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all right perfect so we're just gonna start right now and talk a little bit about what it actually takes for you to turn someone who signs up for your free trial freemium model and what it actually takes to turn them into a happy paying customer and so one of the things I'm really excited about today is just to share with you at Travis who is from gainsight p AG sends their whole solution really revolves around how to actually help you do this and so I'm really excited to both go through with you what this really takes and so Travis why don't just give us a little bit of background of yourself sure hi everyone my name is Travis Kaufman is you see here on the lead product growth you're at gain site and so as far as my background is concerned I have started by actually to begin my career on the engineering side found my way into product and then ultimately to marketing and then now into this I guess interesting little world of product growth which is a fascinating combination without considered product and marketing where like marketing you are trying to help convey the value of your solution but unlike marketing my tool in which to do so is my product and so again stuck here I'm very focused on what is the experience that our our users have with our product and how that can help them understand the value of what we do to incentivize them one to become a customer in our trial which we'll talk about later but to is where there can be potential expansion opportunities and what are the signals that are occurring and the usage of the product that indicates a customers ready for additional set of our offerings so very happy to be here today awesome and yeah I guess I kind of fell in through the world of product from a different lens as well through marketing and I was always doing the kind of traditional way of treating tamanna and you know where you create those leads you put up those form fields and you try and convert them into happy customers but it takes forever and so whenever I launched a freemium product when we got to over a hundred thousand users very quickly I started to realize that the product is actually the best mark you could ever do and so that's what I'm really excited to share with you today and so our goal here is to really share with you a framework that you can use to turn your users into happy paying customers and what I promise you is by the end of this you're gonna look at onboarding in a completely new way so it's going to be quite a lot of fun but before we really dive in I want to ask everyone here what do you think user onboarding is now I was doing a workshop on this and Lisbon a few weeks ago and whenever I asked everyone everyone had a different response of what user onboarding is and so when I would argue user onboarding really is is really just helping your user become successful in the product so that they can actually do something their life I think there's this misconception that good use our onboarding is helping people become the experts at using your product and I don't actually argue that that is is quite a lot different it's it's about helping them see success and what they can do with your product and so when we think about that like what are the the top 1% of businesses doing right when onboarding there's going to be products you know we we sign up once we never come back and see them again and then there's others that completely change the way we live our lives if you think of what was life like before Google Maps messenger or whatsapp a lot of those apps really changed something in our life and how we really viewed the way we do things and so what I'd argue these businesses do extremely well is this they understands the value that provides for the perceived values what they promise people and they're insanely great at delivering on that value and not just delivering on the value but doing that as soon as humanly possible and that kind of begs the question if it's really that easy what are the other 99% of us doing wrong whenever it comes to user onboarding and so what I argue here is that whenever we we promised someone something and we don't quite fully deliver on our value or maybe it just takes us a really long time to deliver on that value there's a valley gap so a quick example before we dive into the main meat of the presentation this is snappa comm so my friend Chris worked at snappa or he's the CEO of it and so he's promising people on his website the perceived value here is that well you can create this online graphic in a snap and so that's the what he's promising people but whenever I actually signed up you actually took me over ten minutes which that might not sound like a long time but in the world of b2c that that can take a ton of time and so I asked my friend Chris and said you know like what's what's going on here this this took quite a while how many people who sign up for your product actually go into the product and he didn't know so he started looking at his analytics and he said well there was twenty seven percent of people are not going into the product so I said huh interesting I wonder why and now I knew why because I've seen his get it again but I wanted him to find out on his own and so he did some digging and he found that theirs is one step which you might have it in your own sass which is the email activation step and so this is common practice for so many companies and when you think about it it's not just one step there is going in finding your Gmail or your email provider then there's clicking a lot email clicking the link in that email potentially having to re sign in and so it could end up being five or six steps alone and so this one step was blocking 27% of people from going to the product so my challenged Chris was can we remove this or can we delay it and so we removed this one step and this is the monthly recurring revenue that Chris sent me and so it just kept going up as soon as you remove this one step the 27 percent of people who previously had never gone into the products