New Trade Routes

Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.

Seattle, WA USA

Trade drives the way people interact.  People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path.  Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival.  New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.

 

The Roadmap to a Free Trial and Frictionless Growth

October 17, 2022  /  Jay Leon

There are two kinds of B2B SaaS companies, those with a “Free Trial” and those without.  Some would argue there is also a third kind of company where the “Free Trial” button leads to a form where the customer must apply for a free trial instead of a truly self-service free trial.  This is just another flavor of not having a free trial.  The free trial strategy only works if it is completely frictionless for the customer and the company.  When you log in each morning, you want to be able to see that hey, 110 free trials kicked off last night! 

Within the free trail group, there are two variants.  Applications with a network effect, and those without.  Both types can effectively use the free trial strategy, but the companies seeking a network effect may choose gaining more users over ever getting paid.  This model is sometimes called “freemium”.  Where users sign up for free, and can continue for free, or can upgrade to paid.

The free trial strategy where the company wants to get paid by every customer is the panacea for B2B SaaS.  Some people call this “Product Led Growth”.  It can be the key to your frictionless growth.

So, there are two types of B2B SaaS companies, those with a free trial and those that wish they had one.  And within the free trial group, there are those that want to get paid by every customer and those that may have customers that don’t ever pay.

If you are a B2B SaaS company with a free trial and the desire to get paid by every customer, here are three things to put on your roadmap:

  1. Be relentless in evaluating the usability of your application.  Make absolutely sure it really does work for the users you want.  Test and QA until you are certain you have a 100% self service new customer onboarding.  If you are not sure, have a beta trial or some other track that only finds adventurous potential customers that will help you work out the free trial bugs.

  2. Promote your pricing in advance of the free trial.  Since you want every customer to pay at the end of the trial, there is no point hiding the cost or making it difficult for potential customers to calculate what the cost will be.  No customer you want for the long run is going to take the time to learn your application while just hoping it will fit in their budget.

  3. Understand your customer’s path to your free trial button.  Make a list of every path you can imagine your ideal customer following to your free trial button and start testing them one by one.  This exercise probably starts with a search for something like: “how to load SAP into data warehouse”.  When I run this search, I get 4 ads and 82 million results.  The success of this path for you requires that you get to the top of that list.

From this discussion, which just starts to map out the journey, we see there is a lot behind every one of those free trial buttons on B2B SaaS websites. Done correctly, the free trial strategy can absolutely fuel your frictionless growth.

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