Esben Friis-Jensen | Userflow
Userflow co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Esben Friis-Jensen has devoted his career to providing SaaS businesses with the tools necessary to drive product-led growth.
In this episode, he explains why, in what some have termed the “end user era”, product led companies are outperforming their sales-led peers, and dissects what marketers need to know to deliver on the promise of product-led growth.
From the importance of making the product the focus of your marketing, to publishing transparent information about pricing on your website, offering an on-demand product demo, creating use cases, and ensuring your content matches what you can actually deliver through the product, Esben goes into detail on the elements of a successful product-led growth strategy.
Check out the full episode to learn more.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Esben on LinkedIn
Visit the Userflow website
Follow Esben on Twitter @esbenfj
Read Clearbit’s report on the anatomy of a PLG company
Esben and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Okay, big smiles. Great. I'll capture that. And we're off 3, 2, 1. Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Esben Friis-Jensen, who is the co-founder and chief growth officer at Userflow. Welcome to the podcast Esben.
Esben (00:25):
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Kathleen (00:27):
Yeah, I am selfishly very excited about this topic because you are gonna talk a lot about product led growth and what marketers need to think about with that. And I say selfishly, because that's something I'm very focused on right now in my own job. And so I love when these podcast interviews coincide with something that I'm looking to learn more about. So maybe we could start out by having you just say a little bit about yourself and your background and also what Userflow is.
Esben (00:56):
Yep. For sure. So as, as you said, I'm, I'm, I'm the co-founder and chief growth officer at Userflow. Userflow is a platform that allows you to basically build in-app onboarding without using codes. So basically product managers or customer success people and so on can build in-app onboarding for free trials or, or post purchase. And Userflow is born product led company which is of course, a lot easier than if you are transitioning from a sales led to a product led company. But we have also been in that world prior to Userflow. I co-founded another company called Cobaltt which today is 200 plus people. And actually in Cobalt we started out as a product led company, then move to sales and then we transition part of the business to more towards product led. So was a bit on that side of the fence where we kind of had to do the transition and, and the challenges involved in that. So yeah, I've seen it from, from both worlds you can say.
Kathleen (02:01):
Yeah, well this is actually even getting me more excited now because you know, what I'm dealing with at the moment is a company that has been entirely sales led and we're, we've just released, self-serve sign on. And so we're really moving in the direction of the majority of our sales being product led. There'll still be some split. And I think that that can be at least from what I've seen a very difficult transition to make, because it's not just a technology transition, there's, you know, cultural transitions in terms of how you think about sales and customer success and marketing and there's you know, process transitions, et cetera. So let's just start out at a very basic level with how do you define product led growth? Because I think different people have different understandings of what that means.
Esben (02:48):
Yeah. I think that the best way to look at it or the way I look at it at least is in two ways. One is exactly, as you said, it's a cultural mindset. It's basically like everybody has to think product first in everything they do. So that includes marketing custom success sales. Everybody in the organization basically has to think product first. And if you are a sales lead organization that becomes hard to do or transition to and that's why it's a big challenge to move to this model for sales companies. The second way of looking at it is to compare it to sales led. I think sales led is the, the SaaS model, many SaaS companies software as a service companies have adopted over the years. I would actually say software as a service started out more in a product led way, but it all the years, I think, due to competition with service providers more that were very high touch.
Esben (03:46):
You started doing more like a, a mix between service and and software. But basically in a, a sales model, you the first culture action, when you go to a website or software website is basically schedule a demo. So you cannot avoid a call to even see the product. And then you typically do a couple of different meetings. You then decide on buying you then get onboarded by a customer success person, and then you get to use the product. So you haven't in many cases, actually haven't really used the product before you made the purchase decision. And in product life growth, you're turning that a bit around. So you actually allow the customers to try the product before they buy get familiar with the product, see if there's any gaps or anything like that. And then they can either buy completely on their own and, and get onboarded on their own, or they can choose to engage with sales customer success, and also learn more in that way. And it's not like a very binary where sales and customer success and all these functions disappear necessarily. They just become like a more, like a nice to have than a need to have basically.
Kathleen (04:57):
So I feel like this is a, an enormous talk, right. Product led growth. There are books written about it. There are there's extensive content around it, and there's a lot of different directions. We could take this conversation. What I would like to do is focus specifically on it, through a marketing lens because my listeners are marketers.
