Lessons Learned From Launching a Self-Serve Plan as a Sales-Led Company

Amplitude’s Franciska Dethlefsen offers insights on lessons learned from launching a self-serve plan as a sales-led company. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

In recent years, more companies have implemented product-led growth (PLG) strategies. And it’s no surprise: PLG and self-serve offerings can lower customer acquisition costs, reduce sales spend, and match the market trends giving end users the ability to try something before they buy it. Now, self-serve isn’t for every company, but for those who are looking to build out this go-to-market motion, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Launching a self-service plan can be tricky, especially for traditionally sales-led companies. It is resource-intensive, can cause internal friction, and, to be completely honest, often fails. Amplitude’s self-service offering, Amplitude Plus, took years of trial and error. Not to mention the countless hours it took to build the business case and secure internal buy-in from executives. Here are a few things we learned from launching a self-serve offering – and what you should consider before launching one, too.

Invest in Testing and Set Expectations Early

When launching a self-service offering, you must set proper internal expectations from the beginning. Don’t run any experiments without setting goals and communicating them to your team. And to get anywhere, you’ll need to get buy-in and alignment from company leadership, which requires explaining the why behind your self-serve plan, not just the what. When launching Amplitude’s PLG strategy, we took a risk. Without enough built-in monetization awareness of the product, we set the clear expectation that the experiment wouldn’t hit benchmarks, but it would indicate whether or not we were headed in the right direction. This transparency helped leadership feel comfortable enough to move forward with a trial run.

Once you’ve got the approval to start testing, I recommend creating an initial alpha test in a closed environment. This allows your team to determine if the resources, time, and energy it will take to launch it publicly are worth it. This also helps your leadership team see that customers can and will invest in a product. But beware: those initial numbers may not be what you want to see. Our alpha, which launched over a year before our official launch, saw just 14 purchases. Not a number that makes leaders jump out of their seats. However, we learned a lot from this experience and used these learnings to completely overhaul our positioning, pricing, and packaging before launching in October 2023.

A full alpha test can be a big investment. So if you’re not ready for that, try smaller, lower lift tests, such as featuring the self-serve offering on your pricing page on your website to test a self-serve plan, known as a “painted door test.” You could also conduct email testing to a smaller subset of accounts to understand their reactions.

Look Critically at Pricing & Packaging 

Structuring your product’s packaging and pricing across self-serve and sales-led is critical to its overall success. You want to set up everyone to operate where they do best: at the bottom of the market for self-serve offering, and at the top of the market for your sales team. At Amplitude, our sellers offer volume discounts that aren’t available on self-serve once a customer has reached a certain volume threshold. This helps us drive self-serve customers to sales if they might actually be better off on another plan.

Once you’ve established clear playgrounds for product and sales, it’s time to nail the details of pricing. When structuring your pricing tiers, understanding how customers progress through product features is key. Instead of only making specific features available on specific paid plans, the customer journey should dictate when features are unlocked. For example, all Amplitude users can create a cohort analysis for free, but only those on a paid plan can save or sync it. A progressive method of unlocking features allows for a more natural movement between plans that aligns with the customer journey. Customers on a given plan can experience certain features, and then if they’d like to explore a feature more, they can unlock additional functionality within a paid plan. The bottom line is that new value should be unlocked within each tier, and the best way to do that is to expose that value on the previous tier.

Get Ready to Become a Churn Expert

Launching a self-serve plan is truly a company-wide effort. This kind of change touches everyone from marketing and sales to engineering and product – and everyone in between. Unlike in traditional, sales-led organizations, growth marketing and product teams are now responsible for reducing churn. To be effective, teams need to understand why customers churn, including identifying certain customer benchmarks and being able to define where each customer stands. Marketing and product teams’ understanding of business metrics like revenue and churn is fundamental to the long-term success of the self-service plan. Getting ahead of churn requires company-wide support and proper staffing, including defining team roles.

Mastering a self-service product strategy comes with challenges and considerations, but the potential for monetization and increased customer satisfaction is significant. However, the most important and basic consideration of all is ensuring your product is actually ready for self-serve. Make sure you have healthy adoption and retention rates – and if you don’t, invest there first. Naturally, it can be overwhelming to begin this journey. Introducing a self-serve model when your company has historically been sales-led can be difficult, but embrace it with a growth mindset – find experts internally or externally, conduct research, and most importantly, talk to your customers. And keep talking to them – you learn something new every single time.