In last week’s edition I covered the foundation of how to sell to self-service customers with a sales assisted motion. This week I’ll expand on that with some more insights on how to decide when this team should get activated and how to evaluate the performance.
Driving the right behavior
In essence the main goal of the sales assist role is to make sure the customer gets as much value as possible during the initial setup phase of the product.
Depending on your business this can for example mean that the sales assist rep helps with the initial onboarding to get the account set up the right way. Especially if the setup is complex by nature, like due to regulation, then having this option can make a difference.
It could however also mean that the rep shares best practices on how to get value from the product. For example by explaining how customers typically set it up, or by getting the right notifications or integrations activated to make sure the product integrates well into the customer’s day to day.
Or sales assist can mean to help in getting the rest of the team onboarded or get the information to the finance team for payment, if these are important predictors for a conversion to paid.
But as you see from these examples, the sales assist role helps in using the product and drives metrics like activation, engagement and adoption.
The aim of a sales assist motion, like with any PLG motion, is to do a high velocity sale. That means the rep typically does not introduce different offers, as it would confuse the customer with. The focus is on converting the customer on the use-case at hand.
Determining the right time to assist
Once you’ve decided which customer segment you want your sales team to reach out to, the next question is how to pick a trigger.
This can for example be certain progress in the account setup. At FunnelFox, a sales tech company I used to run, we focused sales assist on those customers that have gone through the effort of connecting their CRM and email account.
This tells us that they have reached a certain level of commitment in trying out our solution and in addition it means we are now collecting live data for this customer, so we can show actual value when engaging in a conversation.
Setting up these integrations was the first step people needed to take when setting up their account and it could be done within minutes. But it’s at the same time a relatively big step that requires trust, so it proved to be a good segmentation event.
We did investigate if it was worthwhile reaching out sooner, to help people to get connected. But the numbers didn’t add up because those users who didn’t trust us enough to connect their CRM, also weren’t convinced enough to get on a call. So conversion of those outreaches was much lower and did not provide a positive Return on Investment.
So when you pick your trigger event, it’s important to look at the conversion rate of the sales engagement at that stage of the funnel.
If the conversion at the trigger moment you picked is not high enough, there are two things you can do to influence this:
1) Choose a moment further down the customer journey where you have hopefully filtered out more of the uncommitted customers
2) Invest in the product experience leading from the previous trigger moment to the newly defined moment, to maximize the number of people that make it to this point.
Be on the lookout for changes
As with everything in your go-to-market funnel, you’ll need to keep looking at how the numbers hold up over time. Sales assist is a catalyst for the product-led journey but it will not replace the product journey.
With one of the companies I’ve been involved in, we went through a period where many product changes were made at the same time. Through all this change we unintentionally broke the product-led onboarding experience.
For a brief period of time, we suddenly weren’t able to get people on calls anymore. Even while we were still getting the same leads in and had the same sales assist team in place.
This is a testament to the unique state of mind a user who signed up for a free trial is in. If the product doesn’t deliver to the expectation, then there is not enough trust or interest to take the call with a sales person or an onboarding specialist. They will disengage and look for another solution.
When you are deploying sales assist in your customer journey, also make sure to look at the metrics per customer segment. Different regions or different customer segments might respond differently to the sales assist role and these numbers can develop in different directions.
While your average conversion might look ok, it could be that your conversion in the USA went up whereas the one in Europe went down. Make sure you have enough detail in your reporting to identify this.
Evaluate Return on Investment
Most importantly though is to keep an eye on the Return on Investment of sales assist. It can be an expensive endeavor if not done right.
If you know the conversion rate of the product-led experience without sales assist, then the formula to calculate the ROI is rather straightforward:
You take the additional number of deals a sales assist repo brings in and multiply this by the ACV. Then compare this number with the cost of the required sales reps and your expected OTE multiple in revenue to see if this is a healthy motion for the business.
For example:
If you unassisted conversion rate is 5% and with sales assist it’s 15%, then if you normally close 10 deals per month, then that becomes 30, so 20 additional deals per month or 240 per year.
Let’s say your ACV is $3,000. That means you are making 240 x $3,000 = $720,000 in additional revenue per year.
Now let’s say a sales assist rep in your company can close 5 deals per month. That means you’ll need 4 people as sales assist to close those 20 deals. And for easy calculation let’s say annually those reps are on $100,000 OTE (base compensation + variable). So in total the cost for the sales assist team is $400,000.
In this scenario a sales assist rep is returning 1.8x OTE. Most companies are aiming for at least 4, 5 or 6 times OTE when deploying traditional sales but the industry standard for Product-Led Sales hasn’t really been defined yet and there’s strong indicators that a lower OTE to revenue ratio would be acceptable.
The decision if your company would want to pursue sales assist in this case is subjective. It depends if 1.8x OTE is considered enough. But what’s most important is that this information is available and considered.
Sales assist can quickly get expensive, so again, keep segmentation in mind and keep your eye on the numbers.
Small changes to this formula can make a big difference. For example, if your ACV is $6,500 instead of $3,000 and leave everything else the same, then you are suddenly doing close to 4x OTE.
Or if a sales assist rep can close 10 deals per month, then you only need 2 reps and with that you are close to 4x OTE again.
The examples above are only a very rough calculation it’ll give you a good sense of if sales assist is worth pursuing and if so, for which customer segments it actually makes sense.
I’ve also created a Google Sheet where you can play around with these numbers for your specific situation.
What’s next…
Next week I’ll go into more detail on how to identify the best part of the customer journey to start doing PLG. I’ll cover the underlying principles and will provide you with a tool to find out the best place to start for your company specifically.