4 ms·

I don't know if this is quite public knowledge yet, so: human-assisted onboarding is sort of catching on at a lot of SaaS companies in the B2B space, at price p

by patio11 13y ago

I don't know if this is quite public knowledge yet, so: human-assisted onboarding is sort of catching on at a lot of SaaS companies in the B2B space, at price points which are a bit north of the top end of typical 37signals/etc apps. (Squarely in the zone for this new product, though.) A lot of people find it very, very difficult to get started from a blank slate. Automated onboarding/email sequences/video tutorials/etc gets you to a point, but it still leaves guesswork in the process and (candidly) one can always blow off a computer but blowing off a person who has been talking to you for weeks is socially harder to do. This also allows you to do basically a hybridized product/consulting model, since if (without loss of generality) Jason Fried is spending 2 hours for you talking about your business' challenges as he gets you up to speed on KYC, that's essentially equivalent from the customer's perspective to "Rent Jason's brains", but (crucially) the majority of the economic activity actually comes from the product whose use is enabled by the mini-consult rather than through consulting itself. This lets it scale to the moon. (Also, as every consulting company at scale will tell you, you can have Jason Fried's insights on your company actually delivered by an understudy. 37signals certainly doesn't lack for smart people who understand the 37signals playbook.) This is currently giving me fits, since I haven't figured out a great way to deliver it consistently for non-enterprise accounts given that I'm 14 time zones away from many customers, but it's one of the big things I'm working on currently. The word on the B2B SaaS grapevine is it works very, very, very well at moving $X,000 to $X0,000 per year SaaS accounts. I'll blog about this if I ever manage to systemize it successfully. (As usual, the plan is 1) Throw stuff at the wall and figure out what works. 2) Write down what worked and execute against that plan. 3) Pay someone to do #2. I'm currently somewhere in stage #1.)

hkarthik 13y ago
I have my reservations about this, because it feels like B2B SaaS is now going upmarket by reaching for the familiar Enterprise, high-touch sales process. We've all been through this, and we know where it leads. You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. Sales people can rarely bring the same passion or insight as the original founders when approaching each lead. So they start doing more dastardly things (See Zed Shaw:http://zedshaw.com/essays/control_and_responsibility.html http://zedshaw.com/essays/control_and_responsibility.html). Going up market means compromising more on the scope of what the products do. As individual deals become more lucrative, the incentive to close them grows. As this incentive increases, the products often suffer and you get the Bananas in the Lasagna problem (See Jason Fried: http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/37signals-jason-fried-interview http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/37signals-jason-fried-...). So my question to the folks advocating this "new" approach is, how are you going to avoid all those things?
- jt2190 13y ago
  Watch Gail Goodman's presentation "How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death" [1] for an interesting discussion of this. (Skip ahead to 20:42 for her description of "coaches".) [1] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... (edit: presentation title)
- patio11 13y ago
  You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. So it's very much different than a traditional sales guy in the Oracle sense. Some companies brand them as Customer Success Advocates or "coaches" or something similar. You aren't asking for "the sale" per se -- the customer is generally pretty onboard that they want it and will often have given their credit card already. You're just making sure that they actually get to using it successfully. This involves handholding, counseling, motivating, and being organized and persistent rather than bashing down objections, consultative sales, and always-be-closing. In addition to it not reading like "traditional sales" from either side of the telephone, the background/inclinations/etc of the employees who do this are quite different. One obvious example: at many companies, these folks tend to run towards ladies, much like e.g. marketing teams or customer support and in contrast to how engineering teams or sales teams in B2B companies rarely tend to have large concentrations of ladies. (Positive claim not a normative claim, guys: regardless of the optimal state of the world, it is an objectively true statement that the average number of Y chromosomes per team member varies widely across departments in B2B software companies.) As to avoiding it corrupting the flavor of the company: I'm pretty sure 37signals has a corporate culture which isn't going to turn into Oracle anytime soon, and it's unlikely that this would radically change the character of my business either. (Money generally doesn't affect people nearly as much as people expect it to.)
  - gadders 13y ago
    Having said that, though, I bet it would be a great way to (legitimately) upsell people as well.
- jasonfried 13y ago
AVTizzle 13y ago
Towards the end of this post I realized that this was Patio11 responding to Jason Fried responding to Paul Graham... Basically, porn.
ericabiz 13y ago
Hey Patrick--as the person who (may have) introduced you to this, I should share what we're doing. We are just about to hire another full-time person to help us with this as we scale out our consulting-as-onboarding process. I promise to write a blog post once I have more data on how well this works, but I will say this: You can get a well-qualified person in the U.S. who's smart, technically savvy (not a programmer but knows his/her way around computers), and has a bachelor's degree in a related field for $40K/year in salary--and that's a step up from where many of these folks are today. I'm really excited to have a FT person working on this, and I think in the future we'll see the "hacker/hustler/designer" trio that Dave McClure et.al. are so fond of speaking of expand into four people, with the fourth being a customer service/customer onboarding role. In fact, this is our fourth FT person on the team (other 3 are two savvy developers plus me, the business brain.) A designer will be our fifth hire. More data: We plan to implement consulting-as-onboarding for any plan priced over $499/mo (which is our sweet spot right now), and, in fact, "do it for them" in terms of getting all their data into our system (which is where many of our customers are struggling now.) If it works and pays off in terms of customer acquisition and retention, I have full plans to do this for EVERY customer. I learned how to do this in the hosting industry--Rackspace was my example 10 years ago, and I did this with massive success with my hosting company as well. It was also one of my top tips for WP Engine when I consulted there. P.S. Patrick, if you're still reading, we talked about doing a podcast, and this is what we should talk about. I'm game--I'll shoot you an email.

