I don't know if this is quite public knowledge yet, so: human-assisted onboarding is sort of catching on at a lot of SaaS companies in the B2B space, at price points which are a bit north of the top end of typical 37signals/etc apps. (Squarely in the zone for this new product, though.)
A lot of people find it very, very difficult to get started from a blank slate. Automated onboarding/email sequences/video tutorials/etc gets you to a point, but it still leaves guesswork in the process and (candidly) one can always blow off a computer but blowing off a person who has been talking to you for weeks is socially harder to do.
This also allows you to do basically a hybridized product/consulting model, since if (without loss of generality) Jason Fried is spending 2 hours for you talking about your business' challenges as he gets you up to speed on KYC, that's essentially equivalent from the customer's perspective to "Rent Jason's brains", but (crucially) the majority of the economic activity actually comes from the product whose use is enabled by the mini-consult rather than through consulting itself. This lets it scale to the moon. (Also, as every consulting company at scale will tell you, you can have Jason Fried's insights on your company actually delivered by an understudy. 37signals certainly doesn't lack for smart people who understand the 37signals playbook.)
This is currently giving me fits, since I haven't figured out a great way to deliver it consistently for non-enterprise accounts given that I'm 14 time zones away from many customers, but it's one of the big things I'm working on currently. The word on the B2B SaaS grapevine is it works very, very, very well at moving $X,000 to $X0,000 per year SaaS accounts.
I'll blog about this if I ever manage to systemize it successfully. (As usual, the plan is 1) Throw stuff at the wall and figure out what works. 2) Write down what worked and execute against that plan. 3) Pay someone to do #2. I'm currently somewhere in stage #1.)
Hey Patrick--as the person who (may have) introduced you to this, I should share what we're doing. We are just about to hire another full-time person to help us with this as we scale out our consulting-as-onboarding process. I promise to write a blog post once I have more data on how well this works, but I will say this: You can get a well-qualified person in the U.S. who's smart, technically savvy (not a programmer but knows his/her way around computers), and has a bachelor's degree in a related field for $40K/year in salary--and that's a step up from where many of these folks are today.
I'm really excited to have a FT person working on this, and I think in the future we'll see the "hacker/hustler/designer" trio that Dave McClure et.al. are so fond of speaking of expand into four people, with the fourth being a customer service/customer onboarding role. In fact, this is our fourth FT person on the team (other 3 are two savvy developers plus me, the business brain.) A designer will be our fifth hire.
More data: We plan to implement consulting-as-onboarding for any plan priced over $499/mo (which is our sweet spot right now), and, in fact, "do it for them" in terms of getting all their data into our system (which is where many of our customers are struggling now.) If it works and pays off in terms of customer acquisition and retention, I have full plans to do this for EVERY customer. I learned how to do this in the hosting industry--Rackspace was my example 10 years ago, and I did this with massive success with my hosting company as well. It was also one of my top tips for WP Engine when I consulted there.
P.S. Patrick, if you're still reading, we talked about doing a podcast, and this is what we should talk about. I'm game--I'll shoot you an email.
I have my reservations about this, because it feels like B2B SaaS is now going upmarket by reaching for the familiar Enterprise, high-touch sales process.
We've all been through this, and we know where it leads.
You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business.
Going up market means compromising more on the scope of what the products do. As individual deals become more lucrative, the incentive to close them grows. As this incentive increases, the products often suffer and you get the Bananas in the Lasagna problem (See Jason Fried: http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/37signals-jason-fried-...).
So my question to the folks advocating this "new" approach is, how are you going to avoid all those things?
You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business.
So it's very much different than a traditional sales guy in the Oracle sense. Some companies brand them as Customer Success Advocates or "coaches" or something similar. You aren't asking for "the sale" per se -- the customer is generally pretty onboard that they want it and will often have given their credit card already. You're just making sure that they actually get to using it successfully. This involves handholding, counseling, motivating, and being organized and persistent rather than bashing down objections, consultative sales, and always-be-closing.
In addition to it not reading like "traditional sales" from either side of the telephone, the background/inclinations/etc of the employees who do this are quite different. One obvious example: at many companies, these folks tend to run towards ladies, much like e.g. marketing teams or customer support and in contrast to how engineering teams or sales teams in B2B companies rarely tend to have large concentrations of ladies. (Positive claim not a normative claim, guys: regardless of the optimal state of the world, it is an objectively true statement that the average number of Y chromosomes per team member varies widely across departments in B2B software companies.)
