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I think this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Building self-serve can have huge development costs which for enterprise B2B can be absolutely out of proport

I think this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Building self-serve can have huge development costs which for enterprise B2B can be absolutely out of proportion before a product market fit. Isn't "do things that do not scale" (and automate them away once you got enough momentum) a mantra exactly opposite to this?

usrusr 7y ago
Self-serve is a specific form of automation. The problem is that introducing automation after the fact is almost impossible in this case, because the sales org you'd automate away tends to become far too powerful to ever allow that to happen. Postponing the sales automation adds a very hard cultural problem you the technological one you already had. By the way, I would not call "do things that do not scale" a mantra, rather the opposite: "don't scale too early, but be dead sure that you can when you need to".
- meowface 7y ago
  If anything, I'd think self-serve should empower a good sales team. I would think it would let them spend less time scheduling and doing generic demo, PoC planning, and onboarding meetings, because customers could do all of that themselves (with the option to talk to a human at any point in the cycle, if they want to). I've never been on the SaaS sales side, but from the big-enterprise buyer side, I've seen what seems like so many unnecessary wasted cycles spent on things that could be avoided if there was a way for us to immediately start playing around with their product ourselves (and potentially even using it in production) before talking to anyone. Then when we do talk to them and schedule meetings with them, it could be focused on specific questions and feature requests we have after spending time with the product. Instead, it was usually 3 - 7 meetings before we could even get to the stage where we evaluate the product hands-on. Those meetings could be drawn out over the course of 3 - 10 months. I got the impression a lot of that was because they wanted to sweettalk and hand-hold us as much as possible to increase the chance we would agree to the most extensive and expensive contract they could think we'd accept. All the worst offenders would want to constantly take us out to lunch and schedule various sorts of useless meetings before asking us to agree to some absurdly overpriced contract. And then our managers would have to do various dances with them over the course of weeks or months to get them to drop the price/agreement to something we found more reasonable (they'd usually concede to most or all of our requests, sometimes dropping the price by like 80% in the process). I do understand that purely from a financial side; they have a lot more revenue (and commissions) potential if they tailor the price to the most each company is willing to pay, and giving customers access to the things which cost the least to provide, both of which may vary wildly from company to company. And maybe at the end of the day, that is actually the most effective strategy for making money. To your point, maybe a powerful sales org is actually rational to avoid automation, so they can milk more per large customer and make more net revenue. But it felt like a lot of wasted time for us engineers who weren't sure when or if we were going to evaluate the product, or purchase it after evaluation, and usually generated bad will from our engineers and especially our managers. Not to mention the annoyance of interrupting work to sit in on so many mostly-useless meetings. Over the course of many years and dealing with probably 20 or 30 vendors, I don't think there was a single sales team we interacted with who we didn't unanimously agree we utterly despised. The exception was a small boutique firm which happened to have the best product and service in a particular domain, in addition to being priced literally 50x lower than their main competition (one of the companies that frequently wanted to meet us for lunch and schedule all sorts of pre-pre-pre-calls; that company's product was also, maybe unsurprisingly, total shit compared to the small firm's). I believe we mostly just dealt with the founder in that case.
  - anotheryou 7y ago
    Even with a non-self service system spinning up a demo should not take that long. I'd say those companies indeed had further political or other issues leading to your experience. For the product team alone a proper pipeline for building and deployment is worth it. Than again it of course also depends on how the product works, how deep the integration and customization needed are etc.
    - NewsAware 7y ago
      Dev side of the business myself, so just perception of the mechanics why self-service may be unattractive for the sales team: From a sales perspective you would typically optimize for fewer false-negatives (people not buying even though the solution would be valuable for them) at the expense of more false-positives (you wasting time trying to convince people who have no value and therefore don't buy in the end). Self-demos lead to people self-selecting themselves out without sales being able to influence this (explain the lead maybe just misunderstood a feature in the self-demo etc). Besides typical sales bonus structures reward converted leads which the sales person did convert, not avoided churn after self-signup which customer success gets credit for.
      - 1234Mhj 7y ago
        si siht emos dnik fo ekoj.
    - meowface 7y ago
      It was indeed always political, sales, and contractual hurdles (some their company's fault, some our company's fault) I believe if we could somehow interact solely and directly with a vendor's engineers, the whole process would take a few days to a week, max, for most vendors. But sadly that doesn't seem to be how enterprise B2B operates in my domain.

