Compare how people do trial marketing today

One of the reasons the ISV community suffers from such a low conversion rate (reportedly 2%) is often the trial process is hampered by many manual and disconnected processes. For many the cost and difficulty of trying to put together a total end to end solution is so much that they give up and simply go for the shotgun approach of releasing trial software all over without even tracking it. The "throw enough mud and hope it sticks" approach, is this you?

If you are like most ISVs right now you get 2% conversion rates (if you actually track them), why?

Summary of the problems

The critical sales generation process - end user trials - is not tracked or reported on, it's all guess work. All the average ISVs data is wrong or old. Then they have a channel that tells them nothing! All the systems are disparate and unconnected and so are the departments and people. Nothing is automated and slick - it's all a case of a "wing and a prayer".

Then you have the issue of connecting all the processes and departments together into a tight sales and marketing system to maximize revenues. The typical ISV:

has downloads posted on their website, resellers sites and many other third party sites
when someone downloads there is no central respository for all te end user data (even anonymous)
the downloads are never contacted or marketed too or if they are there is no control
the marketing is always at the wrong time as they are marketing to a download time and not use
the marketing is not centrallized and therefore is impotent and branding can suffer
if sales are lucky enough to get any "leads" they have no idea if the user actually did anything with the download
sales are usually working in the dark with very poor data and vast numbers of unprioritized leads
the leads are often not automated or added to the CRM system and therefore mismanaged or lost
sales and marketing usually stops well before most of the users actually get around to trying the demo
management has no idea where their resources need to be deployed, they just keep doing it the old way "hoping" sales will improve!
none of the systems or process are connected up to the licensing system at the back end, so trial extensions and other customer service related tasks are problematic
the email follow up and marketing systems are located away from the licensing and sales systems, preventing useful analysis and control of the meta data.

Most ISVs don't know:

where software is deployed or when it is downloaded
who (name/email etc) downloaded a trial
volumes of downloads from all channels
how may actually start a trial vs a download
who actually started a trial so sales can contact them
when they start a trial and so marketing is haphazard i.e. they market at downloads and not trial users
when to send what trial marketing messages
which people convert from a trial to a sale (maybe they know sales and downloads but they don't know the connection)
any of the trial start times and when these convert to sales, so they don't know the "sales cycle"
who timed out of a trial, and when, so they can't target a special offer to convert or get a new trial period started
who the end user is in any event as its often a channel sale
who or how many users are "abusing the trial" (over-installing/piracy) or actual software
which machines the trials are being loaded on and matching those users to sales

The list goes on an on...

Is it a wonder that there is a 2% trial conversion rate or less?

The solution

The TrialMaximizer™ platform is the solution to all of the above issues and has been designed to address all of the typical problems highlighted. It uses the licensing system as the basis of capturing, measuring and reporting on trials, sales and overdrafts. It's one holistic system totally connected and designed to give the typical ISV all they need to maximise sales and marketing efficiencies and to give management useful business intelligence they need to build their business. Built-in marketing automation handles most of the heavy lifting and full reporting is standard.

The platform also connects systems and services together using web services so that useful data can be passed to other departments as needed to optimize the business systems within an ISV.

TrialMaximizer offers the ISV increased revenues, better business intelligence and lower operational costs all in a cost effective hosted solution.

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