Self-Service vs Sales Teams: Which is Better for B2B? - Podcast Recording

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:04

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop — I'm Alastair Cole. This is a show for tech startups who want to improve how they sell. Every episode we dive into the toughest topics in the world of startup sales, and bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from the sharpest minds and top leaders in the business. My background is as a computer scientist and ex software engineer, and I've got two decades experience in B2B sales and marketing. I'm a cofounder of The Uplift Partnership and delighted to say that today I'm joined by Kiran. Hello Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:50

Hello, everybody, my name is Kiran. I'm also a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. And together with Alastair, we bring all these lovely, great gifts from the world of our podcast and our outreach to you. And I'm also from the world of B2B. I've been in B2B for around 25 years, I think, on or off Corporate Banking at Enterprise tech selling management consultancy pretty much all the way through. And now in the last five years by now a happy journey with Alastair on getting PLIF partnership helping startups to accelerate their growth.

Alastair Cole 1:28

Thank you, Kiran. And together with our CTO, Douglas, we are The Uplift Partnership. And as Kevin says we accelerate sales for tech startups. Today's topic is self service versus sales teams, which is best, which is better for B2B businesses, really excited to get into this topic, something that's really important to us as a kind of technology led business. You know, it's a challenging topic, though. Isn't it? Cool? And what are your initial thoughts? When you think about self service versus sales teams,

Kiran Gill 2:02

I think when it comes down to thinking about self service, you don't traditionally think about B2B companies being self service unless they've got a commodity that they're selling. And a commodity being a product that doesn't need to be customised. It doesn't need to be altered. And pretty much you're going to be shipping it the way it is. And that's where self service in my head, you know, self service in my head would be something on Amazon. That's a self service model. How do you bring that to the world of B2B? That's the big question. So

Alastair Cole 2:34

I think 83% of buyers according to Gartner would prefer to have a self service model. But we know that's just not the case with larger, larger deals, complex deals. So you have to move that way as a business, and really it all comes down to your sales strategy. And we're going to dig into four quadrants of self service versus sales and different models. But it all comes down really to sales strategy. And what we found with having 50 Plus startups go through our 360 sales diagnostic that the average maturity of sales strategy for startups is, is hovering around 44%. For the moment, from those that we see, you know, they tend to be fairly ambitious, they want to move in the right direction in terms of, you know, a combination of sales service and sales teams. But more work to be done there. And that's, like I said, from our 360 sales diagnostic product. That is how we start most of our engagements with startups, FORSCOM breakdown recommendations, and a revenue roadmap, you get more about that on our website at TheUpliftPartnership.com/360. But we're talking about these two scales, right of self service versus sales teams. And when you look at it like this, you can you can be as a startup right at the beginning of your journey and have zero self service on the left hand side and 00 sales teams that's that's how it starts at the beginning of your journey, whether you're a traditional non tech startup or a tech startup. And the way that we see these, this breaks down into these four areas. I just talked about a kind of early stage startups, you know, the beginning of their journey, they're not fully self service yet and certainly don't have a big sales team. What about those technology led businesses care and they're in that top left hand corner to tell me a little bit about their characteristics? Okay,

Kiran Gill 4:39

So what you're going to have in the top left hand corner are companies that are mainly selling from their own platform or potentially from their website, products that aren't going to be customizable, not going to be really customizable. You're pretty much gonna get it the way it is. There might be some features that you can add and take away depending on your own preference, but you won't be able to heavily customise it below price point tends to be, it doesn't have to be depends on what you think is a low price point, but you're not talking, you're not talking 1000s or hundreds, even for this product. And you're probably the people that you're selling this to, you're expecting very low maintenance from them, and you don't really want to engage with them, because you want to keep that cost of sales as low as possible. Because potentially you don't want to make too much work for yourself. And you want to try to sell as many customers as possible. So your markets are probably going to be quite big. And what you're going to be doing there is just trying to address everybody with a product that pretty much is the way you're gonna get it out of the box.

