Modern B2B buyers overwhelmingly prefer to experience a product first-hand rather than endure sales pitches. In fact, a Forrester survey found 3 out of 4 B2B buyers would rather self-educate about a product than talk to a sales rep (Should You Consider A Free Trial For Your SaaS Product?). Offering free trials, freemium plans, or sandbox environments taps into this preference, letting the product demonstrate its value directly. This try-before-you-buy approach reduces the buyer’s perceived risk and builds trust – users can verify the product’s fit for their needs without any commitment (Top B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2024 – Discover Effective Techniques!). It’s a win-win: prospects get hands-on experience, and your product essentially “sells itself” by showcasing its capabilities (Should You Consider A Free Trial For Your SaaS Product?).
There’s data to back up its impact: According to industry research, offering a free trial can boost conversion rates by up to 66% in B2B scenarios (Top B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2024 – Discover Effective Techniques!). Why? Because seeing is believing – once users reach that “aha!” moment where they grasp the value, they’re far more likely to buy. Removing the paywall initially means eliminating friction for interested leads. Instead of forcing prospects to make a leap of faith, you let them validate the value proposition on their own terms. In short, giving product access before asking for payment has become critical in SaaS because it aligns with buyer expectations, lowers barriers to entry, and accelerates trust-building through direct value demonstration.
How Product-Led Growth (PLG) Works and Why It’s Relevant
This philosophy of letting the product drive acquisition is at the heart of Product-Led Growth (PLG). PLG is a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). In other words, the product itself is the engine of growth – not big ad campaigns or an army of salespeople. The idea is simple: make a great product, let people try part or all of it free before paying, and watch it spread (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). When end users find a product genuinely valuable, they will naturally adopt it, tell colleagues, and champion it within their organization.
This flips the traditional sales-led model on its head. Instead of top-down selling to an executive with promises and then onboarding an entire team, PLG starts bottom-up: get the product into the hands of end-users first. If those users fall in love with it, they’ll advocate for it internally, and decision-makers will hear about it once there’s grassroots demand (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). A classic PLG scenario is one user invites a teammate to collaborate (think of how Slack or Dropbox spread virally), and soon the whole team is using it because it genuinely solves a problem. You or your company probably didn’t start using Slack or Dropbox because of a slick ad or whitepaper – chances are someone simply shared the product with you and you found it useful (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). Good products in a PLG model can “sell” themselves: if the product is truly valuable and easy to use, it will “infiltrate the market and grow on its own,” driven by user enthusiasm (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard).
The relevance of PLG today is hard to overstate. It tends to result in faster, more efficient growth than traditional methods, because customer acquisition costs are lower when users are bringing in other users (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). Instead of expensive marketing to generate interest, a PLG company leverages happy users as its marketing channel. Sales teams (if you have them) can focus on product-qualified leads – users who have already tried the product and shown love for it – which makes the sales process far more efficient than cold-calling uninterested prospects (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). With many high-growth SaaS firms (Slack, Zoom, Notion, etc.) adopting PLG, it’s become a proven strategy for scaling via customer delight and word-of-mouth rather than pure ad spend. For a B2B SaaS team, understanding PLG is crucial because it informs how you design your trial experiences, onboarding, and even product features to encourage organic uptake.
Rare Exceptions: When a Free Trial Might Not Be Necessary
While “try before you buy” is powerful, there are a few rare cases where a free trial or freemium model might not be needed. These exceptions usually come down to either a highly established brand or a product that simply can’t be self-served. For instance, if your software is extremely complex to implement without custom setup or large datasets, a self-service trial could flop. SaaS veteran Jason Lemkin notes that free trials “only work if a customer can deploy successfully on their own, very quickly” – if not, a guided pilot or demo is the better route (When Not to Offer a Free Trial? Answer: When Your App Simply Can’t Pull it Off.). Some enterprise software (think large ERPs or heavy-duty financial systems) require so much configuration that a casual free trial wouldn’t show any value. In these cases, companies often use proof-of-concept projects or pilots instead, sometimes even paid pilots, with lots of hand-holding. It’s essentially a structured trial with help, because the product can’t pull off a plug-and-play trial experience.
