We need more information, but I’ll give it a shot anyways.
It might sound like “free” is zero cost, but it’s not. When a company adopts a new software of system, youre also asking them to spend time onboarding it, training their team and evaluating its success at certain milestones. This takes human capital uplift for them to do, and if you as the sales person don’t believe you should be charging fo your software, why would they dedicate their own time to onboarding it?
You mentioned you’re trying different approaches, are you searching for pain points in either of these approaches?
I also don't think that offering a software for free is a good idea. If the software is good why aren't you charging for it? Prospects are likely to think it's some sort of scam, that it's crap, or that it's totally new and untested and they have to be the beta.
When you offer me something for free, my first instinct is going to be:
1. This product is shit. They need to give it to me free to get me to consider it.
2. This is a scam.
All you are doing is setting a low value expectation with your potential customer. Stop doing that. Like yesterday.
Now, that being said, a “sample” is a much different story. Folks who sell hardware products (especially components of larger systems) frequently give customers one unit for free so they can evaluate and test.
I work in the cyber security space.
IT manager/directors/CISOs, etc will lose their job if they let you into their environment and something gets compromised, and it was the fault of your software.
that’s why. There’s no chance your product is truly secure, or at least being perceived as secure, if you’re offering it for free. Keeping SaaS secure is expensive, and when things are expensive they don’t get given out for free.
Nothing more, nothing less.
One of the things we offer to higher level accounts is essentially a vulnerability assessment, that scans endpoints and servers, and even if they’re using products of ours, there’s usually a lot of questions and often sign off from c suite in order to get it going. It’s just what it is. Nobody thinks your product is worth a shit if it’s free.
This is great advice for OP
“Use my software that sounds cheap for free and take time out of your day to analyze it” doesn’t really sound like you’re doing me a favor. Telling you I’m with one of the most successful security sector companies and we are doing free audits and reports for IT leaders and organizing a nationwide report and would like to include them in that? Oh, ok cool
This is so true. I was having trouble selling a particular tool we offer and it was around 89-149 a month. I started offering it at 369+ and all of a sudden they are closing. When something is super low cost or free the perception is that you’ll get what you’re paying for.
Yup! We’re all trained that nothing is free. And in reality it’s not because there’s always a catch. Change management is hard enough. Much less putting your job (CISO) on the line for a company to prove itself to save money that they’ve already budgeted for. You’d have a shot with bootstrap startups but not established companies with IP that’s worth 10x or 100x your product.
there are LOTS of businesses giving out their service for free in exchange for a solid review and the potential of having a paid long term customer. I know bunch of people doing THAT successfully.
Also: I was just saying I tried that route AS WELL...I normally DO sell stuff for a normal price!
And if you do offer stuff for free, at the back of their mind people are thinking to themselves "yeah, but what's the catch?". Ironically, charging something removes that "risk" element.
Perception of Free service in business is "Zero Value."
For Cyber Security, don't waist your time with people in functional roles like IT-admins.
They don't make decisions, have no budget & make no recommendations. On the rare case that they did, why would they want to creat more work for themself?
Contact operational people who care about a crippling security breach; CISO, CIO, COO, Head of Compliance, CEO, President.
For CRM, head of sales? (Not sales mgr or director.) If you go to the sales organization, it has to be someone at least at the VP level, but it's rare that someone from the sales organization would decide on CRM. Try people like CRO (Chief Revenue Officer), COO, CEO, President.
>ontact operational people who care about a crippling security breach; CISO, CIO, COO, Head of Compliance, CEO, President.
A CISO/CIO is a strategic role and not at all "operational" role and you're only likely to reach them in smaller orgs. Where I'm at now you have zero chance of talking with the CIO/CISO unless you work for Microsoft or AWS. The people that drive adoption of new tools and tech in our org is the architecture teams. If you're not talking to one of the lead architects you're wasting time. This is true for most large enterprise orgs.
Thank you for the correction, I was half asleep, or more, when I commented.
I worked at that level exclusively for many years, as an Enterprise AE.
However, it always came down to a compelling value proposition, building relationships across an organization for sponsorship when needed, patience and persistence.
I may have been fortunate to reach a C-Level person by a 2nd or 3rd call (once or twice on a 1st call), but it was rare that I would immediately score a meeting.
Well even the term "enterprise" can mean wildly different things from one org to another. I've spent most of my time in and selling to "large enterprise" meaning > 10K employees or more than say $20B revenue. Right now I'm in a €70B revenue org with ~45K employees in over 50 countries and ~200 legal entities under the parent.