they started going to the product they started seeing value from the products and they started upgrading like everyone else and so it was a really quick way for him to boost by 20% and so when it comes back to the valley gap and how do we limit the valley gap time to value is one of the biggest things that we can really improve on and so that's took me a really long time to really figure this out and so the framework that I built for onboarding is really just on how can we help people succeed and see value in the product as soon as possible and so um for those of you that are listening like how many of you have actually played bowling let me know in the comments a vehicle it's a been yeah and so like the first time you played how many times you get in the gutter I can't even yeah like I lost count there's so many and so when we think about bowling it actually has so many similarities between onboarding oddly enough so whenever we start playing bowling what we're usually taught is we want to throw the ball in a straight line to hit all the pins in the middle the more pins we can knock down the higher our points the more likely we are to win the game and so when we think of our onboarding I challenge you to think about that in the same context is how can we create a straight line where we have the absolute minimum number of steps for a user to see success in the product and if we can do that then people are going to strike out in our product more often and by making it easier and quicker for people to do it's just what's going to happen and so what I really want you to think about for your onboarding especially that first experience in the product if point a is signing up what are those absolute minimum number of things someone has to do to strike out and so what I want to challenge everyone listening here is three questions so if you go through these three questions so if her to write them down but they will help you shape up like what is that a straight line on when you experienced look like so the first one is like what are those steps that can be eliminated and I think it bodes your form fields for instance a lot of companies have so many extra form fields that are completely useless and what are some other ones you've seen Travis that you see people can be eliminated most often Oh formfield certainly a good one I think even after the fact I've seen some companies that during their trials they would introduce an additional verification method right sending them an SMS before you can view this report gave us your cell phone number I think we've we as like so on the enterprise software comes I think we have done this because we have gotten so accustomed to optimizing for our own needs right and sacrificing the users experience right so we use the phone number and I say we isn't this example to follow up with a phone call afterwards to get the prospect on the phone right in this was like it's making these trade-offs that are sacrificing the user experience because we need something internally right that fan so there's always those steps you can eliminate so I want to challenge you to think about like what are those steps for your onboarding and then the next part is what are those steps you can delay and now the reason why I'm asking this is because I find most companies treat onboarding like this one trick pony where as soon as someone signs up they're trying to expedite the whole onboarding process so that then that one sitting you're going to explore the entire product and know everything and that's not how it works and so in a lot of companies there's going to be advanced steps that's maybe that would be perfect for a third time or time user to really explore that part of the products or maybe you just wait until they view that part of the product and then that onboarding journey starts and so what are some other examples you can think of here Travis timing steps it you can delay so I mean an example where you're an analytics offering right and you need potentially to pulling other data sources you don't necessarily need the user to go through and connect all the different data sources it's possible there's one it's very simple to connect where you can demonstrate value and so delaying the use of the others I think is another example right so enterprise software specifically there are many many propositions which I think is a challenge for us to want to focus in on and on their single value prop but delaying the others that can be introduced at a later time I think is one of the just concepts of delaying the non absolutely required capabilities that thing so the the last one I'll really mention here is just like what are those mission-critical steps and so these would be the steps they would be on that straight-line experience that would help you get someone to actually see value and so while are you thinking of like what are those mission-critical steps that you need to have an example I love to share is just Google Analytics and so if you wanted to actually get any insights into your website there's one thing you have to do if you sign up for Google Analytics and that is uploading the script it's your website so if you don't do that step there's there's no value in Google Analytics it's empty it's useless and until you do that first quick win then you can start seeing value and so a lot of b2b companies have a few stats at least that you need to do in order to see value and so think about like what are those absolute things we need to have in the somberness experience and just strip it down to that because then people can strike out more in product and so this stat here of how do people don't know it and whenever I ask companies to figure out what it is and if it's as high is this a lot of them just don't know because they're not measuring it and it's the fact that forty to sixty percent of people whenever they sign up for products they will use it once and never come back if you don't believe me look in your own product data and try and find this stat because often times is it's around this and it's