Scaling Product-Led Growth With Clickwrap

One key aspect of product-led growth is that the sales process is completely self-service. This means users don’t need to talk to a salesperson before they can test out the product and ultimately make a buying decision. However, you still need to ensure that users can legally sign your contracts without a hitch, which is where using clickwrap for product-led growth comes in.

Product-led growth (PLG) is here to stay. If your organization is like most SaaS companies, you have realized that a product-led business strategy is a winning formula for building products that resonate with users and achieve widespread adoption.

However, like many businesses, you may not have considered the need to provide a seamless contract experience in your onboarding process. It’s important you do so because, no matter the business’s growth strategy, a contract management system that helps you create, sign, and manage your business contracts is cardinal, especially when you handle a high volume of contracts.

Product-led growth is a business strategy where the product itself is the primary growth driver. In product-led growth, organizations primarily acquire, convert, retain, and expand their user base via the product. PLG is a business methodology where users experience the product themselves by signing up for a demo, free trial, or freemium before upgrading to the paid version.

Businesses that adopt a PLG strategy—as opposed to a sales-led or marketing-led strategy—pay lots of attention to ensuring that customers can self-serve. The product also needs to quickly prove a “return on investment” (ROI) and solve users’ problems. The focus is on showcasing the product’s value, usability, and efficacy, so that purchasing it becomes a no-brainer.

In a PLG, every team in the organization—from marketing and sales to engineering—rallies around the product. Becoming product-led requires a mindset shift away from the traditional top-down approach at both individual and company levels.

There are many reasons why SaaS companies are opting for product-led growth as their go-to-market (GTM) strategy. One reason is that customers now prefer to self-educate. According to Forrester, three out of four B2B buyers prefer to learn about products or services by themselves instead of talking with a sales representative.

Increasingly, customers want to experience a product before determining its ability to address their needs. Allowing them to actually trial the product does just that.

Buyers don’t want to jump through mental hoops before making a buying decision. They want to decide easily whether a product is a good fit or not. Even enterprise businesses want this. According to Gainsight, “Enterprise buyers expect to try and evaluate software in an easy, frictionless way.”

Customers generally prioritize ease of use when making a buying decision. For 89% of consumers, ease of use is important when choosing between products.

Product-led growth has become part of the business lingo among tech and SaaS companies. Let’s see some popular SaaS companies that achieved brilliant success using the PLG method.

Calendly

Calendly addressed a significant problem in the business world: scheduling meetings that don’t clash. The product has inbuilt virality and is effective in marketing itself.

When a user sends an invite link to another person to schedule a meeting, that person experiences the product. They see firsthand how it could solve the same problem for them, making it more likely that they also become a paid user. So, every Calendly user promotes the product to at least one person.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a file storing and sharing platform that makes collaboration easier. The company provided a solution—helping people share files with ease. Their PLG approach essentially works in two ways.

First, Dropbox built a product that was incredibly easy to use—a simple, drag-and-drop interface that allowed file sharing from any computer on the web. Then, they introduced features—referral program, shared folder, and shared links—that encouraged their users to share the product with others. The company made $1 billion in revenue in ten years, making this PLG strategy a home run.

Koan

Koan is a tool that helps teams manage goals and track the status collaboratively. Koan is an excellent example of a company that didn’t start as product-led but later transitioned to it.

Challenging circumstances during the pandemic forced them to reflect on their growth strategy. Koan’s biggest selling point was Reflections—a weekly status generator. The company discovered that users were 92% more likely to become repeat users after using Reflections. They revamped their GTM strategy to become product-led and launched their freemium product.

Product-led growth makes it easier and cost-effective for businesses to scale their operations and expand into new markets. Some key features of PLG products are that they have a smooth sign-up path and provide a good customer experience.

Contract management is still a hassle for many organizations because contracts can slow down deals. Contracting inefficiency slowing deals is terrible enough for businesses that use a sales-led strategy, but it’s worse if you’re running a product-led approach.

PLG is all about making your customers fall in love with the product by offering quick access and making it easy to use. You need to ensure that the contracts governing that relationship are just as fast and easy to use.

As your business starts to grow and you offer more free trials, freemiums, or product demos, you need to present a high volume of contracts quickly and safely. This is where clickwrap and other click-to-accept contracts come into play.

With clickwrap, users can assent to an agreement by checking a box or clicking a button with acceptance language, such as “I agree.” Both clickwrap and PLG are innovative methods that deviate from the traditional ways of doing things. Using clickwrap for product-led growth can bring lots of benefits to your business.

Better signing experience

Traditional contracting is not compatible with a true PLG strategy. It requires that your customer leave the product, and engage with your sales and/or legal team…the thing they were trying to avoid in the first place.

Clickwrap allows you to deliver a contract where your customer already is, in a method they have already shown they prefer: self-serve. As a digitally native agreement, a clickwrap can be presented directly within a site or app, allowing the customer to. stay where they are already finding value and complete a transaction.

Can handle high-volume acceptance

PLG products often have virality built into them, which means when you implement the product-led approach well, you’ll likely see the product achieve quick adoption. With many people signing up to use the product, clickwrap can help you handle the high-volume contracts you’ll need to manage.

Many of the contracts you’ll need in a PLG approach are standardized contracts you can comfortably present as clickwrap agreements as long as you follow clickwrap best practices. Clickwrap lets you automate the entire contract acceptance stage and capture all the data you need to enforce the agreement.

Excellent backend records

Clickwraps have a high enforceability rate because they help you collect all the information you need to enforce the agreement. Clickwrap automatically gathers information that shows the following:

• The identity of the user that accepted the agreement
• The contract version they accepted
• The time they accepted the contract
• The design and layout of the screen at the time the agreement was signed

You don’t have to sacrifice safety for speed with clickwrap—or vice versa. You can build a contract management system that is in tune with your PLG approach.

Smooth customer experience

Using clickwrap for product-led growth ensures users have a smooth contract-signing experience. Clickwraps are digital or HTML native, meaning you can embed them into your website. Since they are not external to your website or app, users can easily view and assent to them without having to download them as a word or pdf document.

Contracts that are easy to view and accept provide a seamless customer experience, which is key when building a successful PLG product.

Modern contract lifecycle management (CLM) software allows you to manage contracts without hassle. You can deploy clickwraps to accelerate growth in your product-led business approach using modern contract software.

Instead of using contracting tools that drag you back and detract from your effort, CLM matches your pace and streamlines your contracting process. It’s important to choose a CLM vendor that allows you to build enforceable clickwrap agreements with ease.

The business world is fast-paced, and users’ needs are evolving. Customers want a smooth experience, and clickwrap makes that possible.

A product-led approach demands that you build a great product that solves a pressing problem and is easy to use. Using clickwrap for product-led growth ensures that contracts won’t hinder your growth drive.