SaaS Sales: Why You Need to Call Every Trial Signup User Within 5 Minutes!

If you’re a B2B SaaS startup, you need to call all your free trial signups to convert more of them to paying customers and raving fans.

We’ve written about this before, and if you’re not sure yet if your startup should follow this strategy, please keep reading.

Today, we want to share an easy but powerful way to dramatically improve the success of your phone outreach: call new users within 5 minutes of signups!

Need help? Download our free book today, SaaS Sales for Startup Founders.

Why Call Within 5 Minutes?

Because that’s your best chance of getting people on the phone, the longer you wait, the more likely you will be wasting time on voicemail or waiting in vain for someone to pick up.

Many startups don’t want to call people because it can be a huge time-waster. Calling within 5 minutes can fix that.

Dr. James Oldroyd researched how big the difference is in reach rates depending on the speed of the call. He looked at two things:

What are the chances of reaching a lead if you follow up after ____ (x amount of time)?

What are the chances of qualifying a lead if you follow up after ____ (x amount of time)?

It turns out that following up with a lead is best within 5 minutes, and after that, there’s a very significant drop. You might say this is obvious, but most people underestimate how big that difference is.

What is the Difference?

Call within 5 minutes, and your chances of reaching a lead will be 100 times higher than calling after 30 minutes of sign-up. What are your chances of qualifying for that same lead? 21 times higher.

Boom!

The difference is even more pronounced if you wait longer than 30 minutes.

Our experience helping over 100 venture-backed startups optimize their sales funnel supports the numbers from this research.

You reach more people, and your conversations are also better.

They will know who you are and why you’re calling them. They’re at their computer right now and not in a meeting. In short, it’s the perfect time to speak to them about your product.

What to Say?

To make this call, you don’t need to be a slick salesperson or smooth-talker. Simply say this:

People love that!

This will often be a good opportunity for your trial signups to ask specific questions. They want to know how a certain feature works or how your product can help them better accomplish a certain task.

Suppose you can answer these questions in a personal and direct manner. It will make a huge difference in how activated these users are during their trial and how many convert them to paying customers.

Calling within 5 minutes of sign-up is probably the most effective way to improve your overall sales numbers!

Many startups work on optimizing the end of the funnel, training their salespeople, and improving their demos and sales scripts.

All that is important but worthless if you don’t reach enough people to sell to in the first place.

The Funnel Math

Let’s say you have 100 signups per day, call all of them within 1–2 days, reach about 20 percent, and convert 50 percent to paying customers (a pretty typical conversion funnel).

This means you close 10 out of every 100 signups. Not bad.

Let’s say you worked hard to improve your conversion rate and can now close 75 percent of the people you reach. Impressive! This means you’re closing 15 out of every 100 signups.

What would happen if you decided to optimize your reach rate instead and started calling people within 5 minutes of signing up?

Your new conversion funnel looks like this:

One hundred signups, reaching 50 percent of people (within 5 minutes), closing 50 percent, which means you’re closing 25 out of every 100 signups.

A 66.67 percent INCREASE!

If you’re calling your trial users, please stop everything you’re doing now and start implementing the 5-minute rule!