What is The Product-led Growth Flywheel?
The Product-Led Growth Flywheel is a framework that helps you designate an optimal user experience without friction and helps you think about how to drive your product-led growth strategy. The flywheel framework is different from the marketing or sales funnel. The funnel represents the overall journey of your marketing or sales funnel (Discovery stage to Action Stage). The Product-Led Growth Flywheel is more likely a journey of users' experience from the beginning all the way to becoming a champion of your product. The Product-Led Growth Flywheel focuses on optimizing user experience, and each team should develop a strategy to spin the flywheel faster for the company’s growth.
Product-led Growth Flywheel & Product Marketing Flywheel
The most common Product-Led Growth Flywheel framework consists of 4 different customer levels: evaluator, beginner, regular, and champion. And each group connects four different actions: activate, adopt, adore, and advocate. When we apply this framework to a product-led marketing framework, there are three main actions: Attract, Engage, and Delight.
Evaluator /Stranger
An evaluator, aka Stranger in the marketing framework, is not your customer yet. They learned about your product or service from your marketing channel or community. They are willing to sign up for a Free Trial, demo, and Freemium service. Evaluators focus on seeing how your product solves the problem. In this stage, your product needs to deliver the “Aha” moment, and it leads them as beginners (prospects in the marketing framework).
Activate Level - Attract Stranger
When evaluators sign up for your free trial or download your product, the team puts effort into leading strangers to be activated and ensuring they understand your product values.
They don’t fully trust your product yet, but they are willing to have the extra experience to see if it is worth it to move to the next level. Your primary goal is to move Evaluators to Beginners at the Activate level. The product tour from the website to the seamless onboarding process should be optimized for customers to reach the “Aha” moment without a complicated signup process.
Beginner/ Prospects
Once they approach the “Aha” moment, they are willing to have a more sophisticated experience with your product. They will find additional benefits from your product and see how their workflow can adopt it. Beginners would like to have support from customer teams and ensure your product benefits from ROI.
Adoption Level -Engage with Customer
At this level, the team’s goal is to make prospects adopt your product and make beginner users into regular users. The customer success and sales team support their ideal user experience and ensure that prospects have optimal experiences and have the extra problem-solving process with your product functionality.
The user retention curve or stickiness metric will help you understand who becomes regular customers and their specific behaviors. The product team should pay attention to the friction that beginners struggle with, and the customer success team should be ready to support various problem perspectives. Engage with your customers whenever they need your help, educating your product and showing additional benefits.
Regular /Customer
Beginners finally love your product and are ready to adopt it, meaning they become regular customers. They login to your product more often and use it for daily problem-solving. They are already familiar with your product interface and use cases at this level, so they don’t need customer support as much as at the beginner stage. They are willing to see your product's new features and updates and learn more about your product actively. Plus, they would like to give you feedback about their feelings and what should be improved.
Adore Level -Delight the Customer
Each team, including the customer success team, product marketing team, and product team, should keep improving the optimal user experience for your product, educate users consistently, and build strong customer relationships in this stage. It is more likely to connect emotionally with your customer at this level. All your team should listen to VOC (Voice Of Customers) and keep interacting with them and delighting them by providing a captivating product experience.
Champion
Once users adore your product, they start to recommend it to their communities, colleagues, and even their social media friends! Since they have a strong relationship with your product, they voluntarily share your product experience with others. Champion-level customers are your brand ambassadors and want to help others recognize your product. Your team might collaborate with these champion customers for your case study or NPS(Net Promoter Score) survey. They are happy to help and get involved in your product improvement or future product development journey.
Advocate level -Keep delighting
At this level, champion customers can attribute to new strangers. Again, they are willing to deliver their positive message about your product. Your product marketing and customer success team delight these customers to advocate for the next strangers. Your team needs to have a strategic plan for delivering a compelling message to the next strangers with champion customers. In especially modern SaaS environments, people listen and get information from the community, not sales. So advocacy is the key to product-led growth.
Conclusion
The Product-led growth flywheel is an excellent framework for attributing the best user experience, leading to an optimized product-led growth strategy for your team. The most important thing is that the flywheel doesn't have any friction because it directly slows down the flywheel spin, slowing down your product’s growth. To leverage the PLG flywheel, all groups need to prioritize the goal to move the following action and remove the friction for each level so that the PLG flywheel spins faster and delivers effective growth. The Product-led growth flywheel will not always be the same as what we have here. Ultimately it depends on your product and service. You will need to adapt this base framework and have a strategic plan for your product-led growth flywheel.
Product-led growth strategy can start with interactive product demos. Take your customers to the ‘Aha’ moment with interactive demos. Not sure where to start? Check out Tacpoint product demo solution!
