If you are a marketer at a product-led growth business, you need to know product-led marketing.

In the SaaS industry, there are two popular models:

enterprise-level price points with a sales-led approach to marketing and...a product-led growth approach. 

Enterprise doesn’t need as much volume, but you need to account for a long sales cycle and the responsibility of closing deals will fall almost exclusively on the sales team. 

Product-led growth is more about volume and one-to-many.

It lets people interact with the product before buying in a freemium or limited-time, free trial format.

In product marketing, your marketing -- and the product itself -- will also bear the brunt of the work when it comes to new customer acquisition.

“With many SaaS companies, marketing is built into the product -- that’s what product marketing is.”

With that being said, product-led growth falls on a spectrum.

A pure product-led structure, is when the product is a channel, like Typeform or Zoom.

“Say, my friend or client uses Zoom. I now have to download it to use it, but can access it for free as long as I want. But, as I see the features, I’m now thinking about being a customer. Using the product itself generates leads.”

Another common approach is the freemium model.

“It’s still product-led growth. The product is still the marketing vehicle. But it’s not as pure because there’s a time frame. The user needs to activate it and see the whole value of it during the free trial period.”

This can present a problem for SaaS marketers because most are focused on monitoring the content marketing funnel. Instead, product-led marketers track how people use their products.

Derek Skaletsky, founder at Sherlo

To help SaaS companies master a product-led growth strategy that turns more leads into customers, I recently talked to Derek Skaletsky, Founder of Sherlock, a product engagement scoring solution that helps SaaS businesses track utilization. 

Here are just five valuable tips that came out of our conversation about product-led growth in the SaaS industry.

1. Know where you are as a company

Before getting into a product marketing strategy, remember not to think of all SaaS companies as the same. There’s a difference between go-to-market and the other steps along the line.

And each one requires a different approach to growth marketing.

So, start by evaluating what your goals are as a company and team before building a strategy or collecting data that will help you reach them.

2. Leverage data in all aspects of marketing

The next generation of technology and product-led growth marketers will be even more comfortable with cloud-based software, marketing and PR enablement technology. 

They’ll be dependent on data -- not just to make decisions, but to also drive messaging. 

“Cloud-only companies in the SaaS industry are actually still a small percentage. I think it will go more in that direction to the point that, in the next 5-10 year it will be majority SaaS -- but I don’t think it will (or should) ever be 100%.”

3. Create a strategy and environment that’s nimble

Effective product-led growth also means that marketers should continually be more aggressive and flexible.

“Changing a website used to be something you did once every 3 years.