Selling to self-service customers

Introducing Sales Assist (Part 1/2)

When a user signs up for your product through a PLG motion, that means they’ve been convinced enough by your proposition that they are willing to give you their email address in order to give the product a try. 

It is important to realize that this is by no means the same as someone who requests a demo and expects to have a call with a sales rep. That is not what these people are expecting. 

There is a large and growing segment of customers in the market who want to do their own research before they decide to talk with somebody. 

Since the rise of the internet, customers have been much more empowered to do their own research on anything they are considering buying. PLG enables the next step of this trend, where they can actually explore the product by themselves to make sure it meets their requirements. 

This changes the role of a sales person. If you go in hard with a sales pitch to a customer who’s going through this process, you have a good chance of being ignored or scaring them off. 

These new users are in the process of getting to know your product, so the best thing you can do is to offer them guidance and help them get to value as effectively as possible.  

The Sales Assist function

This is why many people who are in a Sales Assist role have a title like “onboarding specialist” or “success coaches”. 

The trigger for Sales Assist to come into action is typically when a new user (or account) becomes a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). At this point, they should have either shown enough commitment or received enough value from the product, that enough of this segment would be open to a conversation. 

There is no standard definition of PQLs – this is highly specific to your product and process. For example, for the Leadfeeder product we offer at Dealfront, this is when someone has integrated with their website. At a company like Calendly, it might be when a certain number of users of one company have an account. 

Once Sales Assist gets in touch with the customer, the entire conversation is focused around helping them to progress on the user journey. 

This could mean helping them to get things configured, showing them how value is created, explaining common use cases or helping them onboard further team members. 

It can also mean helping them navigate their own organization to get budget approval or to get an invoice paid. Sales assist reps can in some cases also make better offers than the default offer that the product displays, although this should not be seen as their primary goal. 

In some companies the self-service buying motion can be deactivated for an account once the user has engaged with the sales assist rep. This is to provide more control over the buying experience of the customer and to provide the possibility for custom offers.

Regardless of the tactics used, the general aim across all interactions is to help the customer progress in what they are trying to do, which is a very different experience from traditional sales.

Balancing between self-service and sales assist

The value of sales assist is in essence to increase the conversion rate of the available product experience. 

Long before PLG was the talk of town there was research out there on the topic of sales assisted conversion. For example, in 2019 Tomasz Tunguz presented the Redpoint Free Trial Survey touched on the potential impact of sales assist. 

Out of 600 companies who submitted their data in the survey, they found that companies with a free trial with unassisted conversion, the median conversion of lead to paying customer was 4%.

For companies that involved a sales person in their free trial process, the median conversion rate to paying customer was 15%. That’s almost a 4x increase in conversion rate.

While that’s a steep increase, that doesn’t mean that sales assist is the right approach for every company. If it makes sense and how to best go about it depends on the volume, the conversion rates, and the increased value of talking with the customer. 

If you are selling a scheduling product at $10/month per user then getting on a call with every single user will be too expensive, whereas if you are selling a $300/month solution then it might actually pay off.

Segmenting for value potential

This is where customer segmentation comes in. There might be subgroups of your customers where sales assist generates a good return on investment. 

The most common example of this is when companies set a user threshold at account level in their PQL definition. This happens a lot in cases where the price per user is low as the example mentioned above.

What this means in practice is that regardless of the firmographic characteristics of the company, like size, industry and revenue, they look at the engagement in the product, in this case the number of engaged users, to assess the potential value of a customer. 

This is common with bottom up models, where any user can start using the product on their own initiative. In these cases, initial activation of one user is not enough to engage the sales assist team. This might just be someone without decision-maker buy-in who is giving the product a go. 

Companies with this type of model want to make sure that there is proof of further momentum in the company before sales assist engages, else the conversion metrics won’t support a healthy operation.

There are also other ways of segmenting customers for sales assist. A company could for example apply their ICP definition and decide to only reach out pro-actively to companies that fit this profile. 

And there are also companies that for certain segments of customers won’t even look at the engagement in the solution, but will just reach out. If it’s a high value customer segment, then this could make sense.

We did this at FunnelFox for example, where a PQL was a company that connected their email and CRM. When companies with more than 1000 employees would sign up, we knew that they would typically have permission restrictions. But we’d reach out anyway. Because even if only a few converted, those contracts were higher value.

It should be noted that the above example only works if you know that you can close some of those deals. In the end it all depends on if you can make the numbers work for you.

One final thing that’s important to note is that in sales assist, even if the sales team doesn’t reach out to a customer, the product-led experience would enable them to buy by themselves anyway. 

The interaction is therefore optional, only if the customer wants to engage. A relevant portion of your audience will not and some of them will still buy.

What’s next

Next week in the second part on Sales Assist, I’ll go more into detail on finding the right timing to engage sales as well as some pointers on how to assess the ROI of such an approach. See you then!