Who Gets the Credit in PLG: Self-Service or Sales?
It’s never a good sign when you’re spending too much time arguing over who should get “credit” for an outcome.
But for companies navigating the path of a hybrid “sales-assisted” and “product led growth” business model, these discussions are often unavoidable.
I’ve seen firsthand how friction between these two motions can turn into a massive distraction for businesses. I’ve also learned that if you’re willing to do the work, the outcome of solving this problem will create more focused and productive teams.
Before you start, you need to eliminate the ego factor.
When you’re trying to resolve conflict between a self-service and sales-assisted motion, it’s understandable that ego will play a factor.
After all, the overall outcome of these discussions will be to assign different value to each channel and invest accordingly. But if you’re not able to get your team to let go of their egos and put the success of the company before their individual teams, you’ll never make any progress.
Here are some examples of the type of situations where the “ego factor” can show up:
A Sales leader doesn’t want to accept that some of the deals her team is getting credit for would have likely closed via self-service without sales engagement
A Marketing leader celebrates the success of an experiment or campaign his team is spearheading as a win for the self-service motion, despite the fact that a large chunk of the revenue campaign came from accounts owned by sales
A Product leader doesn’t accept that a recent big customer wouldn’t have bought if a sales person didn’t help them overcome friction in your app
All of these scenarios can be valid. And on the majority of teams, good leaders will buy in without much conflict. But if you don’t have confidence that your team can get there, nothing else you do will have an impact. And that’s when you’ll need to step in to overcome these types of distractions in the process.
Accept that it’s going to be messy.
An important step in ensuring these discussions are successful is to first accept that the process of aligning your product-led business model with a sales-assisted motion is going to be messy.
There will always be overlap between your different motions. And the answer to how much credit should go to one channel vs the other isn’t always cut and dry.
The goal of this exercise is to put a structure in place to navigate the messiness and evaluate the overall performance of the business. Not to reach some unattainable state of perfection.
Define your ICP and understand how they buy.
Depending on what stage you’re at, you likely already have some version of an “Ideal Customer Profile.”
An important next step in making that ICP actionable is to also spend some time to understand how customers within your ICP actually evaluate and buy products.
If the answer to this exercise is: our ICP doesn’t want to talk to sales and they buy entirely through self-service motion or our ICP is too advanced and needs to go through a hands-on sales process, then you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time. And can plan to go all in on one motion or the other. (Thanks for reading!)
But the more common outcome will be that buyers within your ICP will buy through different channels, depending on a number of factors.
There are two models that I see most often:
The “Individual > Teams > Enterprise” Model
In this model, a product will offer a core set of functionality geared toward individual end users and a more robust set of features for teams or organizations.
An example of this may be a design product that gets adopted by individuals on a marketing team and an enterprise version of the product that lets those individuals collaborate more effectively at scale.
In this model, the individuals won’t need sales engagement to buy the product, and will prefer to try and buy on their own. The role of sales will be to run more of an upsell motion once these users are onboard, likely targeting a more senior buyer in the organization to sell them on the value of the enterprise solution.
The “Crawl, Walk, Run” Model
In this model, rather than breaking your ICP down by roles, you look at your ICP by their different stages of growth. For example, you may have a product where your perfect ICP customer is doing $10M+ in revenue with a more sizable budget.
But in order to reach those $10M+ revenue companies, you need to engage them when they are earlier in their growth. This is especially important in a highly competitive market, where other competitors may offer a free plan to get customers into their funnel and then have a sales motion geared at converting those customers to higher ASP plans when they reach scale months or even years down the road.
Sales won’t have a role in converting the buyers that are in the crawl or even walk stage. But for customers that are ready to run and invest in your platform, sales will be the most effective source for winning these customers.
Align your motions to your buyers.
Now that you’ve done the work to understand who your ICP is and how they buy, you can now align your different motions to the types of buyers you are targeting.
The key here is to understand the attributes that would make a buyer a better fit for each motion.
If you’re following a “crawl, walk, run” motion, where you onboard smaller organizations in hopes that they will expand their usage as their business grows, then the exercise of aligning your buyers to your motion will be much more straightforward.
Here’s an example of how this might look:
Self-Service
Companies doing $0-$1M revenue
1-3 end users without the need for more advanced features
Not ready to pay higher entry price for more advanced functionality; great fit for less expensive basic plans
Sales-Assisted
$1M+ revenue
Working across teams and need additional capacity or functionality
Has budget for best in class solution
Need hands on evaluation via sales |
In the “Individual > Teams > Enterprise” Model, the lines between what makes a user a better fit for a self-service vs a sales-assisted motion won’t always be as clear. In this model, there is a typically two ways that you’d identify whether an account is a good target for sales engagement:
Enough individuals users within a larger organization come through the self-service funnel that it indicates they are ready for Team or Enterprise level functionality
A user (or users) with a job title that indicates they are a decision maker comes through the self-service funnel that indicates that a more serious evaluation is taking place
In this situation, again using the “design tool” as an example, the criteria may look something like this:
Self-Service
Roles: Individual Designer, Consultant, Marketer
Organization attributes: Part of a smaller team
Activity in the product: 1-2 projects and hasn’t invited any collaborators
Sales-Assisted
Roles: Design Manager, Head of Design, Director of Product
Organization attributes: Part of larger organization, working across multiple teams
Activity in product: Multiple active projects, has invited 10+ collaborators including managers
Build alignment on a path forward.
At this stage in the process, you have a a clearly defined ICP and have aligned your two motions to buyers within your ICP.
Now you have to build a plan that has the buy in of your key stakeholders, which in most scenarios will be: Marketing, Sales, and Product.
The specifics of how you organize your teams will depend a lot on your size and strategy as a business. But there are core responsibilities that each team will need to have ownership of in order for this hybrid model to work:
Marketing:
Help reach more of the ICP users for the self-service and sales-assisted funnel
Own the self-service experience and be accountable for self-service revenue
Enable the agreed upon sales funnel (including setting up a scoring model based on the ICP criteria you determined would make a buyer the best fit for sales engagement)
Product:
Partner with marketing to continue to optimize the self-service experience
Work with sales to understand why (or why not) best fit customers are getting activated and converting to more advanced plans
Own the product roadmap that supports both motions
Sales
Execute the sales playbook for your best fit ICP accounts
Partner with marketing to refine the model to ensure your team is working accounts that are the best fit for sales engagement
Provide insight and learnings on how the new motion is performing and where customers are hitting friction in their usage and evaluation of the product
Measure and refine
The process of aligning your self-service and sales-assisted motions will continue to evolve over time. That’s why it’s important to have a revenue dashboard that allows you to track the performance of each channel.
The goal of this dashboard is to provide one view that leaders on your team can align on to evaluate the performance of your different motions. It’s not meant to be a replacement for any team-level reporting leaders rely on to run their teams.
Aligning on what’s included in that dashboard will be critical and should be reviewed as a leadership team on at least a monthly basis.
Here is an example of the inputs you may want to track:
Some of these inputs will make sense for your business, others won’t. But the goal is to come to agreement as a cross-functional team on the metrics that matter and treat them as the source of truth moving forward.
Unlocking growth through both channels
Over time, you will need to evaluate whether a hybrid or a purely “product-led” or purely sales-assisted model is the best choice for your business. For companies where sales and self-service can co-exist, doing the work to define the role of each in your business will be critical for avoiding distractions and unlocking future growth.
Hope this helps.
-Ryan
