GTM Sauce

Swipe.by · B2B · AI marketing for restaurants

Skip free trials and push small businesses to pay a year up front

Most customers pay the year up front

Workedpayments-checkoutpricingonboarding

What they did

Never offer free trials to SMB owners; require a demo and push hard for paying the full year up front. Reasoning: without skin in the game a busy owner never completes setup steps (e.g. clicking 'connect Google') because operational fires always win.

What happened

Majority of customers pay up front for the year

In their words

He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads

Play from 13:33

… they book a demo instead of just put a credit card in no touch? And two, how many demos are you doing per month right now? When I talk to a business owner and I say, I can help you with email, the first thing what they will think is, oh, I have MailChimp already. Well, the question is, when is the last time you used it? Also, 99 of our competitors, their websites look very similar to ours, AI, AI, AI, but it's always automated, automated.

13:33

And then when you look at it, someone still has to click the magic wand to write an email. The email just doesn't write itself, schedules itself, which it does with us, right? That's the core differentiator here. So that's the first one. We kind of really want to make sure that the customer understands so we don't lose them in the setup in between. And that then leads to the second part, really. We don't do free trials. We would never, ever do free trials because if you are, and so, you know, because if you are signing up with us and we don't, as a business owner, you don't have skin in the game, you will not go live because clicking on your email, connect to Google button will

14:05

be delayed, delayed, delayed because the oven broke, because waitstaff didn't show up, because the Wi-Fi went out, because the delivery guy forgot to bring the chicken. And now you have to go to Walmart to pick up some extra chicken for your restaurant, right? And so minor things get pushed out, but they don't get pushed out if the business owner has skin in the game. So we don't do free trials. Majority of our customers pay up front for the year. We're pushing incredibly hard for that to actually have a long-term partnership. And for that, we need the demo. Everyone who has the self-sign-up service, they have not built a relationship with that customer. And so now we are going in, in person, and we can cut out any cold call solution, quick sign up type of solution out there because we actually have that relationship.

14:44

How many demos are you doing per month? 400, something like that. 300 to 400 right now. Again, all outside sales, not a dollar on marketing, not a single inbound funnel. Who's giving the demo? The market leads that are in the markets actually will do the demo virtually, right? So we have an outside salesperson with the customer here. Then we have the customer here and we have someone over the screen doing the actual demo. The rep you have on the …

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Tags: no-free-trial, annual-prepay, skin-in-the-game, demo-required