Free Trials are good — if they are good.
Meaning, if a prospect, or at least, a subset of prospects, can have an amazing user self-guided user experience on a trial, then do it. At least try it.
Free trials can also be very efficient on your sales team. They can get a prospect further down the funnel before sales needs to get involved.
The “problem” with trials is that the more your app requires business process change, or onboarding, or data entry, etc. … the less the odds the trial will be any good.
A Slack Free account? Pretty good.
A Workday Free account? No point.
Second, remember as you go more enterprise, and are more about business process change — fewer of your prospects will want a trial. Instead, they may push for pilots. That require you to do all the work to help with business process change, onboarding, data entry, 🙂
Prospects don’t want to do a lot of work. If the trial is the least amount of work, they will do that. Otherwise, they will want you to do the work.
So …
Third, perhaps most importantly, remember Free Trials are NOT a marketing strategy. I know this is confusing, but they do not get you leads. They mere are a way to push a lead further down a funnel to paid. Magically adding a Free edition or a Free Trial will not get people to Google your app.
Trials are great. But they aren’t for every app.
If you don’t have free trials though, and/or if they don’t work well for your app — you are going to need more folks working on pre-sales.
