Lots of SaaS companies don’t offer a free trial — intentionally.
A free trial is a bad idea if:
- Your product has a lengthy and/or complex deployment process. If it’s going to take 30–60 days to go live, a Free Trial will just lead to failure. That’s way too much work just to see if you might want to buy a product. Most prospects will give up and quit.
- Your product requires a significant amount of multi-step or manual data entry to have any value. This is common with many HR apps for example, that often have no value unless the org is populated with lots of data. Or many finance apps. If the app has no perceived value without a ton of layers of data added, again a Free Trial will just lead to failure.
- The product is too clunky for a Free Trial. This is actually pretty common in enterprise-focused apps. In the enterprise, you can use people (customer success and support, solution architects, consultants, agencies etc.) for a lot of onboarding of data and processes. If your product just isn’t easy enough to use for a Free Trial on their own to be a success, again, it will fail.
Free Trials are magical, done right. But they really only work if a customer can deploy successfully, on her own, very quickly.
If you can’t deliver that today, have humans manage the process instead.
And if you can’t deliver a frictionless Free Trial today, it has a “cousin” — a Free or Paid Pilot. A pilot is in essence a Free Trial with a lot of human help and oversight to assist with the deployment and engagement. Pilots work well, too. Enterprise customers are used to them, in fact.
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e.g., Workday is one of the iconic leaders in SaaS. And what you see is “Read Report”. Not “Free Trial”. And if you dig further, “Contact Sales”.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
