Dear SaaStr: What Was Your #1 Hack to Increase Trial Conversions to Paid?
The quickest hack I did was answer all calls and chats immediately.
- I opened up a remote phone bank / set of agents just to answer trial users’ questions; and
- I made sure every chat that was in a trial was answered in real-time where practical.
There are many product-level things you can do. Improve your messaging. Futz with the time period for the trial. Talk for hours about “personas”.
But the simplest thing I did that moved the needle, that I don’t see most folks do, is set up 10 agents quickly to answer the phone and chat for free users during trials and just talk to them and answer their questions.
Most SaaS companies steer away from phone support in general, and especially for lower-end and trial prospects/customers. They think it is too much work, and too expensive. At scale it can be expensive, no doubt.
But especially if you do it outside of the Bay Area, and especially in the earlier-days, in the early days it isn’t that expensive. Especially if you can segment out support issues (where you should still pick up the phone) from questions from prospects and trial users. You will only have just so many bona-fide trial users before say $5m-$10m in ARR, usually.
Not everyone wants to get on the phone, especially these days. So when a prospect does, that often means they want to buy. They have a couple key questions, often even just one. And talking to a real human being, especially to a vendor without a brand that is not that well known, often is all it takes.
Staff it up today with a new phone number and even an outsourced service to start, and see what happens.
A little more here: Pick Up The Phone. Answer the Chat. Be Present. | SaaStr
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
