Free trial or paid pilot: which one a B2B software seller should offer first

The sign-up list looks healthy. Almost nobody logs in after day one, and your only implementation engineer spent the week on set-up calls for companies that were never going to buy. Choose between a free trial and a paid pilot by how much of your team's time each costs before a buyer decides. If a buyer can set the software up alone and see a useful result the same day, offer a free trial. If it needs their data, a link to Tally or their ERP, or users trained on site, quote a paid pilot.

Count the hours before you choose

It is tempting to copy whatever a competitor offers. Decide from your own diary instead.

Pull out every trial and proof of concept that ended in the past six months. For each, write down the hours your team spent before the buyer said yes or went quiet: demo calls, set-up, data import, integration work, user training, follow-up. Divide the total by the number of customers they produced. That figure is what one customer costs you in pre-sale time.

For example, with made-up numbers: if each free trial takes two hours of your team's help and one in fifteen becomes a customer, every customer costs thirty hours. If each pilot takes forty hours and one in two converts, every customer costs eighty hours, but the pilot fee has paid for part of it. Neither answer is right in general. See the number before you choose. A free trial that quietly needs a day of an engineer's time can be the most expensive offer you have.

When a free trial is the right offer

A free trial works when the buyer can get value without you. The product loads with sample data. A new user reaches the first useful screen in minutes. The price is low enough for an owner to pay by card or UPI without a purchase order. Our note on the first week of a software trial covers getting that buyer to a result with their own data.

Free trials attract the casual: students researching a project, a competitor's product manager, a consultant collecting screenshots, a junior executive told to "look at options". You cannot stop them, but you can sort them. Ask for the company name, the person's role and the number of users at sign-up. Do not insist on a work email address. Many Indian small business owners run the whole company on a Gmail account, and that rule turns away your best buyers while letting the consultants through.

When a paid pilot is the right offer

A pilot fits when value depends on the buyer's own data or people. A dealer-ordering app is worth nothing until the dealers use it. An HR system shows nothing until the employee master is loaded. A plant maintenance tool needs the machine list and someone on the shopfloor to log breakdowns.

The fee does two jobs. It covers part of the work, and it filters. A department head who cannot raise a purchase order for a small pilot fee is unlikely to raise one for the full licence. You learn that in week one rather than month four. A paid pilot also puts you through the buyer's vendor registration early, so the full order later is a bigger purchase order to an existing vendor, not a new vendor approval.

Credit the fee against the first year's licence if they buy within a stated period. Write this step, and who owns it, into your sales process.

Five rules for choosing the offer

1. If a new user can reach the first useful result alone in under an hour, offer a short free trial with sample data already loaded.
2. If that result needs their data, an integration or on-site training, quote a paid pilot.
3. When the buyer will need a purchase order to buy anyway, prefer the pilot, because it starts their paperwork now.
4. A large company asking for a free proof of concept gets one only with a named sponsor, a written success measure and a decision date. Otherwise, quote a pilot fee.
5. With no implementation capacity free, take no new pilots. Keep a waiting list rather than running three badly.

There is a middle path. A guided trial is free, but the sign-up page books a 30-minute set-up call. Anyone who will not book the call has told you how serious they are, and you can run the lead qualification questions on that call.

Imagine: forty dealers and no decision

Imagine a Bhopal company selling a dealer-ordering app to manufacturers. A PVC pipe maker in Pithampur asks for a free proof of concept across forty dealers. The team builds a Tally link, trains dealers over the phone, and about 120 hours of work later (an illustrative figure), three months on, the sales head says the pilot is "going well". Then the sales head moves to another company, and nobody else at the pipe maker knows what the pilot was meant to prove.

Being free was not what sank it. The pilot had no fee, no owner on the buyer's side and no end date. At the next manufacturer, the company quoted a paid pilot for ten dealers in one district, credited against the first year's licence. The success measure, written down before the start, was the share of those dealers' orders placed through the app in the last fortnight of the pilot. The decision meeting was in the plan from day one, with the sales head and finance both named. Our note on why automation pilots stall after the proof of concept goes further on pass marks.

When neither is the answer

If you sell a few large deals a year, try a demo built on the buyer's own sample data. Follow it with a reference call to a similar customer. That may do more than either. And if the buyer cannot say what problem the software should fix, no trial or pilot will help. Qualify first.

Price your own hours first

Fill in the hours for the trials and pilots you pulled out earlier. Then hold your product up against the five rules. Which offer does it actually earn? Software sellers are one of the groups covered by the e-commerce sales and marketing pages. If you would like help setting up the qualifying questions and the pilot terms, tell us what you need; sales process design is the related service.