📕 Transitioning from product led growth to enterprise sales; Headers to 2x your homepage conversion rate; The new product management career path…

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet?

🍩 Product management careers get treated differently than engineering, design, and most other tech careers in that there isn’t a point where you can comfortably stay an individual contributor – the idea is to move up in your rank, or move out. There seems to be a much lesser focus on the PRODUCT part than MANAGEMENT in product management, which is why Ken Norton (previously Director of Product for Google), argues that we need to fight for  a dual product management career path. What he means by this is a role where you manage the product resources for a project rather than a full division, because the reality is that not all people are suited to (or even interested in) being leadership. This non-management role can be key to innovation for big companies as well, because it enables the employee to be an individualistic thinker and avoid the sometimes cumbersome process and structure you find in big co’s. 

🔔 The Bell Curve marketing agency, (who also the Demand Curve marketing group), have written loads of websites in their day, and knows what kind of content it takes to convert visitors into customers. In a recent TechCrunch feature, they highlight a few ways you can improve the conversion rate on your homepage by crafting a sharp header and designing with intention. They provide a pretty cool framework to uncover your value proposition which you can use as a header – you start by describing a bad alternative people resort to when they don’t have your product, then follow up with a sentence describing why your product is better than that bad alternative. Lastly, you turn it into an action statement. Using AirBnb as an example, their bad alternative is “stuck in sterile hotels, don’t experience the real culture”, with “stay in locals’ homes” as the good one. Making that an action statement looks like “experience new cities like a local”. Voila. 

🦁 Drift is known for its early product lead growth strategy, in which their users’ chat boxes were the leading source of customer acquisition for the business. It created a great flywheel effect – new customers meant more Drift branded chat boxes on their websites, with each website’s visitors being subjected to the brand, creating new sets of customers. But recently, they have gracefully pivoted more towards the enterprise, with their average sales price tripling from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021. Elias Torres, the co-founder of Drift, explains that the desire for better retention rates and a higher ARPU prompted the shift, as well as the specifics of how they made the switch.

🧶 Bessemer Venture Partners hosted a B2B SaaS pricing roundtable last month with some notable industry experts: Lekha Doshi (LinkedIn), Akshat Gupta (Airtable), and Ross Biestman (ServiceTitan). They called out some common pricing mistakes, the first being indecisiveness with your model. Lots of groups set up with a “just for now plan” and never end up revisiting, as “nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix”. This is especially true with pricing, where it can become incredibly difficult to untangle your model as you become more reliant on those processes. Another frequent mistake is not defining specific goals around pricing. You need to create a few hypotheses where changing a variable will result in better take up from the market, then run with it!

🎶 Tools like Gong and Chorus.ai get most of the love when it comes to sales enablement, but conversational intelligence is just one small piece of the sales enablement puzzle. Ben Cotton does a good job of breaking down the different categories within the space, as well as some of the top vendors which might not have heard of. Sales coaching software, which provides more detail on recommendations and which reps might be best suited for different parts of the sales process, is an area in particular which we think has a lot of potential.

Source: https://thesaasplaybook.substack.com/p/-transitioning-from-product-led-growth