However, if you want them to give your self-service channel the time of day, you need to catch their attention first. It also gives you a blueprint on how you should be looking at your sales processes, in a way that gives prospects and buyers the flexibility to switch between channels based on their preferences and situational needs. It goes to show what weve known all along: the modern B2B buyer is accustomed to speed, convenience, and personalization. That's why segmenting your customers is critical for identifying how best to incorporate self-service. By continuing to browse, you are agreeing to our use of cookies as explained in our Cookie Policy. Oh, show me a SaaS founder who doesnt love self-service customers. No wonder B2B eCommerces growth has accelerated at an astonishing rate. While Dropbox competes in a different industry and on a different scale than the companies I mentioned, its able to take advantage of a self-serve model because it offers an intuitive product to a large existing user base.

So when people ask whether Atlassian has a large enough sales force or Dropbox can compete with traditional enterprise companies, theyre missing the point. Thats good and all. A more contemporary example is Atlassian. Remove tasks in onboarding that aren't helping customers achieve that one thing they need to solve.

Lets take Sparkle, a photo editing app. Segmenting your users by lifecycle stages allows you to engage them as the customer moves from one stage to another. Now you can drive your users toward this moment at each stage of onboarding. In other words, an assisted sale is a sales approach that prioritizes relationship-building with prospects and customers, engaging them in conversations that help identify and address their needs. The four steps to implement automated messaging include: For customers that are stuck, create emails that will help them remove friction, achieve early goals, and gently nudge. For customers that are active, send automated emails that help them make the most of advanced features, ask for feedback or reviews, or suggest annual billing. Create automated campaigns as users join each segment (see segmentation charts above). Today the vast majority of Dropboxs revenue comes from self-serve sales. Users want to be in control and, 40% of them are preferring self-service over human contact. But instead of engaging each potential customer one-on-one, youll, Self-service only works if the user knows how to sign up and subscribe by themselves. But what else can self-service do for you? to remind them or inform them about upgrades, bug fixes, advanced settings, or new releases. However, like any other sales model, it has its own downsides. How to Comply with GDPR as a SaaS Business, How a Leading SaaS Increased User Engagement with Beamer. Here are the elements you need to build a self-service sales process: The goal is to organize these disparate elements into one coherent strategy, and in a way that makes the entire experience both customer-centric and journey-centric. Use whatever strategies you've found works best (demos, interviews, etc.) An AI driven chatbot can handle the most basic support, while your human team can focus on the most difficult issues or explanations to customers, British comedian Dave Gorman has a thing for, strange FAQ pages filled with obviously infrequent questions. Self serve model if implemented right could create a huge competitive moat for the company. In this article, I will try to delve deeper into various aspects of self serve model such as when to use, risks and mitigation strategy, how to evaluate whether it is right for the business, how to launch, what to measure post launch, and what to do once the launch is successful. Then they run a series of experiments and measure how every change affects the performance of the self-service process, benchmarking it against the sales peoples performance. E.g. Client history loses all context. As weve established, you need both self-service and assisted sales to meet the modern B2B buyers needs. In other words, you need to rely on blog articles, email marketing, referrals, customer reviews, and testimonials if you want to move your B2B prospects through your sales funnel. For example, the goal for Trials is to activate them. Having an internal sales team can help you build a better self-service sales funnel. The world of B2B eCommerce is changing, and fast. Self-serve business access to individual users. When do things click for your users at each lifecycle stage? Here are some brainstorming questions: We highly recommend a book by Michele Hansen, Deploy Empathy, where she talks about interviewing customers. Mark Zuckerberg famously decided to hold off on introducing ads until Facebook became ubiquitous.

If you accurately segment your users based on their needs, a combination of self-serve and transactional sales can also be a great choice. Benefits of a Self-service Model for SaaS Growth, Self-service is a great option for new SaaS products, Forget about waiting times and closing hours, Get more value from your users and your team. Which features play a role in achieving early value? What primary goal does the user want to achieve using your product? The idea at the heart of self-serve is that customers help themselves to the products they want to purchase, rather than going through a salesperson. You're welcome to duplicate this spreadsheet and use it for your own tool research. You need an omnichannel strategy to capture and hold your audiences attention long enough to become paying customers. Creating synergy between self-service and sales-assisted can be challenging, but with a leading digital solution like 2Checkout (now Verifone), you can close that gap, leading to higher sales, happier customers, and increased revenue. Tens of millions of people were using Google for search every day when AdWords launched. A bug in their "product" (the onboarding/marketing/UI) that needs to be fixed. Adding disclaimers to alleviate concerns at certain steps? Implement a chatbot with automated replies for the typical support questions. You dont overcome their reservations and objections by giving them the hard sell. is the implementation of those tools at a larger scale to grow your SaaS spending fewer resources. As they grew so did AWS. Here are the typical segments for a free trial model: Heres the same journey map, but for the freemium model: Learn more in our guide on customer segmentation. Converting a part of your user base to self-serve can be hugely beneficial: it saves resources and helps you focus on high-value customers. While valuable for product development, it will grow unsustainable with time. Without a single place to capture feedback and data, insights get mixed up and get lost in the noise. People from assisted sales are not in the business of chasing leads. 1) An intuitive product capable of self-service, and 2) Enormous inbound demand.

