significantly increase a key metric.