Why we do product-led sales at Dreamdata and how we got here
This year we fundamentally changed how we do sales at Dreamdata.
We’ve opened up our product for free use and gone product-led. It was a nerve-wracking decision and an equally nerve-wracking transitional period.
Through hard work, a lot of experimentation and initially handheld processes, we’re now reaping the rewards of shifting to product-led sales as opposed to our old “trust us, it works” sales approach.
As product-led has been much hyped lately we wanted to share our first-hand learnings and reasoning for going down this road.
Background: Why did we switch to product-led sales?
The B2B attribution industry has historically been dominated by three types of players:
Expensive enterprise solutions, half-baked solutions that were not really built for account-based, B2B companies and software suites that in theory can do some bits and pieces of B2B attribution and customer journeys, without doing any of it well.
It doesn't have to be like this anymore.
By using fresher, smarter and more scalable technology we at Dreamdata are changing this. In fact, we would claim that we’re already best-in-class, at a quarter of the price. You can say that it’s our mission in Dreamdata to democratise world-class revenue attribution. But enough with the sales talk.
As Dreamdata is still a relatively young brand and company we sometimes find ourselves losing deals to established enterprise solutions despite us, in our opinion, offering better tech, support and pricing. The prospect accounts decided to go with the “safe” solution of the established brand.
So painful. So annoying. It had to change. We were growing slower than what our tech deserved. We needed to provide proof that our product was better than the competition.
What did we do?
Obviously, we were going down the traditional paths to try and diminish the number of times this would happen. Here are some examples of what we did and still do:
However, we were not seeing a strong, or perhaps more accurately, fast enough impact of these initiatives.
Therefore we started doing a lot of research about how buyers prefer to buy software today. We started thinking about how we prefer to buy software ourselves. In this research we came across this article by Gartner: “The SaaS Buying Experience: Mapping How Businesses Buy Software”.
It stressed two points that particularly resonated with us.
1. You need to make all thinkable information available for the customer who’s researching. They will tell you when they’re ready to talk.
2. You need to allow people to trial the product before you ask them to give you money.
People want proof, not promises. They want live demos. They want working trials with their own data before complex NDA’s and DPA's, and least of all expensive order forms. Less leaps of faith.
That’s how many of our favourite SaaS companies and products like Slack, Calendly, Segment, Zoom, you name it, work. That’s how Dreamdata should work as well.
We don’t want a forced sales processes, NDA’s before pricing is shared, etc. Forget about all that old-school sales process crap.
Product first, sales later.
Want to know more about Dreamdata’s shift to product-led Sales? Tune in to this conversation I had with Get Correlated’s Breezy Beaumont.
How we did the change
At Dreamdata we’re big fans of Marty Cagan and his product thinking. You constantly need to judge all activity by the business value it creates and not commit resources before you’ve built a proof of concept through a minimum viable effort.
“Let’s just add the button”
In the spirit of minimum viable effort to prove value, the first thing we did was to introduce a new button and a new column advertising the “Free/Trial option” on our pricing page.
No product was built.
No engineering hours were committed to this.
No other advertisement was done.
We set a few limits between tiers, sat back and waited to see what happened.
It wasn’t long before we started seeing proof of Gartner’s insights (shown above). Buyers nowadays want access to the product, not sales processes. There was a quick influx of people clicking the button to set up a free account.
As we very deliberately had not committed any engineering resources to the experiment up front, the first many months were painfully manual:
The request comes in → we manually create an account → manually send an email invitation.
Once the new account connected their data sources, the same process → manually pull the data → manually join and sort the data.
It got to a point where we really were feeling “positive pain”. There’s so much demand that it’s creating bottlenecks all over the place. This is positive pain because.
Your experiment works.
It forces you to innovate fast to resolve these new positive pains.
Now with proof in hand, we could start to commit some engineering hours to relieve the pain:
A request to create an account comes in → Automate account creation → Automate the email sent to access the account.
Data sources get connected → Automate the pull request → Automate a standardised sorting of the data.
So what happened?
Well, good and bad stuff initially. As you can see in the graph below the demand for free trial very quickly accelerated, while our normal sales process that started with demo requests pretty much remained at the status quo.
Although some uptake was expected, the sheer number of new accounts interested in Dreamdata caught us a little bit off guard. This caused some pains and lost potential, but we learned a bunch of stuff along the way:
Be ready: Our Account Executives were not from the kick-off wired to pay attention to free trial signups. Demo calls represented our normal way of handling sales processes. This meant that we probably missed a bunch of in-market opportunities initially as we were not proactively chasing the free trial signups.
Focus your attention: When we did start turning our attention to the big influx of companies signing up for free trials, the next challenge became deciding who to spend our time on. There are simply too many companies in there to talk to all of them. Who are the top 25% most interesting companies? Who fits our Ideal Customer Profile?
Establish a new sales process: Having identified the most attractive free trialers how do you then turn them into a paying customers? In the old sales process, the potential customers knew they had to decide upon buying or not buying. With the free trial that’s not necessarily the case. Now you need to focus on getting them to decide on whether or not to buy your product? Is it completely clear what’s included in the free trial and what’s the paid product?
The Hybrid AE: A product-led sales AE is almost a hybrid role - you're merging with CS. While keeping the overview of the sales process, the AE also needs to get their hands into helping the customer be successful with the product.
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this post on the dos and don’ts of Sales Operations
Product qualified leads: We decided that we would not know enough about the account to set any automated “shut-downs” in our free trial product initially. Therefore it quickly became important for us to create transparency into each of the accounts. Setting up flags for those accounts we need to pay attention to. The Four main indicators became:
Who’s the company?
Meaning do they fit our ICP?
Who has actually completed onboarding?
Product proof first. Then sales.
Who is exceeding the limits set forth on our pricing page?
Meaning it’s fair to reach out and say “we need to talk”.
How big is their ad spend?
The urgency of getting a Revenue Attribution solution like Dreamdata up and running very often correlates with that.
Harvest the goodwill (bonus tip): There’s bound to be a bunch of your free trials that you’re not going to be able to sell to, at the moment. Perhaps they don’t have enough volume to hit your thresholds. Perhaps they don’t have the budget. Perhaps they’re just not there in their company journey yet. And still, they’re happy users of your product. This means you saved up a bit of goodwill with them, which might not represent monetary value - for now at least. But you could perhaps flip these into customer cases or reviews, which could be the foundation of your next sale.
The results so far
Switching your sales model is definitely not without challenges, your organization, as well as your product and tech, need to follow accordingly, but we’re very happy we did it.
Doing product-led sales, for lack of better words, feels like a more honest way to sell. You don’t have to promise stuff. You don’t end up overselling. The product will be the proof you need to convince your customers.
The tangible benefits that we’ve seen switching to a product-led sales process are:
An explosion of companies with a Dreamdata account
A more tangible and logical sales process led by product and proof instead of salesmanship and luck
Higher conversion rates from sales qualified leads to won deals
Accounts being far in the onboarding process already on the day where they sign the contract
You can try Dreamdata free here 👇