Not "OR". ??♀? *And*. ? Close more deals with PLG *and* SLG.

Hey folks!

My new brain crush - Dee Kapila from Miro - has recently articulated her thoughts (and exactly my thoughts, btw) on this artificial PLG vs SLG divide in Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged so well, I just want to print it out and send it to whoever still uses this short-sighted “PLG vs SLG” beef to…mainly peddle their courses & further alienate sales from product and CS teams…while we should be doing the exact opposite. Just STOP, you PLG folks, you. Recognise that your customers don’t care how you label yourself - and that you need to rally your product, product marketing, sales, CS/CX teams together around this one goal - getting ALL users on the happy path & and providing a seamless buying experience - regardless if it’s self-serve or sales-assisted:

We need to focus on providing a great experience and a proof of concept in an economically-feasible way regardless of the prospects ACV -? and making the free + self-serve motions co-exist peacefully, leading to more deals, without “cannibalizing” sales. If Amplitude has made it work - and they have a strong enterprise customer base - so can you. But here’s what we need to acknowledge, and then - address:?

• Your prospects don’t care (nor understand) whether you’re “sales led” or “product led”. They all want a seamless experience with buying and implementing your product though - they want to understand exactly how your product will solve their problem/meet their needs - and have some proof of concept to show their managers before committing their $$$$ (especially in this climate - see Jason Lemkin's recent "Is SaaS?dead?" newsletter ).

• You can’t provide 1:1 sales experience to deals < $3000 ACV. The math doesn’t work out. If you don’t want to miss out on all these companies though - that may also grow over time and become your premium/enterprise plan customers later on through your expansion efforts - you need to plan for a “scaled” buying and customer experience. This includes freemium/free trial with self serve checkout for the lower plans (or even higher plans, for those folks that are allergic to talking to sales). But to have a good trial-to-paid self-serve conversion rates - you need to translate the white-glove sales, sales engineering and CS experience into digital experience - with trial onboarding mimicking your POC process to create a “a self-serve POC” - through automated onboarding, mutual action plans, in-app help resources, and one-to-many troubleshooting sessions with the CS/SEs.

• As I wrote in my recent post on LinkedIn - the most frustrating aspect of any buyer’s journey is the uncertainty - what the tool can do to help you achieve what you need to achieve, how are you supposed to find that out, and how long it will take. Most sales processes, as well as the free trial processes - fail to deliver on those answers. It doesn't matter whether they are PLG or SLG!? They don’t actually provide the answers people need to be able to make their buying decision - “Will this tool solve my problem? Is it worth investing in?”. Most of my sales experience has been a) some discovery + demo. b) that’s it! Get into the free trial and have fun! c) me not having the time and/or urgency to figure it out, and the in-app experience not being helpful enough for me to figure it out quickly. I drop off the wagon without actually achieving my goals, having wasted some of mine and the sales people’s time…

?

But to be fair - let me state the obvious -? it's not the buyer's responsibility to sell the product to themselves. If they are getting ghosted by the sales team and nobody's helping them achieve their goals in the sales process - because the customer success teams are only involved post-sale and sales engineers are rare, expensive, and available only to the largest companies - and there's no "PLG version of the sales engineer" - them dropping out of the buyer's journey is a fair game.?

Here's how to change the status quo - and close more deals from self-serve and sales-led motions:?

1. Rally your sales, product, product marketing, rev ops and CS/CX teams around mapping all the touchpoints in the user journey:?

I know it sounds overwhelming. So for starters - begin with all the touchpoints leading up to activation - at whichever point your users actually experience the ROI of the product.?

2. Make a clear plan for how both your sales and self-serve trial motion are going to assist your users in reaching the "Proof of Concept".?

The "mutual action plan" should include clear timelines and objectives:

• The questions your AEs need to ask to coax the goals and the result from your prospects
• What actions are required for the outcome to be achieved - from both the prospect and your team;?
• A clear timeline for what needs to happen when?

Then - involve your product, product marketing & CX/CS teams in automating this experience for the self-serve segment:

- The questions can be asked via an in-app survey:

- Depending on the answer, you should trigger different automated onboarding experiences leading them to the ROI point:

? - Make sure you track whether your self-serve users are hitting the milestones as per the "action plan" - you can easily create a custom dashboard with Userpilot that will track all the metrics:?

- if not, put them in the "slipping away" segment and invite them to a e.g. one-to-many troubleshooting session/ office hours:?

- make sure you've got plenty in-app education and help resources?such as interactive Resource Center:

What if your self-serve cannibalizes sales????

I got this question from one of our AEs recently: "Can we somehow hide the trial for our larger prospects? Some of them don't want to do the POC because they say they've already checked out the trial".?

This is why you need your self-serve POC to be as good as your sales-led one and make sure your pricing is fair - aka you don't charge your customers that went through the sales process?more?for the same level of service and usage (e.g. number of events, MAUs) as the ones in the self-serve motion.

Conversely - you can let sales incentivize taking part in the POC by offering a better deal than what you have in the self-serve - like what Amplitude did!?

Hope this has given you some food for thought - and as a gentle reminder - Userpilot is an all-in-one platform that offers both the analytics, in-app surveys, code-free onboarding / engagement builder and a resource center with self-serve help resources - everything you need to marry your PLG & SLG motions.

And we have a mutual action plan & a POC process so you can get most out of your trial & demo ! ??

See you soon!?