A Trial Without a Plan Is Just a Science Project.
To paraphrase Hamlet, “To trial, or not to trial, that is the question.” The answer is not so simple.
In the SaaS era, standing up a vanilla trial can be a relatively easy task, which makes it so tempting to offer prospective customers (versus during the on-prem era, where hardware and software needed to be installed). Executing a custom trial (using customer data, reports and workflows) can also be complex and time consuming.
But let’s take a step back and determine why to do a trial (some call them POC’s or POV’s) in the first place.
The primary reason to do a trial is to prove that the product will fit the needs of the prospective customer with real users (versus an antiseptic demo environment). Because of the time and opportunity cost (maybe 30 hours of prep) of executing a trial, we need to be judicious about with which customers we select to do them.
The simplest way to measure trial success is in the conversion rate from trial to signed customer (and not just for the few trial users). Typically, at least 90% of trials should convert to signed contracts. Why so high?
After an AE drive-by demo and after the delivery of the business case and after a custom demo, if the customer fears low adoption of the software, then a trial should be offered. It should be the final proof point (if needed) before closing the deal.
In organizational change projects, it’s understandable why customers would want to test the software in their environment with their users, in order to be confident that the users will adopt the product; however, before agreeing to do the trial, there needs to be clear “success criteria” that is measurable agreed to by the customer and which if achieved, a deal will be consummated for more than the handful of trial users. For example, if the trial user count is ten and the total user count is potentially 200, then there should be at least 50 users contracted as a result of the trial.
For subtle do’s and don’t regarding trial in your company, you might lean on MOIC’s Compass system that collects these and other organizational memories (tribal knowledge) for re-usability, such as volume of data needed to populate the system, etc.
In the SaaS era, standing up a vanilla trial can be a relatively easy task, which makes it so tempting to offer prospective customers (versus during the on-prem era, where hardware and software needed to be installed). Executing a custom trial (using customer data, reports and workflows) can also be complex and time consuming.
But let’s take a step back and determine why to do a trial (some call them POC’s or POV’s) in the first place.
The primary reason to do a trial is to prove that the product will fit the needs of the prospective customer with real users (versus an antiseptic demo environment). Because of the time and opportunity cost (maybe 30 hours of prep) of executing a trial, we need to be judicious about with which customers we select to do them.
The simplest way to measure trial success is in the conversion rate from trial to signed customer (and not just for the few trial users). Typically, at least 90% of trials should convert to signed contracts. Why so high?
After an AE drive-by demo and after the delivery of the business case and after a custom demo, if the customer fears low adoption of the software, then a trial should be offered. It should be the final proof point (if needed) before closing the deal.
In organizational change projects, it’s understandable why customers would want to test the software in their environment with their users, in order to be confident that the users will adopt the product; however, before agreeing to do the trial, there needs to be clear “success criteria” that is measurable agreed to by the customer and which if achieved, a deal will be consummated for more than the handful of trial users. For example, if the trial user count is ten and the total user count is potentially 200, then there should be at least 50 users contracted as a result of the trial.
For subtle do’s and don’t regarding trial in your company, you might lean on MOIC’s Compass system that collects these and other organizational memories (tribal knowledge) for re-usability, such as volume of data needed to populate the system, etc.
Without clear success criteria and commitment from the customer to buy after success is achieved will likely doom the trial as merely a “science project” by the customer and valuable time and resources likely wasted.
If your team struggles to convert trials to buys or doesn’t get large enough deals as part of the conversion, email dave@moicpartners.com for guidance.
