Assistly Marketing VP Tells You Why They Dropped Tiered Pricing and Picked Up Freemium

UPDATE: Assistly was acquired by Salesforce.com shortly after we did this interview… they are now Desk.com.

I sat down and chatted with Assistly’s SVP of Marketing Matt Trifiro via Video Skype and he spilled his guts for you about why Assistly changed their pricing, adopted Freemium, and set out to disrupt the market… all at the same time.

The conversation is about 40 minutes… Check it out:

Do you prefer to listen on the go? Download the .mp3 audio file (36.3MB) here.


Wistia has kindly donated business video hosting to me, which pretty much makes them awesome!

Recently SaaS startup Assistly changed their pricing strategy and included Freemium at the same time, and it made a huge splash with the industry news outlets.

This is just another reminder that Pricing is Marketing that we should all pay attention to.

While this change was covered by a ton of different media outlets – Matt and I were even interviewed for the same article – none of the articles went into the depth that I wanted on what is a pretty MASSIVE change.

So I reached out to Matt and asked him if we could talk about it and record it for you.

He thought that was an awesome idea, too, and we made it happen… just for you!

Some of the things you’ll learn:

  • Is Assistly just trying to acquire free users to sell to a company that will monetize them or are they using Freemium to drive revenue?
  • What the #1 metric SaaS vendors must focus on for long-term success
  • How to use behavior-driven In-App Marketing to effectively segment customers rather than up-front self-selecting market segmentation
  • Why SaaS companies shouldn’t look at Amazon Web Services as the sales model, but at Amazon.com e-commerce
  • How to create a system for pulling users into the app deeper to grow Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Why they moved away from tiered pricing
  • How Assistly moved the pricing / buying decisions to further in the app and extended the “funnel” into the product
  • And a TON more!

I hope you enjoy – and learn from – the conversation I had with Matt as much as I enjoyed – and learned from – having it.

Please comment below and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

– Lincoln

About Lincoln Murphy

I invented Customer Success. I focus primarily on Customer Engagement. Learn more about me here.