As to avoiding it corrupting the flavor of the company: I'm pretty sure 37signals has a corporate culture which isn't going to turn into Oracle anytime soon, and it's unlikely that this would radically change the character of my business either. (Money generally doesn't affect people nearly as much as people expect it to.)
As I mentioned in my post, high-touch, full-service doesn't have to be the permanent model. Our plan isn't to do it this way forever. Our plan is to do it this way for a while so we can learn everything we can. Then later on we can automate this and make it self-service. The product will be a lot better off because of it. This was pg's point in his original post as well.
As a data point from another SaaS company owner, we thought this would be temporary too, but we found out it was so valuable in increasing customer retention and engagement that we are now planning to make it permanent (see my post above--we're hiring a FT person for this now.) The cost-effectiveness of this is off the charts. Patrick found out about this from me when I spoke about it at Microconf and I already have people from there telling me it's made them $500/hr+ (I believe it, as I've seen similar numbers in my own SaaS company.)
Oh, I should add: If you want people to rave about your company, there's nothing better than this onboarding process to do so. People become sort of religious about your business after a first-touch customer experience like this one. Probably preaching to the choir if you are Jason Fried, but this goes double for everyone else reading this who's building a software company.
I'm glad to hear that companies such as yours that are doing this are not necessarily considering making it permanent. I read PG's original article, and although you make reference to it, I felt he was addressing a different sort of issue than it sounds like you are. In your case, you actually went out of your way to engineer internal systems that let you do things manually, and you probably could have spent the same time and engineering resources you used to do that to instead develop the automation you don't have yet.
I may be in the minority, but let me give you some perspective as a potential customer who has experienced this kind of hands-on "service" from other SaaS-y outfits: I WANT automation from your service. I have worked with 2 companies that made me jump through all kinds of hoops to get an account set up with them when I could have had a usable account provisioned and active in 5 minutes had they automated their processes. As a result, it took days, because (surprise) their employees have their hands full, and I also have better things to do (you know, actual work responsibilities and customers of my own to respond to) than to have my hands held jumping through all of your contrived and artificial hoops just to use your service. That's just a waste of my time and yours and something that only ends up causing unnecessary delays to service turn-up, and in both cases, it seriously soured my taste for the service and almost made me contemplate throwing in the towel and going with a different solution.
This isn't the feeling that you want to leave your new customers with who are trying very hard to give you their money. You mean every time we need to make a change to service parameters, I need to submit a spreadsheet with my change request to somebody that's going to plug it in on your side by hand? MAYBE 24 hours later, if I'm lucky? Forget that: I'll go with somebody that gives me an API or a web portal that I can use to make the changes myself in a matter of minutes.
But what about "post-sale"? I think there will always be customer demand for concierge-level of service. Some SaaS models do lend themselves to self-service, but others don't. Knowing that distinction is key.
Anyone who's signed up at the concierge-level of service will always get that level of service. And if we ultimately go self-service, I'd still keep the concierge-level of service around, just at a premium. We might even consider adding a concierge-level of service tier to Basecamp.
Watch Gail Goodman's presentation "How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death" [1] for an interesting discussion of this. (Skip ahead to 20:42 for her description of "coaches".)
A lot of people find it very, very difficult to get started from a blank slate. Automated onboarding/email sequences/video tutorials/etc gets you to a point, but it still leaves guesswork in the process and (candidly) one can always blow off a computer but blowing off a person who has been talking to you for weeks is socially harder to do.
This also allows you to do basically a hybridized product/consulting model, since if (without loss of generality) Jason Fried is spending 2 hours for you talking about your business' challenges as he gets you up to speed on KYC, that's essentially equivalent from the customer's perspective to "Rent Jason's brains", but (crucially) the majority of the economic activity actually comes from the product whose use is enabled by the mini-consult rather than through consulting itself. This lets it scale to the moon. (Also, as every consulting company at scale will tell you, you can have Jason Fried's insights on your company actually delivered by an understudy. 37signals certainly doesn't lack for smart people who understand the 37signals playbook.)
This is currently giving me fits, since I haven't figured out a great way to deliver it consistently for non-enterprise accounts given that I'm 14 time zones away from many customers, but it's one of the big things I'm working on currently. The word on the B2B SaaS grapevine is it works very, very, very well at moving $X,000 to $X0,000 per year SaaS accounts.
I'll blog about this if I ever manage to systemize it successfully. (As usual, the plan is 1) Throw stuff at the wall and figure out what works. 2) Write down what worked and execute against that plan. 3) Pay someone to do #2. I'm currently somewhere in stage #1.)