pent 6 months building self-serve checkout. B2B buyers just wanted a demo.

For the first year of our SaaS, all of our sales were done manually. I would hop on a Zoom call, walk the prospect through the product, answer their questions, and send them a Stripe link. It wasn't scalable, but it worked. We had 50 customers paying us $99/month.

Then, I drank the Product-Led Growth (PLG) Kool-Aid. I read all the blog posts about how "frictionless checkout" and "self-serve onboarding" were the future. I convinced my team to spend six months and $15,000 (we hired a contractor) building a complete self-serve funnel: a new marketing site, automated onboarding emails, and a seamless Stripe checkout integration. We removed the "Book a Demo" button entirely.

We launched the new self-serve experience two months ago, and our revenue has actually gone down.

When I started calling the leads who visited the pricing page but didn't buy, the feedback was unanimous:
"I had a few questions about how your security works, but there was no way to contact you without buying first. I just went with your competitor who offered a demo."
"I needed to know if this integrates with our legacy system, but I wasn't going to put in my credit card just to find out."

I realized I made a massive mistake. I confused B2C e-commerce with B2B SaaS. Our buyers aren't buying a $10 t-shirt on a whim; they are making a business decision and need reassurance. By trying to remove all "friction," I accidentally removed the human trust-building that was actually closing our deals.

Now we have to rebuild our sales pipeline from scratch.

For those who sell B2B: Did you ever try to force a self-serve model when your product actually required a sales touch?

How do you balance the efficiency of PLG with the necessity of human interaction for higher-ticket B2B deals?