Esben (05:17):
Yep.
Kathleen (05:18):
And really, I guess for, if you were gonna speak to a marketer who had not done product led growth before, what would you say would be the key things that they need to keep in mind as they move into that world? Like what changes in your role as a marketer?
Esben (05:36):
Yeah, no, that's a very good question. First of all, before you even dive into the operational details of of what you should think about, I think it's important that that you have the, the people who are gonna work on this buy into why should I even do this? Right. and, and two reasons that product led has become so popular. One is that we are in what some called the end user era, where end users have a lot more power in making decisions on what software you wanna buy for your business. And that means end users simply want try the product. They don't necessarily just wanna do demos and and stuff like that. They wanna actually get hands on your product before they, you make a buying decision. You're basically selling to, to a group of people who are very tech savvy or, or large, the majority of them are very tech savvy and they want to try before they buy.
Esben (06:27):
So that's one big reason why this model is becoming more popular. The second reason that many are seeing a great success for this model is is basically the, that one have seen that the companies, the sales companies on the public market who have a product led model are more successful, are growing faster have higher revenue multiples and so on than their peers. And a lot of the reasons it's still early data, but a big reason for that is basically that you don't have to add headcount to grow, right. It doesn't become a, a need to have to add like sales customers as marketing headcount to grow. Cause your product is a bigger part of the equation. And in that way you can grow faster without adding headcount. So I think that those are two kinda big reasons why one should even do product led growth. Yeah, that makes sense. Then look at, yeah. When you then look at the operationally from a marketing point of view, and this is just, I wanna like, not sound means, but there's, there's a lot of fluffy SaaS marketing out there. Right. I think we all became very, like, we watched that video online. I can't remember his name, focus on the why.
Kathleen (07:40):
Simon Sinick start with why.
Esben (07:42):
Exactly. Start with the why. Yeah. And that became like okay, now we are only talking about the why. Right. And it becomes super fluffy when you only talk about the, why you also have to look at the, how especially in like a mature industry, something, that's, it kind of established market. The why is kind of known to most people. So the, how becomes super important, like does this product solve this? Why with a great UX, does it solve it? For the specific use cases I have in detail. And so on that that how becomes super important in, in a sales world. And if you're a product led marketer, that's what you need to keep in mind. So basically in your marketing, you, you need to, to think product first, right? You wanna present the product, you don't just wanna present like the big why or, or like marketing as is just, you actually wanna show the product in your marketing.
Esben (08:43):
So I think that's, that's a, a big part of it is in including the product in, in your marketing material on your website potentially doing like demos that are like click through demos or videos showing off the actual products. So the customers can see it. I think that's a big part to, to that, that model. The second part is then actually allowing people to try your product. Many do that through a free or free trial. And there's this concept I've known. I know you have done an episode on that in the past about PQL or product qualified leads. And that is becoming a more kinda, is becoming a popular way to kind of measure is somebody being qualified based on the product. And that's something marketer in a product led world, you should know what a product qualified lead means to their business. And typically it relates a lot to the, to a free trial or excuse me, freemium and how the user interacted with that free trial. Did they do certain actions? And so on that, that made them a product qualified lead.
Kathleen (09:54):
Yeah. So it's a, like a usage kind of a usage metric. Right?
Esben (09:58):
Exactly. Okay. So I would say those are the, the main things, then there's a lot of details to that. Right. another big thing is pricing, transparent pricing is big in a product led world. And it, again goes back to the how it's not just like the why, and then you have to reach out to somebody to, to figure out what is the price and so on. You actually wanna show, at least for your certain segment of your customers, you wanna show some kind of preliminary pricing. So they have a rough idea about how expensive is this. So that's another kind of key thing to, to include in a product world.
