With the sixth installment of our Acting Like a Top 25 Salesforce ISV webinar series, we begin a three part mini-series on the buyer’s journey, starting with the trial experience. The trial experience can be a make-or-break moment in your buyer’s journey, so CodeScience CRO, Sean Hogan, teamed up with GTM Guides Founder, Mike Davis, to share proven strategies to build customer trials that close.
In this hour-long session, Sean and Mike discuss how ISVs can take a thoughtful and measured approach to designing and building a positive trial experience for prospective customers. Along the way, they provide several tips to help ISVs reduce friction in the buyer’s journey, educate both Salesforce and internal sales teams, and optimize the available trial tech framework to improve close rates.
Register now to watch the webinar and download a copy of the slides.
Defining the Trial Experience
Before diving into the topic, Sean took a moment to clarify exactly what the trial experience comprises. It’s not just trialing the technology, Sean explains. “It is the experience you want a prospect to go through as they’re interacting with your company and your technology through the buying process.” Aligning both your tech and your team to the buyer’s journey is key to ensuring a positive experience for your target buyer.
Designing a Frictionless Experience
Drawing on his experience helping ISVs optimize their buyer’s journey, Mike discusses several strategies and best practices for building and designing a frictionless, multi-channel trial experience.
Designing an effective trial experience that wins business for your company starts with designing the story you want to tell, then executing around that. This is a three-pronged approach, as it includes the story you want to tell your prospective customers, the story for Salesforce AEs and CSMs, and the internal story to help your sales and marketing teams close more business.
Aligning Your Tech and Team for Success
Now that you’ve designed your trial experience and prepared your team, it’s time to select and align the tech. ISVs should focus their trial experience strategy on the tech frameworks that are best suited to tell their story. “You don’t have to leverage everything,” Sean explains, and Mike provides some considerations and guidance to help ISVs decide where to prioritize their optimization efforts.
Building Trial Experiences that Close
So what steps can you take right now to optimize your trial experience and improve your close rates? Start by identifying the gaps in your current trial experience. Sean and Mike provide several resources to help you with this task, including a Close Rate Audit Checklist. “If you start to break this down into small, understandable parts, you’ll start to see the engagement of your employees, the engagement of your prospects, and your close rates start to increase,” Sean advises.
Mike closed with two tips on the trial experience that look ahead to the next two installments in our Top 25 ISV webinar series:
First, when a prospective customer installs a trial, “Don’t go ‘hands off.’ Design a playbook and have it be repeatable.” This way, your sales team is prepared with a clearly designated path forward to close the deal.
Secondly, while 30 days is the default length of the trial, it doesn’t have to be. “Fourteen days is good. Seven days is even better!” Mike exclaims. Shortening the trial can create a sense of urgency to help close deals faster. “People procrastinate. Try going down to fourteen, and hopefully I just knocked two weeks off your average deal duration.”
To hear more from our panelists on optimizing the trial experience, along with an informative audience Q&A, watch the full webinar here. Keep an eye out for the next installation in our Acting Like a Top 25 ISV series, which will focus on enabling your GTM teams to the buyer’s journey.
Companies build their Salesforce businesses better with CodeScience. It is our mission that no ISV navigates Salesforce alone. If you’re looking for guidance on your product, help supporting your customers, or just need to ask an expert, get in touch today!