Alastair Cole 5:44

That left hand side early stage technology and off the peg, less complex, smaller deal size, lower cost of sale, and then the and then the other side of that right hand side. Kyra talks about these kinds of more traditional sales teams and ones that have full coverage sales teams, as well as full self service what's happening on the right hand side. So

Kiran Gill 6:04

This is traditionally where I've come from, and this is my background is traditional selling as I would call it, it's a higher cost point, you've got a salesperson that's interacting with a purse juicer, it's probably a relationship that leads up to a point. So your salespeople are interacting with multiple buyers, building relationships, and then selling on the back of those relationships, deal size is going to be a lot higher, your product is probably going to be sophisticated in the sense that it's going to be a complex purchase. So it can be customised. And the customer, we might be able to choose features, you can change it the way they need it to be, it's going to be a consultative selling approach. And that's what you're looking at here. And that's why you can afford to have a salesperson in the room, because you're going to be charging potentially 10s of 1000s for this product. Yeah, you can afford to have a very expensive person like myself doing your bidding for you.

Alastair Cole 7:02

Yeah. Okay, so those four groups, we're just going to pick out behaviours and characteristics of individual companies in those groups. And we're gonna start in that bottom left hand corner. So those early stage companies, you know, we've got one right down at the start early stage SaaS, that's a classic kind of company that we we've had success helping early stage, maybe the founder is selling on their own, and maybe they're selling with with one other maybe two other people, it's pretty early stage, they haven't really developed their self service yet. And we can see the direction in which they need to go. What should they be doing Kiran to kind of move up towards more of a self service model and why?

Kiran Gill 7:50

Well, some of this comes from the world of product, doesn't it. So they've got to be thinking about the way they're designing their product, and making sure that their product is going to have all those features and functions that the client would want, and that they aren't going to be customizable. So the product design, and I know I come from a sales background, but obviously, being a part of the sales team, you are trying to advise, especially in the startup arena, you know, the sales team is involved with product development, and all the features and functions that are coming out. The one thing that you need to be very careful of. But here is that you don't want to add don't You don't want this product to go down the right hand side, if your business model is to keep yourself on the left side of the graph here, then you need to make sure that your product development is holding on to that you keeping and also is your cost of sales. And this is marketing lead sales. So this is more your traditional kind of marketing, you're bringing people to your website, and you want them to purchase from there and get all the information they can put off possibly getting about your product from your website, onboarded from your website, the whole kind of journey is there. There's no interaction with sales. And you've got to have that mindset, that pure SAS mindset when you're designing your sales process here. So your sales process is pretty much you're not going to talk to anybody, you're just going to go down this route. And potentially if people have problems, yes, they can reach out to you over there. You know, whether you have a chat bot or whether you've got a boy inside the website that people can speak to. Other than that, you pretty much want to keep it as low as possible.

Alastair Cole 9:24

Yeah. And so that down in that bottom left hand corner, we're talking about you know, you've got the basics right, you've got your website products and descriptions of services, contact information. And you've got like you've talked about that marketing stuff, working hard, you know, FAQs, user guides, tutorials, things that you can get into on the website. As you develop. You're talking about more interactive features, you know, ROI calculators, configurators, little, little, little getting access to playing with certain features as that as that kind of comes through. So that's all moving up in that left hand side and towards more of a robust self service model. So let's, let's move up there into that more more robust service model, you've got mature SAS, you know, they've they've, they've added a lot more of that digital self service features and functionalities I've just talked about, you know, this, there's full payments, subscriptions, and where you come helping buyers get to them being able to purchase, maybe that's a repeat purchase, it might not be the first time that you're paying, you're making that purchase online, especially if it's large. But certainly, that payment staff is connected, right? The subscription model is online, and you're moving towards, you know, a full automated onboarding and payment. And then that other area that we've picked out top left, that is a bit unusual, we'll come back to a bit later, there's kind of basic business tools, right, that are 100% Self Service, they're super low costs. One of the ones that we use are very basic AI tools that you don't need to sign off for, you could just use a company credit card, buying tokens to do things. And, you know, they they sit kind of on their own, they're obviously if they grow, if those businesses grow, then they can head over their plan is to head over to the right, and grow their business, and then start to bring on salespeople to help them close, more complex deal deals. So that's that left side. Let's take a little bit of time to talk about what's happening down in that in that bottom right hand corner, they're kind of more traditional, where they've got more sales teams, more salespeople to start with Kiran took us through these, these these three types of business we've we've shown here.

