Sales-⁠assisted user onboarding.

Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.

Brian Tracy

“What do I need to do for you to try out a car today?”

That sentence makes me cringe. It’s the stereotypical sales tactic of the used car salesperson.

A few years ago, my wife and I were shopping for our first car together. We headed to a local car dealership. When we arrived, I made it clear to the sales rep that we didn’t intend to buy anything that day. But the salesperson persuaded us into his office with free popcorn and mochaccinos (who can resist!). Then he showed us the best deals of the day. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for the entire afternoon while this fellow disappeared, emerging time and again with a new, lower price written on a sheet of paper.

After several rounds of this, we thanked him for his time and reminded him that we didn’t intend to buy a car that day. We excused ourselves, with a piece of paper in hand, sealed with a promise that the price was good for the next few days.

Well, you can imagine what happened next.

A couple of days later, we caved. I phoned him up to tell him I was ready to buy and would be over shortly. I believed it would be an easy transaction, with my shiny new car waiting for me! No more need for haggling, or so I thought.

But when I got there, the same salesman told me the price was no longer available! Apparently, the manager who approved it made a mistake—at that price, the dealership would be losing money.

I left furious over the bait-and-switch and arrived at another dealership that offered the car for the price I wanted.

Chances are you’ve also run into a bad experience with a salesperson as well, whether it’s buying a car, furniture, or even software. We often remember the bad experiences more than the good ones. But not every sales experience needs to be painful.

Good salespeople can add a ton of value to the buying process. When compared with a low-touch, product-led onboarding approach, sales-assisted onboarding can increase conversion rates by 3.5 times. Surprisingly, this can be true across all ranges of deal sizes for free trial B2B products.

That’s why most product-led companies eventually hire a sales team. For example, take a look at Slack, a classic example of a product-led company. If you think they don’t have a sales team, you’d be wrong.

In 2019, 40% of Slack’s revenue came from their sales team closing deals with larger organizations (companies making more than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue). As a result, they experienced a 66% surge in marketing and sales expenses from 2018 to 2019.

As Slack proves, there’s room to employ both a product-led and sales-led growth strategy to onboard new users. This approach is known as sales-assisted or hybrid onboarding.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how the sales function can complement a PLG approach to user onboarding. My intention isn’t to provide an in-depth focus on sales in a PLG model. I’m sure someone could write an entire book on that topic. My goal is to show you:

1. The differences between a sales-led, product-led, and hybrid onboarding.
2. How adding salespeople benefits the user onboarding process.
3. How the role of a salesperson differs in a PLG organization.
4. When and how a sales team should reach out to users.

Just a quick note—if you don’t think you could ever benefit from a sales-assisted onboarding approach due to your product, target customer, or the market you serve, feel free to skip this chapter. Can you imagine Netflix hiring a bunch of salespeople to sell subscriptions? Me neither!

Sales-Led, Product-Led, and Sales-Assisted Onboarding

In a classic blog post titled, The 5 ways to Build a $100 Million Business, Christoph Janz explains the number of potential customers in your total addressable market. He describes how your business’ annual contract value dictates your “hunting strategy,” a.k.a. how you acquire, onboard, and retain new customers.

To build a $100 million business, you can hunt for:

• 1,000 “elephants,” or enterprise customers who can each pay $100,000 or more per year.
• 10,000 “deers,” or medium-sized companies that each pay $10k or more per year.
• 100,000 “rabbits,” or small businesses that each pay $1k or more per year.
• One million “mice,” or consumers who each pay $100 or more per year.
• Ten million “flies,” or active users that you can monetize $10 or more per year each.

