SaaS businesses have by and large been built on a premise that they meet a need of a company or individual, and that once the company or individual gets a taste for the product, it will deliver enough value to keep them paying for it. The barrier of course is getting someone to try your product in the first place, so logically, most SaaS businesses have some kind of pilot or trial to allow their customer to try before they buy. In reality, for both customer and business, this is a little too hit and miss, at times like clunky speed dating or an awkward blind date where the match is not a match, and at other times, it’s a perfect 10 where the star align to deliver value to the customer and revenue to the company.
When you look at an average sales funnel, you’d think that the time and money spent my sales and marketing to get prospects to a trail stage should result in a decent conversion rate from trial to live, so if your funnel is looking way too “martini glass” with lots of trials failing to convert, here’s 5 areas to investigate.
Lack of prep and planning: The analogy I usually use when I’m talking about the internal viewpoint (sales to success handover) or the external viewpoint (getting started with your trial) is the perfect wedding party – it feels effortless and so much fun to the guests, but the wedding planners know that the long and complex lists of actions required in advance of the party is the reason for the success. In the same way, many SaaS product trials fail due to lack of planning.
It could be as simple as not consulting the customer’s IT team to ensure that your company emails have been whitelisted (not blocked by your customer emails servers), or as convoluted as working with a larger business to get on their preferred supplier list, but if you don’t have a clear checklists on what needs to be done BEFORE agreeing to run a pilot, you are likely to hit a barrier that pointlessly de-rail the pilot and looses you revenue. It’s seems such an obvious thing to do, but always categorising your failed pilots and analysing the output can reduce the failures by driving better planning.
Lack of purpose: “Tire kicking” is the biggest time wasting exercise known to man. In my career, I’ve heard so many times, “give us access to your product and we’ll have a play around.” I’m not selling a toy, and if you are not serious, there is no point in wasting your or my time! Customers in both b2b and b2c need to know why they are trying a product, because if they are doing so as a favour to the sales person, because their boss told them to or because they were killing time, then the chance of getting any money from the customer is very slim.
We’ve all seen “tire kickers” at conferences and events – they have a swag bag from every exhibitor, and don’t even stop to watch the demo. Weeding out customers who are not serious is good for both of you – you’ll spend more time on those with a real need for your product, and you’ll save the “tire kickers” from wasting any more of their own time, too!
Lack of success criteria: You can be very clear on a purpose for trialling a product – save time, reduce cost, increase productivity, simplify purchase process, etc, but a big missed opportunity is to drill down with a prospective customer to identify trial success criteria. You can break this down into two points. Firstly, what needs to happen during the trial for you to be convinced to sign up and start paying for the product? The reflex is to define a measure like save money or time, but often customers are not measuring this, so what is the benchmark you are measuring against? Instead, focusing on something more objective, if a little less tangible, like “did this feel like an easier way to work or deliver my task” might be more meaningful.
The second point (relevant to b2b trails) is how to measure success for both the business / decision maker and the stakeholder / users – “save money” for a CFO might mean “more automation and less clicks for a user.” As these criteria mattered in the trial, they will continue to matter after the customer starts paying, so nail them early to start demonstrating value as early as possible!
Lack of engagement: The steps a customer goes through in a customer journey are predictable. The actions required to move from one stage to another are also predictable. The emotions a customer goes through on that journey are harder to control. Those of us in customer facing roles spend huge amounts of time trying to establish relationship with individuals to understand and influence those emotions in a positive way. When a key contact leaves, or a new contact is introduced, it usually means we have to start all over again in the engaging stakeholder process. But it’s not just contacts that change, priorities, business needs or overall market trends affect b2b and b2c. Stakeholder and decision-maker engagement are really important factors to understand, so that we can broaden and de-risk these factors.
For example, in a SaaS product trial, getting agreement to run a user survey toward the end of the trail is a good way to show value beyond cost saving – happy users = more engaged employees. Showing benefits that give decision-makers confidence are highly influential too – security, availability, reliability and predictability are hygiene factors that might not deliver delight, but will deepen trust and dependence on a product. Thus engagement needs to be thought of not as a way to influence one or two people, but a means to demonstrate a number of different metrics, facts and data points that give different people in the business reason to trust and rely on us.
Lack of on-boarding: Finally, stating the most obvious point, that probably envelops elements for all the other factors, think about human nature. As creatures of habit, despite what we think, we are not predisposed to try something new. Even if we know it’s better, we are hard-wired to stick with what we now. A seamless (i.e. simple) on-boarding is one way to reduce friction during change, and capture observations on early life usage and adoption of your product. More than that, weak or malformed on-boarding is the fastest way to turn a curious or nervous new user into a negative “tire kicker” or stubborn “refusnik”. On-boarding means that you’ve got one shot at helping them engage with you, your product and a new way of doing something – don’t blow it because you are too focused on new product feature development!
If you really think about it, by the time you get someone to a stage where they want to try your product (paid pilot, fixed term trial or free basic “land and expand” approach), both you and the prospect have already done a lot of work. If the product is a good fit and the marketeers have targeted the right audience, it seems crazy that conversion of pilot and trial customers is anything less that the majority. We all accept the many variables we face (product maturity, market tolerance on pricing, competitive landscape, regulatory requirements, etc), but marketing, sales and customer success need to own the improvement on conversion – not just because it gets more revenue through the door, but because successful trails create successful customer who buy more, recommend you to other and stay loyal for longer.
MOM Inc 