CHAPTER 11: 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 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. As we’ve seen in Chapter Three, 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.

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. How adding salespeople benefits the user onboarding process


2. How the role of a salesperson differs in a PLG organization


3. 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!

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.