My 2 cents... When asked for a discount pre-trial, I am vague suggesting "We'll find a way to make it work for you. We can offer discounts for longer term contracts. Once you do the trial, we can narrow down the scope and figure out how to get it to make sense for you."
If they'll give a reasonable budget to hit, then we can find a way to make trade-offs to hit it. If it's discount requests without either a budget to hit, or an explicit competitor's price, then it's too early to make concessions. You need the specific competitor so that you can define value propositions. And if you ask for enough competitor pricing, then eventually you'll get a sense of what the real price away from you is, and if the prospect is giving you BS.
This is a tough topic, because on a business with 10% net margins, if you give everyone a 10% price cut, you've given away all of your profits.
I was about to suggest much the same thing. Instead of offering a month trial by default, only offer it when enterprise customers ask about billing. Then you can use it as leverage, in the "Here! I'm giving you something!" sense, rather than it just being an assumed perk. You've thus generated goodwill and can follow up the trial with an offer for a bulk 12-24 month deal.
You can still offer free trials by default to lower tiered customers, eg. consumers, small businesses etc. But they aren't the ones that you need to worry about 10%+ discounts on. Becuase they're so low billing that the rarity of the pre-trial discount will render the overall cost negligible.
If they'll give a reasonable budget to hit, then we can find a way to make trade-offs to hit it. If it's discount requests without either a budget to hit, or an explicit competitor's price, then it's too early to make concessions. You need the specific competitor so that you can define value propositions. And if you ask for enough competitor pricing, then eventually you'll get a sense of what the real price away from you is, and if the prospect is giving you BS.
This is a tough topic, because on a business with 10% net margins, if you give everyone a 10% price cut, you've given away all of your profits.