Giving away 'tester' product

[Brown and Boris]

Once you have given away produiut on a trial basis, does it undermine your ability to get the full price later?

I have a new product which to advertise I am letting the first organisation who want to use it in a particular way have it for free as long as we can write it up for the trade mags in the hope that having seen it work other wil buy it.

However, it tends to be a tight knit marketplace and no doubt otheres will find out that the first few got it for free. I wondered whether giving it away to these first 6 or 10 customers led to underming pricing later and if I should get a non discolure agreemnet signed?

[Boosted LS1]

Could you loan it to them for indefinate trials.

[egomeister]

Might be a bit of a different scenario but in the last company I worked for we tried to not give anything for free.

It was an engineering r&d company, and we found that if we provided samples FOC they tended to get forgotten ("... oh yeah, they did that for us for free" ) whereas if we charged a small fee for them they were always coming out of someone's budget and held their attention a lot better as someone was accountable for spending that cash.

Like i say, this scenario may be a little different - we were dealing with global companies and the "samples" had several thousands of investment in each, but it was an approach that worked for us.

Edited by egomeister on Sunday 30th March 12:15

[Brown and Boris]

Boosted LS1 said:

Could you loan it to them for indefinate trials.

It is actually web site acess they are getting free. Once their intial project is over they will in future have to pay like everyone else. I was just a bit concerned that having had it for free they might then be reluctant to pay real money for it. I have made it clear that only the first customer use in any particular sector is free because we are trialling the product to get them to make a rapid decisions for fear of someone else taking the free place in their sector. I wondred if I should have offered it at say 50% so they know what the future price will be but I won't be able to set the price until we know who well it works and how much money it saves them (which is one of the questions to be answered in the sector trials)