Kathleen (10:35):
So there's a lot obviously to think about. And you know, what, when I, as a marketer think through this, one of the things I always feel like is, is how, how can we orchestrate a buying journey that requires zero interaction with sales, right. And that's the, the big change from a sales led organization. And, and I'm in this interesting situation and you kind of talked about it with one of your companies where we do have an enterprise version of the product where we're happy to have people interact with sales. In fact, they have to interact with sales. And, and so I, I, I, I wonder, like if you have any thoughts around when you have that situation, like, how do you, how do you create that split journey in a way, like, how do, how do you set it up? So if somebody has questions, you're qualifying that buyer to understand, you know, are they enterprise, or are they PLG? And are there times when you wanna have your, your PLG buyer, when you wanna allow them to talk to sales, if I hate to use the word allow, cuz it doesn't sound right. But do you know what I'm saying? Like how, how do you think through that, those divisions,
Esben (11:38):
I think as a product led business, you wanna make, as I said in the beginning, like sales customers that like nice to have, right. And you wanna allow the customer to self-select to some extent. One thing we do at Userflow is we, our primary culture actions are sign up for free trial or view a demo, right? It's not schedule a demo. Schedule a demo's like a tertiary call to action. And but we still allow it, right. We still always have that channel open. If somebody wanna self-select interest speaking with a human, then they can do that. Right. But we want to drive that they evaluate the product first. So, so you, you it's again that putting the product first and then the, the people kind of second, right? The people driven process second.
Kathleen (12:30):
Is there ever a threshold, like a price threshold under which you like wouldn't have anybody or wouldn't even allow them to talk to sales cuz at some point like even one conversation, if it's a very low price product, be kind of makes it unprofitable.
Esben (12:44):
Yeah. Those, those are things are harder to do really be tough on that piece. Right. I think it's more allowing you can of course like drive in co we tried different things, right? You, we had a schedule, a demo form. And then when you selected between server and 50 employees, you would go to a more self-service flow instead of the, because that's why we started when we went on the sales led to product led transition, we decided to just focus on the smaller customers, right. Because they had the most simple use case. It was the, and I think for us as a change management exercise, it was easier to allow those customers self serve than to give up on high touch on the larger businesses. Right. But I think that's more a change management thing. And like over time, I, and it was like this kind of baby step approach, really what the end goal was was to allow anybody who wanted to self-serve to be able to self-serve right.
Esben (13:43):
And self-select that but in the beginning you can do baby steps like that, where you are kind of hiding certain path for the larger customers and are showing them through the smaller customers. But I don't think that's an ideal journey. It's just like a good baby step journey for somebody moving towards that model. I think the ideal journey is really allow anybody to do the, the free trial first. And, and then the, the bigger enterprises they will, that's what we do at usable. Right. They will reach out at some point because they need a contract. They need you know, to discuss the, the bigger the, the, the enterprise pricing. And that's, again, going back to, in, in the transparent pricing, that's another good way to be them, right? You put up three packages and the enterprise package is, can be contact us.
Esben (14:35):
And it shouldn't really fit with the, that should be a package that the enterprises wanna select, right. That could include things like a large amount of whatever your, your product is using as well as like paperwork, paperwork is something like most enterprises need paperwork. If you include those two things in your enterprise packets, you're kind of forcing them to go towards that meeting or discussion about that, at least reaching out about it, but you're still allowing them to do the free trials so they can buy into your product and so on beforehand. And that gives you a lot of ammo that they've actually decided on your product before you even go into that procurement.
Kathleen (15:15):
Yeah. They can self qualify basically.
Esben (15:17):
Exactly.
Kathleen (15:18):
Yeah. So let's break this down and, and kind of think through the journey. So the first thing obviously is somebody lands on your website. I mean, there's other things before that, but assuming you can get them to your website, they get there. And then you already mentioned a couple of key ingredients. So you mentioned having a, a self-serve on demand demo available on the website, having a transparent pricing. Are there other things that in your experience are really important to have on the site to facilitate a really smooth product line customer conversion flow?
Esben (15:53):
Yeah. I think things like show now you said video demos, but also just showing the product presenting, what are the functional with like actual screenshots something you want to do use cases, right? Like the it's not just about the technology, it's about like, what, what are others doing with this product? How are they using it? What use cases are they using it for? Really to, to also, there's also a way to kind of pre-vet your ICP, right? Your ideal customer profile. You wanna, you wanna not have people who are actually looking for something completely different, so not for your free trial, that's a waste of time. You, you only want the people who are kinda actually fitting the use case of your product to sign up. Right. So it's good to, to kind of have enough information that unmets the people who are looking for somebody else basically.