pretty scary so whenever we think about four hundred sixty percent of people will sign up and never come back why so think of that that's a lot of people that's over half of the people who sign up your product will sign up and never come back and so while you're thinking of that I'll give you a little bit of a story so the bowling Association actually had a pretty big issue they started noticing that the people who were playing bowling we're just there the very experienced people there was there is no new blood in the game and so they started realizing like hey if we want to be in business and actually grow this business we got to adjust this issue because a lot of people are finding it hard to have fun bowling and because it takes a while to get good at it and so what they started to think about is well how could we actually make it easier for more people you can actually play bullying and so a fellow in Austin Texas actually came up with the idea of the bumper and so if you've been playing bowling you would probably have tried it maybe once or twice and it makes it super easy for you to knock down more pins because your chances of getting the ball into the gutter is almost impossible I say almost impossible because I've seen people playing bowling like shot but maybe there's some outliers there that can still get it in the gutter but whenever we think of your product and the first time someone goes to actually explore your product it's gonna be really easy for them to get it stuck in the gutter in fact that 46 percent of people got stuck in the gutter they don't actually experience the value and so you can use product bumpers to really kind of bump people into the right part of the product so they can see more success and so in this section Travis is actually going to go through and share with you just what are some examples of product bumpers that you can use for your own product so we've got a great collection of product bumpers now the West had put together so a plan to give you some examples of how we again site are using these same concepts so for example once the user logs into the product there really are these good five set of product bumpers a progress bar so in the example of a progress bar we realized we needed one and we actually hosted a customer advisory board recently and where we brought in customers of ours who had recently gone through the purchase process with our software and one of the areas of feedback they gave us was that when after they logged in they didn't know how much effort it was going to take how much time it was going to cost them and so being able to demonstrate and show very specifically what is the effort involved for them to know know if they have enough time now to do you never think mine deferred and come back right product tours same thing making sure that you're orienting them to what is possible within your product and guiding them to very specific set of capabilities checklists onboarding tool tips I'm Stacy I'll go ahead and cover all of these in more detail so here's an example of what we've done at gainsight so this is the concept of a progress bar and it might be a little bit less traditional but we're showing really two things when the user first comes into the product here are the four steps right and one of those steps is already completed so we're actually trying to present to them that they have achieved something already so that they're not starting from nothing every time they have to do an additional stuff and then we clearly articulate what the other steps are and then in a gray font there you'll see what it's the time it's going to take for them to do so so when they first log in they see this little progress step and again we tried to be a little cute with some of the headings down below or the you know the subscript down below but we wanted to do is make it very clear what the steps were and how long the steps would take so this is showing them a sense of progress it gives them an incentive to understand what is what is going to happen when they do something now the next example that we have here is a product tour now I've seen a couple examples of this and one of them is you know as they first log in there's like a splash screen it's like oh welcome to the product and you know that can offer some initial guidance to the user what I'm showing you here I would consider is a little bit more of an advanced step right so for enterprise software you may have multiple value propositions right so you may have you know in this case game side px there's really three core value props you know one's an analytics value prop understanding what users doing in product and the second value prop is is you know helping users adopt your product by introducing some of the concepts for showing tey and lastly is how do you get feedback from users to know what is the qualitative you know what are some of the things that they're asking you to do is they experience your product so we have three very big potentially different core value propositions and how do I get a user to achieve a success with all three of those it's impossible right and so what we're trying to do here is when a new user comes into the product we want to be able to guide their experience based upon their interests right and so in one example if we have a specific marketing campaign that is bringing a user to our product we can key off the in-app experience based upon that campaign and again that's a pretty advanced topic to introduce but something everyone can do is ask right if you don't you know what the customers a desired outcome is with your software is to prompt them and collect this information as part of their experience so what I can then do from here is that if they're interested in you know identifying product usage trends I can then guide them to where in the application that they'll get that information right so this is a this is a way for you to give your users a tour and again unless your product is very simple you have a single value problem you may have a single tour for everyone but