“Product-Led Growth is Inevitable” – Aakash Gupta Interviews Ben Williams on B2B Growth

Ben Williams’ insights are a masterclass in modern B2B product growth. From simplifying bloated products to designing smarter growth models, his advice is grounded, actionable, and deeply human.

Check the complete episode here:

How to Drive GROWTH in B2B

Ben kicks off with a bold statement: Most B2B products are bloated. Over time, teams ship features without revisiting their value. Instead of continuously monitoring impact, many organizations reward building new things over refining or retiring what’s already live. As a result, old features linger, confusing users and draining engineering resources.

“We don’t incentivize teams to kill features. But doing so often improves UX and frees up engineering capacity.”

How can you combat this?

• Teams must shift their mindset: treat “shipped” as the starting point, not the finish line.
• Proactively monitor success and be bold enough to cut unused or redundant features.

Modeling impact: Why simplification is strategic

Simplification isn’t just good housekeeping: it’s strategic. Ben explains how product teams can model the impact of removing features by:

• Measuring engineering cost: Track bug fixes and maintenance on legacy code.
• Evaluating UX clarity: Streamline user journeys to boost adoption of core features.
• Cross-functional messaging: Remove distractions to sharpen go-to-market positioning.

Product leaders need to treat shipped features as experiments with ongoing monitoring, not just a launch-and-forget mentality.

Product-led growth is inevitable

Ben introduces a nuanced view: every company must become product-led eventually, especially in the realm of retention.

While product-led acquisition (often equated with freemium and self-serve) is popular, retention is where PLG proves essential. Companies can’t ignore UX and user satisfaction anymore, even in sales-heavy enterprise environments.

“If you don’t create a great user experience, someone else will — and they’ll win.”

Discover how to improve user experience by crafting more effective user story templates.

Examples like Salesforce, Workday, and Adobe Analytics show that legacy companies grew without great UX, but only because they had no competition. That’s changing fast.

Demystifying PLG

Ben offers a refreshing definition of PLG:

“It’s not about freemium or self-serve. It’s about solving a meaningful problem in an elegant way that users want to talk about.”

PLG has three vectors:

• Acquisition: Users discover and adopt the product themselves.
• Retention: Delight keeps them coming back.
• Monetization: Expansion based on usage and satisfaction.

Crucially, you don’t need to nail all three at once. Focus on one (often retention) and build from there.

 

Why product-led sales works (and when it doesn’t)

Ben explains that product-led sales is about using product usage data to guide human sales conversations, not replacing sales. Done right, it creates warmer, more informed conversations.

He highlights zero-commission sales teams as a PLG-aligned model: reps focus on user success, not just closing deals. Instead of chasing quotas, they help customers discover deeper product value.

“PLG sales isn’t just about harvesting free users. It’s about expanding value with customers who are already seeing success.”

However, PLG doesn’t work everywhere. In industries requiring full-company buy-in, like infrastructure or experimentation platforms, enterprise sales-led motion may be more effective.

Growth models: loops, funnels, and team alignment

Ben stresses the importance of growth models: frameworks that define how a business grows. These models:

• Quantify acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization.
• Highlight bottlenecks and loops (virality, content, sales).
• Help teams prioritize and align across functions.

He distinguishes between funnels (linear) and loops (cyclical), and emphasizes that models must evolve with the business.

Growth models are your roadmap. You update them constantly — markets change, loops plateau, users shift.

Ownership of the growth model should sit with the product growth lead, but the entire org, including marketing, CS, and revops, must be aligned around it.

Retention is an output, not a goal

Though retention is often the top-line metric, Ben argues against making it the sole focus:

“Retention is a lagging indicator. The levers that influence it are activation and engagement.”

He advises product leaders to:

• Focus on user onboarding, activation, and early user success, and review some onboarding UX examples.
• Drive ongoing engagement: repeated value.
• Monitor retention, but don’t chase it in isolation.

Innovating for retention: The case for adjacent products

One smart retention strategy? Build adjacent products that users engage with more frequently. Ben references:

• Zillow: From infrequent home buying to daily home value check-ins
• Apollo.io: From one-time contact exports to sales engagement tools
• Snyk: Used SEO-optimized developer tools (Sneak Advisor) to drive daily use and acquire new users

These “sidecar” products bring users in, but must connect clearly to the core value to convert effectively.

Collaboration: Marketing, sales, and growth pods

Product and marketing teams must work in lockstep to deliver real, measurable growth.

The key to effective collaboration lies in aligning both teams around a shared understanding of the user journey, core value proposition, and product strategy.

Product teams bring insights into user behavior, product capabilities, and growth levers, while marketing translates these insights into messaging that resonates with the right audience.

To bridge the gap, both teams need to:

• Collaborate on defining the ideal customer profile (ICP) and ensuring the product messaging matches real user needs.
• Align on critical user milestones, like activation and engagement, and create campaigns that highlight these “aha moments” effectively.
• Share ownership of key metrics, ensuring that both teams track progress toward acquisition, activation, and retention goals.

Final Thoughts

Ben wraps with a reflection on how growth principles apply universally, not just in business, but in life:

• Be data-informed
• Stay curious
• Build with users in mind
• Continuously iterate
• Align across teams

Read the full article here.