Another scenario where you might skip a public free trial is when you have an extremely strong brand and word-of-mouth in a niche market. If your reputation is so solid that prospects already trust the value (or if you have a very small, well-known pool of target customers), a formal free trial might be less critical. For example, an industry-leading enterprise vendor with decades of trust might get away with offering demos and consultations only. Even then, they usually provide some form of pilot or sandbox upon request, because savvy buyers still want to test things. In the case of Workday (a major enterprise HR platform) – an iconic SaaS company – the product is too complex to support a simple self-serve trial, and indeed Workday’s site offers no “Free Trial” button at all, only options like “Contact Sales” (When Not to Offer a Free Trial? Answer: When Your App Simply Can’t Pull it Off.). Workday’s strong enterprise brand and the complexity of its solution make this viable.
To be clear, these are exceptions, not the rule. Unless your product truly cannot be tried without heavy involvement, or you’ve got overwhelming market trust, it’s risky to forego a free trial. New startups especially can’t lean on brand alone – without social proof, most customers expect some free hands-on experience before paying (otherwise you’ll need to invest heavily in sales or ads to overcome that gap). In summary, almost all SaaS products benefit from letting users try them, except those few cases where doing so is technically impractical or unnecessary due to unique market position.
Providing Free Access Without Overloading Your Team
One common concern with free trials or freemium access is: “Won’t this overwhelm our team or cost us too much?” The key is to design your free experience in a low-touch, cost-conscious way that still delivers value. Successful PLG companies manage this balancing act by doing a few things:
- Embrace Self-Service and Automation: A low-touch free trial means users can sign up, onboard, and get value without needing constant help from your team. That requires an intuitive product and great self-service resources. If you implement a free trial, make sure your business has either a strong self-serve support capability or enough support staff to handle user questions; otherwise, you may need to rethink offering one (Should You Consider A Free Trial For Your SaaS Product?). Documentation, in-app tutorials, chatbots, and community forums can all deflect common questions so that offering free access doesn’t suddenly flood your support lines. As one guide on customer engagement notes, customers of low-touch SaaS should be able to navigate and find what they need easily, supported by help articles and an intuitive UI (Low-Touch SaaS Models: A Customer Onboarding Guide). The example of Atlassian (makers of Jira, Confluence) is telling – they had no traditional sales team, but relied on excellent self-service onboarding and documentation so users could onboard themselves at scale (Low-Touch SaaS Models: A Customer Onboarding Guide). Investing in such infrastructure keeps your trial pipeline running without burning out your team.
- Limit the Scope to Control Costs: Free access doesn’t mean giving away your entire product with no limits. It’s about delivering enough value to hook users, while keeping the costs manageable. Many SaaS companies do this by time-limiting the trial (e.g. 14 or 30 days), or in a freemium model, by feature-gating and usage caps. For example, freemium tiers are usually a stripped-down version of the product – only the basic features needed to give users a taste of the product, with richer features behind a paywall (How To Use Freemium Pricing). This way, you’re not expending resources to let free users fully use expensive features indefinitely. A classic case is Dropbox’s free plan: it gives any user 2 GB of storage for free, but if they need more space (which costs money to provide), they’ll need to upgrade (How To Use Freemium Pricing). Similarly, Slack’s free plan keeps only the last 90 days of messages and limits integrations, which delivers enough utility for small teams to start, but naturally encourages power users to upgrade once they outgrow those limits. The guiding principle is to find the right balance – unlock just enough value for new users to be convinced, while gating the highest-cost or most premium capabilities for paid plans (How To Use Freemium Pricing). By structuring your free offering thoughtfully, you ensure that trial users get a meaningful experience without running up unsustainable costs.
- Use Sandboxes or Dummy Data if Needed: If your SaaS is one that incurs heavy compute or requires significant setup per account, another approach is providing a sandbox environment or guided demo environment. This might be a separate instance of the product with pre-populated sample data (so the user doesn’t have to integrate their own data during the trial). It can be reset or limited in ways that control resource usage. This sandbox approach can lower the burden on engineering and support while still letting the user play around. It’s essentially a free trial with guardrails, ensuring one user’s exploration doesn’t, say, consume massive server costs or affect production systems.
