How to sell SAAS without a sales team

On my flight back from my year-end vacation, I was listening to Jason Fried's episode on Lenny's podcast. Jason Fried is the co-founder of 37signals — the maker of Basecamp — a project management platform and Hey — a premium email service.

It was interesting to learn that Basecamp has no sales team and still has close to 150,000 customers and generates a lot of revenue.

Let's see how the signup for a Basecamp account is like.

Basecamp's home page

Two large call to action buttons, both pointing to the pricing and signup page.
Both plans have all the features and the only difference is in the sizing and support.

Simple signup page and requires no credit-card.

After setting the password, user is logged in. There's no delay in verifying email, etc.

After login, user can create projects, use the get started tile to self-onboard or view a sample project.
Onboarding experience is checklist based and and each item in the list walks the user through a feature.

As user onboards, clear progress is shown.

I will stop here and will not go into features or how Basecamp actually manages projects, etc. as that's beyond the point.

The key is that Basecamp takes the user from sign up to using the app as quickly and as smoothly as possible. They've removed all obstacles, decision points and cognitive load.

A few things that make this possible:

Simple website with feature listing, clear & effective call to action buttons.
Simple feature and pricing tiers. Reduced cognitive load.
Simple signup. No credit card required.
After signing up, user is logged-in directly and taken to the self-serve onboarding.
Trial account has all the features on and lets user try everything.

Once the trial is over, if the user likes the product, there's no conversion/learning/change to move to a paid account. Because user is used to the product, and upgrading is simple, the conversion will be very likely. Onboarding focuses on helping the user become successful in using the product. Upgrading to a paid tier becomes a no-brainer.

Basically, once people experience the value of the product, the next logical thing to do is upgrade.

Slack, Zendesk, Zoom, Atlassian are some of the other shining examples of how the product sells itself. Of course, sales teams are needed to accelerate revenue growth and for enterprise, high ticket value customers.

This approach follows the Product Led Sales (PLS) idea and is more than just using converting self-serve users to paid ones and driving sales. It can be used to upsell and cross-sell. The approach also brings alignment among Product, Engineering, and GTM teams.

There's a lot of discussion around product led growth (PLG) and product led sales recently. IMO, the hybrid approach of product led sales is the future for selling SAAS. Some good discussions here: 1, 2, 3.

Having the PLS mindset from ground up allows you to scale and grow when you eventually hire sales teams as well. Free trial or freemium model opens up the sales funnel. In the long run, this approach lowers the customer acquisition cost, results in better user experience, increases adoption and shortens the sales cycles.

One of the most important things for this approach to work is to embed product analytics and learn from usage patterns and signals. Add a feedback loop for users. Learn from this data and enrich your product further. This will allow you to lead with value — which eventually will help in increasing retention, conversion rates and overall product satisfaction.

Summarizing key take aways:

Simplify your offering
Simplify the presentation (social media, website, etc.)
Make signing up self-serve
Remove friction in the sign-up process. Skip payment if possible
Make onboarding smooth with great user experience
Link byte-sized help videos/documentation for self-help. Offer email/chat support
Use analytics and learn from user behavior and feed this into the product to add value

Let me know your thoughts.