for the more sophisticated applications out there and I find enterprise software tends to land itself in this category is you know being as specific and personalized as possible so this is an example of product toward essentially the introduction of it the next area is this notion of checklists right so it what I'm showing you now is an area that persists within our application that shows a list of items that are going to help with a user on board and again instead of assuming that the that you're trying to help the user move through something as fast as possible some people want to move at their own pace and with a checklist you can you can allow them to take the reins a bit and they can start their own guides this way they can view the specific documentation they can know what are the areas of the product and get information that way so here's an example of a about how we've incorporated checklists into the trial experience now the next option here is onboarding tool tips and by no means do I think you need to do all of these all the time I have I'm a big fan of looking at what are the users actually meeting and then introducing based upon need you can get that information through you know analytics offerings understand where drop-offs may occur you can get that through you know a customer advisory board like we didn't you know get that through feedback and a form of surveys and such so in this example what we wanted to do is to emphasize what the setup look like so West shared the example of Google Analytics right you need to the tag our products is very similar where you need to something within your product and so we've created a video that resides in the application and what we then do with this tooltip is that as users are navigating throughout the product maybe clicking around trying to explore and learn we we introduced an area of the product that brings them back this session to say hey these are great you're looking these things but come on back here and this is where the next step is going to be so providing a tool tip of winds of where additional context of why something is present is is is helpful that fan I guess I'm not in spite are some of the most common mistakes you see people make with onboarding tool tips going crazy I think on everything like that's that's what I mean like the the instances be like oh I've got this thing let me go put it everywhere because who doesn't want to know about all of these officers on the left right yeah yeah starting from what you understand your users actually need everything else becomes extras and the extras are good to highlight but not all at the same time it's actually a great example you called out but things to defer right mm-hmm so in our case we're deferring integrations referring a lot of things we're trying to focus on that initial completing that initial set up other areas that I think that's probably one of the highlights is that the people here you know they they grab onto this new technology and they just kind of bring it everywhere and if you're introducing it everywhere then it's again it's just down more noise so being very specific on waiting for things I think personalizing is also something that you know I see companies not thinking through enough okay and I say personalization the fact that you know with technologies like gainsight px you can introduce message to your users whenever you want right new alerts let's say a new product announcement is great but what I find is that companies are often introducing announcements that are irrelevant to their users and potentially blocking the conversion that you want to take right so for example publishing released notes it's not all that valuable to show your new product release notes as someone who just interview product great right so the fact that you know you're not segmenting proper done who should actually see something and where they should see and what their needs are I think it's another another mistake so whatever solution you're looking at make sure that you've got the right the ability to segment properly so you don't overload a user or introduce just extraneous communications yeah that's a good point I remember a few weeks ago I was signing up for drift and you know a lot of people know drift has like a live chat solution but they've recently introduced a new video product and soon as first I'm signing up for drift and I'm going through it and then I get this like modal as soon as we get to the dashboard like here's our video product I'm like I don't care this is not what I signed up for I want some shot part this is like something you could totally delay and so I think what you're mentioning is segmentation you have to have that for here because I think a lot of people just treat it almost like a pop-up like everyone who goes to this page sees it but that shouldn't always be the case yeah exactly right so the last item here and I I didn't intentionally say the best for last but gee this is one of those most interesting concepts to apply is this concept of addressing the empty state in the software that I've built in the past you know shame on me but I really didn't I was worried more about it doing what it was supposed to do what was the functionality that the product was supposed to do and did it do it less so about helping my users understand what they needed to do in order to get the value from it so you know I put expectations on my customer facing teams I have a customer success team they're gonna onboard my customers maybe show them all this stuff and that that works for a period of time but ultimately if your business is growing and successful is that you're going to get constrained on resources on all fronts and so you need to start focusing on how you can scale some of these some of you know some of these efforts right by incorporating the experience of the product so what I'm showing it here this is a retention analysis as it's one of the features of our offering and because it is dependent on data if we were to expect users to sign up for our trial the product which