by: Jack Coates. Check his stuff out at http://monkeynoodle.org/ !

For a B2B product, every user willing to spend some time in your product is a gift. Spend the time to make the product easy to try and collect as much feedback as possible. A free trial or a free tier is a piece of cake to offer for a SaaS product, and not impossible for a downloaded product. What blocks teams from starting with one is fear: fear that they will miss their shot with the perfect customer. That fear is grounded in not having properly identified the perfect customer of course! So, some terminology: after all, if it weren’t for the TLAs we’d be SOL PDQ.

Product management teams talk about product market fit all the time, but can sometimes gloss over that PMF is only one element of a successful go-to-market motion. A GTM is best thought of as a machine, an engine that refines the mass of contacts into precious customers. Big companies might have multiple GTMs, while a startup is trying to make their first one. The GTM is internally structured as a funnel of filtering steps and actions: Contacts at the Top of Funnel (TOFU) are repeatedly filtered through various stages of Prospect-hood until the great binary “will you or won’t you buy” question at the Bottom of Funnel (BOFU). The stages might look like:

• build awareness
• identify need
• identify budget
• identify buyers, champions, and gatekeepers
• introduce solution
• prove the value
• close the deal

And that’s why come enterprise sales teams are a thing, because it takes a lot of effort to solve big problems with expensive solutions. Every step in that funnel is at least one meeting involving several expensive people from both sides, so no one wants to waste any effort. For instance if you’re repeatedly stuck at trying to identify budget with organizations that can’t afford your stuff, that’s a sign that you’re building awareness in the wrong environments. And so we introduce the concept of the ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile (apologies to the Juggalos).

The ICP shouldn’t be the people who’ll already talk to us, probably because they knew our sales people from prior roles. Nor should it simply be the really big customers. Instead, it’s a stereotypical representation of organizations who have the problem we solve and have identified budget for solving that problem. Simple enough to aim a boiler room of SDRs (sales development representatives) or SEO (search engine optimization) specialists at. Accurate enough that their efforts are profitable. What would be really great is if the definition is typical enough in the general population of enterprise buyers that more prospects can be found by broadening aim a bit. In other words, maybe success with Idaho customers can be replicated in Utah and North Dakota by just shifting the ICP targets a bit.

Okay, so now we know what an ICP is, and we know that there’s a bunch of people on the Internet… where and how do those things overlap in a way that makes a free trial of your product useful? Counterintuitively, we’re not ready to answer that question yet, because we’re talking about an enterprise product. Remember the funnel? Nobody’s going to spend any significant fraction of a million bucks on the strength of a free trial alone; there is a sales process when you’re pursuing a small number of prospects for a large amount of cash. In fact, your enterprise sales team may even argue against free trials at all. They’re working hard to shape a narrative and efficiently pull prospects through the funnel, and a prospect going off the rails on their own seems unwise. In fact, sales might argue that an unguided experience of your product will ruin their chances to convince prospects of the product value. That statement’s gotta sting a little… especially if it’s correct. That’s one of the three reasons why free trials are really good business for the enterprise vendor.

1 If it’s difficult to bring new users in, growth will be slower. The new customer onboarding flow must be as painless as it can possibly be. No matter how many or how few customers you have, that number doesn’t easily get bigger when bringing a new user into the product requires handholding from an expensive and busy field engineer.

2 The fewer users there are, the less you know about how your product really works. Anyone who is willing to invest ten minutes into trying your product out is giving you a massive gift. You get ten minutes to see their expectations, identify frictions, and learn where failures occur. You’ll hear about these things from customers and BOFU prospects too… but you’ll hear a lot less, because they’ve already been hand-carried through the friction points by a field engineer. If you can get feedback from people that aren’t even in the funnel, you learn a lot more.

3 Your competitors are doing it already. Expectations began to change with open source packages that made it possible to try enterprise software before engaging the sales process. RUM feedback platforms like Pendo and FullStory made it easy to get value, and rapid iteration frameworks like React made it easy to respond to findings. Finally, the free-wheeling economic conditions of the last ten years made it possible to afford free tiers and free trials. Now, the expectation has shifted; for a given class of enterprise software, no ability to try-before-you-buy is probably the outlier. To be clear, my point is not to blindly follow the herd, but rather that the competition is taking advantage of more feedback and growth opportunities than your team is.

There is a counterpoint: if your product is so damned hard to use that anyone without guidance is most likely going to bounce off, an enterprise sales motion is the correct starting point for today’s sales. That said, it’s also a foolish point to hold at, and arguably very strong evidence that you haven’t really attained product market fit. If you have to say a free trial is risking a lost prospect, you’ve got an urgent problem that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. At the very least, you have a COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) problem because you’re having to use account executives and field engineers to guide prospects into success instead of having them focus on problem discovery and solution presentation. At the worst, you’ve got a product that can’t compete, and need to rethink your development plan.

But, what if there’s something special about your market or your product? As a rule, there’s rarely something all that special, but it does happen. However, I don’t think that specialness is justification for deferring free trial for very long. Some scenarios:

• The product is so technically amazing that customer champions will fight for it; the other side of this coin is that the product has required every ounce of development energy to get to functionality.
• The product is in a market so commoditized that no one will spend money on quality, probably because cough Microsoft cough is “free”.

The thing is, these are both signs of things not having gone well in the past! In the first, the engineering was harder or the budget was smaller than ideal. In the second, either there is no opportunity or no one has managed to explain what the opportunity is.  Neither one is a permanent condition or scarlet letter of failure, but neither is a condition to celebrate and cherish either. Today is always a good day to consider first time run experience and ask why there’s no free trial.