Selling Self-Serve

North Star Principles for Best in Class Platforms

Self-Serve does not imply your product will sell itself, or you that you won’t need a skilled go to market and sales team organization to drive your business. Rather, Self Serve is a

foundational business principle that can fuel better product, better customer acquisition, and ultimately a better business than traditional paradigms.

This is evident with companies like Zendesk, Dropbox, and Atlasssian ( just to name a few). They have a core self-serve business ethos — yet still have large go to market teams driving tremendous growth in enterprise and mid market.

Businesses with a self-serve north star, complimented intelligently with traditional go to market , can drive sustainable long term competitive advantages in their respective markets.

To unpack:

Better Product

Self serve businesses assume no human should have to intervene to (1) explain how to use a product or (2) how to benefit from a product. This requires hyper focus on creating products that are:

• Easy to integrate
• Intuitive for end users
• Self-evident in value

In the early stages of a product these principles might seem trivial to deploy against commodity functionality. What happens over time, however, is a product continues to evolve against customers’ more sophisticated requirements — albeit with the same self-serve principles.

As feature gaps against the incumbents narrow — ease of use and simpler integration become a competitive advantage as a business moves upmarket.

Better Customer Acquisition

Self Serve can accelerate growth compared to business employing only traditional acquisition models (direct sales and partnerships). Some key factors:

Access to Self Serve Buyers

Much of the SMB market, and portions of mid market and enterprise line of business, prefer completing large portions of the buyer journey on their own. Why cut these customers out?

Customer Velocity

As an emerging platform — its critical to get frequent customer feedback on your product, as it will drive your road map and improve your operational capabilities. A self serve channel gives you access to SMB buyers, and a higher volume of businesses using your service.

Lead Funnel for Enterprise

All the self serve investments you are making will pay off as you move upmarket. Enterprise decision makers, or the engineers they rely on to implement projects, will benefit from the self education capabilities you make available. This will create more qualified inbound leads for your sales team, which can at times also accelerate sale cycles.

Access to Global Customers

Self Serve enables earlier and more intelligent international expansion. Non US customers, many of whom read and understand english will find their way to your service. These early adopters can inform your more intentional international expansion efforts (i.e. local language support, 24x7 support, field resources in geo, etc).

Clarity of Value

Self Serve demands clarity of thought. Because there is no assumption that a sales or customer service rep will be there to walk a customer through your value prop — self serve forces an optimization of messaging, positioning, and over all value prop of your service. This in turn drives more qualified leads with better educated prospects.

Efficient Scale

Ultimately, serving tens of thousands of customers across the globe can be done more efficiently with a self serve businesses. Superior products mean fewer support tickets and fewer competitive battles. Clarity of value prop fuels better educated prospects and shorter sales cycles. Transparency of pricing reduces negotiation friction….just to name a few.

Self-Serve — Principles

So what attributes are key in a self-serve business? A few of the important ones:

Instant Access

Friction to access a product is removed. There is typically a sign up button to register for the service, so some form of product engagement can begin immediately.

Documentation

No NDA’s are required to understand the depth of the product, or access documentation. What the product is, how it works, and how to integrate are all easily accessible from a website.

Pricing Transparency

Initial pricing and volume pricing are available on the website. This does not imply every possible customer scenario or the largest enterprise volumes need can’t be negotiated — you can have a contact sales button for those scenarios.

Contact Sales

Don’t forget that many customers, especially your larger ones, will need sales engagement. Make it dead simple for prospects to get in touch with your sales team. At the same time, make sure you have a well defined internal process to quickly respond.

Status Page

Ideally you have a status page where customers can get real time updates on the health of your service. Done right, it should also be the place where service updates are posted in real time as you’re working through an issue.

Customer Support

Customers should have a simple channel to engage and get their questions answered. This could range from public forums to high SLA response time customer service tickets.

Compliance and Security

You’ll reduce friction in the sales process if you can document your security processes and compliance standards. Make it easy for customers to find this. At the very least, it will be a valuable tool for your sales team to refer to as they engage prospects.

Legal

If done well, many businesses will be ok with click through terms of service. Work on optimizing the click thru for your most standard legal objections. Provide a clear link to your terms of service, and work to keep it as simple as possible.

Billing

Make it simple for customers to understand their bill, and how they are trending at any given time.

SLA’s

Like pricing , It’ll be impossible to create custom SLA’s for every one of your customers if you are building a business for scale. Try to craft service level agreements that make sense for your customers and your business — and make them accessible and default to your customers. As with pricing — there may be some SLA’s you reserve for unique or large customers.

Self-Serve is Hard

Make no mistake, adhering to a self serve go to market philosophy is difficult. It takes much more thought and longer cycles to design, market, and sell under this paradigm.

Done well, however, a platform will be in a tremendous position to both move upmarket and scale efficiently.