Sherlock CEO Derek Skaletsky is featured on a special episode about product-led growth in the SaaS industry on the B2B Lead Gen Podcast hosted by Los Angeles-based digital marketing consultant Eric Schwartzman, an award-winning podcaster since 2005. 

Schwartzman has interviewed legendary Wall Street Journal consumer technology columnist Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher of Recode Decode and Leo Laporte, among others.

Listeners in the product-led growth business will not want to miss this discussion about sales- versus product-led growth models: 

  1. Enterprise level price points with a sales-led approach to marketing and... 
  2. A pure, product-led approach.

Derek explains the differences between the enterprise model, where you don’t need as much volume, but you’ve got to get through a long sales cycle and close deals through direct sales versus...

A product-led growth approach that leverages one-to-many marketing communications and the network effect to grow a user base. Where as enterprise marketers pitch and demo products, product-led marketers let their products pitch themselves.

“With many SaaS companies, marketing is built into the product -- that’s what product marketing is,” says Derek. 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. “If a 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,” continues Derek.

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,” he says.

Tracking Product Utilization

This can present a challenge for SaaS marketers as it requires accurate, reliable metrics on how users engage with your product, which is what Sherlock does by scoring product engagement. 

Derek also shares why created the company after more than a decade of experience in product marketing, leading teams at companies like Traackr and Kissmetrics where but brought together different functions and teams within the organizations in order to achieve a better business outcome. 


To hear Derek’s 5 tips for product-led growth SaaS marketing, listen to the episode and subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast.