Tracking free trials in RCM and Lead Lifecycle Model

[jeanmarieborich]

I am working on building out our first lifecycle / RCM model at the company I work for and was wondering how to handle trials within the model. We are planning on treating trials as leads with a specific lead stage within SFDC. Not all leads will be trials - some trials will obviously convert to opportunity or convert to recycled or disqual (still working on the logistics of how we are treating trials in SFDC). 

My question revolves around how to treat these trials in Marketo with our Lifecycle buildout.

• Does anyone have any experience and could provide advice on how to treat trials within a Lifecycle model? If so, how did your model buildout work?
• Should they be a stage on the success path? Should they be a detour? Depending on what option you picked - why did you choose that? Were there advantages for reporting? Reporting on trial > opportunity > closed won would be pretty essential for us. 
• Trials are set to 60-90 days and then they expire - how do you account for that within the Lifecycle / RCM? 

I have built a few Lifecycles out but never dealt with a free trial - any advice would be appreciated. If there are things I have not considered that I have outlined above, I would appreciate any guidance on outside factors that would impact the performance of our reporting and success with the launch.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

One of my clients had demos instead of trials and we treated demos as QLs. This worked well for us rather than having to create and manage a separate stage altogether for the demos. Worth mentioning that the trail request form in our case had similar fields to that of the contact sales rep form with some additional product-specific fields for which they're interested in getting the demo.

In your case, since the trial period is relatively longer (60/90 days), you could create a separate stage for people requesting it and probably send out targeted communication emails to them while they're in that stage, so they're able to maximize the use of trial, understand the product well, and are in a good position to make a decision post-trial period ends. I'd recommend having this trial stage on the success path itself because IMO this stage comes in the optimal path of how a person would linearly transition to a closed/won business. Also, since you'll have a separate stage, you could use OOTB success path analyzer report to see what % of people move to the opportunity and closed won stages, what percentage of people get turned back, lead velocity, etc.

Also, instead of passing people directly to the sales to work on the post (or during) trial, I'd recommend you pass only the qualified people after the trial is over/nearing to end, so your sales team isn't spending time talking to people who aren't interested in the product during the/post-trial period. You can have a flow that'll send out a communication to people as they near the trial end period to understand whether they're still interested or not and send interested folks over to the sales team to work on and the rest over to the nurturing stage (not necessarily a separate stage within RCM model, you could turn back people to one of the initial engaged/nurturing stages). Of course, these are my initial thoughts regarding one way you could process trials, based on your requirement and strategy you could set this up in some other way. I hope you find this helpful.