How mature product-led companies balance 1:1 sales and self-service motions
Don't shift the same dollars from your product-led motion to your sales-led (or vice versa).
Product-led growth is going through an interesting period right now.
On one hand, it feels like we’re in peak PLG mania. And with the tech world slowing down in 2023/2024, SaaS companies are more focused on margins and profitability than in the past during the “customer acquisition at all cost” years.
PLG has been viewed as the “holy grail” for achieving efficient growth, so it makes sense it’s so popular right now.
On the other hand, there’s never been more confusion about what PLG is. What it isn’t. What it looks like in the wild. Who’s doing it well. And how to do it while balancing your sales-led and self-service motions.
Why most SaaS companies need a hybrid motion
The dream state of product-led growth looks like a touchless ecommerce experience.
Someone visits your website. Signs up for your product offer (freemium or free trial). Hopefully they use it in a meaningful way and get some value (which we typically call activation). They pull out their credit card and purchase a paid plan. Then upgrade between plans, or expand their usage over time.
This is the dream state that every product-led company is chasing.
I got to see this first-hand during my time at Wistia. They were early to the freemium movement and by the time I joined in 2015, they had an impressive product-led business:
Hundreds of thousands of free accounts
Tens of thousands of paying customers
Zero sales reps
It was an incredible high-volume business. And as a marketer coming from a traditional inside sales-led environment, I fell in love with the model.
At the time, I thought touchless sales was the future of SaaS and this company was proof that it scaled.
But something interesting was happening…
People were raising their hands asking for help. They were writing in to customer success (because that was the only place they could contact Wistia in a 1:1 way).
But they weren’t asking for help troubleshooting something technical or reporting bugs.
They were asking about how some parts of the tool worked. If it worked for unusual use cases. They wanted to understand how integrations might help them accomplish their business goals. Some even specifically asked if they could speak with someone from the sales team.
It was fascinating! And for a company that cared deeply about helping users - it felt like we needed a sales team to help more of them.
But we weren’t sure how to be a self-service business with a sales team.
We knew we didn’t want to send every signup to a sales team, but we weren’t sure how to identify who we should send to sales - and when during their product journey.
And the real challenge was learning to grow total revenue, without just shifting the same dollars (or conversions) from your product-led funnel to your sales-led (or vice versa).
Those were the things that led me down this journey.
What it looks like to integrate your sales-experience with self-service
And since then, I’ve learned that most of the large/mature product-led SaaS companies aren’t 100% self-service. They’re running this “hybrid model.”
Here’s how it works in action.
First let’s look at the traditional sales-led experience.
This is a simplified version of the playbook we ran at HubSpot when I worked there from 2011 - 2014.
A person visits your website. Signs up for your sales-led offer (Demo Request, Price Quote, Get in Touch form, etc). There’s some qualification (on the marketing/sales side). Then some 1:1 interaction. Hopefully a 1:1 purchase. And later, a 1:1 upgrade experience.
Now let’s look at a 100% touchless, self-service experience
This is a simplified version of the playbook we ran at Wistia when I first joined and there were no sales reps.
A person visits your website. Signs up for the product offer (in this case - a free plan, but for others it can be free trial, or reverse free trial). There’s an activation journey that happens helping folks receive value. User can then choose to either keep using the product for free or purchase a paid plan. And hopefully a purchase / upgrade today, or later.
When we combine sales-led with self-service the experience looks like this:
Users can still self-select into a traditional 1:1 sales experience (🟨) if they choose. Or if they prefer to explore the product on their own, they can still sign-up for the self-service experience (🟦).
But there are 3 really interesting moments where we can integrate the two experiences. IE, users can start in the self-service experience and then have a sales assisted experience based on their:
Segment (ie things you can identify about them during the signup process)
Preferences (hand raisers/ people who prefer to interact with your sales team)
In-product behavior - PQLs (based on usage and/ or feature engagement)
When you do this correctly, the user has control over a lot of control of their experience (and how they engage with your team). But you do enhance that experience with 1:1 interactions for certain users/accounts that might need it - or find it valuable.
If you do this correctly, your 1:1 sales team should account for around 20% of your net new customers in a given month, with the other 80% coming from your self-service engine.
They key is to get your sales-team focused on converting the high value accounts that contribute a lot of future revenue.
This is a great overview for how to run the hybrid motion. But if you want to hear more, I recently gave a Masterclass to the ClubPM audience on this exact topic where I share lots more context, examples, and get into the role of segmentation to break through conversion plateaus.
You can watch it here 👇
Or, if you’re a product-led company looking for help creating a high-converting system like this, let’s chat! I currently have 1 product-led advising spot available (as of March 20th).
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