What you end up “hunting” for largely dictates whether you should adopt a sales-led, product-led, or sales-assisted approach to user onboarding. It also depends on the complexity of your buying process. To help visualize this, here are these two factors on a two-by-two matrix:

Here’s a little rundown on when to use each approach:

• Suppose you have a high annual contract value (typically over $100,000) as well as a complex buying process with multiple stakeholders and a long sales cycle. In that case, consider onboarding new users using a high-touch, sales-led method. Cisco and Marketo are good examples of companies using this approach.
• If you offer a low annual contract value where users use a self-checkout process to purchase your product, then onboard new users with a low-touch, product-led process. Netflix is an excellent example of a company that employs a purely product-led onboarding approach.
• If the annual contract value ranges anywhere from $2,000 to over $100,000, then you should consider a mix between the two. In this case, the buying process complexity can vary from a simple self-checkout to complex multi-week sales check-ins.

A company that transitioned from a sales-led to a hybrid onboarding approach is Hubspot. They moved downmarket and released a freemium product for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). Slack also transitioned from a product-led to a hybrid onboarding approach when they moved upmarket to sell to enterprise companies.

• If you have a low annual contract value and a complex buying process, then you’ll be out of business sooner rather than later. Avoid this at all costs.

The key point here is that user onboarding doesn’t have to fit into one box. You can think about it more like a continuum. On one end is low-touch, product-led user onboarding. On the other is high-touch, sales-led onboarding. Where you end up on this continuum largely depends on your product, pricing, market, and buyer preferences.

From my experience, most successful B2B SaaS companies eventually adopt a sales-assisted onboarding strategy. For product-led businesses like Slack, Dropbox, and Drift, they end up hiring salespeople to onboard new users as they start pursuing larger deal sizes. For sales-led companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Vidyard, as they move downmarket, they shift their sales team to help new users find additional meaningful value with their product.

How Sales Can Complement Self-Serve Onboarding

"But we’re product-led. Our product is self-serve. Visitors can sign up and purchase it without the need of any salespeople, right?”

I’ve heard this too many times to count.

This isn’t always the case. Let me be clear—being product-led doesn’t automatically mean you’re anti-sales.

In this product-led era, we have a desire to move away from sleazy sales tactics, don’t we? But good salespeople don’t use unscrupulous methods to manipulate someone into buying something they don’t need. When done correctly, they can add a ton of value to users in a PLG model. They make the product experience better.

In general, there are three primary reasons to add salespeople to self-serve onboarding:

1. Direct users to experience the value of your product

Sometimes even supposedly simple products have hidden hotspots that make it difficult for users to achieve their First Strike. This is where the “sales” team can be helpful. I place quotes around the word sales because this frequently looks more like support and customer success than sales. But the goal is the same: get the user to experience the value of your product, so they purchase it.

In a PLG model, salespeople act more like coaches. Going back to the analogy of the bowling alley, coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges.

When free trial users get stuck installing the Appcues code snippet on their website, they don’t talk to support on the phone. They speak to an account manager, who connects them with the right people to solve their issues.

2. Facilitate product penetration or expansion

This is the approach in the early days of Slack. Their sales team didn’t send out cold emails that tend to pile up in an inbox: “Hi, if you need intra-organizational communication assistance, you should check out Slack.”

Typically, one team within an organization first adopts Slack into their workflow. The role of the “Account Manager” (pssst...it’s a salesperson) is to help get other teams within that organization to use Slack.

This is an example of the “land and expand” strategy. After you “land” a few users within a large company to sign up for a product, you “expand” by selling more seats and additional features for the organization. Often, this requires a sales team to make persistent, deep connections with high-level decision-makers. Salespeople work at the account level, not the user level.

3. Guide users in the buying process

For mid-size and enterprise companies, the buying process isn’t always straightforward. For large companies, barriers often exist to purchase a product. This could include security audits, sign-offs from the procurement team, and requests for customized Service Level Agreements.

Whatever the reason, some users may want to talk to someone from your company. You could wait for them to schedule a meeting or book a call with prominent CTA’s like “Contact Us” or “Contact Sales” on various pages on your site.

But smart product-led companies anticipate the needs of certain customers. They have sales teams armed and ready to reach out to these users before they run into barriers. Product-led onboarding is not about removing the sales function. It’s about supporting new users. They don’t badger, nag, or hound users with phone calls, emails, and text messages. Instead, they’re consultative and helpful.

