This is framed like a question about sales strategy, but to me it’s actually a product question. There are two key inputs when trying to roll out a low-touch model:
- Does the buying motion of your user persona allow for it?
- Can your product actually support a self-serve or low-touch user experience?
You need both of these to be true in order for a low-touch model to work, and they are both very difficult to change once the snowball has started rolling down the hill.
Many people don’t realize the persona issue until it hits them. Sooner or later, even with companies like Atlassian and Slack that you mentioned, you end up moving upmarket, selling to large enterprises, and hiring high touch sales reps. This is for persona reasons and not product reasons – people need a high touch just to survive their company’s procurement processes.
In your case, with a very early stage business, it is probably still doable to move to a low-touch model, but it has to be part of a comprehensive strategy. Put lines in the sand around who your product is for and what their experience needs to be like in a low-touch UX, and commit to living in that world comprehensively across your business.
This happened to us at RJMetrics. We marketed ourselves as a self-serve product and focused on end users who wanted to self-serve. But the product never caught up to the vision because so much of our functionality was built around the crutch of high-touch services from our early days. That gap was a major source of friction, contributed to churn, ultimately was at the core of a lot of our biggest issues in scaling the company.