In short, providing free access is doable without overwhelming your team if you commit to a low-touch mindset. Self-serve onboarding, clear usage limits, and smart tooling will keep the trial pipeline efficient. Many companies find that the lower Customer Acquisition Cost from PLG (since the product does the heavy lifting) more than offsets the costs of supporting free users (Should You Consider A Free Trial For Your SaaS Product?). The key is planning: be deliberate about what the free user journey looks like, so it’s satisfying for the customer yet sustainable for you.
Documentation and Onboarding: Essential to Trial Success
Opening the gates to your product isn’t enough on its own – how you guide users during their trial often determines whether they convert or drop off. Good documentation and onboarding are absolutely essential to turning free users into happy customers. Remember, a free trial user is still learning the ropes. If they get confused or can’t see the value quickly, they’ll leave long before they consider paying.
A strong onboarding process ensures that new users reach the core value (“aha!” moment) as soon as possible. This might include interactive product tours, checklists for key setup steps, tooltips that highlight important features, and of course easy-to-find documentation for deeper help. The importance of this can’t be overstated: one SaaS company found that when trial users reached the aha moment and became truly “activated,” they tended to stick around and had higher lifetime value (SaaS Average Free Trial Conversion Rate: Benchmarks). But achieving that often requires investing in user education. As Userpilot notes, you’ll likely need to pour effort into the onboarding experience to help users realize your value proposition – especially in a free trial that doesn’t require a credit card up front (SaaS Average Free Trial Conversion Rate: Benchmarks). In a no-pressure trial, users won’t fight through a steep learning curve; it’s on you to make it easy and intuitive.
Good onboarding goes hand-in-hand with good documentation. Every trial user should have access to clear how-to guides, FAQs, and support content that enable them to solve issues or learn features on their own. If a basic FAQ isn’t enough for a complex product, consider offering more extensive training materials for trial users, such as short tutorial videos or a guided training module. Studies have shown this pays off: when the software company Storyboard That revised its onboarding to include more thorough training (ensuring new users fully understood the software’s capabilities), they boosted their free trial conversion rate by 112% (4 Reasons SaaS Free Trial Customers Don’t Convert). The lesson is that well-informed users are far more likely to see the value and become paying customers. Onboarding should be in-depth but not overwhelming – deliver the right info at the right time. For example, an initial welcome email might point to a quick start guide, and in-app prompts can nudge users toward key features. It’s also wise to let users skip or opt out of help when they don’t need it (4 Reasons SaaS Free Trial Customers Don’t Convert) (you don’t want to annoy power-users with too many tips), but have it readily available for those who do.
Moreover, engagement throughout the trial period is key. Don’t adopt a “set it and forget it” stance once they sign up. Consider a sequence of helpful follow-up emails: for instance, an email after day 1 to offer beginner tips, another mid-trial to highlight commonly missed features or share a success story, and a reminder as the trial is ending. As one SaaS case study showed, customizing communications based on user behavior can boost conversion – e.g. if you can monitor trial usage, you might send different messages to highly active users vs. inactive ones (4 Reasons SaaS Free Trial Customers Don’t Convert) (4 Reasons SaaS Free Trial Customers Don’t Convert). All of this falls under the umbrella of onboarding and user success during the trial. The most critical goal is to keep users engaged and seeing value throughout the trial (Should You Consider A Free Trial For Your SaaS Product?). Great documentation and onboarding resources function like a virtual customer success team: they continuously show the user how to get the most out of the product. If you achieve that, you’re far more likely to convert them at the end of the trial period.
High-Impact Language: How Landing Page CTAs Affect Conversion
Sometimes it’s not just what you offer, but how you present it. The language on your website’s call-to-action (CTA) buttons can significantly impact conversion rates. Phrasing like “Try for free” vs. “Request a demo” signals very different experiences to a potential user, and thus will attract different behaviors. Generally, “Try for free” tends to invite a broader audience because it promises instant access with no commitment. In contrast, “Request a demo” implies a slower, sales-mediated process (which some visitors in early research stages will shy away from).