Esben (16:51):
Then I think it's super important about those call to actions I talked about as well, right? Like don't have the culture action, be contact us or schedule a demo. It's more like sign up for free trial view a demo really have that be the main journey you want to drive towards. I think that's, that's another big thing for the model and our, you mentioned like they land on, on the website. Right. But really true product led marketing goes a lot, comes a lot before that. Right? You have you wanna market the same kind of product externally outside of your website and drive into the right things. If you're doing SEO, if you're doing, doing SEM, or if you're doing content, make sure that that content is aligned with, with what you're actually selling and, and are doing. And that's just some, like basically don't over promise and under deliver because in a product led model, that's impossible basically, right? That's a lot big part of what it is about as well. You can't really over promise and on deliver. Cause the product is such a big part of the initial journey that if you have a misalignment between what you market and what they see, they're not gonna buy your product.
Kathleen (18:10):
So that's an interesting point. And so does it then become even almost more important that if you're using like paid ads or if you're doing content for specific audience segments or use cases that you effectively create landing pages that you're driving people back to so that you can customize it's you know, 10 versions of your product page one for each audience, if you will. So that it's really tightly matched. Is that kind of how you've approached that?
Esben (18:37):
Yeah. I think one thing we do, we have the, and I think many companies have that, right. The classic use case web websites. Right. but we show the product and we show how that product is in included in that use case. So for Userflow, it's for instance, do we wanna improve product led growth? Do we want to improve trial conversion? Do we wanna improve feature announcements or customer attention? All things you can do with, with Userflow, but we have a separate page for each basically I think another common that does this really well is there's this company called Zapier and they're known for doing like product led marketing extremely well. What they do is they have these pages where if you search for Salesforce integration yeah. Then they pop up like connect Salesforce, X tool. Then they have a page for that. And because they're this kind of intermediary that connects different tools, but people won't search for Zapier, they will search for I want to connect Salesforce with Marketo. How do I do that? Right. And they solve that problem, but you, you search for that integration and stuff.
Kathleen (19:49):
Yeah. That's a great point. And you you're so right about Zapier because like, I I've been a HubSpot user for years and anytime I wanna make any other platform work with HubSpot and I do any kind of a search, they always come up first. Yeah. And in fact, I'm always looking like, is there a zap for that? Because it, you know, it's, it's been that effective. Okay. So, so you, we talked about the website and we talked about the elements there. One thing you didn't mention, and I'm curious to know your opinion on this is like chat bots or live chat. Where does that fit within this equation?
Esben (20:23):
I think it's, it's that human connection that you should never forget about? I think there's nothing worse than how can I put it like these like more traditional industries travel industry and, and especially where it's almost impossible to reach a human being. Right. and it's an frustrating customer experience, to be honest there should always be an option to reach a human being. And, and, and I think that's what I'm saying is like product led doesn't mean that no people should ever be involved. It just means that you put the product first and you should automate where you can. So yes, for instance, you can make a chatbot that suggests article, or you can have a knowledge base that suggests what somebody should read about. And ideally the customer goes and read about it themselves and figure it all out themselves.
Esben (21:17):
You should definitely have a lot of great knowledge based content that can also serve as great marketing content. Some of the best markets and we have at Userflow is, is exactly our knowledge base. It's some something that people tend to, to search for certain things and then they will find it. But having said that you still need that possibility in the last result to connect with a human being who can then kind of answer your, your questions in many ways, sales becomes this whoever you want to run that chat, especially in a free trial or on your website becomes a product expert, right? Because the customer, because they can see a lot of information about the product on the website, they will have much better questions and if they have much better, they also expect the people on the other side to be able to answer those questions. So you need to have product experts on the other side, actually answering where you may be in a sales led model, because there's not a lot of information, then they will tend to ask basic questions. And then you can maybe get away with like, having some more junior or less, less of a product expert answer questions, but that doesn't work in a product model. Cause the basic stuff should really get answered by your website. Yeah. And not, not by a person.
Kathleen (22:42):
All right. So then assuming you can get them into a free trial what needs to happen. I mean, obviously not everybody who enters a free trial converts to becoming a paying customer. So like what kind of trial nurturing, if you will have you seen work really well?
Esben (22:59):
Yeah. So one thing is of course, like you need to have a great product. That's number one. That, and that's what I love about product led growth. You can't fool the customer, right? You, you need to have a great product cause they're gonna try it and they're gonna see, okay, this is a great product or this is not a great product. So that's definitely number one, secondly is you can do a lot of like addons to that, right? One thing is in-app onboarding which you can like basically have like a checklist or, or product tours or whatever that guides the user to, to discover this famous aha moments that you want them to discover which is basically it's tightly close to the it's tightly connected to the PL measurement, right?
