Sharing a bit of my own experience: I used to do a lot of demos for my SaaS (usually 1 to 2 hour long, because it ended up in some form of coaching session on cash-flow forecasting habits), but after a while I realised that I got more churn from such users ultimately.
I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things :
How did the trial conversion go? Do you have a lot of in-app prompting and email around conversion?
We tried that at Cronitor in 2015 but we saw less engagement from users who started a trial without a cc and less engaged users, predictably, converted at a lower rate for us.
I have no in-app prompting at all, and I have a simple 5-email benefits-oriented email series (via customer.io).
I don't have enough numbers for things to be meaningful (it's a small-scale SaaS), but I seem to recall that removing the CC without onboarding initially was not great, and things improved with the onboarding tour (sorry if I cannot be much more specific!).
Removing the CC avoided the need to handle refunds for some people, which was a bit of hassle to handle.
I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things :
- An in-app onboarding tour (fully self-service), implemented with mock data (see https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5... for a full write-up on how to implement that with Rails & Hopscotch)
- A git-based detailed knowledge base (also self-service), https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-g...
And I also moved from a CC-upfront trial mode, to a no-CC trial.
Applying those 3 measures slashed my "customer support time" to almost zero & fewer churn.
I suppose I'm attracting more savvy, self-service users too now.