Kiran Gill 11:47

Okay, so if you think about who we got down in that bottom right hand side, you've pretty much got your kind of professional services and your consultancies, or you've got some very complex tech companies that you can have. So you know, those of you who've worked in complex tech, we're talking ERP systems, CRM systems, things that need real configuration, when you're selling and probably services and maintenance are also included. Now. And I know the new world, we're slowly moving away from this, but this business model is there. And it's still and it's still, it's an addressable massive market. So you can't just forget about this. So if you think about the consultancy side of things, now you are talking, you've got salespeople on the ground, you've got feet on the ground that are new and pressing the flesh getting in front of a client, you might be using some side of self service to dry to bring clients into your business. But it's probably very low key that the less sophisticated consultancies probably have a very basic kind of website that kind of tells you about their product, not really doing any kind of self service there. But it doesn't mean that they can't do more self service. And this is one of the you know, when we work with our professional services clients that we work with, we try to bring them more than the self service side of things to say you can do some of the things traditional self service companies do. However, you're always going to be that hybrid, you're going to be somewhere in between, but you could bring customers in.

Alastair Cole 13:21

Yeah, and that bottom right hand corner as well. I like this idea of the arrows moving kind of towards the top left hand corner. So Can those we've worked with startups who are in that complex tech space, and maybe they've got an instal, they're selling some personal service as well, for them to be able to create smaller products from what they've got, or smaller features, or take out the bit that is most valuable and then maybe offer that as a SAS or is it or isn't easy thing. So there's a, there's a product element there too. And you talked about the resellers, you know, who are much more traditional, but obviously they're having to go that way. And if we had somebody on from a reseller of ERP or SAP, something large like that, what would be your recommendation of a next step here and in order to get to more self service,

Kiran Gill 14:16

A lot of these companies are pretty much the world I've lived in for a long while. Before we started up, a lot of these companies were already developing their own tools and platforms. So they already knew that the business model in this large arena was changing. And with the big set of the big players, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are also now moving into the SAS world where they don't need the resellers as much as they used to. A lot of the large resellers or even the smaller ones started thinking you know what, we need to start developing our own tools, and they're pushing themselves towards the left as well to see themselves. So when you're thinking about, you know, if you're thinking about traditional platforms. In the old days, you would never think C CRM would be something that you could purchase just off of a platform. HubSpot does this all the time, and Salesforce is moving that way. There's so many CRM systems now that are SaaS based, you don't even speak to anybody, you pretty much purchase it straight from our website.

Alastair Cole 15:21

Yeah, so if that's you, in the bottom right hand corner, you know, maybe you're a small consultancy, selling professional services, you'd like to develop more self service for your buyers, or you'd like to, you'd like help with working out how you can productize in order to move to that top left hand corner, you can reach out to us and the same with complex tech, you know, we've worked with startups who have instals, it isn't just isn't just SAS, and and help them create as much cell services as is possible for them on their website. Obviously, you can't go and do a demo of that in Slava, certainly, you can have interactive tutorials, guidelines, video walkthroughs, quotes, to work out how your complex and much more complex deal is going to cost. So there are tools and there are, there's a psychological exchange, there's a value exchange there that actually if you're providing value through some of these configurators, and tools, and online features that buyers are naturally more committed, they've spent the time to dive into your your website, your features, play with things request more information, so then they're more committed and And crucially, they're more qualified, right, my friends, and the more cell service you can provide the the cheaper it is for you effectively, sure, there's that initial cost of setting that up. But it's, it's beneficial going forward and talk a little bit about that, that the impact of cost of sale, as a result of, of digital self service carrying and what that does that going to sales teams and bottom lines,

