You made an important point. I am interested in the enterprise space. The old way of making a sale is to send a salesman out and have him convince some executive committee to purchase your product. The sales cycle is 6 months or more and the price has to be somewhere north of $100K to pay for it all.
If you go with the easy in, easy out approach, the customer, most likely at the department or tech level, tries out your product as SaaS, with self-service If he likes it, he signs up with a subscription. The benefits are lower sales cost, a shorter sales cycle, and less time spent on tire kickers. You are probably getting revenue in 2 or 3 months.
One problem with that approach in the enterprise is that most of that $100k+ software is stuff that takes a long time to customize and integrate; there's just no low-cost way to try something out.
More peripheral services like instant messaging or collaboration tools are easier to do that with. Something like a CRM system is probably harder due to the volume of data you'd need to port and the large change in how people do their work, re-training required, etc. Something even more core like supply-chain management or an accounting system is even harder to try-before-you-buy, and the penalty for trying something that doesn't work is way, way higher. In order to get to the point where you know if it's going to fail or not, you have to take some big risks and sink in a huge amount of time and money.
> I am more likely to try something if I can back out painlessly if it doesn't work out.
Yup.
I would like to see information about ease of exit included more often and more prominently in reviews of sign-up-based products. In fact, it would be interesting to have a site that gave only ease of exit information, for all kinds of products.
