One of the worst charges you can level against marketers is that we just love to speak in jargon.
TOFU and BOFU, growth loops, KPIs... it’s almost as if we’re afraid everyone will realize we have no idea what we’re doing if we spoke in plain human language.
🙋🏼♂️ Guilty.
I get some of the blankest stares every time I start talking about the 3 motions.
Jokes aside, figuring out your motion strategy is one of the most important levers startup founders have in their business. That makes it super important to understand what it is and how it works, so you can benefit from it.
So, I thought I should cover them in depth. (And avoid the jargon as much as possible.)
Let’s get started.
What are the 3 motions?
In essence, the motions simply explain the high-level mechanics of how you get your customers.
In SaaS, there are 3 ways to acquire customers:
Self-serve: This is when customers buy on their own, (usually) without speaking to someone from your team. Generally, this happens on your website.
Sales-led: This is the usual case of companies that rely on sales completely to drive new business. Every time you land on a SaaS website that’s just pushing you to “Book a demo”, you’ve landed upon a sales-driven organization.
Sales-assisted: This combines the two motions above. It is meant to allow companies driven by a combination of product-led growth and a self-serve motion to successfully layer on a sales motion and allow the sales team to focus on bigger (and more profitable) deals.
These are the 3 motions in short. However, I promised you a deep dive, so let’s explore them in more detail.
Self-serve
Self-serve and product-led growth (PLG) confuse many people in SaaS. In many cases, the 2 terms have become interchangeable. They are not.
So, what’s the difference?
PLG is how you grow – it’s about creating a system that encourages people to use and share your product naturally in a way that creates more users and customers for you without you having to actively go and convince each of them.
Theoretically, you can have a company that’s purely PLG driven, but only uses a Sales motion to close business.
(I tried looking for an example – share in a comment if you can think of a SaaS that uses this combination of PLG and purely sales-driven approach.)
Self-serve (the motion) is how people buy from you – the availability of a place (typically your website) where they can subscribe and start their account, followed by adding their payment details to become customers.
The beauty of self-serve is that it is infinitely scalable – you might need another server every now and then, but in general no one on your team needs to be heavily involved to set up an account and onboard new customers.
Which means you’re only limited in your ability to get new customers by your marketing efforts (i.e. getting enough people to know and want what you’re selling).
Which is what makes all your assets around the product and the process of getting started with it so important. Because most customers will never experience a touchpoint with your team, how you design your signup, onboarding, and activation process, along with emails, guides, and other documentation is critical.
As is the experience you’re offering with your product. The reality is that self-serve works best when combined with some kind of freemium offer.
Self-serve and the Freemium model
Freemium ≠ free.
Yes, you are offering a free version of your product, but it is limited in a way that serves 2 very specific goals:
People who won’t ever pay can still use the product:
Sometimes this is serving you a purpose – think of product like Profitwell, who were using their free forever SaaS analytics product to build a large cache of data, which they were then monetize (through consulting, etc.)
(The ultimate demonstration of how useful such a strategy can be was when Profitwell sold themselves to Paddle for $200m.)
In other cases, you’re just laying the foundation for being top of mind when they can pay and are actively looking for a solution. (E.g. HubSpot offering a free version of their CRM.)
Users start creating and experiencing value
The first point of the free plan is, of course, so that new users can understand the value of your product (Show, don’t tell).
However, there’s another, less altruistic reason to allow people to start using your product without paying. As they experience the benefits, they will naturally build more value into it, essentially locking themselves in.
Imagine you spend years writing content in a WordPress blog. Or recording internal knowledge and processes in a Notion account. You’d be ready to go through a ring of fire to avoid having to move away from it.
(For the record, in a previous lifetime I had to migrate 400+ blogposts from a custom blog to WordPress and it wasn’t a pretty experience – even with help from the engineering team.)
This combination of understanding the value of a product and locking it inside this product, makes it easier to convince people to convert to a paid plan when they hit a paywall.
Final note on freemium: Don’t give too much away for free!
I’ve seen companies that literally rely on the benevolence of their users. Being too generous is not a good strategy – yes, some people would pay from the greatness of their hard, but there’s a point at which people feel stupid paying for something they can benefit from for free.
And people don’t like feeling stupid...
Reverse Trials
One thing I want to mention when talking about freemium and PLG is the practice of offering a Reverse Trial.
This is just another fancy word for something very simple – the idea of putting every new (free) signup on a trial of the version of the product that includes all available features.
When you combine this with the right onboarding (in-product and email), it helps them get started with using the product and the features in question, allowing you to build a strong foundation for conversion.
If things are going well and people use these features during their trial, at the end of it, they would have created value in it.
Now you can go for the kill conversion by asking them to upgrade to a paid tier to keep the value they’ve created and keep using these features.