Kiran Gill 17:00

I think we have to be careful. And I think this is one of the major competence conversations I always have with founders, when I'm speaking to them about their businesses is, you know, when you're starting off, it's quite daunting, you've got all these costs, you suddenly bring a salesperson in, and their salesperson has been given a target, what theoretically should be the running cost of the business as it is plus a little bit extra. Now that could be a daunting figure for a single salesperson. Now, when you then start looking at your kind of product, think to yourself, how are we going to get to that sales level? And what do we need to do now if you're going down and self service route, your effort is going to be put into hitting as many people and getting as many hits into your platform into your website as possible and get those get get as many sales as possible so that your salesperson can go and chase don't chase those larger deals. If your salesperson is chasing the smaller deals, and hasn't got time to chase the bigger deals, you're on a rocky path to what could turn into a disaster zone. And we've seen so many startups have that problem, not understanding what their cost of sales is, not really knowing what their sales process is going to be, kind of getting stuck between, you know, a rock and a hard place not really knowing, are we going self service? Are we going traditional sales, we're actually not doing either properly, and we end up being nowhere. And by that time the market changed. And unfortunately, the startup ends up going nowhere.

Alastair Cole 18:32

Yeah, and so you know, those in the bottom, you know, if you're more sales teams than you ourselves, so it's not too late, right? There is a bit of investment that's needed. And it all really comes down to sales strategy, right? It's about sowing the seeds right now for the future pipelines, if your pipelines are struggling as well then investing in self service, we'll, you know, fill it better and fill it with more high quality leads. And, you know, it is a long game, you know, setting up these self service platforms is expensive, it takes time. It in itself requires some kind of configuration and consideration. So it's a big deal, but you haven't missed the boat. If you're down there in that bottom right hand corner, do you need to be thinking about moving towards self service because it is now table stakes, you know, the number of sellers is reducing the number the size of buying groups is increasing research online before purchase that was already quite high as been, you know, exacerbated by the pandemic. So, there's three of the areas that last the last one then is that top right hand corner, okay. And, you know, we're talking about those companies that have, you know, large sales teams, and also very high quality, robust self service, kind of businesses. Talking about Kiron.

Kiran Gill 20:01

I think I've touched on one of them, HubSpot, Apollo. Most of you people probably know about these ones in the background, then you can see these companies that have a free offering, potentially even. And they're self service to bring you in. And then what they do is they sell to us from their platform. Now, that's for us. In the small world. However, at the same time, they've got an enterprise sales team that is going without reach that is chasing the bigger health hefty ideals, because larger medium sized businesses potentially aren't going to come to your website to try out your product for a few weeks and to see whether it works or not. So what you do need then is an enterprise sales team, you need a sales team that is traditional that is going to go out there and do all those things that you want to do. The great thing, what they have here is a model where they're capturing all the small fish on one side with their truck trailer, and they will decide they've got a they've got themselves a fishing rod, and they're chasing after the big fish as well. So they've got this great model way of doing things. And this is pretty much a modern tech business. You know, you're either you're this is what you're aiming for. This is where all the new businesses that are coming out there are going down one of these two routes, they could come from the right hand side, they could come from the left hand side. But realistically, as Alastair showed you on my graph there, that's what you're looking for, that 's where we've got that treadmill, that's what you're looking for where your business is pretty much covering both sides and a bit of both sides of the funnel. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 21:33