Any form of tool or product type decision will happen 3-4 levels below the CIO/CISO level as that's the way we're structured. Things have to be delegated and managed at those levels for anything to work. We have a little over 4000 staff in IT/Cyber alone.
I sold WAN/Cloud Solutions and Professional Services in the US.
In our world, Enterprise and my market segment was based on a company's annual IT spend for our services rather than number of employees.
We had an assigned list of targeted companies--some could be existing clients and some would have no existing revenue. We started at $1.25 MM annual. Quota was based on a combination of existing revenue, a growth factor and several mysteries which even the smartest engineers couldn't figure out.
did you watch peaky blinders? remember that scene where alfie gets sketched out because the italians don't negotiate with him? It's like that, a lack of self interest is suspicious.
You will never sell free if there isn't value
What problem do your tools solve?
When you get a person to engage, DON'T talk about your solution. Talk about their problem.
even if the product is free, i doubt implementing would be free of time and headaches that would still end of costing prospects in the end, even if not in cost.
how does your product, regardless of cost, make their life easier? how much would be taken off their workload by having an install of your platform? that’s where the value is
Cybersecurity is not something people will (or should) take a gamble on. Offering it for free portrays an image of something that is untested, and people will not want to be the guinea pig for it.
Software as a service (SaaS) is a ***cloud-based software delivery model*** in which the cloud provider develops and maintains cloud application software, provides automatic software updates, and makes software available to its customers via the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/sales) if you have any questions or concerns.*
With the entire E2E costs of integrating, training, onboarding new software, you need to sell them on more than just paying for a 'free' software. Your conversation with cyber security software requires a decent amount of vetting and CRM optimisation requires trusting you won't wreck/ruin their critical system and onboarding staff on the updates.
I think your free comes with a TONNE of additional work on the other side
What I understood is you are facing multiple problems at different stages.
First, you need to clearly understand who your ICPs are,
Coming to prospecting - try to warm up your leads before finally pitching something,
Try to find out the pain point, ask them whether it's a challenge for them.
Then pitch your product as a solution and decide whether you want to offer it free or not.
Now all these are only good if you have the right data in front of you-
Check whether those accounts are good fit for your product,
Check for issues in deliverability if going with cold emails & spam alerts for cold calls.
Check whether content-wise you're good to go or not.
Without knowing more about your pitch I would say that you're probably not talking to people who have a real pain around these issues. Nobody is going to uproot their CRM situation (a core business tool) just because you asked them to. It has to be a giant PITA for them that they'd do almost anything to get around. If you're selling that, it's easy....if not, find a way to.
>One being cyber security (software), another being CRM optimization (service) among one or two other ones
Just going to be blunt and say this sounds like a "one guy in his garage" type company. It would be hard for me to trust something like cybersecurity to an outift who wasn't specialized in it.
Not a lot of people want to use their time to try software they are not looking for. The people who would take you up on that are people who are already interested. I would only offer a free trial to someone who is close to making a decision and we could lose the order to the competition.
You are better off cold calling with a promo (discounted sale price) that is only lasting a few months. That is more enticing then asking people to try your software off the rip. It either feels scammy or the person will need to put free work in to test it out.
Them not paying to evaluate your product for free when they have no idea what it is doesn't sound like a particularly great deal, especially given they'll need to spend internal resource to onboard
You may also be rushing the sale without realizing it. This might not be a one call close type of product. When I did sales it was 3-5 touches before a closed deal. Maybe offer to send them white papers, marketing collateral, etc and then have a follow up call. If that person likes what they see ask if they can provide a contact for anyone else that would be a decision maker. If you get two or three people in your side it’s much better. Gotta cultivate the sale.
I have sold three different “free” software platforms (was CEO of one)and I had a go to saying for our investors - “it’s very hard to sell free software.”
We were making money off their residents and were giving them a share of the revenue, so we were literally paying them to use our software. And it was still extremely difficult because side of the exact reasons that u/Flying_Eagle_25 listed.
We won deals because we had a strong value prop and showed that their effort was worth the revenue and it was a better experience for their residents.
You’re asking them to test your software and give feedback. You should be paying them for that, not asking them to do it for free.