Which of them require the most hand-holding? This can be Userlist or any other tool that allows for behavior-based messaging. Theyve even posted about the benefits of self-service: efficiency, money saving, and customers love the experience. Get access to our internal checklist which compares popular email automation platforms for SaaS, feature-by-feature. They find your product through word of mouth, inbound marketing or partnerships. Read part II of the article here. And even though he uses it for comedy, he makes a good point when he says that FAQ pages are supposed to say: A self-service model is a great way for SaaS to scale revenue and achieve exponential growth without the need of a huge team.

Self serve model serves the long tail of the market, more specifically small and micro-businesses (Business with < 10 employees) and also individual users. Pick an email automation tool. Finally, its important not to confuse a companys self-serve business model with its mission. Download our free printable worksheets to plan your success metrics, segments, and campaigns.

and keep your users engaged long enough to generate revenue: A good call to action should inform a user what will happen when they click and also entice them to do so. The golden opportunity for companies with a self-serve model is to increase the percentage of their business thats sold online, not decrease it. While you can capture leads using the above channels, your sales team has to close those leads to make them count. Not all users are tech-savvy. And you need to deliver a consistent experience for those touchpoints to count. If you want them to give your business the time of day, your B2B selling model should provide them the same level of ease and convenience a B2C storefront offers them. They then deploy their product team to come up with ways to fix this bug. Learn on the go with our new app. Today, half a billion people have a Dropbox account and can test for themselves how well it works.

To define your customer journeys, envision the lifecycle stages of your product. is fast response times. With Dropbox, it only takes a few clicks to start sharing your files or collaborating with colleagues. The idea is to wait before reaching out to PQL, so that they understand the value proposition of the product. We hope that the recommendations above will help you kick-start that process.

Lets call them NoSalesCorp. As CEO Drew Houston says, that means the company effectively has 500 million salespeople. Theyre in the business of coaching users. for Slack it was the famous 2,000 messages for the teams who are starting to use it. NoSalesCorp then measures how well their self-signups convert in comparison to users whove been contacted by a sales person, what the lifetime value of those customers is, how successful they are using the product, etc. In the self-service model, you still need to have a good product, attract potential customers, invest in targeted ads, and improve your marketing strategy. If its something that customers can do by themselves without any human assistance then its self-service. Both channels become an echo chamber, pushing leads across the threshold back and forth based on loose criteria, not on clear distinctions that reflect their changing needs. What Is User Onboarding? First, you need a product thats easy enough for anyone to use and buy on their own. To be more specific, a self-service sales model allows buyers to start, end, upgrade, downgrade, and modify their subscription any time, depending on their limitations and situational needs. The Ultimate Guide for SaaS Companies, SaaS Email Marketing: 16 Strategies for Success (with Examples), 7 High-Converting Email Templates for Every SaaS. Which features clearly correlate with enterprise sales? Self-serve is the holy grail of efficient business models. Easier said than done. That said, if history is any guide, self-serve is the prototype sales model to strive for. Which means focus on removing any friction in the path to monetization. The most flexible digital commerce platform that can give your business a real boost. At scale you will have to rely on well-timed, automated interactions to ensure smooth customer onboarding.

Paul Kogan gives good advice in this podcast episode: Similarly, Christopher Gimmer of Snappa told us how providing better resources in the form of templates has created a better experience for their customers. Where can they remove friction from the activation flow? You need a Commerce automation tool to knock down that wall. Evaluating customers based on features is often a good way to start. E.g.

Create video explainers or demonstrations about how to use the product. If you want to connect with the modern B2B buyer, the right eCommerce strategy is just the thing to put you ahead of the competition. We use cookies to ensure your consistent experience on this website. It will be difficult for competitors to change habits of individual users without significantly changing the playfield, d) Word of mouth: WOM of sales people in small and micro business and their network help widen the reach among other similar customer base and thus gain scale, e) Higher stickiness and higher barrier to entry: Economies of scale will create a significant competitive advantage as more and more such small and micro businesses onboard the platform strengthening the barrier to entry, f) Growth mindset: Orient the whole company around a growth mindset and strategically orient them around failing fast and iterating, g) Network effect: More specifically a data network effect: As more users use the platform, they generate data that strengthen the recommendation engine around what techniques work better that can be used by others, a) Wide top of funnel: Allows to reach wider customer base in SOHO and Small businesses who are tech savvy and do not want to engage with sales people, b) Non-linear scale: Scales non-linearly unlike transactional model or enterprise model that relies on sales reps to scale, c) Diversifies business model: Reducing dependency on few big key clients. How can they better educate and sell users on the product? Having a clear call to action to upgrade once your users want to access certain premium features. But while eCommerce is fast becoming the preferred sales channel for B2B consumers, many businesses still find themselves struggling to keep their B2B leads from falling through the cracks. Its less intrusive, as it gives users the autonomy to explore, learn and solve their problems at their own pace. This is where leads usually fall through the cracks. On that aspect self serve model helps create a frictionless and low touch model for users to self sign up and start playing with the product either freemium or free trial or small value account. There a very successful SaaS company that proudly proclaims they dont have sales people. So even without the help of salespeople, Google could reach millions of potential customers instantly. Educate your customers to help them solve that one problem they are coming to solve. Neither Facebook nor Googles mission mentions ads, and similarly Dropboxs mission omits software subscriptions. Self-serve is what pays the bills and gives these companies the freedom to invest in the innovation and big bets that can advance their value proposition. And you can count on them to do a ton of research before they reach the point of purchase. Will this purchase sour my relationship with my colleagues and shareholders? Product qualified lead friction should however match to ensure by the time sales reach out to PQLs, Perceived value of upgraded account > Perceived price + Friction, This is where it is important for growth product managers to evaluate the friction in the self serve model to ensure users are able to achieve their objective with the product. Use them to follow the best practices and overcome "analysis paralysis.". Simply measuring the performance of your self-service signups versus those that signed up through a high-touch sales process will provide you with valuable insights on how to optimize various parts of your self-service model. A self-service model provides any SaaS with a larger funnel or a wider net to cast. Because it requires two key ingredients that are hard to find in combination. But if you dont bridge the gap between these two channels, your leads will end up stuck in the Lead Purgatory..