and so, you know, Dave seems to have an interesting talk about HubSpot. And one that I like is MailChimp, you know, using even a pay but not not the full price, Malgin version, there's all we're even in the menu, when you open the menu on desktop, there's a phone number in there for sales, right? If there's ever an opportunity, or you know, if I might be interested, it's right there. And then you know, there's an enormous sales team behind it, even though their focus is obviously on percent on their digital platform. So, you know, those tech monsters, you know, the monday.com is the Google workspaces that AWS, they started life in that top left hand corner, like the basic business tools, we talked about the kind of cheap transactional AI ones, and obviously, they've moved across now. So those tech monsters, those unicorns, are owning that kind of whole area at the top, like you talked about offering free products to start with to get you hooked. And that's the direction in which all aspiring businesses are going up. You know, you want the big sales team, but you've got to have digital service, and they work, they work so well Hand in Hand in terms of deal qualification and cost of sale. And I love that kind of jump over. That's why I like that MailChimp, that phone number in the menu, because that is effectively the kind of handover, right, your digital cell service is taking you so far. And that handover, you know that that MailChimp might feel like a million miles away for most businesses, that that handover happens in different places. So it might be that for you and your business, it's basic website, and some FAQs. And then that rolls into a book demo. And then maybe you can squeeze in a few more interactive features and an ROI calculator and other tools and gradually you're moving that handover further and further along, doing more stuff, self service, and still growing the business with a big sales team. So those are those big four areas we just you know just dealt with they're kind of full coverage ones that do start life as you know, kind of SAS self service businesses to start with. And those are the four sections and our area of expertise. Or six, where we've had success in the last six months. And the focus of our business tech startups is in that bottom left hand corner. So if that's where you are, if you're in that bottom left hand corner, early stage tech startup, you need to help accelerate your sales and we can help with the sales teams, finding and recruiting great people setting your sales strategy but also we're with deep expertise in technology and product and marketing. So we help with digital self service as well. Awesome. Any final thoughts, Kiran on any of these boxes or anything? What have we, what have we left out?

Kiran Gill 24:27

I think yeah, the only thing I would say around is if you find yourself in a lot of businesses will find themselves in that consultancy, the traditional selling point on the right hand side where you're not really your self service hasn't got going. You're pretty much selling you've got a product that potentially is going to be lower in cost of sale. However you find yourself spending a lot of time on your consultancy. every sale seems to be you know, it takes forever to sell. You haven't got enough in the market. You do all those things. You know that At the Promised Land does self service and that's where you want to go. But most businesses do find themselves in that bottom right hand corner. And there are processes, there are ways of making your business successful there. You know, you might want to be on the left, you might want everybody to come to you and buy from you don't don't threat though, if you're in that, in that bottom right hand corner, there is sales processes and ways of doing your business to make sure that you get, you can get those larger clients, you can start your business by winning larger clients and moving towards the left. So if you find yourself in that consultancy way, you know, still reach out to us, have a word with us, there are processes, there are ways of doing this, it comes back down to traditional sales, selling outreach, and doing all those things that, you know, I'm never gonna go away.

Alastair Cole 25:49

Thank you super helpful. So the stat that I showed at the start 44% of the average maturity of sales strategy that we've seen, over the 54 startups that have been through our 360 diagnostic product, which includes a full score and breakdown, bespoke recommendations and a revenue roadmap in a 25 page, personalised report that is accessible through our portal, you can go in and see your 360 dashboard. So that's, that's, that's moving along very nicely. Very exciting. The partnership comes forward slash 360. To get more if you're interested in finding more about it, tap me up or tap Kiran up on email on LinkedIn. Really the last thing to do is talk about our next event. Would you like to introduce this? Kiran?

Kiran Gill 26:47

I think we're talking to our people from the bottom right hand side, it's about getting higher quality leads, and personalised outreach, you know, how do you how do you close those big juicy deals? How do you get more of those into your pipeline, where you can then work on your self service business, and you don't have to worry too much about that, because you've got a nice juicy, you know, few million pounds worth of deal coming through the door.

Alastair Cole 27:13

We'll talk about that. Let's talk about that. So self service is great at improving the quality of leads. And you know, that lead generation and lead quality is something that our clients ask us about time and again. And so we're putting it back at the centre of our next episode with a real focus on personalization with something that we're doing day in day out using our tools and other AI tools in order to find and engage with and generate interest in really high quality, ideal customer profiles. So, so real focused on personalization, or using AI and human touch. And that's in two weeks time. Two weeks today. Wonderful. Well look. Thanks very much for your time. Kiran. We're just wrapping up now. So I think we'll say goodbye and leave it there.

Kiran Gill 28:13

Thanks a lot, everyone.

Alastair Cole 28:14

Thank you. Bye bye bye.