Trials are the crack of enterprise deals

“Sounds great, let’s get a trial going and see how it works” can be the most destructive words you hear from your enterprise prospect. It sounds great. They’re interested. Interested enough to invest some time in installing your technology and looking at it. And it’s taken several months to get the entry point, develop the relationships, go through the demos and get to the stage they really want to do it. So what’s not to like?

If you’ve ever been here, you know many enterprise sales dreams lay shattered on the rocks of meandering trials. 

• “It looked good, my team really liked it. We should discuss whether it can be budgeted next year or the year after.” 

• “My boss says this isn’t the highest priority. We should review once we’ve finished project ABC.”

• “...” just getting ghosted.

Trials promise an easy high: quick engagement, visible progress, low commitment from the prospect. But like crack, they're addictive to sales teams and destructive to your business.

Hands up  if you’ve ever been here. If so, you’ve learned the hard way and there are probably two critical mistakes you made.

 When you set out the trial, you didn’t have clear success criteria that made it obvious that you are delivering value.

 More crucially: you did not have agreement from the Economic Buyer that following success they would move the trial into production. 

Possibly you didn’t even engage with the Economic Buyer before the trial.  Says the Champion: “yes of course we definitely need to speak to the CxO, but we need to do the trial first to demonstrate the value before we take it to them.” If they're saying this, they're not really a Champion.

My solution: stop doing trials. 

Your product works, you have seen it work in multiple places, why does every customer have to try it?  Moreover, a trial inevitably means incomplete deployment, cheaper approaches, shortcuts, less commitment from the client. And therefore greater chance that it fails.

Sure, they want to know that if it fails in their environment they are not tied to a long-term contract that offers no value, so structure it differently.

• They sign up for 3 years, giving them the best pricing.

• They launch a full deployment solution using all the relevant resources their side to make it successful.

• You agree some specific criteria must be met within X months of launch, and if you fail to meet these due to your product/service, they can cancel the contract.

This is better for the customer. They don’t waste time trialling and then building into production. They don’t do a trial which has increased chance of failure due to the incomplete integration into their environment.  But they still get the comfort that if your product fails they can get out.

“Nooooo.”  I hear you say. “It will take forever to get them to sign up to this and we can get the trial moving much faster.” True. But that trial is much more likely to be a waste of time for you and them. And that’s much more costly for you: every failed trial is resource thrown down the drain that could be delivering you new revenue.

The best approach is to follow my advice and get a full contract signed with exit clauses. This requires full engagement up to the Economic Buyer, through procurement and with the users. But ultimately it is the more reliable and faster route to revenue

If this is not possible, then the following is nonnegotiable: you meet with the Economic Buyer and get agreement that if you meet the clearly stated trial goals then the company will work urgently to move to a commercial agreement and production within X weeks of trial completion.  Even if this is not a legally binding position, a senior executive will not make this statement lightly.

If you cannot get engagement with the Economic Buyer and you cannot get them to make this commitment, you’re wasting your time. Move on. 

Don’t worry about the sunk cost, don’t throw good money after bad. Go find a prospect who is serious.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment here or reply.