Why you need to improve your support documentation for product-led growth

Product-led growth is the new industry buzzword for SaaS companies. We are seeing more and more companies changing their marketing strategy to be more product led. Even a company like Hubspot, who made their name as a successful in-bound marketing company, has doubled-down on product-led growth. So, what does this have to do with documentation? And why do you need to make sure your documentation is on-point in order to succeed as a product-led company?

To understand the difference between product-led and sales-led growth, you need a conceptual shift from thinking about company success in terms of revenue to thinking about your customers’ success as your success. The idea is that you offer your customers something for free and deliver such excellence that they want to pay to upgrade. This is about widening the top of your marketing funnel to capture anyone with curiosity, then letting them decide if they want to convert into a customer. No more pushy sales messages, no more endless churning out of inbound marketing content, you let the product do the talking.

In the past, a great salesperson could sell you a product that didn’t even exist, but the climate has changed; the average consumer is much more well-informed, and competition has increased to a degree that it becomes impossible to differentiate one marketing message from the others. Consumers want to try for themselves rather than taking the company’s word for it.

This is good news if you have a great product, but if you don’t it means you start pouring profits into improving your product rather than growing your sales team.

First impressions count for a lot and the first interaction your user has with your product has to be flawless if you want to keep them as a customer. If you think that by offering a freemium service, users will take into account they are getting it for nothing and be forgiving of its flaws, you are wrong. Whether they are paying for it or not, your user has chosen you rather than the multitude of competitors they could have chosen from and is taking the time to experience what you have to offer. If they are not satisfied, it means they have to go back to doing their research and spend time on another learning curve to get to know a competitor. They’ll blame YOU for that lost time (and won’t be back).

Users who have a great onboarding experience will happily sign up and even pay more than the market rate if it means they don‘t have to go and try more products. Everyone is short on time and they WANT your product to solve their problem. They are literally yours for the taking, all you have to do is deliver what they need.

That means your onboarding process needs to be easy, intuitive and effective - in helping them to solve their problem or showing them how they would do it in the future. If there is too much friction in your onboarding, you should focus on removing that friction as much as you can. Every dollar spent on improving your onboarding experience means less CAC (customer acquisition cost) dollars.

If you have a complex product which is not so easy to pick-up-and-play, you need to make sure your user documentation is robust and easy-to-find. Users trying your product don’t want a demo session to find out how to use it. Most users won’t be put off by a complex product if they can see that it is going to solve their problem, but they do need to be able to find out how to use it, either with an easily-searchable knowledge base or FAQs section, or clear and precise user guides. Modern consumers prefer the “show” rather than “tell” method and are happy to self-instruct so long as the information is at-hand.

Find out how I can help you improve your support documentation and create a roadmap for product-led growth.

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FAQs

There may be a temptation to overstock your FAQs section with every single fringe user-case scenario you can think of. This will only make it harder for 95% of your users to find what they are looking for. FAQs are frequently-asked questions and “frequently” is there for a reason. Don’t include everything you’ve been asked ever.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of filling it with FAQs you want your customers to ask. They probably don’t think about your product the way you do and turning it into an area for self-promotion will quickly render it ineffective and useless.

Keep your FAQs lean, focused and well labelled and keep track of new questions coming in so that you can update and improve it constantly.

Knowledge Base

Your knowledge base is a full resource of how everything works in your product. In the knowledge base, you can go into more detail on how a feature or functionality works, whereas an FAQ might just be focused on addressing a specific usage.

Your knowledge base will be much more information-rich so you need a good way to order it. Order the content into categories, thinking of the way that makes the most sense to the user (not to you).

User Guides

User guides can be great to lead the user through processes or ways to use your product. This might be to help you get a user set up with a new account, add users or change roles and permissions. User guides can be housed in a central resource where users can easily access them online or download them to help them through.

User guides can also take the form of contextual help within the interface. Nowadays there are many tools with can be embedded, guiding the user through an onboarding or other integral process in your app without them having to leave the interface.

Making sure support is always easy to access makes it much less likely a customer will abandon your product.

Whichever support method you use, make sure it makes sense for your particular product and user. If you can crack the code of product-led growth and create a solution that sells itself, you can incease revenue while actually investing less in sales and build a model for long-term, sustainable growth.