Professional Services in SaaS PLG

Selling Professional Services to bump our Revenue 

Professional services are an interesting way to boost PLG's revenue. It might sound counterintuitive because the concept of PLG is to deliver a self-serve experience. So why would we sell Professional services? 

When we launched, we were really selling our mid-market SOC 2 compliance automation product to startups and SMB. We rejiggered our product with a self-serve onboarding experience, but our positioning, messaging, and pricing remained very complex for our customers to understand. 

We were providing a freemium which attracted a lot of start-ups and SMBs. Then, we had a service layer that the industry was accustomed to. We sold these Professional Service packages and passed them over to our customer success team, who would meet with the customer periodically and guide them through our software.

Professional Service Didn't Scale At All

We sold our Professional Services to several customers. We felt good closing deals. We presented to the company. We story-tell that the PLG-motion created a faster pipeline of sales. Congrats all around! 🥳 🤔

Then it became unscalable. 

Our customer success team could not scale. They were rightfully prioritizing larger customers first. Smaller customers needed more handholding, had more questions, and required more attention. 

How do we charge Professional Services without stretching our customer success team too thin? Do we limit the number of success hours we can offer? Would the customer continue to pay for the success hours? 

Finding the Gaps to go back to Selling Software-Only

We recognize our PLG customers purchased Professional Services and handholding because they think achieving SOC 2 compliance is too complicated. They want to pay someone to guide them. 

That was the gap — that compliance is not achievable through self-service. 👈

And if we were to lean into PLG motion, we would have to dispel that and reassure our customers that they can achieve SOC 2 compliance by themselves. We will give them the roadmap and resources for it. 

Since then, we have stopped selling Professional Services. We developed our self-serve documentation, created step-by-step roadmap content, created a community, created interactive videos, and reassured our customers that many startups before them have achieved SOC 2 compliance easily without hand-holding. And because these SMB customers want to save money, they understand they want to try this for themselves first. 

We noticed through the product usage data that customers were progressing on their compliance journey using our platform. This gave us confidence that indeed it is possible, and on this path, we can disrupt the incumbent sales-led industry that was selling software and holding services. 

💡 Takeaway:

If possible, offer a Professional service layer first. Learn why your customers were willing to pay you for this. Then, shut down the professional service layer and create self-service materials and assets to replace handholding. Reassure your customers that it is possible, and you will give them a step-by-step roadmap on how to do it. 

Read more about Pricing and Packaging in PLG:

• Advanced Pricing and Packaging Strategies for Product Led Growth

• “Restaurant Menu” framework to SaaS Pricing and Packaging

• Usage Based Pricing Examples from successful companies

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.