A tale of The Free Trial False Summit - what it is and how best to utilise feedback from free triallers of your SaaS product
Why a free trial can be good for business
Most SaaS companies offer some free trial period. It’s a fantastic way to hook people in early and let you both figure out if you’re a good fit for each other.
Free triallers also tend to be very engaged with your product during evaluation and it’s at this time that you will often receive a ton of support requests - many if not most of which are going to be feature requests.
There were two ways we dealt with this in our last SaaS business
- Ensured we had a dedicated help site with all the FAQs we’d hear from free triallers. We found a combination of step-by-step instructions with images and videos worked really well.
- Built Receptive. Yes, seriously! Feature request management was such a pain point for us we created Receptive as a way to allow all customers and free triallers to self-serve to generate, comment on and prioritise feature requests - freeing up the support team to do what they do best.
While you can get great feature requests from free triallers, it’s really important to weigh their feedback in a way that’s right for you and your business. Really early stage SaaS companies have to listen to free triallers. You don’t have an active, paying customer base, so early feedback is essential to shaping your product (we’re massive fans of The Mom Test - full of techniques to help distinguish ego-stroking compliments from commercially useful feedback - more on that coming soon).
As a growing SaaS company with an active, paying customer base, you need to ensure that free trialler feature requests are not jumped on and implemented immediately in the hope of converting them onto a paid plan. It’s an easy mistake to make but you quickly realise the perils of the Free Trial Summit.
The Free Trial False Summit
This summer I climbed Ben Nevis, Scotland’s highest mountain. Several times during the climb, I’d think I was near the top only to find getting over one ridge led to yet another steep, rocky path. By the time I was near the top, I was so fed up I sat down and ate my sandwich!
Anyone with a SaaS product will have experienced the same feeling or “The Free Trial False Summit” at some point. You knock down each objection by building features, only to find that the trialler then finds another reason your product isn’t right for them. Each time you think you’ve finally made it, they find something else.
You can lose a ton of time and money chasing around triallers that will never convert and even build features that don’t add any value to your product. That’s why you should record what free triallers say and understand what they actually mean.
The most important thing to remember is that free triallers ain’t customers… .politely ignore their feature requests. Listen to your customers. Be aware of The Free Trial Summit and don’t build for them until they convert.
Why you need to separate free trialler feature requests from your paying customers
It’s essential to separate out free trialler feature requests from the rest of your paying customer base.
When you view prioritised, free trialler feature requests as a group rather than on an individual basis, you can start to get insights into feature gaps in your product that might help convert more people on to paid plans.
Understanding this feedback from your paying customers will also give you some powerful product management data.
Receptive’s reporting allows this separation; you can easily segment feature requests from free triallers or choose to ignore free trialler input so you keep the signal-to-noise ratio nice and high.
When your free triallers convert to paid, their requests come back to life in Receptive and they get counted as “real” requests - that’s when you really need them. So all the customer’s feedback to date is suddenly valuable in a new way.
This is why its vital to store your feature backlog in a dynamic system that understands the changing relationship with customers as they go from trialler to paid customer.
Where free trialler feedback is most valuable
There are a few situations where we find feature requests from free triallers are incredibly important for a SaaS product:
When free trialler feature requests are are viewed as a group
Cohort analysis of all prioritised, free trialler feature requests can help you spot feature gaps in your product that might just help close more deals.
To help inform your marketing messages
Pick up the phone to your triallers. Might sound a bit old school but this is invaluable. You learn loads on a conversation (things people wouldn’t tell you over email) you can steer the conversation to dig deep and really understand their problem set.
Make notes of the actual phrases your customer uses in conversation around their problem set and your feature requests. These can then be fed back into your marketing messaging - priceless!
To understand why people won’t buy your product
This is a big one. You can often spend all day chatting to people who use your product or are in a very active trial. Getting feature requests and feedback from users who won’t / don’t buy your product can be extremely helpful in informing the overall vision for your product.
Other awesome, related stuff from the web
Can’t disagree with this one:
Your teenage years are just the Free Trial of life’s paid subscription plan.
— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) November 17, 2014Why giving away stuff for free can be a good thing https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-saas-marketing-is-different/.
