What your free triallers say and what they actually mean
What you hear from free triallers
Over the years, we became very used to learning to decipher common phrases from our free trial cohorts. We learned and tracked these phrases in our last SaaS business where we were often dealing with SMEs in a market where users were not used to buying and negotiating SaaS deals.
These are some of the top things we’d hear frequently and what they actually meant.
I’ll buy when you deliver this feature = I haven’t evaluated your product
Explain that you concentrate on implementing feature requests from paying users, and sign them up to your newsletter so they can stay up to date with your product news.
If the feature request is way off where you’re heading with your product, tell them. Honesty really is the best policy and you’ll stop wasting your time and theirs.
I’m going to buy a huge account in 12 months = Please give me a cheap account forever
This is one to really watch out for. Of course you have to do deals (particularly in the early days when you’re gaining traction) but don’t start implementing feature requests in the hope that a free trialler will convert.
There have been occasions when we’ve delivered feature requests to convert a trialler to paid but this was done under a signed contract and it made sense financially. If you’re going to do this, get a contract in place, and don’t deliver that feature until the customer has paid up.
I haven’t had time to evaluate your product, can I have an extension? = I haven’t really got the pain point you’re solving
While not true of all SaaS products, we found free triallers that are heavily active and engaged in the first few days have a much higher conversion rate to paid account then those who don’t bother then ask for an extension.
If they don’t make time to evaluate early on (especially common with SME customers where the business owner is the evaluating user, and they get distracted by the next day’s crisis), the same thing is likely to happen again.
I just need my boss to sign-off/process the payment = I don’t have authority to make a decision and probably haven’t even mentioned this to my boss yet
Always Identify the decision maker upfront.
Give all free triallers a call or at least a personalised welcome email. Your goal is to understand what pain point they are trying to solve, so that you both understand if and how you can help them. You also need to work out who in the organisation has the power to buy. If you can’t speak to the financial decision maker, at least make sure that you have offered to help your contact build the case to buy with them.
Build me this feature at cost and I’ll sign-up for a big account when you deliver = Deliver this feature for me then I’ll probably change my mind and not purchase
Look out for tight timescales and them making any excuse not to sign-up/pay in after delivery. Loss leaders are a bad idea. Get the commitment, get it in the contract.
What other phrases should you watch out for and why? Have you found that these issues only arise when dealing with certain segments of user? Comments welcome!
Other useful stuff courtesy of the tinterwebs
Are SaaS sales a 27 step process? The SaaS Buying Experience: Mapping How Businesses Buy Software