by patio11 13y ago

hkarthik 13y ago

I have my reservations about this, because it feels like B2B SaaS is now going upmarket by reaching for the familiar Enterprise, high-touch sales process. We've all been through this, and we know where it leads. You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. Sales people can rarely bring the same passion or insight as the original founders when approaching each lead. So they start doing more dastardly things (See Zed Shaw:http://zedshaw.com/essays/control_and_responsibility.html http://zedshaw.com/essays/control_and_responsibility.html). Going up market means compromising more on the scope of what the products do. As individual deals become more lucrative, the incentive to close them grows. As this incentive increases, the products often suffer and you get the Bananas in the Lasagna problem (See Jason Fried: http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/37signals-jason-fried-interview http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/37signals-jason-fried-...). So my question to the folks advocating this "new" approach is, how are you going to avoid all those things?

jt2190 13y ago
Watch Gail Goodman's presentation "How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death" [1] for an interesting discussion of this. (Skip ahead to 20:42 for her description of "coaches".) [1] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... (edit: presentation title)
patio11 13y ago
You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. So it's very much different than a traditional sales guy in the Oracle sense. Some companies brand them as Customer Success Advocates or "coaches" or something similar. You aren't asking for "the sale" per se -- the customer is generally pretty onboard that they want it and will often have given their credit card already. You're just making sure that they actually get to using it successfully. This involves handholding, counseling, motivating, and being organized and persistent rather than bashing down objections, consultative sales, and always-be-closing. In addition to it not reading like "traditional sales" from either side of the telephone, the background/inclinations/etc of the employees who do this are quite different. One obvious example: at many companies, these folks tend to run towards ladies, much like e.g. marketing teams or customer support and in contrast to how engineering teams or sales teams in B2B companies rarely tend to have large concentrations of ladies. (Positive claim not a normative claim, guys: regardless of the optimal state of the world, it is an objectively true statement that the average number of Y chromosomes per team member varies widely across departments in B2B software companies.) As to avoiding it corrupting the flavor of the company: I'm pretty sure 37signals has a corporate culture which isn't going to turn into Oracle anytime soon, and it's unlikely that this would radically change the character of my business either. (Money generally doesn't affect people nearly as much as people expect it to.)
- gadders 13y ago
  Having said that, though, I bet it would be a great way to (legitimately) upsell people as well.
jasonfried 13y ago

AVTizzle 13y ago

Towards the end of this post I realized that this was Patio11 responding to Jason Fried responding to Paul Graham... Basically, porn.

ericabiz 13y ago

Hey Patrick--as the person who (may have) introduced you to this, I should share what we're doing. We are just about to hire another full-time person to help us with this as we scale out our consulting-as-onboarding process. I promise to write a blog post once I have more data on how well this works, but I will say this: You can get a well-qualified person in the U.S. who's smart, technically savvy (not a programmer but knows his/her way around computers), and has a bachelor's degree in a related field for $40K/year in salary--and that's a step up from where many of these folks are today. I'm really excited to have a FT person working on this, and I think in the future we'll see the "hacker/hustler/designer" trio that Dave McClure et.al. are so fond of speaking of expand into four people, with the fourth being a customer service/customer onboarding role. In fact, this is our fourth FT person on the team (other 3 are two savvy developers plus me, the business brain.) A designer will be our fifth hire. More data: We plan to implement consulting-as-onboarding for any plan priced over $499/mo (which is our sweet spot right now), and, in fact, "do it for them" in terms of getting all their data into our system (which is where many of our customers are struggling now.) If it works and pays off in terms of customer acquisition and retention, I have full plans to do this for EVERY customer. I learned how to do this in the hosting industry--Rackspace was my example 10 years ago, and I did this with massive success with my hosting company as well. It was also one of my top tips for WP Engine when I consulted there. P.S. Patrick, if you're still reading, we talked about doing a podcast, and this is what we should talk about. I'm game--I'll shoot you an email.