Esben (23:48):
If you understand what is, what defines the PQL, you will also understand what are the aha moments they need to realize to reach that state to give an example at Userflow, we have, it's a builder tool. We want the user to basically spend if they, more than 30 minutes in our application building we know then they, we consider them a product qualified lead because they, they spend a lot of time, they got engaged with the builder and they actually built something. The aha moment we want them to realize is really that it's easy to build these flows without much a education, right? Like it's basically they can jump straight into this and get started. So all our onboarding is geared towards that aha moment. So, so we have like a initial kind of product to it that shows them how to create a flow or onboarding flow right themselves.
Esben (24:43):
It's very action driven. I think that's another, what I say product tours, many think a product tour is just like next, next, next, next, whatever, really boring descriptive tour, but really great product tours is about driving action. It's about getting the user to do something with your product. So they discover the value and actually do something right. It's a, out about getting a ton of descriptions in, in tool tips and then just clicking next. That's why many go wrong with that? And then so that's the in, inside the product. But what will often happen is people will leave the product maybe after a certain time, whatever, and then you need to have some kind of automated email on top of that. I'm a big fan of making it as personalized as possible. So have, even though it's automated, make it seem like it's coming from real people don't make it like like this is from company X, right. Because it already a very automated and product led approach.
Kathleen (25:50):
Who should that come from? Like who in the company should, should that be from? I mean
Esben (25:55):
The most companies being successful at it, I actually see it as being the founders or something like that. Cause people love that. But it doesn't need to be, it can also be customer success manager or somebody, just some kind of person they feel is a real human being. Yeah. That, that is reaching out. And I think, yeah, for me, that we've seen a great deal of success with that. Despite it being automated people still respond to it. Like it's not automated and, and that's awesome. Right.
Kathleen (26:26):
Yeah, I'm a fan of I'm a big of in those automated emails that you want to have feel more personal. Putting a sentence in close to the end, like before you sign it where it says, while this is an automated email, I'm a real person. And I eat, I read every response like sometimes, and it depends who your audience is. Like I, I often market to marketers and they're, they can see through the automation. And so acknowledging it, but saying like, I will actually read what you say to me is tends to be effective. And I get a surprising number of responses actually. So there's a little trick for anybody listening,
Esben (27:00):
Always a thing, another way to make it more personal or make it seem more real is actually not to have all the, I know, so hops, like that's what they did. Right. But all that you can send an emails just makes that's not an email anymore. Right. Then it's a marketing email. As soon as you see like like a, some kind of formatting that doesn't look like a real email
Kathleen (27:23):
Hundred percent, like you gotta make it look like it came out of a Gmail.
Esben (27:26):
Exactly. Then it's no longer personal. Right. So that, that's also what we do when it's all automated, but it's actually, it's real emails. It's like basic font and no like big, big graphics or anything like that. Then another thing so onboarding is this kind of continuous journey, right? So now that these initial things is about getting the customer to convert, right. And that's what you want to do. Just before I leave that, the last thing you can of course do is then when you have that peak measurement, then you can have sales or whoever you wanna. I have a, I have a kinda dream of sales and customer success kind of merging in the future, but that's another thing. But you, you can then have them track those PQLs and whoever doesn't convert immediately, it's actually, okay. They do a bit more outreach on those, right? Like they, then they can start their proactive outreach on the ones that didn't convert, but give them some time to convert. Maybe it's the two week trial period that you just allow them, allow them to reach out themselves or, or not. And then you can kind of engage with them more, more heavily. Right. If you enguge too early, you risk that you're messing up the whole product led approach.
Kathleen (28:50):
Why is that just, just because you're expending resources that you shouldn't be, or
Esben (28:54):
Exactly. I think in some cases, if it's a very big customer and, you know, okay, these are likely to not make a decision like that. Maybe it's okay to start earlier, but in some reason, sales connect, they become too aggressive and, and end up like, remember the whole reason why product led growth is popular is because people want to try themselves. They want to do things themselves. So they don't wanna feel too pushed into doing anything. So it should, it should rather be them reaching out, ideally, and then you responding to their questions in a good way, but there are, of course always scenarios where you wanna maybe be a bit more proactive in your, in your outreach. But I think the automated emails is already a very proactive approach it's just automated. Right. Basically.
