With consumers changing their minds faster than you can say "sales pitch," the cost of acquiring new customers going through the roof. Traditional sales tactics are just not cutting it anymore.

Enter Product-Led Growth (PLG). PLG is not just a buzzword but a powerful tool to adapt to changing customer behavior. So, how would a traditionally sales-led organization go product-led overnight?

It’s not an easy process to transition to product-led GTM but, you can start by making product adoption your primary goal to begin with. Before you ask, how does that work…let me explain.

Why Should Product Adoption Be The Primary Goal?

Taking Incremental Steps

Embracing product adoption as the primary goal allows organizations to take incremental steps toward PLG adoption. By lowering entry barriers, segmenting and targeting the right customers, aligning sales and marketing efforts, emphasizing expansion, and employing a dual strategy, companies can gradually transition towards a product-led approach while mitigating risks and ensuring long-term success.

Addressing the Challenges

The journey from a sales-led model to a product-led one entails overcoming various hurdles, including mindset shifts, organizational culture barriers, skill gaps, alignment issues, and ensuring product readiness. Embracing product adoption as the primary goal helps address these challenges effectively by fostering a customer-centric approach and driving organizational alignment toward achieving common objectives. You are essentially creating a cross-functional common goal to work towards.

Driving Sustainable Growth

Shifting the focus from sales transactions to widespread product adoption lays the foundation for sustainable growth. Prioritizing product adoption enables organizations to cultivate deeper user engagement, foster customer loyalty, and unlock expansion opportunities within existing accounts. By aligning efforts around driving product adoption, companies can create value-driven relationships that endure beyond the initial sale.

How to Drive Product Adoption as The Primary Goal?

Establishing a dedicated cross-functional expert team a.k.a the Tiger Team to spearhead PLG transformation streamlines your PLG adoption journey. This team can be instrumental in fast-tracking the common goal - product adoption.

Leverage the expertise of diverse teams and team members to drive user engagement, streamline onboarding processes, and optimize the overall product experience.

Adopting a product-led approach for long-term growth also required a shift in how success is measured. Beyond traditional revenue metrics, tracking product adoption – encompassing active users, feature usage, time-to-value, customer feedback, and expansion revenue – provides actionable insights into user behavior and product performance.

Having a dedicated team of diverse experts, measuring and optimizing product adoption metrics, organizations can iteratively refine their strategies to drive continuous improvement and maximize ROI.

Understanding Account-Level Product Adoption

When aiming to drive product adoption, solely targeting individual users within an organization is not going to cut it. The focus should extend to driving adoption across entire accounts.

Why?

Because, the decision-making process involves multiple stakeholders within a company, each with varying levels of influence and needs.

Prioritizing account-level product adoption means ensuring that your product is integrated seamlessly into the workflow of the entire customer organization, maximizing its value and utility. Getting an entire organization—not just individual users—fully onboarded and engaged with your product should be THE goal.

Account-level product adoption ensures:

• Holistic Engagement: Capturing the attention of an entire organization leads to deeper relationships and long-term loyalty.
• Scalability: While acquiring individual users is great, it can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. On the other hand, when you focus on account-level adoption, you’re able to scale your growth efforts more efficiently by targeting entire organizations at once.
• Increased Lifetime Value: When an entire account adopts your product, the lifetime value of that customer skyrockets. You’re no longer reliant on one user sticking around—you’ve got an entire organization invested in your success.
• Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Happy customers are your best advocates. When you win over an entire account, you’re not just gaining one advocate—you’re gaining an army of them. This word-of-mouth marketing can be incredibly powerful for driving new business.

Strategies for Driving Account-Level Product Adoption

So, how can you ensure that your product is adopted by entire accounts? Here are a few strategies to consider:

• Targeted Onboarding: Tailor your product onboarding process to cater to the needs of different teams within an organization. Offer specialized training sessions and resources to ensure that everyone is onboarded effectively.

For example, Loom sends onboarding emails tailored to their user type.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with different departments to identify pain points and demonstrate how your product can address them. By showing value across the entire organization, you’ll increase buy-in and adoption.
• Executive Engagement: Don’t just focus on winning over end-users—make sure you’re engaging with executives and decision-makers as well. When leadership is on board, it becomes much easier to drive adoption throughout the organization.

For example, Stack Moxie uses Inflection to send automated QBRs to the decision makers among their customers showing the value of their product to their teams.

• Data-Driven Insights: Use product analytics tools to track adoption metrics across different accounts. Identify trends and patterns to understand what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.

In Summary

Product adoption is essential for companies embarking on the journey toward product-led growth and sustainable growth in a changing business landscape. And, product adoption by accounts is the secret sauce for unlocking growth and achieving long-term success. By focusing on winning over entire organizations, you’ll create deeper relationships, drive scalable growth, and increase the lifetime value of your customers.

So, if you’re looking to take your growth efforts to the next level, it’s time to shift your focus to product adoption and especially adoption by entire accounts. Inflection can help you achieve that.

From our native two-way Salesforce integration, to our support of Account<>Workspace<>User data models, and to account-based journeys, Inflection is the only marketing automation specifically built for B2B product-led companies. Request a demo.