When it comes to converting customers online, we'd all love to increase the influence we have on their decision making—but without adding friction. If we don’t, we’re leaving cash on the table. Yet for some reason the SaaS industry has settled for ‘Talk to Sales’ and ‘Start Free Trial’ as the go-to best practice. Two flawed solutions to increase our influence and lower friction, that in reality only achieves one at the expense of the other.
We’re all so used to seeing and applying these two practices that we fail to look for a better one. However, I believe there is a simpler, more elegant solution that can actually create a frictionless experience while increasing influence over a customer’s decision. But before diving into the solution, let me elaborate on the problem with ‘Talk to Sales’ and ‘Start Free Trial’
The problem with ‘Talk-to-Sales’
If we simply want to increase our influence at the moment of conversion, ‘Talk to Sales’ is indeed the most sensible option. Your sales agents can discover the prospect’s needs, guide them through your pricing structure, and nudge them towards the best plan.
But the reality is, most customers don’t want to talk to sales. We’re increasing our influence at the cost of adding friction. Friction may be a great way to start a fire, but it's a lousy way to treat customers. If one of your competitors allows visitors to convert without sales intervention, you can safely assume some of your precious leads will try their service first.
The problem with ‘Start Free Trial’
As onboarding processes and technology have improved to the point where human intervention is no longer necessary to get started, SaaS companies have started experimenting with free trials. There are some clear benefits to offering free trials (not the least of which is avoiding a sales conversation). Users can sign up and determine the same day whether or not a product solves their problem. Additionally, as many SaaS solutions produce a lock-in effect, by the end of the trial it’s often more painful for a user to switch to a different solution than before. Thus, lowering friction to get started while making it unappealing for a user to cancel.
However, free trials hardly increase your influence over the customer’s decision-making process. SaaS companies tend to go so far in lowering friction that they end up knowing almost nothing about the user. You might be able to analyse how a user is engaging with your product, but that doesn’t mean you understand which problem they’re actually trying to solve. A good sales agent never starts by pitching product features, but rather tries to discover what business objectives the user aims to achieve. This is essential information to closing a deal and up- or cross-selling, yet nonexistent during most free trials.
Lastly, most users that decide to stick around after the free period expires will simply select the cheapest tier. Convincing them to jump to a premium tier is difficult because you lack the touchpoints where you could nudge the customers effectively.
A better alternative: Pricing Guides
When talking about simplicity, Steve Jobs once said, “You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” I believe that statement is at the core of solving this problem.
Most companies that rely on ‘Talk to Sales’ can’t effectively boil down their pricing model to one simple pricing page; instead, they take 30 minutes of your time to explain it. Those who offer free trials think they need 14 to 30 days to convey the value of their product to users.
So, how else can we guide our customers to pick a plan that works for them?
Well, what if we take the best aspects of the other two practices—discovering the client’s needs and self-service—and combine them? You can help your customers navigate your pricing and empower them to make the right decision through Pricing Guides. Pricing Guides are the self-service equivalent to a discovery call. You ask a handful of questions that get to the core of the value you deliver and convert these insights to a recommendation in real-time. It’s a strategy already deployed by companies like Mailchimp, HelloFresh, and Just Russel—as you can see on their pricing pages.
These companies deeply understand the essence of their products, got rid of the parts that are not essential, and narrowed down their Pricing Guides to a user-friendly experience.
Pricing Guides in B2B: Mailchimp
Mailchimp managed to transform a highly complex SaaS pricing page into a single button: Find my plan. If you navigate to their pricing page you’ll see multiple product lines, several tiers, a usage-based component, an incredibly exhaustive feature comparison table, and even a pay-per-seat aspect. Yet somehow, they managed to boil down all of these variables to a 5-step Pricing Guide that not only presents a recommendation on the right plan and price, but even elaborates on why that plan is right for you. That’s what I call a frictionless experience.
At the same time, Mailchimp is collecting invaluable data at scale and fast-tracking their discovery process. They understand why each individual customer converted, enabling sales agents to target and spend their time only on the most promising customers for upsell opportunities. Because they’re now saving time in the discovery phase and increasing their lead scoring accuracy for upsell opportunities, it greatly increases their sales-per-rep.
Pricing Guides in B2C: HelloFresh & JustRussel
One illustrious example of Pricing Guides in the B2C space is HelloFresh. HelloFresh offers meal kit subscriptions straight to your doorstep. If you visit the HelloFresh website and navigate to Our Plans you can personalise your dietary plan. On the left you can select your preferences and on the right you can customise for the number of people and meals per week. When you change your wishes you get live feedback on the price, greatly increasing transparency.
Maybe an even better example from B2C is Just Russel, a dog food subscription service from Belgium. Arriving at their pricing page, you’ll immediately notice the call-to-action button ‘Discover your price’ and the starting price. When you click on the CTA you’re asked to share your name and email address. Next, you’re guided through a series of questions regarding your pet’s dietary restrictions. Once you’ve created a dietary profile for your dog you’re presented with a feeding plan and you can order. Interestingly, because of the seemingly tailored feeding plan, by the time the price is presented you don’t doubt the price point and take it almost for granted. Without any human intervention, you have a completely custom dietary plan for your pet.
If we take a closer look at the advantages of Just Russel it becomes even more interesting! When a user starts the guide, they’re asked for a name and email. Because of this, Just Russel can retarget participants through various ad platforms. Better yet, when these leads come back the recommendation is still saved and all they have to do is share their credit card credentials. It’s the SaaS equivalent of a shopping cart. Admittedly, they lose some leads by asking for personal information at the start of the guide, but they more than make up for that with overall conversions thanks to retargeting capabilities. Next, this guided approach enables them to do constant A/B testing: number of questions, type and order of questions, recommendations, pricing, copy, imagery. The conventional pricing page bombarding users with information all at once doesn’t lend itself to such controlled A/B testing. With pricing guides you can measure drop-off and conversion rates at every stage.
Why isn’t every company doing this?
You may find yourself convinced about the potential upside and start wondering: why isn’t every company doing this? Because up until now, Pricing Guides have been an incredibly expensive endeavor. It’s a major engineering feat to ask a series of questions—in a user-friendly way—and calculate a qualitative recommendation in real-time. Even leading survey solutions like Typeform don’t offer the capabilities.
No company was offering a service to do this at low cost, and each of the examples I illustrated use custom-built solutions. That is, until now. This week we’ve launched Urplan.io to enable companies to start using and building Pricing Guides. Instead of investing tens or hundreds of thousands building a custom solution, you can start for free and pay-per-lead instead.
Tjitte Joosten is the Founder of RevFixr, the one-stop shop for better monetisation of your customer base. RevFixr turns pricing into your biggest growth lever. Prior to founding RevFixr, Tjitte was responsible for the commercial strategy and operations at tech companies like Docfield and Experfy.
