It is important to know why a customer signed up in the first place.

• First touch point: Pay close attention to the welcome email responses and use them as conversation starters.
• There are several tools available to stay in touch with customer through the evaluation of the product (intercom, in­app chat etc.).
• But most importantly when you are beginning to scale from the early adopter crowd to "early majority", it is important to hear the objections & concerns from every user of your product.

You should also track behavior within the application.

If your product has different personas of users, say tech & non­tech folks who evaluate then consider identifying the specific behavior within the application and use this for pre­sales engagement. Ex: a technically inclined user is known to follow a specific pattern of checking API documentation, making API calls to application etc., vs. a non­API user who may check very specific features of your application. Arm the sales team with summary of information for contextual conversations.

Managing the funnel

The key to managing the ideal sales funnel in a do­it­yourself (DIY) SaaS Product is not to keep all the leads in the funnel. Rather the intent should be to keep the "ideal customers" in the funnel.

So, you obviously need to understand the ideal customer. Assuming you are already targeting correctly & getting the right type of leads, it is important to help qualify the leads quickly through a series of steps either within the application as do­it­yourself steps or by interacting with the prospect.

Top of the funnel

• If you are looking to qualify prospects who are serious & would pay, you could use a credit card based trial. The downside is that you will get fewer but highly qualified signups. Even if there is no upfront charge, requesting credit card attracts only serious users based on various studies.
• Reducing friction in the signup process by requesting minimal information is essential to improve the signup conversion rate. Getting customers quickly to explore the application is absolutely essential for a great first time experience without delays. Delayed email verification helps to avoid any delays in receiving emails for verification before experiencing the application.

User Activation / Facilitating Self Selection By Prospect

○ Make third party product dependencies transparent. Ex: if your product works only with the Google ecosystem make it clear. Or if you need incorporation in a specific country to get the related payment gateway (like ChargeBee does), then make it transparent.

Qualifying the prospect:

• Identifying the one activity that you want users to experience to get started with your product is essential. It could be adding another user, or creating a specific setup or configuration in your product.
• Keeping track of customer activity via detailed logs, understanding the source of signup & journey in the website followed by application is essential to understand the quality of prospect.
• In some cases asking for phone number & reaching out quickly via phone through "Inside Sales" also helps short­circuit the process. However, this experience varies by culture, nature of your product & persona of your customers.

Build Engagement

• There are multiple drip marketing techniques to send automated emails and keep the customer relationship warm.
• However, the best way to stay engaged and quickly get customer to the next level is to setup a personalised product demo & allow them ask questions.
• There are prospects who may not want to have a demo, but allow them to just ask questions in general about your product, startup etc., to make a conversation.
• Tools like Intercom tremendously helps keep track of number of sessions, specific features explored & send targeted messages / emails that helps build engagement. Experiment with tools that suits your business based on your customer persona.

Closure

• Assuming you have a limited period free trial, engage early to get customer to opt­-in. Getting card on file but charging later is essential. Once you get the card information on file, the chances of sales closure goes up significantly.
• Having ability to extend trial period is essential, in case of delays in setup or customer availability.
• Usage of discount is not essential, unless you are in a space where the market is commoditized and customers choose only based on price point. Offer discounts only after the need & time for closure is clearly established. Offering discounts early & finding out that customer will go ­live after 6 months is not ideal.
• Similarly, annual contracts with 10 to 20% discounts are a great way to get long term commitments, especially for bigger customers.

Follow ­up after end of trial

• Pool the not­ converted customers into a different bucket & make a special offer, from time­ to ­time.
• Nurturing customers and working through the objections of qualified but lost customer through a nurturing cycle is important to bring some of them back to top­ of­ the­ funnel at a later point in time.

Types of Drop outs

• Every stage of the sales funnel that results in better quality customer also has drop­outs. It is important to understand the reasons for drop­outs & take necessary actions based on that.
• Here are a few common reasons for drop­outs and it may not be such a bad thing if it happens due to self selection:
• Casual signup ­ There is no need for the service and user signed up to "just" explore. These users tend to not verify emails OR setup the basic configuration required to start using the application. This is a great way to qualify the users.
• Not for me ­ after exploring the product the prospect may decide that this is not what they were looking for. The product design / configuration itself can be a great way to help them understand this.
• Not now ­ A qualified customer but not having an immediate need should be included in a nurturing cycle with an occasional educative email to have their mind share.
• Need handholding ­ When we start scaling business to late majority of customers, many of them need handholding to start using the product, unlike the early adopters. It is important to have the services team internally to help with setup or have partners who could help with integration / setup. Internal service could be charged separately as setup­fee or baked­in as part of pricing. It is important to understand how the unit economics work out long term and not lose a customer because they need assistance.
• Losing to a competitor ­ This could be due to lack of enough peer validation, better fit of competitor's product, better pricing or any number of reasons. It is important to get a chance to converse with customer over phone / email to understand the objection to fine­ tune the offering regularly.

Engagement Metrics

You should be collecting key information during this engagement process:

• Size of your customer's business & if they fit into the right segment you want to address (bigger ones are great, but if they are going to complicate your road map at that stage you may not want them).
• Primary problem they are looking to solve. You will be surprised by the reasons your customers will give you for evaluating your product. This is very helpful in providing the right perspective of product. You job is to find the most compelling reason and use that in all your marketing and sales collaterals.

Seeing is Believing (going beyond the numbers)

One thing is to look at the metrics and it is another thing to see what the visitors on your website and trial users on your product are doing. You can use a combination of Kissmetrics and Visual Website Optmizer.

KiSSFLOW had taken for granted a few things about the way their users were using their product. These were non-­issues. But, when they saw what they were actually doing they were astonished. One key thing to do is to switch between metrics based engagement tracking and a visual way of engagement tracking.

Drip Emails for Re-activation

It is unlikely that all users who sign up to try out your product are going to activate their accounts to the same level. Some users might require a push or a nudge to activate their accounts.

Sending emails to the user over the lifetime of their trial based on their activation and usage pattern can be a great way to engage users who have not completely activated their accounts. GrexIt nudges its users upto 4 times over the one month trial period to start using their accounts actively. Brightpod has around 6 emails that sent over the 14­day trial. The automated emails that are sent out contain context about the user's usage, and tell them the next steps to take to further activate their accounts.

Lifecyle emails for activation can be implemented very well with tools like customer.io or intercom.io.

There will be users who would never activate their accounts. There also will be users who activate but never buy. Your goal is to keep them engaged to your brand and product. One way to do this is to add them to the list of users to whom you send content from your blog. If you are posting content on your blog that has insights about your industry, and is useful to your audience, your subscribers would love it, and would be reminded of your company every time they receive a new update from you.