Look at a reverse textbook first. How a bad product design can make customers and customer success managers miserable:
The white cat is the user | The yellow tiger is the CSM:
How Bad Design Drives Crazy Sales And why product-driven growth is a false proposition in China
This is a real case of a SaaS product in China, and the chat records are also real conversations on WeChat. The second half of this conversation is scarier as CSM advises customers to "Never click Enabled"...
In product-driven growth, if this kind of small design problem is common and not taken seriously by the product department, sales or CSM partners will spend a lot of time answering similar questions. What is the efficiency? How can you use products to drive growth?
In addition to complaining, it is necessary to review the original intention of SaaS products. Adhering to the principle of "the simpler the product, the easier it is to use", SaaS products often take the road of standardization and emphasis on scalability in order to ensure the consistency and usability of the experience. The other side of standardization is that users with different backgrounds, occupations, and regions have very different usage habits, and it is difficult for a completely standardized product to satisfy everyone.
Hence the template. Team collaboration tools such as telemarketing list Asana need to provide templates or suites for the job characteristics of different team users in the company. The same is true for Notion. Students, products, design, and marketing all have a set of relatively personalized templates.
How Bad Design Drives Crazy Sales And why product-driven growth is a false proposition in China
▲ Asana templates provide a variety of options
Templates address the needs of different groups of people, while geography and culture are another factor. For example, SaaS products born in Silicon Valley all log in with email or the open ID of Twitter and Facebook (now called Meta). It is not always easy to use in China, and the products do not open up the social ecology of Chinese users. International version, Chinese version also appeared.
Our commonly used SaaS tool products not only come from overseas platforms, but also have Chinese versions of overseas platforms and domestic products. Below, we will analyze them one by one and look at B2B SaaS platforms with different backgrounds, the possibility of adopting PLG in China, and the mode of marketing and sales. Welcome to take a seat :)
1. Overseas SaaS platform, only sales and marketing teams in China
My former owner is a large foreign SaaS platform. The product managers are all abroad, and they will not design products for the Chinese market alone. The iteration and debug speed of the products cannot meet the needs of domestic users at all.
My experience tells me that if you work in a telemarketing list foreign SaaS platform in China without a local product and R&D team, and without the autonomy of Chinese products, it is very difficult to achieve a high probability of product-driven growth locally. For example, Slack, Twillo, and Zoom will also have many domestic users, as well as domestic sales teams. The company headquarters is also a PLG model, but its business in China can only be a traditional marketing & sales model.
For small partners doing marketing on overseas B2B SaaS platforms, PLG can be used as a way of thinking to understand, but don’t rely on product optimization... Local marketing management still needs to focus on the “sales-marketing” relationship, and do a solid job In each campaign, the new data is improved, the funnel performance is optimized, and the user operation is focused and refined.
2. Overseas SaaS platform, with a complete product team in China
After all, the Chinese market has huge potential. Canva's products in China are completely separated from overseas versions. Wechat login, we also develop Wechat mini-programs, and the design templates are adapted to the needs of domestic social media. In theory, such companies have great opportunities. PLG can be practiced.
How Bad Design Drives Crazy Sales And why product-driven growth is a false proposition in China
▲Canva Chinese version
How Bad Design Drives Crazy Sales And why product-driven growth is a false proposition in China
▲Canva International Edition
However, the users of design tools, students, designers, etc., are very different from those of platforms with technical backgrounds, such as Github, PingCAP and other users. Faced with a more complex target group, unlocking their paying potential relies heavily on local sales and support teams.
In addition, the usage habits of domestic customers are also issues that must be considered. Atlassian's method of solving product usage questions through user communities and wikis is basically inapplicable in China. Domestic users do not like to read documents, and they are accustomed to directly asking support engineers or CSMs in WeChat groups when they encounter problems.
So not only