The Case for Product Trial Automation

In my earlier post, I have shared my outlook on a Customer’s Lifecycle journey in SaaS products.

Most SaaS companies focus on getting prospects into a free product trial. Good companies realize that in order to avoid churn and increase customer lifetime value they need to ensure that, over the long run, the customer receives value from the product. This is how customer success industry was born.

Great SaaS companies focus on accelerating prospect’s journey through the customer lifecycle steps while measuring the conversion rate at each step.

Very often SaaS companies overlook two important steps in between:

1. Product activation
2. Conversion to paid customer

Low product activation is the result of a) poorly designed free trial, and b) ineffective on-boarding process. Proper on-boarding process can help your prospects get maximum value out of the free trial and improve conversion to paid customers, but only if you’ve already figured out your optimal free trial offering.

A lot of guessing is involved in designing a free product trial. Many companies are struggling to find the optimal duration of the trial, capacity or usage limitation, product features, and the ability to differentiate between the buying personas. These aren’t the easiest things to figure out.

And, by the way, why should companies wait till the end of the free trial run to convert prospects if your potential customers realize the value of the product sooner? Why should your sales team wait until the end of the 30 day trial if the prospects validated your product in 7 days?

In order to accelerate the buying process, companies need to identify the level of engagement that will highly correlate with the conversion from free trial to paid customers. Which actions do your prospects need to accomplish in order to realize the product value? The ideal time to initiate a buying request is as soon as the product was validated. The longer you wait — the longer your buying cycle becomes.

Free product trial offering has many challenges and one way that companies are dealing with it is by removing the free product trials altogether, and instead offering a “Request a Demo” option.

Based on the 2014 SaaS Metrics Report by Totango, 37% of SaaS companies do not have free trial or freemium model. From the same report:

“Over the last 4 years, there has been a drop in the percentage of companies depending on free trials or freemium offerings to acquire new business.”

The decision in favor of guided demo compared to self-serving free trial is often explained by the complexity of the product. While many successful companies are going this route I have serious doubts that this way is the most efficient one.

First of all, many prospects will be turned off right away since they will be forced to interact with the sales rep. This feels like a hard-sell way that is too early in the processes. Second, you are running into a possibility of wasting your sales rep’s time on unqualified leads or designing a separate pre-qualification process.

Wouldn’t it be more effective and efficient to design self-serving free trial with an awesome on-boarding process and initiate contact only when you know exactly that the customer fits your ideal profile?

Let me recap:

• Companies need to pay close attention to each step of the customer’s lifecycle journey.
• Coming up with a free product trial process and offering what works is incredibly hard.
• Measuring product activation when prospects realize the value of the product can help companies dramatically in reducing e the length of the buying cycle.

Product Trial Automation can be the solution.

What if companies had the ability to easily and quickly automate and personalize product free trials?

Product trial automation solution will empower companies to customize free trial experience based on features, duration, usage or capacity, and an ideal customer profile.

With a couple of clicks your team can pick and choose what features should be a part of the free trial. You can also select the duration of the trial and possibly adjust it for each feature. To validate the product value your team can set a specific engagement metric which, when reached, will send a notification to your sales rep.

What if you can change your product trial depending on who is coming through the door? Product trial automation solution can help your team create clusters of prospects and automatically give them access to free trial that’s designed just for them with an on-boarding process that is more customized.

I realize the obstacles for designing product like that. For one, tight integration is difficult to do especially when every SaaS product is unique. Second, the market is not big.

Imagine the marketing possibilities when your team can create customizable product trials on the fly. Pick features, select duration, and generate a custom link which you can embed in your marketing campaigns. Instead of forcing everyone through the same process you can create uniques free trial experiences.

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Originally published on Linkedin.
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