The Product-Aware Business
Once we've set strategic direction, and we have a better idea of who our customers are and the product benefits that they look for, we should consider which go-to-market approach to execute.
Product-aware growth is an approach which uses your company products as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. If you’ve used Dropbox, JustPark or the Revolut Payment Card you’ve witnessed this first-hand — you didn’t read a lengthy whitepaper or have a sales-person contact you. You just signed-up and started using it.
Unlike sales-led companies where the whole goal is to take a buyer from Point A to Point B in a sales cycle, product-aware companies flip the traditional sales model on its head.
Product-aware companies invite the buyer to use the product and help them experience a meaningful outcome whilst using the product.
Once they’ve seen the benefit, paying for the service becomes a no-brainer.
Understand the value to your customer
In order to build a successful product-led business, you need to understand what value you are giving to your customer. This is part of being a customer-centric organisation. Then you need to make sure you communicate that value to your customer in a way that is relevant to them. Once you communicate your value, then you need to make sure that you deliver that value.
Product-aware growth will save you from the flood of rising customer acquisition costs and decreasing willingness to pay for your product.
Implementing a product-aware organisational structure also delivers significant benefits, which is explored in another post.
Next: Products, Architecture & Value
If each business had unlimited time, money and resources, it would ace its revenue growth, and dominate its market. But this is rarely the case. In Products, Architecture & Value we discuss the need to design Products to meet your organisation’s Enterprise Architecture principles. Otherwise well-meaning activities will result in products that cause a drag on the corporate ability to support them, and the wins from delivering value to your customers will be diluted. Your corporate strategy should recognise this potential pitfall.