we know takes you know it's not happening in the same second and then have the data populate we're looking at a turnaround time with potentially two weeks right no one's gonna sit there for two weeks then come back and it was it was just a long time to value and so what we had intentionally done here was introduced what does this look like and what are the benefits of this capability once data is populated and so again this is this is a little bit of a shortcut to addressing stay twitches cut beyond the additional here's your call to action there's nothing to show here but here's what you do and you click this button I think that's a good starting point but I think being able to show the users what they're going to get if they do something is also a good way for you to incentivize the action so the example that this came into play we had we had a new the other thing that I'm introducing here is that we've got the benefit messaging which is typically like a marketing exercise that live on your landing site right so with a trial what we saw is we had one person sign up for the trial they invited a colleague their colleague didn't look at the website at all hmm and so they were in the product for a total of three minutes and left and never came back we were lucky enough to get some feedback from them we followed up afterwards right and they shared with us you know you know here were the issues that we saw but really they they gave a three-minute time window they didn't look at anything on the website and so there was no notion of what were the value propositions they would get their software right right so by addressing if you stayed in this forum we're showing them what this looks like and what the value they could get and also introducing the benefit messaging within the product itself so I think enterprise software this is I I don't know I think this is one of the most critical things to get Oh get get right or at least put energy into getting something in place you know when you have a trial of your of your software the old expectation that you have a sales rep on the phone with them and talking to them while they're doing it is unrealistic and that may be the case where you sometimes you do but more often than not people are interested in self discovery they want to experience a proctor self and if they can't understand it it's going to be put into the I'm gonna get to this someday maybe bucket ever alright and so the last time I leave you with is empty states so combining put in putting all these concepts together if your product has addressed empty state properly you are guiding new users through you know through the the onboarding sequences that we showed you then you're able to really show them what your product can do and help incentivize them and show them what the action don't take it as well as understand the effort so all of these all these components this didn't happen overnight right we didn't wake up and go like ah we have to address all five of these right now it's actually great that Wes is putting this framework together because what we were doing is we were going through a bit at a time and we're saying gosh wouldn't it be great if wouldn't be great if you get me back from our customers we go through this iteration we say like oh gosh addressing empty state if you go talk to engineering teams it if you're having analytics offering it can be a very heavy lift for them to try to bake in the right data that helps you tell the right story and it often has put on a shelf so this was a this this type of addressing empty state was something that is much more palatable for you to get done in your product itself without sacrificing too much of the darn the investment that you yeah you're probably already scarce to have delivered on today so so I'll go ahead and hand it back to Wes here to finish up with part three which is the conversational bumper summons so the last part of the bullying iLife framework is really just thinking about all right what are we gonna do when people don't do specific things in the product and what are some of those signals that we can really look for to really prompt them and help them wherever they are in the user journey and so people are always gonna be leaving your product so we need to think about okay when are they leaving how do we bring them back what are some of those key prompts we could do and so the story I'm gonna give you here is really with Toyota so Toyota as you might know is a car manufacturing company but it wasn't always very successful and so they they have this one problem like many other car manufacturers where they had an inventory issue so how it used to work is car manufacturers are come up with a really big forecast then they get to work building all those cars now if they sold all those cars great they did the job well but would often happen is they would actually might be a little optimistic on the sales forecast and then they'd be left over with millions and millions of dollars of inventory and so for any car manufacturer if you get a couple of those maybe recalled cars or just cars that didn't sell that well you could actually go bankrupt and meanwhile you built this massive business which employs thousands of employees and that's really scary and so what mr. Toyota really started to do is look the grocery store and so when he was in the grocery store you started realize that wait a minute there's people don't go to the grocery store just because they they go for certain reasons and one of those reasons might be hey my fridge is empty I need to go get some food or I'm just hungry I need to go to the grocery store and so what he's starting to realize is that the way people work is that we're all living our lives based on certain signals and so we started realized as if you start looking for signals in your business you can start in his case seeing okay when are people buying cars how many cars do we need to create now and build a distribution a whole system based on every single signal and so what I find at least when it comes to onboarding is