If your goal is product-led signups, a low-friction CTA like “Start your free trial” or “Get Started for Free” will usually convert more initial visitors than a request demo button. There’s evidence that putting a form between the user and the product dramatically increases drop-offs. For example, B2B sites that only offer a “Request a Demo” (with lengthy forms) see high bounce rates – forms with more than 5 fields can have up to a 67% bounce rate, per Formstack data (Your “Book a Demo” button is losing conversions). This is because a visitor who is just interested in trying the product gets turned off by the homework of filling a form and waiting for contact. If you tease “Try it now” but then present a gated form instead of actual access, many will feel tricked and abandon the process (Your “Book a Demo” button is losing conversions). In essence, a high-friction CTA (like an immediate sales contact requirement) filters out a lot of potential leads who aren’t ready to talk to sales yet.
On the flip side, a clear “Try for Free” button sets the expectation that the user can get hands-on quickly, which aligns with the PLG mindset. But it’s crucial to fulfill that promise. If a user clicks “Start Free Trial,” they should be able to start a free trial (even if it’s just account creation with minimal info). Any mismatch – like “Try for free” leading to “we’ll reach out to schedule a demo” – will not only lose a lead but also harm trust. As one analysis put it, when a prospect clicks a free trial or demo button, their intent is at its peak – they’re essentially saying “I’m interested enough that I want to try this right now.” If you then delay them with forms, scheduling, or other hurdles, you’re introducing friction at the worst possible moment (Your “Book a Demo” button is losing conversions) (Your “Book a Demo” button is losing conversions). None of those hurdles are as effective as letting the prospect actually use the product immediately.
Now, this doesn’t mean “Request demo” has no place. In many B2B SaaS (especially those targeting large enterprises or high-price products), you’ll have both: a “Try it free” for the self-serve crowd and a “Request a demo” for prospects who want a guided tour or have specific questions. The key is to tailor to your audience segments. Often, the landing page will feature a primary CTA like “Get Started Free” and a secondary option like “Contact Sales” for those who prefer that route. This way, you capture the best of both: high-volume signups from the free trial button, and higher-intent, qualified leads via the demo request. It’s wise to A/B test wording too. Sometimes even subtle differences (“Get Started” vs. “Try for Free” vs. “Free Demo”) can affect click-through rates. But as a rule of thumb, be transparent in your CTA language – if it’s a free self-service trial, say so; if it’s actually just an opportunity to talk to sales, then “Request a demo” is more honest. Aligning the CTA with the expected next step will improve your conversion and set the right tone with prospects from the get-go.
PLG Success Stories: Slack, Notion, Figma and More
Nothing illustrates the payoff of “value before payment” better than the successes of some now-famous SaaS companies. Slack, Notion, and Figma are three standout examples of businesses that leveraged PLG and try-before-you-buy tactics to rocket to growth:
- Slack – Viral Team Adoption: Slack is often cited as a textbook PLG company. From day one, Slack offered a free tier for teams to try out a fully functional team chat (with some limits like message history). This let any small group or department start using Slack immediately without approval or budget. Slack’s strategy was to make onboarding incredibly easy (just invite your coworkers via email) and let the product’s usefulness drive expansion. As colleagues experienced how Slack simplified communication, they naturally invited more team members. Entire organizations ended up embracing Slack not because a salesperson sold them on it, but because employees were already using it enthusiastically. This bottom-up adoption model led to explosive growth. Most users first heard of Slack through a coworker, not an ad – a fact echoed by the observation that people often start using tools like Slack or Dropbox without even hearing about them beforehand, simply because a teammate shared a file or invite and pulled them in (Product-Led Growth: Definition, Benefits, Metrics | Productboard). By the time Slack’s sales team talked to a large company about an enterprise upgrade, hundreds of employees might already be active on the free version. Slack’s freemium model and relentless focus on product usability meant the product essentially sold itself within organizations, fueled by viral word-of-mouth.
