What’s the best way to get a software product in front of potential customers?

That question has long vexed SaaS startup leaders. Traditionally, companies rely on sales teams to schedule a time to chat with users and hopefully work to onboard them as long-term customers.

But that leaves a lot of missed opportunities to connect with customers. Just ask Ecobot, an Asheville-based SaaS startup in the environmental services and ClimateTech space. They recently had somebody come onto their site close to 2am and sign up for one of their paid plans without ever speaking to someone on the sales team.

That sale was only possible because Ecobot made a strategic change to how they find customers online through product-led growth.

What’s Product-Led Growth Anyway?

As the name suggests, product-led strategy lets a company’s product do all the talking. Potential customers experience and test out the platform for itself without having a sales person guiding each part of the customer’s journey.

The Ecobot team worked throughout the last year to figure out what sales strategy would be best for them. The Asheville-based startup tried the “traditional” path of hiring outbound-led sales and business development team members. They tested that strategy against the impact of letting a customer try out the product first on their own time.

Product-led was a clear winner for the SaaS startup.

Key metrics showed that the pivot was a good move for the company. Ecobot’s customer acquisition costs dropped from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds, meaning they do not need to spend as much money to land every single sale. As part of its transition to a product-led growth (PLG) strategy, Ecobot launched a free version and self-signup option on their website. From this, Ecobot has seen higher quality customers and better usage from early customers who start dabbling around with the platform first before making the decision on their own time to move forward with a paid plan.

“The market wants to give autonomy to the individual to do their own research and make decisions about the software that they want to use to do their job,” Lee Lance, CEO and co-founder of Ecobot. “People don’t necessarily want to sign up for a half hour demo.”

It’s also helped make Ecobot more accessible to small business owners, Communications & Marketing Lead Zoe Kovacs told Hypepotamus.

“Folks who don’t really have time in their day-to-day to get on a demo or to even look for software are really ideal candidates for [our] product-led growth mission,” Kovacs added. “[Our software] is intuitive enough that the end-user can get the value out of [the product] themselves.”

Why It Worked For Ecobot

The pivot into product-led growth has also changed how Ecobot thinks about their entire marketing strategy.

“We really transitioned away from brand marketing [and] started leaning heavily into inbound marketing,” said Kim Nichols, Director of Customer Success at Ecobot, who runs the startup’s product strategy. With the transition, she said she spent a lot of time studying how her target customers interact online and how they want information delivered to them.

To do that, the startup has been creating free, self-serve resources that resonate with their target audience in the environmental scientist community. Its most popular is a soil guide and other field guides that “help people do their work more accurately,” Nichols added.

Instead of just putting out social media marketing and advertisements promoting the platform, Ecobot has started amplifying their resources and guides as a first touch-point to get in front of customers.

This new marketing and sales strategy has helped to widen the demographic of people who are aware of and interested in Ecobot, Nichols added. With their new marketing strategy, educators, students, and the broader scientific community have found value in Ecobot’s resources, which can only help bring more awareness to the startup’s platform.

It all comes down to collecting the right type of data, the Ecobot team added. Implementing PLG requires a startup to not only understand customer acquisition costs, but also to figure out what parts of a product they can give for free at the beginning of the sales cycle without cannibalizing paid customers down the road.

One helpful piece of advice Ecobot shared for those looking to implement PLG within their marketing strategy: Make sure to build out a robust self-serve educational materials library — be it YouTube videos, articles, or in-app tours — so that customers can easily get up to speed on their own time.

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Featured photo from Ecobot’s LinkedIn