Implementers failing to prioritize doing some legwork during the free trial period also costs time for the sales organization of the selling party.
From the sales side, if we see the prospect the finding a solution is a low enough priority that their engineers can’t spend time in two weeks to simply look at a solution, then they might not be an ideal fit for the product (they don’t enough business pain, don’t have a champion, and/or don’t have an economic buyer to prioritize the purchase of a solution).
This is of course highly dependent on the nature of the software and the ideal customer profile of that solution, but the fact that there’s two sides of this coin is something to keep in mind.
In many orgs, pain points are subtle, product evaluations happen on the back burner, and internal consensus on pulling the trigger might take months. These firms are left on the table by a demo/sales process that can only afford them two weeks.
And a trial need not take many sales resources. We can automate that with a demo download and self serve documentation. If it's an on prem demo, a 2 week or 12 week trial costs us the same - it's just a sign up and download. We don't actually need a sales rep to prod them about buying - the demo countdown does that, for people actually gaining value from the demo.
Let's acknowledge the article's evidence that longer trials can convert customers with lower pain points. Secure customers like to evaluate things without pressure. And they might be the majority of customers.
Let's enable this by building sales resilience, engineering the infrastructure painlessly delivery a longer trial that takes near zero sales or production effort.
From the sales side, if we see the prospect the finding a solution is a low enough priority that their engineers can’t spend time in two weeks to simply look at a solution, then they might not be an ideal fit for the product (they don’t enough business pain, don’t have a champion, and/or don’t have an economic buyer to prioritize the purchase of a solution).
This is of course highly dependent on the nature of the software and the ideal customer profile of that solution, but the fact that there’s two sides of this coin is something to keep in mind.