How to Scale a SaaS Beyond $10M ARR Without a Sales Team by Wes Bush

Scaling a SaaS to an 8-figure annual recurring revenue business without a traditional sales team is not just a possibility—it’s becoming a strategic imperative for many.

Wes Bush, a recognized thought leader in the SaaS community, dives into this counterintuitive approach in an upcoming talk where he unpacks the innovative tactics for driving product growth.

TL;DR

• Wes Bush is the CEO of ProductLed and a best-selling author who has helped businesses drive sustainable growth through product-led strategies.
• Businesses can scale by enhancing the product experience, prioritizing customer success, and using data-driven insights to continuously improve the product.
• Product-led growth leverages the product itself for customer acquisition and retention, often through free trials or freemium models, while sales-led growth relies on direct sales efforts like demos and negotiations by a sales development representative.

Some tried and true PLG approaches for scaling SaaS include:

• Offering free trials or freemium models, ensuring users experience the full value of the product firsthand.
• Personalizing the onboarding process significantly reduces the time to value.
• Providing self-support resources through an in-app center and reducing the need for human support.
• Utilizing contextual messages for upselling and cross-selling at moments of high user intent.
• Creating growth loops that drive virally and new customers without any effort on the company’s side.

If you want to learn more about these strategies and hear directly from Wes Bush, join our Product Drive Summit to learn more from Wes himself!

Who is Wes Bush?

Wes Bush is a leading advocate for a more efficient and customer-centric way to sell software. As a best-selling author and the founder and CEO of ProductLed, he is one of the most sought-after product experts in the world.

His work, especially through his book “Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself” centers on using the product to drive user acquisition, activation, and retention.

Wes Bush has also worked for some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. Armed with these experiences, he trains teams worldwide to help them turn their products into powerful growth drivers.

Scaling your SaaS without a sales team

Scaling a SaaS means expanding its operations and increasing revenue at a rate that outpaces its growing costs. Very often this translates to attracting new customers, and in many companies, sales is the main channel of acquisition.

“Sales can complement a great product-led motion,” Wes Bush says, adding that “though in a lot of cases, you don’t really need sales intervention if your product-led motion is good enough.”

Here are essential steps Wes Bush recommends to successfully scale a SaaS beyond 10m ARR without sales teams:

• Establish a clear strategy: Identify your ideal user and create a well-thought-out model.
• Develop a product that naturally attracts buyers: Ensure the product is intuitive, delivers value quickly, and addresses the pain points of the users effectively, encouraging organic growth through user satisfaction and word-of-mouth.
• Focus on customer success: Invest in customer support and success to ensure users achieve their desired outcomes without direct sales intervention. This includes comprehensive onboarding processes, proactive support, and community building.
• Use data to refine your offerings: Continuously gather and analyze user feedback and product usage data to refine the product, making it more appealing and useful to a broader audience. Also, don’t shy away from running experiments like A/B tests to drive improvement. And most importantly ensure you have a competent team in place.

Product-led growth vs sales-led growth

Product-led growth is a strategy that uses the product as the main driver for customer acquisition and retention. It often leverages free trials or freemium models to get users into the product. Then, emphasis is put on an intuitive, and self-service experience that allows users to recognize value quickly.

On the other hand, sales-led growth is a strategy that involves demos, presentations, and direct negotiations handled by sales reps to generate leads.

The choice between product-led and sales-led growth strategies depends on several factors, including the industry, the average contract value, and customer needs.

While PLG can be more efficient for widely applicable, easy-to-use products, a traditional sales process might be better suited for complex solutions aimed at large organizations.

In many cases, companies find a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of both strategies to be most effective.

How to scale your SaaS with a product-led strategy

Using a product-led strategy to scale your Saas means creating a product that is so valuable and easy to use that it essentially sells itself.

Here are five ways you can scale with a product-led strategy:

Offer free trials to generate product-qualified leads

“97% of buyers prefer to ‘try before they buy’ vs ‘talk to someone in sales’,” says Wes Bush.

For users to experience the product value, they first need to use it for a while – for free.

Think about it: it would be pointless asking potential customers to part with their hard-earned cash if they don’t know if it suits their needs.

By offering a free trial, you not only establish trust with prospects but also generate high-quality leads who see the benefits of your product and are likely to convert into paying customers.

Create a contextual onboarding process to reduce time to value

To convert free trial users, make sure that they experience the product value as quickly as possible.

One way to reduce time to value is by personalizing the onboarding process.

In this way, users discover the features that matter the most to their use cases.

What’s more, tailoring the onboarding flows to different user personas’ JTBDs reduces the information overload. Apart from causing fatigue, receiving lots of information about irrelevant features could lead the new user to the conclusion that the product is not suitable for them after all.

To start with personalization, use welcome surveys to identify user needs as soon as they join.

After segmenting users based on the data they provided, trigger interactive walkthroughs that guide them through key features for their use case.

As opposed to traditional product tours, these guides engage users with one feature at a time, ensuring that they adopt it before moving on to the next one.

Provide self-service options to decrease the need for human support

As your SaaS business is set to scale, you can expect more customers, and this means more queries.

Enable customers to solve their issues quickly and easily by providing them with self-support resources.

Create multiple formats of support materials, such as video tutorials, FAQs, checklists, and documentation. Embed all of them into a single in-app hub that users can access easily.

Ultimately, this will reduce pressure on your service reps and enhance customer satisfaction.

Drive account expansion through contextual upsell messages

Offering upgraded versions of a product (upselling) and adding complementary services to an initial purchase (cross-selling) can help users enjoy a better experience and experience more value.

Not only that, but cross-sells and upsells also pump more money into your revenue, which you can invest to further scale your product.

It’s best to trigger upgrades contextually, at moments when users are more likely to convert. An example of a high-intent moment can be when users reach the usage limit of a certain feature.

Implement growth loops to acquire customers

Growth loops are a strategy that relies on embedded product virality to drive sustainable and compounding growth.

Basically, the existing customers promote the product and drive new customer acquisition by simply using it.

For instance, Slack uses its Slack Connect function that allows users to be invited to other people’s channels so they can use the platform even if they don’t have their own team. As a result, new users are able to use Slack for themselves, which keeps it top-of-mind until they need a messaging tool for their team.

Want to learn more about scaling SaaS?

A talk by Wes Bush will help you eliminate the guesswork as you scale your product-led business.

Through his teachings, you will discover how you can drive customer success while achieving sustainable growth.

Book your place for free and learn from Wes Bush an effective framework for scaling SaaS on October 8th.