Plain and simple. If you ever need help, welcome to join a demo call and we can brainstorm your challenges together. That translates as a. has been a verb for some time now. Each lifecycle segment typically has its own "conversion goal" and a related email campaign that triggers when the user joins that segment. These need not be complex. c) Act as an economic acquisition strategy if embedding in the product is done right as Calendly does. Ask them if they want to learn more and show them what else they can do with your product. In a business landscape that grows increasingly complex by the day, you need both to create exceptional and personalized customer experiences.

It's the same exact thing a customer success manager would do, but powered by behavior data and email automation. I enjoy writing on growth and monetization. Before buying, they will scour different channels to find solutions that will address their needs and challenges. (there are plenty of tools that can help you with that) will help you take any lead from trial to purchase or upgrade without a single call, meeting, or email. We always recommend to start with a minimal tracking plan. Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Empowered users love the aspect of being able to explore a product before converting to either a paying user or upgrading to premium account. Having a self-service channel is great, but that doesnt mean you dont need a sales team. Oana Trif, Director of Product, Global eCommerce at Verifone, sums up perfectly how a CPQ solution can improve the B2B client experience and the sales process. The best way to do that is to use a self-service eCommerce platform on your website. You wont need a huge sales team and a skeleton crew will look like an army because automated processes can live without people. Self serve model has been a major source of customer acquisition. What are the steps on their way to success? Do they need to tweak something in the user interface, e.g. This breaks down the wall between the two channels, facilitating a smoother flow between them and creating the B2B Sales Infinity Loop.. Similarly with Facebook, businesses only need 15 minutes to create ads that will potentially reach billions of users and take advantage of the social networks sophisticated targeting. A classic user onboarding campaign checks in on different feature metrics, and offers help if that metric equals 0. Is there a specific aha moment when the user feels the value received? But not impossible.

While your tech stack may already involve using CRM or digital commerce solutions, a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution can be the final piece that bridges your sales process synergy. Earlier this summer, Snap became the latest to get in the game when it launched a self-serve ad manager. Senior Business Development Lead Seerat Bilal Bhat on Meeshos foolproof algorithm for and his, Meet Stori: Mexicos Credit Card for the Masses, How Heal uses Health Gorilla to Streamline Medical Record Retrieval and Deliver Remote Care, H.E. We contribute 1% ofall revenue toStripeClimate to remove CO from the atmosphere. The goal of a sales-service model is to create a self-service flow, which empowers B2B buyers to solve issues on their own without direct help from your company. As you dont need to focus on each potential client individually you can spend your time improving your.

Keep reading to find out. McKinsey reports that 75% of B2B buyers prefer to purchase online instead of buying directly from a salesperson.

Forward the responses to your customer support inbox, so that you remain in touch with customers who need help. B2B self-service is nothing new. Accept mobile and online payments from buyers worldwide, Subscription management solution to maximize recurring revenue, Full commerce solution built for digital goods sales, Additional services to boost online sales, 73% of B2B decision-makers are Millennials, 75% of B2B buyers prefer to purchase online, email (50%) is the B2B sales channel that produces the highest ROI, How to Use Cold Outreach to Generate More B2B SaaS Leads in 2022, The 9 Most Common B2B eCommerce Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, The Future of B2B eCommerce: Trends and Statistics, A frictionless entry point (free-trial, freemium, etc. And thats without outside helpunless they want it. Theres a nearly infinite number of things they can do to "fix the bug", among them: This isnt even beginning to scratch the surface of whats possible.

There have been moments when I was having a few drinks with some friends and someone asked a question that nobody could answer. Which features are being used by your highest-paying customers? In other words, it helps both departments to collaborate seamlessly, streamlining internal operations and allowing them both to gather, aggregate, and categorize feedback and usage data accordingly.