For many years now we've offered a self-serve 30-day trial for our SaaS product. About 20% of trial signups are good quality. The rest often have poor data, are difficult to get in touch with, or are foreign companies attempting to copy our features for their own projects. Should we put a better filter on who we let through the door? We're considering reviewing each trial to verify contact information and make sure we have a good product-customer fit prior to approving the 30-day trial. It seems these could be the benefits: 1. Improve the quality of active trials - Helps focus sales team efforts on quality leads only - Gives us earlier contact with the prospect so we can qualify and collect more information 2. Gives the product more of an exclusive feel / build a bit of anticipation because of a slight waiting period. 3. Makes it more difficult for competitors to get access and copy the results of all our R & D. 4. Makes us less of an open door target for hackers I'd love to hear your opinion or experience!
What would happen if...
> you banned certain country IPs?
> you had a pre-qualifying opt-in requirement, where a visitor had to affirm that Yes, they were in one or more of the specific situations your SaaS provides a solution for?
> you made each potential trial user have to call and have a 2-minute qualifying conversation with your staff?
One or more of these will give you a better-qualified trial user pool.
I see this frequently in my marketing coaching: the person is afraid that without being "open" to all and sundry, they're somehow going to be turning off and turning away tons and tons of business.
How's business now?
What do you have to lose?
What do you have to GAIN from a pool of much-better qualified prospects?
Look at how the SaaS market generally does what it does...and the results they're getting. Do you like those results? If not, maybe you should be behaving differently.
Answered 8 years ago
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