How The Role of a Salesperson Differs in a PLG Organization

Consultative selling (also called needs-based or solutions-based selling) is the key to how a sales function can complement a PLG approach. This approach shares many similarities with a product-led mindset. Both practices:

• Put the needs of users front and center throughout the customer journey, instead of running through a list of the latest bells and whistles, hoping that something grabs the prospect’s attention.
• Maintain a clear focus on helping users achieve their desired outcome instead of trying to close a sale at any cost.
• Deliver a purchase experience that’s more about being heard than about being sold to.

You’re probably wondering, “How is this different from what good salespeople do in a sales-led organization?”

Indeed, PLG doesn’t upend everything we know about sales. Many parts of the sales job remain the same. A deep understanding of the different stakeholders in the buying process remains important. There are still budget discussions to be had. And, of course, there is still a quota to hit.

But there are some subtle yet important differences in the sales process of a PLG model:

1. The salesperson shifts from chasing leads to coaching users

In a traditional sales model, the salesperson explains, shows, and demonstrates the value of the product or service. Prospects might not even have a clear understanding of their problem and your solution yet.

In a PLG model, users have already shown interest in a product. They’ve tried and tested out the product already. Hopefully, they’ve experienced the value of it. In this case, salespeople act more like coaches. In the analogy of the bowling alley, users are now familiar with the mechanics of bowling. They’ve achieved their First Strike and desired outcome.

Coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges.

2. The salesperson needs to frame the product in different ways to different audiences.

In a PLG model, salespeople need to reframe the product’s value and benefits for the end-user and the department heads and executives. This is a subtle but important difference. What end-users value might be different from what executives value.

To the end-user, they might be using the product to save time and perform their job better. For department heads and executives, they’re likely looking at the expected ROI of the product.

Salespeople need the ability to pivot from one frame of reference to another quickly. They need to understand the pain points and opportunities for different stakeholders.

3. The salesperson has to leverage product engagement data in the sales process.

In a traditional sales model, salespeople usually qualify leads based on two factors:

• High-value interaction with marketing materials where leads become a Marketing Qualified Lead ( MQL).
• Customer or company fit based on a checklist of the most common attributes someone needs to embody to become a successful customer for your offering. If they meet this requirement, leads become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).

After leads pass the qualification process, the sales process begins. It finishes when the prospect becomes a paying customer.

Soon after, the user onboarding process starts.

In a PLG model, an MQL could still exist. But since there’s a lower barrier to product entry, the primary CTA for an MQL is the signup. Once users achieve meaningful value in the product, they become a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). Based on product engagement data and customer fit, the lead becomes an SQL, and the sales process kicks off.

We’ve already briefly discussed PQLs in Chapter 6. Let’s go into more detail in how a PQL fits into sales-assisted onboarding.

PQLs and SQLs in the Product-Led Sales

This one sounds obvious, but for a long time, the most qualified leads for a software product have never even used it before. PQLs are important to a consultative sales process. These are the users who are ready for a more in-depth conversation–they’ve already engaged with a product.

Traditional qualification criteria for PQLs include marketing activities (e.g. downloading an eBook, attending a webinar, etc.) or firmographic attributes (e.g. company size, industry, company, revenue, etc.) that imply an interest in the offering.

Nothing says “interested” like engaging with a product. So the more PQLs generated, the more consultative conversations a sales team can have.

Defining Your PQL

What makes a lead product qualified?

Generally speaking, a PQL is a measure of each new user’s engagement with a product. This is a combination of:

• Activation: Has the user completed the Straight-Line Onboarding? If not, how far are they from completion?
• Engagement: How often are they using the product, especially the core features?

Here’s how to find the answers to these questions for your SaaS business:

1. Set up a system to measure product engagement.
2. Define your PQL criteria.
3. Rank users by product engagement.

1. Set up a system to measure product engagement

Tracking product data is an integral part of qualifying leads based on product usage. Focus on the key milestones in your Straight-Line Onboarding. The goal is to know which users have not completed certain steps so the sales team can respond accordingly.