Kathleen (29:42):
Yeah. And so any, anything in particular that you think it's important for folks to consider if they are splitting between enterprise and PLG within one organization? Like what are some landmines that you should be on the lookout for, if that's your situation? First
Esben (29:57):
Of all, I wouldn't call it PLG and enterprise. I think enterprise, actually a lot of enterprise also combines a PLG world.
Kathleen (30:05):
Sales led versus, so I should say sales led you're right. You're right.
Esben (30:08):
We actually see a lot of like bigger organizations where the end users sign up for free trials and that's how they evaluate products. But yeah, no. So, so when you have that split, it is of course hard. I think you need to split your organization in many ways. You need to have like a, a product led organization and a sales led organization. And of course they should talk to each other. But, but you cannot like mess up the different different flows between it, right. It's important that every in the product led journey is super focused on that and are not trying to bring in sales led elements into the product led journey that this transition, the hardest thing, hardest thing about it is that people don't believe, oh, can we really let the prospect just go on their own?
Esben (30:58):
They need us, right. They need us to do that meeting with, with them to, they need us to go on a call, otherwise they will never understand the product. And those kind of things will mess up the entire thing. Right. so you just have to have an organization that all is totally bought into the idea that people can actually figure out a lot on their own. And if they can't, we should solve it in the product, not in the we people. Right. so, so it's important to, to have that mindset in, in the product led part of your organization. Yeah. And I think it's, it's if you have that split, it is probably, yeah. It, it, it is, it is making things a bit harder. I always think it's easier to have, like what, what are you first, are you first a product company, second sales? Or are you sales led and then maybe, and
Kathleen (31:48):
When you say first, you don't mean chronologically first, you mean priority wise first?
Esben (31:52):
Yeah. I think like, I think it, it it's, for instance, if I go to the website and they have free trial and view demo, then I would say they think product led first mm. And sales second. And if you have a website where it's schedule a demo, they think enterprise or sales first. Right. Yeah. And, and it's okay to have product develops because they can still have a click through demo on their website, or they can have when the user actually have done the demo with the salesperson, maybe they give them access to certain free trials. You can still have product led elements after that. But it's kind of like the, it's not the first thing the customer sees is not a product led journey. Right. So, so yeah, I, but yeah, it, it, it still, these things are still super early. It's not, it's not that easy to say how it's gonna be. But I think, yeah, I think you need to take a stance on what kind of organization are you and, and go have that as the main part.
Kathleen (33:01):
Now, one thing we haven't talked about is this nexus between customer success and marketing, and this is a conversation I'm having right now internally because we're still a very young company, but we're, we're moving from being more sales led to being more product led. And the conversation is along the, is around this notion that with customer success, it's going to be much less hands on and we should be moving more in the direction of creating curriculum for our customers and more help docs and things like that. And I'd love to get your take on like where that fall within the organization and how to manage that process of, because there, I feel like it's a very much a blend of customer success and marketing, right? Like, yeah, there's a few companies I've seen one that comes to mind is Asana. They have a phenomenal video library of teaching you how to use different parts of the product. So what's been your experience with that?
Esben (33:59):
No, I think, yeah, this is, oh, this is something we could discuss a lot because I think there's a lot of things that are slowing progress because you have so many different teams. And I think it's a legacy, legacy SaaS model is that you had marketing sales, customer success, operations, sales, engineering, whatever. Right. And I think we need to look at that structure if you're a product company and say, Hmm, does all those teams make sense anymore? Right. Like, do I need to have that split? Cause it's adding complexity. And, and I already mentioned that like about sales and customer success in a product led model sales person and a customer success ends up doing very, very similar task. They're answering questions. They become like product experts that are answering questions from the customers rather than like it's a very active sales process.
Esben (34:56):
So yeah, I think they're, I've seen somebody like, aha, they do that very well. They've merged those two teams into something called product experts basically. And I, I think we'll see more companies doing that, but, but going back to your question yes, knowledge base becomes super important. And I think whoever it's it's I agree with you, it's super hard to, to say who should own that. Right. and it could be customer success. It could be marketing, but it's really a collaboration. Yeah. If you have those teams, it's a collaborations collaboration, and, and they need to work closely together on, on making it happen. But it's, again, one of those things where maybe we should rephrase the organizations there, there's a bit of like, there's also this gap to product, for instance, right? Like in, in knowledge, space product, they are the ones who understand the product the most.
