There’s something undeniably addictive about watching thousands of people sign up for your product each month. It feels like instant validation that you’re being seen (marketing is working!) and that people want what you’re building (your product has an audience!). You share these numbers proudly with your team and your board, month after month, convinced you’re winning.

‍If a tire-kicker signs up for your free trial, pokes around for five minutes, and vanishes - does it count as growth, or did it just make a sound in your analytics dashboard?

But here’s the catch. Handing users the keys and letting them explore freely puts enormous pressure on both the product and the user. In theory, your product speaks for itself (Product-Led Growth!). In practice, most buyers give you just a few minutes to understand value and assess fit before they move on.

When Quantity doesn't equal Quality

Quantity was never the issue. We were delivering thousands of trial sign-ups a month, but our trial-to-customer conversion rate was well below the ~10% typically considered healthy for a SMB & mid-market B2B SaaS company. We could also see that most users poked around for less than 30 minutes, and 90% of those users never returned. Instead of discovering value, they were bouncing before they ever got oriented.

In addition, our Sales Team frequently found themselves on the defence, going into full objection handling mode when they were speaking to prospective buyers. It was always “I can’t find this or do that” instead of “Show me what this can do for me”. Rather than conversations starting from a place of curiosity and momentum they were starting in a deficit and trying to claw their way out.

Death by a Thousand Optimizations

Aware of the data but unwilling to throw in the towel on PLG, we tried to optimize our way out of the problem. 

We rolled out in-app guides, invested in meaningful UI/UX improvements, refined onboarding flows, rebuilt our trial email campaign three separate times, and layered in pop-ups offering complimentary onboarding support. Each change delivered a bit of lift but never enough to leave us feeling confident.

After several quarters of this we knew that we didn’t need another tweak, we needed a more foundational change.

When Sales-Led Starts to Make Sense

We could see that sales assisted leads were converting better, retained longer as a customer, and had higher ACV. Our average contract value also comfortably supported getting a human involved. With non–sales-assisted trials continuing to convert poorly despite months of product and communication improvements, we decided to experiment with a gated product experience.

Executing the Pivot

This experiment required tight coordination across teams. After reviewing the data with the leadership group and confirming Sales was ready to support a fully sales-assisted motion, we kicked off the change.

We replaced every Free Trial CTA with Request a Demo, updated our intake forms, lead scoring, ad messaging, and sales sequences, and clearly defined what success would look like. We also built a new dashboard to track results end-to-end.

To keep momentum and accountability high, we also introduced a daily commercial standup to track quantitative and qualitative progress, and made adjustments where necessary.

Early Signals

With only a month under our belts we are still closely monitoring the impact of this change and remain open to reverting back to Free Trial. That said, the early signals are positive.

As expected, the number of leads has decreased sharply (80% from previous months) but the quality of the leads and conversations have improved. The ‘busy work’ that Sales was doing, chasing leads that were never going to convert, has been replaced with doing thoughtful prep work for genuinely qualified leads. And instead of defending the product, the team can now be focused on discovery and demonstrating value. 

Balancing Motions

For now we are continuing to monitor the impact of removing a self-serve trial and keeping Request a Demo as our primary entry point. The allure of PLG is still very real, and something we want to explore in the future, but it is not our full go-to-market strategy. 

In an ideal world we would have both motions working in parallel: a PLG path for customers whose needs align cleanly with our out-of-the-box product, and a sales-assisted experience for more complex, enterprise, or custom use cases. Getting there, however, still requires a significant investment in our product, and that work must be carefully weighted against everything else in our product roadmap. 

Watching new users pour in can be intoxicating. But at some point, it’s worth asking whether that growth is creating momentum, or quietly working against you.