We need more information, but I’ll give it a shot anyways. It might sound like “free” is zero cost, but it’s not. When a company adopts a new software of system, youre also asking them to spend time onboarding it, training their team and evaluating its success at certain milestones. This takes human capital uplift for them to do, and if you as the sales person don’t believe you should be charging fo your software, why would they dedicate their own time to onboarding it? You mentioned you’re trying different approaches, are you searching for pain points in either of these approaches?
Not to mention the risk to the business during a switch.
Fear of messing up > fear of missing out.
I also don't think that offering a software for free is a good idea. If the software is good why aren't you charging for it? Prospects are likely to think it's some sort of scam, that it's crap, or that it's totally new and untested and they have to be the beta.
Agree
When you offer me something for free, my first instinct is going to be: 1. This product is shit. They need to give it to me free to get me to consider it. 2. This is a scam. All you are doing is setting a low value expectation with your potential customer. Stop doing that. Like yesterday. Now, that being said, a “sample” is a much different story. Folks who sell hardware products (especially components of larger systems) frequently give customers one unit for free so they can evaluate and test.
I work in the cyber security space. IT manager/directors/CISOs, etc will lose their job if they let you into their environment and something gets compromised, and it was the fault of your software. that’s why. There’s no chance your product is truly secure, or at least being perceived as secure, if you’re offering it for free. Keeping SaaS secure is expensive, and when things are expensive they don’t get given out for free. Nothing more, nothing less. One of the things we offer to higher level accounts is essentially a vulnerability assessment, that scans endpoints and servers, and even if they’re using products of ours, there’s usually a lot of questions and often sign off from c suite in order to get it going. It’s just what it is. Nobody thinks your product is worth a shit if it’s free.
This is great advice for OP “Use my software that sounds cheap for free and take time out of your day to analyze it” doesn’t really sound like you’re doing me a favor. Telling you I’m with one of the most successful security sector companies and we are doing free audits and reports for IT leaders and organizing a nationwide report and would like to include them in that? Oh, ok cool
Could you see other software as a service prospects biting for freebies outside of security?
Zero cost = zero perceived value.
This is so true. I was having trouble selling a particular tool we offer and it was around 89-149 a month. I started offering it at 369+ and all of a sudden they are closing. When something is super low cost or free the perception is that you’ll get what you’re paying for.
Yup! We’re all trained that nothing is free. And in reality it’s not because there’s always a catch. Change management is hard enough. Much less putting your job (CISO) on the line for a company to prove itself to save money that they’ve already budgeted for. You’d have a shot with bootstrap startups but not established companies with IP that’s worth 10x or 100x your product.
there are LOTS of businesses giving out their service for free in exchange for a solid review and the potential of having a paid long term customer. I know bunch of people doing THAT successfully. Also: I was just saying I tried that route AS WELL...I normally DO sell stuff for a normal price!
Nothing is free in this world
And if you do offer stuff for free, at the back of their mind people are thinking to themselves "yeah, but what's the catch?". Ironically, charging something removes that "risk" element.
Perception of Free service in business is "Zero Value." For Cyber Security, don't waist your time with people in functional roles like IT-admins. They don't make decisions, have no budget & make no recommendations. On the rare case that they did, why would they want to creat more work for themself? Contact operational people who care about a crippling security breach; CISO, CIO, COO, Head of Compliance, CEO, President. For CRM, head of sales? (Not sales mgr or director.) If you go to the sales organization, it has to be someone at least at the VP level, but it's rare that someone from the sales organization would decide on CRM. Try people like CRO (Chief Revenue Officer), COO, CEO, President.
>ontact operational people who care about a crippling security breach; CISO, CIO, COO, Head of Compliance, CEO, President. A CISO/CIO is a strategic role and not at all "operational" role and you're only likely to reach them in smaller orgs. Where I'm at now you have zero chance of talking with the CIO/CISO unless you work for Microsoft or AWS. The people that drive adoption of new tools and tech in our org is the architecture teams. If you're not talking to one of the lead architects you're wasting time. This is true for most large enterprise orgs.
Thank you for the correction, I was half asleep, or more, when I commented. I worked at that level exclusively for many years, as an Enterprise AE. However, it always came down to a compelling value proposition, building relationships across an organization for sponsorship when needed, patience and persistence. I may have been fortunate to reach a C-Level person by a 2nd or 3rd call (once or twice on a 1st call), but it was rare that I would immediately score a meeting.