2. Define your PQL criteria

A PQL could involve multiple product engagement metrics including, but not limited to the following:

• The number of times the user has returned to the product.
• The number of other features the user has tested.
• How soon after signing up the user tries out additional features.

The exact criteria that go into defining a PQL will vary by company. But as a rule of thumb, a user who has completed the Straight-Line Onboarding and achieved their First Strike is a good indicator of a PQL.

As mentioned in Chapter 6, if you look at a continuum of user engagement–where one end indicates the moment a user signs up and the other end is the moment users achieve the Product Adoption Indicator–the PQL could manifest anyplace in the process.

3. Rank users by engagement

Once you’ve evaluated the product engagement metrics that make up a PQL, create a segment of users who have:

1. Completed the PQL criteria.
2. Not completed the PQL criteria.

Better yet, determine how far along users are in the PQL criteria, so you can rank them on how close they are to being qualified (a.k.a. a product engagement ranking model). This is how the sales team starts moving.

Doing this is not a simple task. Product events need to be based on how important they are. Then it’s quite the job to keep up with each time an account uses important features over time.

Though tools like Sherlock (sherlockscore.com) can help.

If you’re selling a B2B product, where multiple stakeholders in a company make the purchasing decision, the PQLs are accounts, not users.

The SQL in a Product-Led Sales Journey

Chances are, you don’t want the sales team to reach out to every single PQL. Some might not be a good fit. Can you imagine Canva’s sales team reaching out to a student who only wants to create graphics for her class presentation?

Focus your energy on PQLs who fit your ideal customer profile to make it worth the sales team’s time and effort.

To find the ideal customer profile for your offering, create a list of specific attributes that an account needs to be successful with the product.

This could be:

• Company size
• Industry
• Annual revenue
• Role of contact
• Employee headcount — company-wide and within key departments
• Budget
• Geography
• Technology they use
• Size of their customer base
• Level of organizational or technological maturity

Next, find the common attributes of your best customers and create a list of them. Think of accounts that understood the product quickly and have now become raving fans. If they could, they’d give your product a Net Promoter Score of 11!

Find commonalities such as:

• What’s the size of the organization? (Measured in revenue, number of customers, number of employees, etc.)
• What’s the size of the relevant department?
• Do certain job titles exist in the organization?
• Which industry or niche are they serving?
• How long have they already been in business?
• What’s the number one reason that would prevent them from buying your solution?
• What’s the number one reason that would make them decide to buy your solution?
• What makes your offer appealing to them?
• What goal do they want to achieve with your solution?
• How are they currently trying to achieve this goal?

Now, in a product-led sales journey, SQLs have two components:

1. They’ve engaged with your product enough that they’ve become a PQL.
2. They fit your ideal customer profile.

Once these are defined, leads who fit both criteria are ideal for sales-assisted onboarding.

If you map out product engagement on one axis of a four-by-four matrix and customer fit on another, you get the Product-Led Qualification Matrix created by Derek Skaletsky, CEO of Sherlock:

• Users who have high product engagement and are a good customer fit are the SQLs. Engage them in the sales process.
• PQLs are users who have high product engagement and are not a good customer fit. Offer support to them, but there isn’t any need to engage them in the sales process unless they contact your team directly.
• Users who have low engagement but are good customer fit are known as the “heartbreakers.” They’re the dream customers, but they aren’t engaging with the product. Nurture these users and offer support if they reach out.
• For users who have low engagement and are not a good customer fit, feel free to ignore them.

When and How Should Sales Reach Out To Users

It’s a bit tricky to know when to get a salesperson involved once a lead becomes an SQL. An overly aggressive sales team could turn off prospects who only want to use the product and be left alone. Instead, the goal is to recreate the kind of experience we’ve come to expect from the Apple store—a friendly environment filled with experts who are ready to answer your questions, teach you about products, and help solve your problems.

With that in mind, sales outreach in a PLG model generally fits into two buckets: hand-raisers and proactive campaigns.