usrusr 7y ago

Self-serve is a specific form of automation. The problem is that introducing automation after the fact is almost impossible in this case, because the sales org you'd automate away tends to become far too powerful to ever allow that to happen. Postponing the sales automation adds a very hard cultural problem you the technological one you already had. By the way, I would not call "do things that do not scale" a mantra, rather the opposite: "don't scale too early, but be dead sure that you can when you need to".

meowface 7y ago
If anything, I'd think self-serve should empower a good sales team. I would think it would let them spend less time scheduling and doing generic demo, PoC planning, and onboarding meetings, because customers could do all of that themselves (with the option to talk to a human at any point in the cycle, if they want to). I've never been on the SaaS sales side, but from the big-enterprise buyer side, I've seen what seems like so many unnecessary wasted cycles spent on things that could be avoided if there was a way for us to immediately start playing around with their product ourselves (and potentially even using it in production) before talking to anyone. Then when we do talk to them and schedule meetings with them, it could be focused on specific questions and feature requests we have after spending time with the product. Instead, it was usually 3 - 7 meetings before we could even get to the stage where we evaluate the product hands-on. Those meetings could be drawn out over the course of 3 - 10 months. I got the impression a lot of that was because they wanted to sweettalk and hand-hold us as much as possible to increase the chance we would agree to the most extensive and expensive contract they could think we'd accept. All the worst offenders would want to constantly take us out to lunch and schedule various sorts of useless meetings before asking us to agree to some absurdly overpriced contract. And then our managers would have to do various dances with them over the course of weeks or months to get them to drop the price/agreement to something we found more reasonable (they'd usually concede to most or all of our requests, sometimes dropping the price by like 80% in the process). I do understand that purely from a financial side; they have a lot more revenue (and commissions) potential if they tailor the price to the most each company is willing to pay, and giving customers access to the things which cost the least to provide, both of which may vary wildly from company to company. And maybe at the end of the day, that is actually the most effective strategy for making money. To your point, maybe a powerful sales org is actually rational to avoid automation, so they can milk more per large customer and make more net revenue. But it felt like a lot of wasted time for us engineers who weren't sure when or if we were going to evaluate the product, or purchase it after evaluation, and usually generated bad will from our engineers and especially our managers. Not to mention the annoyance of interrupting work to sit in on so many mostly-useless meetings. Over the course of many years and dealing with probably 20 or 30 vendors, I don't think there was a single sales team we interacted with who we didn't unanimously agree we utterly despised. The exception was a small boutique firm which happened to have the best product and service in a particular domain, in addition to being priced literally 50x lower than their main competition (one of the companies that frequently wanted to meet us for lunch and schedule all sorts of pre-pre-pre-calls; that company's product was also, maybe unsurprisingly, total shit compared to the small firm's). I believe we mostly just dealt with the founder in that case.
- anotheryou 7y ago
  Even with a non-self service system spinning up a demo should not take that long. I'd say those companies indeed had further political or other issues leading to your experience. For the product team alone a proper pipeline for building and deployment is worth it. Than again it of course also depends on how the product works, how deep the integration and customization needed are etc.
  - NewsAware 7y ago
    Dev side of the business myself, so just perception of the mechanics why self-service may be unattractive for the sales team: From a sales perspective you would typically optimize for fewer false-negatives (people not buying even though the solution would be valuable for them) at the expense of more false-positives (you wasting time trying to convince people who have no value and therefore don't buy in the end). Self-demos lead to people self-selecting themselves out without sales being able to influence this (explain the lead maybe just misunderstood a feature in the self-demo etc). Besides typical sales bonus structures reward converted leads which the sales person did convert, not avoided churn after self-signup which customer success gets credit for.
    - 1234Mhj 7y ago
      si siht emos dnik fo ekoj.
  - meowface 7y ago
    It was indeed always political, sales, and contractual hurdles (some their company's fault, some our company's fault) I believe if we could somehow interact solely and directly with a vendor's engineers, the whole process would take a few days to a week, max, for most vendors. But sadly that doesn't seem to be how enterprise B2B operates in my domain.