PMM, PM, Product Growth Manager, Growth Marketing Manager? 😵‍💫 🤯

Who owns the trials? 🤔 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ Hey folks, Funny story: we decided to improve our trial experience recently and realised that...we have 10 people involved in it 😵‍💫 🤯 I had a moment of dread when inviting them all to a meeting (how do I fit 10 people into one meeting room?! Oh wait, we all work remotely...How do I fit 10 people into my 13-inch laptop screen?!). On a more serious note - if everybody owns something, then nobody owns it. So if your AEs are sending emails to your trial signups, your SDRs are calling them, your Product Marketing Managers are designing their onboarding flows but your Product Growth Managers are messing them up with A/B tests to improve the activation rate, and finally your CSMs are roping them into user webinars...it's time to clean it up!  Who should own the trial conversions? [Thumbnail for video]( [Watch my video rant]( Obviously, it depends...on your company size. In my experience, "the more the merrier" doesn't really apply here 🙄. If you have a small team, you probably don't even have a PMM, PM and Growth PM to do this tug-of-war over your trials. Your Product Managers are handling everything post-signup, and your marketers everything pre-signup. But the larger your company and the more sophisticated both your product and marketing teams are...the more complexity you will experience in your trial funnel. Sometimes complexity = sophistication, which is good. Mess isn't. And if you have both SMB/startup accounts, that are paid monthly and have a low ACV, and enterprise prospects in the trial...this gets the trial landscape even more complicated. Now, I'd vote the [PMMÂ]( should own this and drive the trial-to-paid conversion strategy. LinkedIn seems to agree, but only about just: [Image] BUT - if you want to do your trials well, there are so many Jobs-To-Be-Done around them they obviously can't be the only stakeholder in the equation - and should inevitably liaise with all of the aforementioned functions in the company to create a really good trial experience. So let's have a look at who deals with what in[the ideal SaaS free trial funnel:Â]( Trial [signup page](: This is a critical piece of real estate that should reinforce your product's value prop (ideally with 3 top benefits), give social proof in the form of review scores, client testimonials and accolades (e.g. G2 badges, security badges like SOC2 Type II) and a signup form (requesting a work email in a smart way like in the Miro example below) with a CTA: [Image] Who should own it? Your product marketing manager - this is your value prop copy master. If you do have a [Product Growth Manager](or a Growth Manager - they may want to run some experiments on this page to improve the trial signup rate or trial-to-paid conversion rate - e.g. pitting testimonials vs. reviews vs. G2 badges; testing different CTA copy; adding or removing friction to the signup flow to then test the quality of the inbound leads coming through the funnel (the less friction the higher the trial signup rate, but typically the lower the trial-to-paid conversion rate - as more friction weeds out the undecided/undetermined users.) See more examples of the [trial signup pages here.]( Typically - your Product Marketing Manager is more of a qualitative and creative person who can write the perfect copy to exude the value prop of your product and hit the soft spot of your ICP, while the Product Growth Manager is the more analytical, quantitative person on the team who will design the experiments aimed at improving the trial-related metrics + analyse the results. You see how they should cooperate here: the PMM writes, the growth PMs runs & measures 😉  [Trial onboardingÂ]( Now, your new free trial user has signed up with their work email - and the clock is on. You have ([typically - read this post on trial length if you're considering a different approach]() 14 days to show them the value and sell them on your product. Who should be responsible for their onboarding and own the trial activation + trial-to-paid conversion metrics? Marketing, Product, Product Marketing, Product Growth, or maybe CSMs? Or maybe Sales? 😬 Once you have your trial signup through the door, things get really busy, and even more complex: - a new trial user's email goes through the signup form - depending on whether your trial flow is completely self-serve or if you have a customer-success-assisted onboarding for larger accounts with more potential - you may already want to segment your trial users at this point. By using enrichment tools (like Zoominfo, Chillipiper or Clearbit) you can identify the largest/most fitting prospects and pipe them into a different sequence (or connect them with a human Account Manager or a CSM who will guide them through the onboarding.) Your PMM should liaise with the CSM/Account Manager on the messaging the hot leads are going to get in their emails (they didn't book a demo for a reason - you need to work on the value prop to make them want to jump on an onboarding call!) - [for BOTH the self-serve trials and the human-assisted trials]( - you still need to design the self-serve onboarding flows. Start from [a welcome screen]( with a [microsurvey]( asking the new trial signup about their Job-To-Be-Done, so you can then nudge them on the path that will take them to their goal in the shortest time. [Image] This is where PMMs and PMs have a chance to work together. The Product Managers (or sometimes the Product Growth Managers) design the flows for different segments to help them complete their "[happy path"]( - which the PMMs fill them in with compelling copy. If your PMs are too busy - your PMMs can create the whole flow themselves using no-code tools like [Userpilot](. 😎 Otherwise your users may wander off to the...unhappy path: [Image] - Apart from the onboarding flows, you need an[in-app resource center]( to allow users to search for the right Knowledge Base articles, help docs, and video tutorials. This is typically a joint venture between the Customer Success (who design the help materials) and PMMs (who design the layout and content of the Resource Center widget + make sure the help materials are aligned with the overall positioning). You should also customize the content of the Resource Center based on the page where the user is on + their JTBD (again something you can do with Userpilot too!) - Make sure youremail communication]( (you will still need to send out onboarding emails - with some resources, reminding inactive trial users to pick up where they left off, or that their trial is ending in N-days) is consistent and aligned with the in-app communication + the stage in the trial users' journey. What does consistent mean? If you've recorded the trial users' use case + the in-app events they have performed on their user journey so far - don't send them out-of-touch emails with irrelevant resources or nagging them to book a demo (again - they didn't book it and opted for the self-serve trial in the first place for a reason!). If you're inviting them to a conversation - make sure it's relevant to where they dropped off the trial funnel - e.g. in Userpilot, if they started working on customizing an in-app survey, but haven't actually launched it - we'd invite them to a personalized session to help them with survey customization. This is something the CSMs would run, but the PMM should still supervise.  [Image] - Finally - if the trial doesn't convert - typically it's either sales (SDRs) or marketing that take over the "nurture" campaigns. Based on the users' activity in the trial, and the reason why they didn't convert (who said you can't run a churn survey with users who didn't convert from the trial?!) - the person responsible should craft relevant emails or call scripts for this segment. Again, the PMM should map and revise all the communication even at this point. So as you see - it's not like one person works on the trial...but yeah, you should have a captain on that ship who will manage this whole cross-functional crew towards success. And we are, by the way, hiring for that position now 😎 If you're a great PMM in love with Product Growth and looking for new opportunities - respond to this email and I'll send you all the details ;)  See you all next week! [Image] Emilia Korczynska, Head of Marketing at Userpilot I'm a marketing manager obsessed with product growth. Wanna talk? Simply respond to this email! To make sure you keep getting these emails, please add emilia@userpilot.co to your address book or whitelist us. Want out of the loop? Don't remember you subscribed at all? We get it. We sometimes don't remember how we got to our office today let alone how we subscribed to this or that email. 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