If you are a marketer in a product-led business, you HAVE to be a product-led marketer. In the SaaS industry, there are two popular models: enterprise-level price points with a sales-led approach to marketing and...a product-led approach.  Enterprise doesn’t need as much volume, but you need to account for a long sales cycle and the responsibility of closing deals will fall almost exclusively on the sales team.  Product-led growth is more about volume and one-to-many. It lets people interact with the product before buying in a freemium or limited-time, free trial format. In product marketing, your marketing -- and the product itself -- will also bear the brunt of the work when it comes to new customer acquisition. “With many SaaS companies, marketing is built into the product -- that’s what product marketing is.” With 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. “Say, my 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.” 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.” This can present a problem for SaaS marketers because most are focused on monitoring the content marketing funnel. Instead, product-led marketers track how people use their products. Derek Skaletsky, founder at Sherlo To help SaaS companies master a product-led growth strategy that turns more leads into customers, I recently talked to Derek Skaletsky, Founder of Sherlock, a product engagement scoring solution that helps SaaS businesses track utilization.  Here are just five valuable tips that came out of our conversation about product-led growth in the SaaS industry. 1. Know where you are as a company Before getting into a product marketing strategy, remember not to think of all SaaS companies as the same. There’s a difference between go-to-market and the other steps along the line. And each one requires a different approach to growth marketing. So, start by evaluating what your goals are as a company and team before building a strategy or collecting data that will help you reach them. 2. Leverage data in all aspects of marketing The next generation of technology and product-led growth marketers will be even more comfortable with cloud-based software, marketing and PR enablement technology.  They’ll be dependent on data -- not just to make decisions, but to also drive messaging.  “Cloud-only companies in the SaaS industry are actually still a small percentage. I think it will go more in that direction to the point that, in the next 5-10 year it will be majority SaaS -- but I don’t think it will (or should) ever be 100%.” 3. Create a strategy and environment that’s nimble Effective product-led growth also means that marketers should continually be more aggressive and flexible. “Changing a website used to be something you did once every 3 years. Now,