Hand-raisers are those who ask for help. Maybe they’ve filled out a form, asked a question using the in-app chat, requested a high-value feature, or sent you an email.

In these instances, sales reps should act more like a customer success team. Their role should be seen as a coach who works hand-in-hand with the customer to resolve blockers. They need to have a strong grasp of the product and customer use cases to cater to the distinct needs of different audiences. These team members should be motivated by understanding the product in a deep and meaningful way, not just crushing their quota.

On the other hand, proactive campaigns are manual or automated outreach to current users that generate demand for paid or higher-tier plans.

The focus is on high-value accounts that fit the ideal customer profile. The key is to find ideal moments in the user onboarding journey so that a sales outreach is welcomed:

• After signing up: sales can help users set up their accounts correctly and use the product to its full extent. This entails anything from implementing a complicated integration to guide the account through a proof-of-concept for a broad company-wide rollout.
• Celebrate wins: when users achieve something meaningful, such as completing their First Strike or setting up their account correctly, sales should show them some love and congratulate them. It’s an opportunity for sales to offer additional support by guiding them to the next step or showing a demo of other helpful product features.
• Going top-down: once enough users sign up from one company, sales can initiate an outreach. The pitch should be tailored to the executive pain point. Ideally, lead with personalized insights based on the usage behavior of existing users from that account. This is what a communication tool for companies, Yammer, did to layer sales on top of their freemium offering. They prompted users to invite their coworkers. Once enough workers joined, their sales team would reach out.

Whatever you do, make sure the sales team adds value to the product experience. You don’t want them to add more friction than necessary. I’ve provided sales outreach email templates you can use in Appendix 2.

What Comes Next?

My goal with this chapter was to show you how sales can complement your self-serve onboarding. When building out a sales-assisted or hybrid onboarding process, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Hiring a sales team, paying commissions for sales, and building product-led sales playbooks are all important factors to think about. For that, you can check out the following resources:

• Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler
• The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge
• Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

And, of course, we’ll be creating more content about product-led sales on productled.com.

Chapter 10 Summary

• Sales can complement self-serve onboarding by:
  1. Directing users to experience the value of your product.
  2. Facilitating product penetration or expansion.
  3. Guiding users in the buying process.
• The role of sales differs in a PLG organization:
  1. The salesperson shifts from chasing leads to coaching users.
  2. The salesperson needs to frame the product in different ways to different audiences.
  3. The salesperson has to leverage product engagement data in the sales process.
• The three steps to define your PQL:
  1. Set up a system to measure product engagement.
  2. Define your PQL criteria.
  3. Rank users by engagement.
• In a product-led sales journey, SQLs have two components:
  1. They’ve engaged with your product enough that they’ve become a PQL.
  2. They fit your ideal customer profile.
• If you map it out on a four-by-four matrix with product engagement on one axis and customer fit on another, you get the Product-led Qualification Matrix:
  1. Users who have high product engagement and are a good customer fit are the SQLs. Engage them in the sales process.
  2. PQLs are users who have high product engagement and are not a good customer fit. Offer support to them, but there isn’t any need to engage them in the sales process unless they contact your team directly.
  3. Users who have low engagement but are good customer fit are known as the “heartbreakers.” They’re the dream customers, but they aren’t engaging with the product. Nurture these users and offer support if they reach out.
  4. For users who have low engagement and are not a good customer fit, feel free to ignore them.
• For high-value accounts, find ideal moments in the user onboarding journey so that a sales outreach is welcomed:
  1. After signing up: sales can help users set up their accounts correctly and use the product to its full extent.
  2. Celebrate wins: when users achieve something meaningful, such as completing their First Strike or setting up their account correctly, sales should show them some love and congratulate them.
  3. Going top-down: once enough users sign up from one company, sales can initiate an outreach.

Action Items to Improve Your User Onboarding

• Work with your onboarding team to define your PQL.
• If it’s appropriate for your business, start building a sales process to complement your product-led onboarding process. Identify ideal moments in your Straight-Line Onboarding for a sales outreach.