Esben (35:55):
Right. but the customers success are the ones who understand the customers the most. And then you have marketing that are the best at marketing and kind of presenting things in a nice way. And you need to bring all those things together and, and make the best knowledge base possible for your, for your customers. Right. and maybe I, the reason I'm saying like this thing about product experts is maybe by having a simplified organization where you have this product expert team, that's the organization where you can go and ask these, like what should be in the knowledge space, and then markets, and can maybe make, make the actual knowledge space and make it look nice. But the product experts are the ones who ask like maybe have right. The, have their write, the initial articles and so on. Yeah. That, that product expert team is something I'm, I'm a big advocate for, should exist in us.
Esben (36:46):
They could also be amazing thought leaders because they actually understand the product inside out. They're not just like sales people. I'm putting quotation marks here. Don't have video see else customers they're actually product experts, right? They're somebody who have a deep understanding of the customers use cases, how they're using the products why they're using the products and they can better guide the customers. And they can also better do thought leadership around that. And, and social selling is becoming more and more popular and marketing. Right. And there would be amazing social sellers these product experts and you could spread that out instead of just having like the founder or somebody like that, which has been the typical situation that you just have one person doing follow leadership that you could have multiple what people doing for leadership about your product.
Kathleen (37:42):
So who out there we've named a couple of companies already, but who, who out there, if you wanted to point to, I don't know, three to five companies that you think are really beautiful examples of what it means to do PLG well, who would you put on that list?
Esben (38:00):
Oh, there there's a lot of them, I think.
Kathleen (38:03):
Is this like picking your favorite child?
Esben (38:06):
I mean, Slack, Slack is always somebody who comes up right. Slack is just, you would never imagine speaking with a salesperson at Slack, like the majority of us wouldn't at least right. You, you would you would basically just go and start using Slack and you love it. And then it grows from there. And then suddenly it spreads the word and everybody's using it in the organization. Right. I think Slack has done an amazing job on, on growing their product really, really fast with that approach based on another example that often come up is Zoom. So Zoom made the consumer app where everybody suddenly in the consumer world could get it from for free and use Zoom for free. Right. and then they loved it so much that they recommended it to all, to be used in their business.
Esben (38:56):
So, so that's another where you, and, and that's actually a good example of some, somebody may be targeting more in enterprise world where the end users are becoming customer or becoming advocates for, for using Zoom because of the quality and on so yeah, there are, there are many great coming is out there doing great product led stuff and especially startups because they have no other choice. They need to be product led because lack of resources and so on. That's also why Cobalt. We started out as product led. Then when we grew, we were competing so much against consultancies that and they had a very high touch model. So we were kind of forced a bit to do a more high touch model. But then now when the SaaS market has matured so much, everybody just, you're not competing against consultancies anymore, you're competing against other SaaS solutions. Right. And then product led becomes a, a, a, a benefit and, and a better solution for those customers.
Kathleen (40:00):
Yeah. Oh, I can't wait to check those all out, cuz I'm in the middle of literally just going around and doing some benchmarking. And, and it's funny, cuz if you look at our website today, you can see the sausage being made in the sense that like we just initiated self-serve sign on, but we still have our primary CTA is let's talk because we just we've been moving so fast. It hasn't caught up. So it'll be interesting over the course of the next month, maybe by the time this gets published, that will change.
Esben (40:25):
Another one you can look at is Amplitude this data analytics company they're on the public market. They're selling to huge enterprises, but if you're going to their website, it's all view of them or sign up for pretrial. They don't have like the yeah. Schedule demo is very statuary or even lower in the priority for them. Oh, I'll definitely check that out. Very successful enterprise company.
Kathleen (40:49):
Great. All right. Well so before we kind of get to our wrap up section how does Userflow fit within this? So you, you are used then during the call, it usually during the free trial stage, it sounds like to help increase adoption. Is that correct?