Both my own experience and the experiments of leading experts (doesn’t get more leading than Elena...) show that reverse trials consistently lead to more conversions.
In fact, implementing a reverse trial is one of the first things I recommend when I talk to SaaS founders about growth strategy.
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Sales-led
Sales-led is perhaps the most straightforward of the 3 motions – it essentially comes down to getting enough work (leads/pipeline) for your sales team.
This works best for companies that are targeting large enterprise clients. As I covered in my newsletter on GTM strategies, it can be hard to make this work if the tickets you’re working are small.
Some companies can combine product- and sales-led motions (in fact, the best always do). Doesn’t that mean you should always have a product-led motion?
Why isn’t pure sales-led on the way out?
The simple reason is that some products just aren’t very useful without the whole team using them. (Thinks HR products like BambooHR, etc.)
That means there should be someone (usually on the executive team) who decides to buy them. Very often that person won’t even be the main user of the product – in the case of BambooHR, its most active users would be the PeopleOps team (onboarding and off boarding, leaving assessments, etc.) and individual team-members (requesting time off, etc.)
That means there’s little point in trying to get the economic decision maker (who’s most likely a C-level person in charge of PeopleOps) to sign up and use organically before your sales team descends upon them.
Pure sales-led is still alive and kicking, which leaves the question: When does it make sense to combine sales and self-serve?
Sales-assisted
A Sales-assisted motion is a hybrid approach of the self-serve and sales-led motions.
To challenge your thinking: all the companies we perceive as examples of amazing PLG success, have layered a sales motion on top of their product-led engine in order to chase and close big deals.
Think Slack, Jira, HubSpot, etc. In fact, a lot most of the growth of these companies nowadays comes from these big accounts that generate heaps of revenue.
How do they do it?
The trick stroke of genius is that they can benefit from a very strong land-and-expand opportunity. (In fact, you’ll often see Net Dollar Retention numbers for these companies well above 100%.)
The typical scenario for a company like Slack is a single (and sometimes quite small) team, say engineering, within a large enterprise signs up for Slack to communicate better as a team.
They have the budget and internal policies allow them to sign up on their own without having to go through an extensive procurement/compliance process.
Next, the customer success team wants to have a direct line of communication with the engineers because they need to explain customer feedback/requests/etc.
So the whole CS team gets added to the company Slack account, but since they’re now all there, they start using it for their internal communications.
Before you know it more teams are joining the party.
This is the key moment when the Enterprise sales team at Slack notices the growth of said account.
They are ready to pounce.
They identify the internal decision-makers who can make a decision about buying Slack for the whole company and they go after them with a message like:
Hey, a number of teams within your company are already using Slack, why don’t you buy it for the whole organization – we can give you an optimized price and advanced features.
Note that these features are focussed on what’s important to the decision-maker – typically, you’ll see messaging around compliance and (information) security rather than UX and “your team will love it”.
Slack has already done this work with the individual teams and team-members – through their superior UX.
(For a deep dive into the sales-assisted approach, check out Elena’s post.)
How to know which motion is right for you?
Is it just a matter of personal preference?
Or whether you want to go after SMB or Enterprise customers?
Yes and no.
As we discussed above, Slack is very successful with enterprise accounts, but the product is definitely not purely sales-driven.
Because, at the end of the day, it comes down to how the product gets adopted throughout an organization.
The reason Slack relies on PLG while BambooHR is purely sales-driven is where the adoption pull comes from.
In the case of Slack, as we hypothesized above, it’s the end users who are starting to use Slack and thus creating an inertia that trickles all the way up until it reaches management who then just sign off on a decision that’s effectively already made by their teams.
It is very hard to produce the same effect with an HR tool. In a sense, this type of product benefits from a network effect where the value comes from everyone in an organization using it. But it’s not going to trickle up as a team adopts it one at a time.
So, to these teams, it doesn’t make sense to invest in PLG. (Please note that PLG is different from UX – optimizing the product experience is always a beneficial thing regardless of how you add customers.)
In case you’re wondering how SaaS companies are getting away with not having a free trial and/or public pricing, this is how – they have a clear idea of who they want to talk to and how to get to them.
(And just to lift the lid a bit – plenty of sales-led SaaS companies offer free/low-cost pilot projects that essentially serve as a free trial.)
Your motion strategy matters
Hopefully by now I’ve managed to convince you that some jargon is not a bad thing.
Choosing your motion(s) is one of the most important decisions for your SaaS company – and it’s not something that can be decided at random.
Deciding whether to drive growth purely through sales or a self-serve engine (or through a mix of the two) is also dependent on who you’re serving and how your product is satisfying the needs of your audience.
(One final plug for the importance of the 6 Fits Framework.)
Hopefully this guide will be a useful starting point – but in case you want to check your thinking, feel free to book a (free) session with me.