- Notion – Freemium for Massive User Growth: Notion, the all-in-one workspace app, is another great case. Notion adopted a freemium model where individuals and small teams could use a generous portion of the product for free (Notion’s personal plan became free, and their team plan free for a limited number of users). This allowed millions of users – from students and freelancers to professionals – to onboard themselves and start organizing notes, tasks, wikis, etc., at no cost. Notion’s bet was that if people found it valuable in their personal or small-scale use, it would creep into businesses and larger teams organically. That’s exactly what happened. Users who loved the product brought it into their workplace or recommended it to friends. In 2020, Notion reportedly grew its user base 5x in a single year, leveraging the surge of remote work and its free accessibility to spread rapidly (Notion’s Foundations of Product-Led Growth & Marketing: Insights from Rachel Hepworth – Decibel). By letting users experience the product’s flexibility and value upfront, Notion built a huge community and fanbase before aggressively monetizing. When their usage hit a certain point (say, a team needs to collaborate with unlimited members or a power user needs advanced features), upgrading to a paid plan was a natural next step – by then, the value was proven. Notion is now valued at billions, largely thanks to PLG-fueled adoption. The freemium strategy “allowed users to experience the product’s value before committing financially, contributing to a significant user base,” as one analysis noted (Beyond product-led growth: Diversifying strategies with Notion and …).
- Figma – Design Collaboration Gone Viral: Figma, a collaborative design tool, took on entrenched competitors by using a PLG approach combined with a free tier. Figma made the bold move of running entirely in the browser and offering a free plan for individual designers or small teams. That meant anyone could start designing and invite others to collaborate in real-time, without paying a cent or even installing software. This frictionless access and instant collaboration was a game-changer in the UX/UI design field. Designers at companies started trying Figma for small projects (since it was free and easier to share than legacy desktop tools). Because design involves feedback and teamwork, those designers would invite product managers, developers, or other designers into their Figma files. Those invitees would then see the magic of real-time collaborative editing – something that solved a huge pain point. Figma spread within organizations in exactly this manner: one team uses it informally, others join, and before long the whole design department insists on adopting it. The fact that Figma was accessible from any browser made it incredibly easy to adopt and removed typical barriers (“I need a specific OS or license”) (What Can We Learn From These Top 5 Product-Led Growth Companies?). The company provided a great free experience but with certain limitations (for instance, a cap on the number of projects in the free plan), ensuring that serious users would convert to paid. Figma’s strategy paid off massively – it became indispensable at many companies and was eventually acquired for a staggering $20B, a testament to how well PLG can work in a competitive market. As one growth newsletter put it, Figma’s freemium approach was “so irresistible that designers couldn’t help but spread it through their organizations.” The lesson: address a real shared problem (in Figma’s case, collaborative design), offer a no-friction way to try it, and your users will become your evangelists.
These examples underline a common theme: if you deliver a product that genuinely solves a problem and make it easily accessible, users will drive your growth. Each of these companies trusted that giving value upfront would lead to revenue later – and it did, in a big way. They focused on making their products so essential and user-friendly that people wanted to keep using them and tell others. In place of heavy marketing, they relied on user delight and network effects. As one overview of top PLG companies summarized, they all created products so good and essential that people “just had to have it – and refer it to their friends,” rather than relying on pushy sales tactics (What Can We Learn From These Top 5 Product-Led Growth Companies?). The takeaway for a B2B SaaS team is that enabling prospects to experience value early isn’t just a nice-to-have – it can be the engine of your growth strategy. The goal is to turn your users into champions by the time you ask for their business.
Conclusion
Helping users experience product value before asking for payment isn’t merely a marketing tactic; it’s fast becoming the expected norm in SaaS. By lowering the barrier to entry through free trials or freemium models, you align with modern buyer behavior, build trust through transparency, and let your product’s strengths shine. Product-Led Growth is about patience and confidence – you’re confident enough in your product to let it out into the world for free, and patient enough to nurture users until they willingly convert. Of course, execution matters: you need the right onboarding, support, and limitations in place to make this approach scalable and effective. But when done right, the “try before you buy” ethos can create a powerful virtuous cycle: more users trying your product leads to more champions singing its praises, which leads to more users and ultimately more paying customers. For internal strategy, the mandate is clear: build a product worth trying, then make it easy to try. Revenue will follow value.
