Push the sales over the finish line

This Tuesday, I've been invited to give a speech and share my thoughts on PLG (Product-Led Growth), SLG (Sales-Led Growth) and everything in between at the regional SaaS Meet-up here in Aarhus, Denmark.

It's a biannual event with some 80 SaaS companies participating, and I'm really looking forward to sharing what we've learned over the past 2-3 years.

Because, probably like everyone else starting a SaaS company, I had a dream of building a business with just two teams:

A product team that designs, builds and manages the product.

A marketing team that tells the world about our product and drives in new customers.

But as I soon learned, that dream is incredibly difficult to realise.

It all comes down to a combination of your customers' technical skills, the complexity of onboarding to the product, and the user-friendliness of your self-onboarding process.

If you don't nail all three, your product team might have built a great product, and your marketing team might drive in lots of free trials, but at the end of the day, those free trials never experience the "Aha!" moment using your product that turns them from freebies to paying customers.

And when running a business... That's a problem!

Even though we're doing a lot to help our customers self-onboard, our ICP (B2C E-commerce) are typically not very technical, and getting up and running with Herodesk does require a bit of work. When you know where to click, it's, of course, super simple, but email forwarders, DNS records, and API keys are a bit frightening for most.

So we took the consequences and hired two sales executives (to get new customers) and two customer success managers (to onboard them).

And it works great!

We've been working like this for almost five months now, and while it does work great, we've found one area we never thought of, where the new customers get stuck in the process.

Adding their credit card to the account.

We only accept payment via credit card. I don't want the hassle of bank transfers, the fees of PayPal or the uncertainty of Bitcons. No thanks, keep it simple and something we can automate 100%: Payment via credit card only.

That, of course, requires the customers to actually enter their credit card details in our system so we can charge them.

We've seen a lot of customers give a verbal "yes!" to our sales reps, start onboarding and then taking a loooooooong time completing it and adding that damned credit card, so they can get started. Our CSM's (customer success managers) are wasting too much time cashing credit cards.

So, in an attempt to solve this, we're trying something new to help push new sales over the finish line. We have built something that we internally call the "signature room".

The idea is simple: It's now the responsibility of our sales executives to get the customers to create an account, add their credit card and book the first onboarding meeting with our CSMs.

During the final sales call, when everything should be in place, the customer will receive a link to the signature room. The first version will look something like this:

The idea is that the sales executive is on a call with the customer while they're seeing this. If there are changes to the subscription (number of seats, AI agent resolutions, payment terms or whatever) they can be updated real-time by the SE.

The customer enters their details, accepts the terms and presses the big button. Then, they are redirected to a window where they can enter their credit card details, so they are on file and ready to be charged on the agreed first payment date. Finally, the (newly signed-up and ready) customer sees this page:

where they can pick a time to book the first onboarding meeting with our CSM's.

It is my hope and expectation that this will shorten the time from lead to onboarded and paying customer significantly.

It is also my hope that our customers will appreciate this hand-held process where they are guided through everything, from start to end.

I wish all of this weren't necessary, though. I wish we could keep it super simple and not have all these hand-held processes (keep dreaming, LOL). And don't get me wrong: I love Herodesk and the team, I wouldn't change a thing. The reality is just that our customers often really, really like and appreciate (and need) to talk to a human throughout the process.

And when that's what the customers need, then that's what we'll deliver.

Best-in-class customer service from the beginning to the end.

Oh, by the way, funny side story before I wrap it up. We've started to get more B2B and SaaS customers. Two segments where we can really do a huge difference for our customers, too. While they share a lot of traits (being internet-based businesses, communicating with their customers across channels and need some tool to help them get their customer support in order), they're also very different in others.

One of our new SaaS customers posted this a few weeks ago:

His onboarding process: Write me a message to confirm that a specific API endpoint exists, create an account, onboard, add a credit card, and go!

So, to go full circle on this post and wrap it up, he's the proof that if you, as a customer, have the technical skills and are used to self-onboarding on various SaaS products, it's definitely possible!

ICP (and their technical skills). Onboarding complexity. Product user experience and friendliness.

One road isn't more right or wrong than the other. Just figure out what works in your situation and do it.