Esben (41:09):
Yeah. So not only, I mean, Userflow is in general, like onboarding and exactly about driving users. It's towards that aha moment and that can yes. Be done in a free trial. That's a very common use case for our customers. It's like driving users towards the aha moment as fast as possible. But onboarding is really a continuous journey. And what user can also be used for is feature announcements, guiding users to new features surveying users. So NPS, but also asking questions about features and stuff like that. So it's really a continuous journey that ensures both more customers get converted, but also that they stay retained within your product and get adopt new features as they launched many new features. They kind you'll be surprised sometimes when you go and ask your customers did you try this new feature or they will even ask, when are we getting this new feature it's been there for six months now having this right. And, and that's a very common scenario. So, so I would say that's, that's what we do as well. So we, we look at our onboarding as this kind of continuous journey where you are, you're constantly onboarding your users to convert and retain them and upgrade them as well. Right. You want to have them buy your proof on or whatever you want to call it as well.
Kathleen (42:36):
Yeah. All right. Great. All right. We're gonna shift in then to the two questions I ask all my guests, the first one being the, the marketers, I talked to say that one of their biggest challenges is just keeping up with everything that changes so quickly in the world of digital marketing you know, platform changes, algorithm changes to coming and going. Like, how do you stay on top of it all personally?
Esben (42:58):
I, I, I think I look I just follow along on LinkedIn, right? I think that's my main, it's become I think LinkedIn is an amazing social media by the way. And it's becoming better and better and it's really a place to seek knowledge and discover new things. Cause there's so many people talking about things on LinkedIn and not a big area that has evolved is Slack groups or Slack communities among a lot of like product led communities
Kathleen (43:31):
Any particulars that you wanna call out.
Esben (43:33):
Yeah. One called product led dot com, which is Slack community, very focused on product growth. And then there's one called the product marketing online. I think it's called something like that. I can remember. Yep. But it also a very active community and that's maybe even better for marketers and especially product marketers to, it's a fantastic, very active asking a lot about product led growth and product marketing and, and things like that. So great. Those are, those are two Slack groups. I spend a lot of time in.
Kathleen (44:06):
All right. And I think you, we've sort of already answered the other question I usually ask, which is, you know, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I just define as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you, which I feel like is based basically what PLG is all about. And I generally ask who's doing it well, you've given a few names here. Anybody else you wanna call out?
Esben (44:23):
Yeah. I think the last one, now you mentioned yourself, you're gonna go look at like, who's doing product led well and so on. Right. I think there're two, two companies that wanna put on one is Clearbit. So Clearbit is this company that does like basically data. They, they just, they can get the data on, on people and so on and companies, and they actually made this marketing page called the anatomy of PLG I think, or something like that PLD company. And what they're doing is using their data to show what is a PLG company? What does it mean to be a PLG company? So they're taking all the PLG companies and are looking at what are they doing? What, what are the things they're doing? So they're kind of presenting that they have all this amazing data, but they're also giving us value by showing it off.
Esben (45:15):
And it's actually also something that has inspired us at Userflow to do more like pages that you know, blog posts, you kind of do a one blog post and then one can link to that. Right. But with this, they're doing like new kind of sections within the same page. So we started doing the same with video series. We've done one called product led Userflow, where we basically use the same page, but add new videos on it as a video series. So it becomes this single link that people can link to with high quality content. So that's somebody I wanna point out. And then the second one is Openview, which is a VC company. They have amazing content on product growth really recommend you check them out. Yeah. Openview is yeah, they're really promoting the, the product world and, and do a lot of data analysis and different companies.
Kathleen (46:10):
Yeah. 100%. And then I just discovered also Gainsite has a really good category within its blog on product led growth. That has a lot of good content. So there's not,
Esben (46:22):
Yeah, there's a lot of companies out there,
Kathleen (46:24):
No shortage of educational materials, only a shortage of time with which to consume them. Great. Well, if somebody is listening to this and interested in reaching out and asking a question or connecting with you or learning more about Userflow, what's the best way for them to do that.
Esben (46:40):
So LinkedIn is probably the best connected with me on LinkedIn. I am also on Twitter, but I mostly interact on LinkedIn. So yeah, connect with me there. Connect.
Kathleen (46:50):
Great. And as usual, I'll put a to Esben's LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So head to Kathleen-booth.com, if you wanna check that out. All right. And then that brings me to the end. So if you've been listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to apple podcasts and leave the podcast or review, and if you know someone else who's doing great marketing work, please do send me a tweet at Kathleenlbooth on Twitter. And I would love to make them my next guest, but in the meantime, that is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Esbenn this was really interesting.
Esben (47:25):
It was my pleasure. Thanks.
