Experiment with adding a contact sales option in app
Experiment summary
Currently, free users that may be interested in upgrading only have the option to upgrade on their own touchlessly via "buy now" CTAs. We know some customers prefer to talk with sales prior to upgrading and currently we do not provide them with this option in-app leaving them to either upgrade touchlessly, find our contact sales page on about.gitlab.com or to not upgrade at all.
Hypothesis
By providing good fit users with an additional resource (talk to sales option) at potential upgrade moments we will increase IACV.
Business problem
As a business, we need to understand how to present users/teams with the most efficient upgrade paths. By conducting this as an experiment and understanding which companies sizes and/or usage patterns have the highest upgrade rates we can work towards providing users/teams with the most optimal CTAs. As someone that's previously implemented this type of in-app contact sales experience, I believe it's extremely critical that as we launch this as an experiment and that we understand the close rates to ensure we're generating quality leads for the sales team.
Supporting data
In our SaaS trial data, we've found that groups trials are far more likely to upgrade (source) as are users in companies sized 1-499 (source) and companies located in NorthAM and EMEA (source). We can leverage this data when determining what cohorts of users to target in the first iteration.
Expected outcome
We believe we will increase in upgrade rate and total IACV for the experiment group vs the control. At this point, we don't have an estimate on the potential IACV impact.
Experiment design & implementation
We will select high traffic upgrade points in-app such as the pricing pages and/or paywall states where we will keep the primary CTA will remain "buy now" and we will add an additional CTA for "contact sales". This CTA will open an in-app form where we will prepopulate known information about the user and only display the required unknown form field such as "phone number". This form submission will directly update the lead record in SFDC and we will work with marketing ops/sales to ensure the team members are properly notified of a submission.
Design specs
ICE score
| Impact | Confidence | Ease | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 8 | value 3 | Average(1:3) |
Known assumptions
Currently, a user has to have high intent to find our contact sales form on about.gitlab.com and submit it by creating this process we will be making it much easier to contact sales. We need to ensure that can track the quilty of these contact sales requests to ensure we're providing sales with good leads. To be cautious during the initial testing we may want to limit the initial launch to the cohorts identified in the supporting data section.
Results, lessons learned, next steps
TBD - this section will be filled out after the experiment is run.