that most people treat it as just in case they create maybe 10 emails for their user onboarding email sequence and regardless of if you're Sally or Jeremy and you do something totally different in the products you're getting the same thing and so that's where you get a lot of annoyed customers or even just users because they're getting the same thing they it's all cans is saying like did you do this and the product here's the link to do it nobody likes those kind of email problems or anything else so what I've challenge you to think about is what are examples of signals what are people telling you in your product and so I'm going to give you three that I believe are the most important signals that you need to look out for and what you can do in a response so the first signal is what do people do whenever they sign up so if someone signs up what can we send them so an example might be let's send them that welcome email and then maybe a users tip email which if you're not sure what a usage tip email is here's the the download so whenever I signed up for whiskey as soapbox products which is a Chrome extension where you can record your screen I created my first video but I didn't share it with anyone and so if you know what Wistia does they do video analytics really well so if I wanted to actually experience the value of the product I needed to share the video with someone and so think about in your own product even back to like Google Analytics example from the beginning someone didn't upload this let's remind them let them know that that is what is stopping them getting the way I've seen value from the product and so think about the next signal is okay if someone has a quick one in the product so let's say they they did upload that script to their website or in your case for getting sad px like they did do the same thing now the retention analysis part is ready so let's prompt them to access that data that they previously had never had access to and let's really drive them forward to that part and regardless if you use email SMS or some other kind of in-app notification it doesn't necessarily matter which ones you use it's just important to look for what are those signals and how can we help people and so the last signal I really focus in on is the desired outcome so let's say someone goes into your product and actually experiences the full value that you promised this is when you can really focus on the sales side and it becomes 10 times more effective and so I find a lot of companies they just start sending all like the sales the emails really way too early and it's a little bit premature when you haven't actually experienced the value whereas in this case when we're looking for the signal of okay someone has experienced a desired outcome they they get the value our value proposition actually means something to these people they have actually experienced it and so what you're gonna find is even if your sales reaches out at this point or you send case study emails that combat although the current objections that people might have with your products this stuff actually converts and so when you're thinking about how do I turn those four users into happy paying customers the whole goal especially for this part is looking at okay what are they doing and are they actually seeing success and once they do experience the value of the product then we can flip the switch on to more of a sales driven email sequence to really help people take that next step and experience the value of the product again and again and so what I'd really like you to focus in on is just think about from a bumper standpoint like where are people dropping off in your product what are people not doing that we could drive them back to the product and actually see more value because the whole goal of this bowling alley framework is let's get people as many strikes as possible so I can see success in the product and experience it on their own terms and so to really wrap up what I want you to think about here is this so the value gap is what is preventing you from really helping your users see success and so we all promised people something which is the perceived value it's what's on our our website copy and what's the difference between the top 1% of companies that are really doing well with their onboarding is that they deliver on their value extremely quickly and help these people become successful and so the real kind of Nemesis of boarding is really that valley gap and that can be just a long time to value a ton of friction in the process so the more we declare war on that at a closer we can get to this and really helping people experience the value of their products quicker and so I really hope you enjoyed the bowling alley framework if you would like to get the full chapter from the book that I wrote on product that grows just go to this URL you will get access to the full chapter for free and then Travis wanted to tell us a little bit more about this yeah so everyone who's attending the webinar today I mean I welcome you to start a trial of the insight px simply go to games.com /px so the examples that I shared are all delivered through gainsight px as an offering so again helping your users find value it's no accident it's a combination of understanding what it is that they're doing and not doing and being able to help drive them to that value through a set of very personalized in-app as well as out of application engagements so you know I welcome you to start a free trial against what accomplished px happen against there any further questions you have related to gain sites offerings awesome so I'm just gonna switch over the screen so we can do the Q&A but while I'm doing that like what do you feel the majority that people get wrong with user onboarding well I think people get wrong one there's no focus on it at all I think can go back to enterprise software because that's that's a lot of the examples that I see is that you assume that it's someone else's role to fix right so you said oh I got this customer success team they have an