#76: A trick for leveraging free trial sign-ups to shatter company records
With real screenshots + tactical examples
Hi Friends,
Special one today.
I have my good friend Saad Khan, the Director of Sales at Aligned taking over and running through the playbook he’s been using with his team to SHATTER records over the last two quarters.
This is a masterclass with real-world examples and screenshots. The results speak for themselves.
This free version of my newsletter I run twice a month is possible because of companies like Aligned.
If your sales cycle are longer than 4 weeks, you should get a deal room.
3 reasons why:
90% of the sale happens when you aren’t in the room. Deal rooms give you a look under the hood and see how buyers are engaging with what you shared.
Buyers are crazy busy. Make it easy for them to share decks, proposal, business case etc in 1 collaborative workspace to keep deal momentum flowing.
It signals seriousness about an evaluation. If you position a collaborative workspace and they say no, chances are it wasn’t a deal to be had. Focus on 20% of deals that can close
I’ve partnered with my friends over at Aligned to give all my readers access to 3 free rooms (no credit card required) check it out here:
Now… take it over Saad.
What is Signal-Led Sales? Simply - The cure for “Dying Outbound”
What are the core Signals we stack at Aligned to prospect?
1. Website signals - De-anonymized site visitors
2. Product signals - Sign-up’s, engaged sign-up’s, activation failures, user tracking, lookalikes, Tableau trigger dashboards.
3. Social signals - content engagement, company followers
4. Digital rooms signals - Risk and Intent
Some context on the tech stack we use to run these plays:
-Site Visitors = Target Accounts list. (Clearbit)
-Sign-ups (Looker Dashboards)
-Site Visitors + Engaged Sign-Up’s (Warmly.ai)
-High Value Visitors that did not sign-up (Warmly + Retention.com)
-Deal Signals - Identify Risk and Intent (Aligned)
40% of free trial sign ups are activation failures - people do not realize the full value of a product by self serving in a trial.
You have to help them and educate them right away.
Here’s a step-by-step process of how we do it:
Step 1: An individual user signs up and they are sent the following omni-channel message. (Omni aka Emails, Linkedin DMs and Calls)
To avoid activation failures we see if a sign-up is actively on our website through website de-anonymization software. This helps us pinpoint where to narrow our focus.
A lot of orgs right now are asking Individual Contributors (ICs) to test new products. For example, we’ve noticed that a lot of AEs are taking matters into their own hands and trying out deal rooms.
When an AE signs up for a deal room in Aligned it triggers a workflow in Hubspot and we check Tableau dashboards for Usage and Activation right away.
We look at activation from two perspectives:
1. Does the user log into Aligned multiple times
2. Does the user share a deal room with prospects
From there, they get a message:
Going Below the Line (BTL) to end users - we do workflow sessions and help them see the true value of Aligned. By doing this we uncover some key business priorities for our Above the Line (ATL) messaging and have a POV to use when talking to leadership.
This process has allowed us to book meetings with 6sense, Oyster, Gong, Salesforce, Hubspot and some of the hottest orgs in the world!
Example of information we gather below the line:
Step 2: Personalized emails and video. Check the inspect tool trick down below.
VIDEO EXAMPLE: https://sendspark.com/share/ug1uttg3xsnf0jn7n7qeoesjsrz7hxzd
Step 3: Book the meeting
Here are some of our results from this play. Bringing the receipts!
Sequence results in order
Emails to ATL leaders of product sign-ups.
Emails to cold lookalike companies
Emails to Product Sign-ups
A core email we send to sales leaders (ATL) is shown in an example here to educate them on what the product is doing for their team and why it should be scaled.
Step 4: Reach out to lookalike companies
We then use Ocean.io to reach out and book similar “Lookalike” companies that have similar attributes.
Repeat.