How sellers can use Pendo Session Replay to improve their customers’ trial experiences

Not only is this “trial” period a chance for us to clarify and agree upon success criteria, together—it’s also an opportunity for me to brainstorm with my customers and help them start seeing the value of Pendo before they make a commitment. 

The trial period usually looks like an initial call to scope and determine each customer’s success criteria. Then comes a series of check-in meetings with their team and ours, typically involving people from the departments that will ultimately use Pendo (e.g. product, developers and technical resources, customer success, sales, etc.). Both parties commit a lot of time and resources to this process, and to getting the trial just right. So of course, we want everything to go as smoothly as possible for both us and our customers. 

But the reality is that any number of things can go wrong during a trial, which could lead to an unfavorable outcome. Maybe the success criteria was too ambitious. Or perhaps expectations weren’t properly set by the seller. So how can we ensure success, each time? Our newest product offering, Pendo Session Replay, has an important role to play.

The challenge

As sellers, our “home base” during any trial is the success criteria we develop with our prospects and customers. We bring them up in every trial check-in meeting, and use them to ensure we’re moving in the right direction and laying the groundwork to address the challenges our customers are looking to solve. If we aren’t meeting those criteria, the trial is in danger of being deemed unsuccessful—undesirable not just for us as sellers, but also for customers, who commit valuable time and energy to the entire evaluation process.  

Visual data—in the form of session replays—is an invaluable tool in making sure prospects and customers are getting the most value possible from their trial. And the insights we’re able to glean from these replays are a great way to avoid a seller’s worst nightmare: Not meeting success criteria at the end of the trial. If things do go south for any reason, these replays are also a proactive way for us to understand what went wrong, what could have been avoided, and what could have been done differently so we can improve the trial experience next time. 

The solution

With Pendo Session Replay, we get all this visual data—combined with product analytics and customer feedback—in one place. Each type of data (quantitative, qualitative, and visual) informs the other, and gives us a unified and actionable view into our customers’ trial experiences.

Pendo Session Replay also makes it much easier for us as sellers to confirm success criteria with our customers. While verbally confirming these criteria is great, there’s nothing like being able to see your prospects’ and customers’ actions for yourself. Pendo Session Replay allows sellers like me to get a glimpse into our prospects’ and customers’ trial experiences, prior to those all-important check-in meetings. Armed with these insights, we can go into calls already knowing what these customers have accomplished on their list of success criteria, as well as where they’re potentially struggling to realize value. 

There are a couple of things I look for in Pendo Session Replay to ensure we’re off to a good start, and a few examples of success criteria people trialing Pendo often have:

1. Data validation
2. Tagging properly
3. Deploying a guide
4. Ensuring that account and visitor level data is coming through
5. Creating a funnel
6. Creating a path

Using Pendo Session Replay, I can dig into sessions and see exactly which of these have been accomplished (and which haven’t) prior to meeting with my customers. 

This also allows me to see potential problem areas and proactively intervene to get things back on track. For example, I recently worked with a customer who was having difficulty triggering a guide. With a quick glance at Pendo Session Replay, I was able to identify that they had accidentally set the guide to launch in a staging environment instead of their public environment. Thanks to that replay, I was able to notify them of the quick fix and have them check off another piece of success criteria—without having to use our check-in time to troubleshoot.

Here are a few additional advantages to leveraging Pendo Session Replay during a trial:

Faster confirmation of success criteria

Pendo Session Replay allows sellers to ensure success criteria is met, without having to troubleshoot during a call. Event logs timestamp every event captured within a replay—so you can jump directly to the moments that matter most. You can also set replays to play at up to 4x speed and automatically skip idle moments—so can can  scale your understanding of how users engage during a trial.

Accelerated discovery time

Because Session Replay helps reduce the need for live troubleshooting during scheduled trial sessions, you can instead use that valuable time to brainstorm and envision value between both teams. This means you can keep looking forward and plan for success proactively, rather than constantly resolving technical missteps after the fact.

Enhanced collaboration with sales engineers

Sellers often prep with sales engineers prior to customer meetings. With Pendo Session Replay, both sellers and sales engineers are able to take a look at potential pain points for our customers, and make sure we’re covering what’s most essential on the call. And since Pendo Session Replay currently allows for unlimited seats, we can either do this on our own time, or together. 

The outcome

The power of seeing and knowing how prospects and customers have been using Pendo—before physically speaking to them—goes a long way in ensuring a successful trial. It allows us as sellers to not only come to meetings better prepared, knowing what to expect—but also creates a better experience for our customers. And ultimately, this improves the odds of a successful trial—and deal close.

Want to learn more about Pendo Session Replay and see the power of visual data in action for yourself? Schedule a custom demo with our team here.