onboarding team dedicated doing this and it's almost the not my problem no scenario with enterprise companies and I think we we often focus too much on other things rightly to the feature functions that exist like always kind of deep prioritize think it's really easy to be prioritized until you understand what what the loss is that you're getting right right so I mean that's that's one one potential example okay and so for the overall like some of the parts around conversational bumpers like what are some of those things that you've seen work really well for people to really bump people back into the product experience and see more value yeah so there's actually a couple of them that I can use one of them is a example that we've used which is actually using email to bring users back and you know various tumors like marketing automation platforms where you wanna send a sequence of you know emails to someone what's important to call out with the concept of a conversational buffer is that you're only going to send it if they need it okay so if they haven't taken the desired action after what is a reasonable amount of time that's when you introduce it right so by that alone there's more context to it and it's it's potentially a welcomed interaction as opposed to yes it's now Monday at 6 a.m. I'm going to give you an email right great um so making sure that all the interactions are based upon some action that a user did and did not take in your product I think that's very helpful the second area is actually enforcement right so if you have a 15 day trial you can't operate on the honor system right so introducing effective paywalls at the right time and making sure that those paywalls or those gates present a clear call to action all right so I think many times I see either aren't enforcing it which is a huge mistake and then the second piece that they're they're potentially not doing is making call session very clear right so if you do have a trial experience and let's say you do need to speak with a rep before you can actually purchase the offering is that it's very clear that one that that event is tracked so your team can follow up with the prospect or in the ideal case is that you're presenting that prospect saying hey your trial is up that here's exactly we need to do and who you need to contact you to try again so those are some other you know scenarios where using the product of the vehicle you know being very very intentional based upon what they've done not necessarily what you want always right and so one of the questions I got before the webinar is just how do you decide whether you should have this free trial of freemium or even some hybrid model so well freemium and free trial I think they're one of the factors actually West Knight we've talked about this before is is what is your volume your total addressable market if you have the potential for you know millions of users be coming into your product and then using it and purchasing that way it's potentially an opportunity for a freemium type offering the other factor to freemium versus a trial is that there's cost the cost of you delivering that free trial if you are a very let's say data centric SAS solution and it's going to cost for you as an organization to store it you may it may be cost prohibitive to introduce a toll of pure premium offering so if the cost is low and the Marcus is the the volume of people interacting in that trial is high then you could look at a premium offering the trial I find for enterprise software companies but for many of them to be a very successful vehicle to establish trust right so more and more often the buyers that are interacting the software and that value gap they haven't seen it they've seen it many many times yeah for many many companies and they now come to you and you're like oh yes instantly magic for free and they they go okay yeah right supporting this gap to exist and so one way for you to establish trust with them is to offer you know a time based trial to where you're putting you know or anyway about this it's not the right phrase you're setting the example of what can be done you're walking the walk not yeah so recently like my whole view on that answering that question was always like I really looked at time to value and so I was having this conversation with Patrick Campbell who's a co-prophet well and you really changed kind of cute' it and so initially it was like nice and cut and dry if you got a long time to value it's like maybe it's sales led maybe it's a free trial for you and submit like freemium just don't do it but then I started to look at a lot of other products and I'll give you an example so one of the ladies who spoke at the product led summits I believe the products called tetras so it's a wiki essentially for your company and so initially they had a free trial but you think about building a wiki in like 14 15 days it's not gonna happen like you're not going to build that wiki and maybe it's just in that first 15 days it just looks like a nice Google Doc so you use and you're not going to get much of value out of it and so they decided to actually go freemium and what they realized is that was actually the right model for them because it took people so long to see value from that particular product and so what are your thoughts on time to value in terms of freemium and is freemium actually better if you have a longer time to value in some cases I mean it sounds like it could be I mean I mean I can speak from our example here is you know we were primarily doing a trial to establish trust the cost rest of delivering it because we are a data centric solution there are there are costs to it and we do have a sales organization that is very good at the enterprise sales notion and so what we found was introducing a trial experience was a way for us to complement what we were doing on the sales had be more efficient and potentially help attract a more self-service buyer so you know in in in terms of time to value it's going to be a spectrum right I think there are winning when there is low