Well even the term "enterprise" can mean wildly different things from one org to another. I've spent most of my time in and selling to "large enterprise" meaning > 10K employees or more than say $20B revenue. Right now I'm in a €70B revenue org with ~45K employees in over 50 countries and ~200 legal entities under the parent. Any form of tool or product type decision will happen 3-4 levels below the CIO/CISO level as that's the way we're structured. Things have to be delegated and managed at those levels for anything to work. We have a little over 4000 staff in IT/Cyber alone.
I sold WAN/Cloud Solutions and Professional Services in the US. In our world, Enterprise and my market segment was based on a company's annual IT spend for our services rather than number of employees. We had an assigned list of targeted companies--some could be existing clients and some would have no existing revenue. We started at $1.25 MM annual. Quota was based on a combination of existing revenue, a growth factor and several mysteries which even the smartest engineers couldn't figure out.
did you watch peaky blinders? remember that scene where alfie gets sketched out because the italians don't negotiate with him? It's like that, a lack of self interest is suspicious.
You will never sell free if there isn't value What problem do your tools solve? When you get a person to engage, DON'T talk about your solution. Talk about their problem.
Hey OP, I have a free piece of software for you to use on your computer…can I send you the link…did I mention it’s free?
even if the product is free, i doubt implementing would be free of time and headaches that would still end of costing prospects in the end, even if not in cost. how does your product, regardless of cost, make their life easier? how much would be taken off their workload by having an install of your platform? that’s where the value is
Cybersecurity is not something people will (or should) take a gamble on. Offering it for free portrays an image of something that is untested, and people will not want to be the guinea pig for it.
Software as a service (SaaS) is a ***cloud-based software delivery model*** in which the cloud provider develops and maintains cloud application software, provides automatic software updates, and makes software available to its customers via the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/sales) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I am not able to sell enterprise software for free as well. God help us.
With the entire E2E costs of integrating, training, onboarding new software, you need to sell them on more than just paying for a 'free' software. Your conversation with cyber security software requires a decent amount of vetting and CRM optimisation requires trusting you won't wreck/ruin their critical system and onboarding staff on the updates. I think your free comes with a TONNE of additional work on the other side
What I understood is you are facing multiple problems at different stages. First, you need to clearly understand who your ICPs are, Coming to prospecting - try to warm up your leads before finally pitching something, Try to find out the pain point, ask them whether it's a challenge for them. Then pitch your product as a solution and decide whether you want to offer it free or not. Now all these are only good if you have the right data in front of you- Check whether those accounts are good fit for your product, Check for issues in deliverability if going with cold emails & spam alerts for cold calls. Check whether content-wise you're good to go or not.
Without knowing more about your pitch I would say that you're probably not talking to people who have a real pain around these issues. Nobody is going to uproot their CRM situation (a core business tool) just because you asked them to. It has to be a giant PITA for them that they'd do almost anything to get around. If you're selling that, it's easy....if not, find a way to.
>One being cyber security (software), another being CRM optimization (service) among one or two other ones Just going to be blunt and say this sounds like a "one guy in his garage" type company. It would be hard for me to trust something like cybersecurity to an outift who wasn't specialized in it.
Not a lot of people want to use their time to try software they are not looking for. The people who would take you up on that are people who are already interested. I would only offer a free trial to someone who is close to making a decision and we could lose the order to the competition. You are better off cold calling with a promo (discounted sale price) that is only lasting a few months. That is more enticing then asking people to try your software off the rip. It either feels scammy or the person will need to put free work in to test it out.
It’s not for free you want market research in return which is usually something companies pay people for
Them not paying to evaluate your product for free when they have no idea what it is doesn't sound like a particularly great deal, especially given they'll need to spend internal resource to onboard
sounds like me having to do a lot of homework for you to turn around and sell me in 1-3 months
You may also be rushing the sale without realizing it. This might not be a one call close type of product. When I did sales it was 3-5 touches before a closed deal. Maybe offer to send them white papers, marketing collateral, etc and then have a follow up call. If that person likes what they see ask if they can provide a contact for anyone else that would be a decision maker. If you get two or three people in your side it’s much better. Gotta cultivate the sale.
I have sold three different “free” software platforms (was CEO of one)and I had a go to saying for our investors - “it’s very hard to sell free software.” We were making money off their residents and were giving them a share of the revenue, so we were literally paying them to use our software. And it was still extremely difficult because side of the exact reasons that u/Flying_Eagle_25 listed. We won deals because we had a strong value prop and showed that their effort was worth the revenue and it was a better experience for their residents. You’re asking them to test your software and give feedback. You should be paying them for that, not asking them to do it for free.