Part II: The Bottoms Up Growth Playbook
Five Key Tactics for Selling Your Product Bottoms Up
In Part I: The Founders Checklist For Bottoms Up, I’ve talked about how to decide if bottoms up is the right go-to-market approach for your B2B software company. If you’ve gone through the checklist, this post outlines five main core growth tactics for scaling your bottoms up company:
Let’s dive into each below.
I. Have A Freemium Product Offering.
Bottoms up starts with product. While different products have different inherent characteristics, all successful products need to be intuitive to start and continue to use. A simple onboarding process, self-service checkout, intuitive design and educational pop-ups need to do the heavy lifting of getting new users active in the product.
If you truly believe people won’t be able to live without your product once they’ve tried it, put your money where your mouth is and make it free for anyone to use. Depending on your product you can then price based on number of seats or other volume-based triggers.
- Caveat #1: Waitlists: While it’s true some famous bottoms up products like Slack started as a private beta, the purpose of this was to develop a great product with an engaged group of users, not as a means to create hype unto itself. While limiting users in the very early days can help you focus on developing your core product, real bottoms up growth works best when its friction-free to all users, rather than exclusive or behind a paywall.
- Caveat #2: Free Trials: While a free trial is self-serve, it often doesn’t allow you to maximize referrals and viral growth, as it ends quite early in the user lifecycle (more on this below). That being said, if giving your initial users a timed taste allows you to better convert larger teams down the line (like Zendesk), do what makes the most sense for monetizing your product.
II: Make Referrals A Core Part of Your Product.
When you bet on the quality of your product for growth, word of mouth should be your first marketing channel. Make sure your product is set up from day one to encourage and capture as much of that buzz as possible.
When your product is multi-player, referrals will be inherent in the product design, but, either way, be sure sharing your product is seamless with clear referral touchpoints and custom links (even if you just hack it together with utms in the early days). Additionally, giving incentives like free months or other benefits to your early adopters can be a great way to kickstart this channel and create a viral loop.
III: Think Like A Consumer Marketer.
While bottoms up is a product-first approach, do not assume that just because you’ve built it they will come. You still need marketing!
The good news is since people can use your product pre-purchase, there’s no need for traditional B2B marketing like whitepapers, demos, and case studies to explain how great your product will be once they buy.
When you start your sales process at the individual level, you virtually are just targeting consumers who have a corporate credit card, and therefore need to invest in and prioritize brand just as your consumer counterparts do. You also need to reach your customers where they are, which is not always where traditional enterprise buyers are. This might be through more traditional consumer marketing channels like social, or even newspaper or subway ads. It also might be in the more niche communities where they spend their time, like GitHub, Dribble, Slack groups, etc.
IV: Sub In PQLs for MQLs.
In a bottoms up model, your main marketing channel is your product itself. As you grow, Instead of having your marketing team qualify marketing leads who’ve never interacted with your product, you can qualify the people already using your product. This is called PQLs, or Product Qualified Leads. For example, you might decide that once a user has sent 10 messages and logged in 3x in the first week, they are a PQL, and a rep should reach out.
Tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel can help you understand what the right triggers are, but just like traditional lead qualification and scoring, your PQL definition should be continually iterated on based on feedback and communication between sales and product. For a helpful benchmark, PQLs contacted by reps typically convert at 25–30%.
V: Focus Your Sales Reps on Farming.
Now that you’ve qualified the users who are already loving your product as PQLs, you’ll want to focus the majority of your salesforce on farming existing accounts. Atlassian famously touts that they grew without any sales, as their reps only farmed from existing accounts with zero outbound to the mid-market and enterprise.
Don’t panic, this is certainly an extreme and not necessarily recommended for the early days — even Zoom and Slack did and now do outbound to varying degrees. But, the core focus of a bottoms up sales team should shift to net account expansion as you let the product and consumer marketing do the heavy lifting on lead generation.
If you are a building a B2B software startup bottoms up, I’d love to know what growth tactics are working for you!
email: nicky@streamlinedventures.com / twitter: @nickykamra
About Us: Streamlined Ventures is a seed stage fund focused on data and applied AI across all sectors. Based in San Francisco, we’ve invested in over 125 companies including DoorDash, Rigetti, AppLovin, EasyPost and more.