time to value I think introducing this concept potentially is easier right and I think when you have tissues longer time to value I think you need to get potentially more creative on helping customers understand what needs to happen to get the value but I don't think it completely takes it off the table I mean you kind of put the the high time to value or maybe potentially high complicated or high customizable products yeah you know some little short cause is not possible but what those same companies will be doing is a very high touch POC process with their customers mm-hmm right and so in some cases a product let approach like this is supporting what would typically have been a very high touch POC process and making it you know more efficient so it's not I don't think it's necessarily an all-or-nothing or its trial or freemium or Nothing I think there's there's a spectrum in between of where you can use your product to help drive both customer acquisition and retention and growth definitely yeah and I find a lot of people just don't realize that you can mix them it's like maybe you start with a free trial and then if someone doesn't convert you roll them on through the free plan I've seen some companies do this really really well where an example is be nudged ai and so if you sign up for their free trial like you get access to everything is a premium experience and then if you don't convert they give you access to the free Chrome extension and that sits in your Gmail and enriches all the contacts but what you don't realize is that well they're their logo is like front right left and center in your email and like you're spending a lot of professionals are spending in or from two to three hours in their email every single day imagine how expensive that would be from a marketing perspective to get in front of your buyer for two to three hours every single day and they might not be looking at you but that's building awareness to a whole new level and so I think in terms of thinking about how you mix the t-shi edges together sometimes giving away your product can be really good if you do have something more visible and so you just have one question from Roxy about like how do you decide the length of the trial which i think is a really great question you're gonna kick it up sure yeah so when we went through this process at gain site we looked at we had an understanding of what were the activities that need happen in the product in order for customers realized value and we've looked at the average time it took for that to happen and then we set our trial experience on the more aggressive side of how long that typically takes the price of just under the average and we did that for a couple of reasons one is that you know we internally have revenue targets to hit and so we wanted to make sure that it was relatively time bound so it came down to setting it at a roughly 15-day period there were debates around it being 15 days or 30 days or completely open-ended which is much more it looks like a freemium type motion but we knew that we we didn't have the brand awareness at the time in this space which is the the product experience base to have a high volume of trials or new trials coming to the product and so we kind of shut down the idea of going pure freemium route run but yeah so that's that's how we went about it it was actually what is the time to value and then being a little bit more aggressive on what that looks like I'm trying to think of there's an interesting study done that talked about conversion rates relative to duration of the trial and also duration of leader monthly or annual contracts I'll see if I can find I'll see if I can find out that was also some helpful information around you know if your conversion rates are the same after 30 days and 15 off for the 15 right time yeah so that's that's how we approach it here I'm sure there's other ways enough West have you seen other other approaches on setting the length of it yeah so one of the things I like to look for is I just like how long does it actually take people to convert because you're gonna have a 15 day free trial and maybe people convert on day 30 or day 90 which is actually really common for a lot of folks so I like to look at like how long does it actually take the bill to convert and then there's also the concept of Parkinson's Law where it states that like things will take people as long as you give them time to do things then so that's why I think a lot of companies just don't see a big dip whenever they go from like you say a 30-day free trial - a 14-day because people are gonna spend the same amount of time trying to figure this out maybe they're just gonna front load it and spend that time earlier on but there is some issues to with let's say actually time capping it and what I've actually seen for one of the competitors in this room more so around the concept let's say if your product is dependent on other people doing specific things like a developer implementing and code onto your actual platform that can take a really long time so if there is certain bottlenecks in the process and you have a 1450 day free trial that can really hurt your conversion right because now before the end of the trial there they might even just purchase it but like guilty ly they're just trying to figure it out on their ends like how to actually use this product if it's a good fit for them and so the idea of a you should usage based free trial is also kind of interesting as well if that is an issue where you do have a bottleneck for your business that doesn't rely on the actual user and just thinking about okay what is the usage how much of this product we're gonna give away for someone's really get a good feel for it in their business so I hope that answered your question Roxie and if there's any more questions definitely let us know but for now we're going to end the broadcast and thank you so much for attending and learning more about how to convert your users and you happy paying customers great things can Prost you miss their ease it's been awesome