Squeezing Lemons ⇒

My task at LemonStand is to increase sales so I thought I'd share what we've done that's worked and not worked.

Our challenges are fairly standard:

• no contracts
• max. two week sales cycle (corresponds to 2 week trial)
• rarely have valid phone number on trial customers
• lower price point
• people just exploring options
• LemonStand can be a little overwhelming if you don't know where to start

What has worked:

• live chat (we use Olark)
• better and more frequent email during the trial (via Customer.io)
• better messaging on our website to attract the ideal customer
• targeted outreach to previous customers
• offering Professional Services to help people get started

What hasn't worked:

• calling people on a trial - most time people don't leave a number or don't answer their phone. They certainly never return a message.

We've also raised our prices to better match the value we bring and that increase has not decreased the number of new customers. We are also going to increase our outbound sales efforts on highly targeted customers.

Our next challenge is to increase our trial to customer conversions, and we do have some ideas on how to accomplish that.