When we recently introduced the Aible payback guarantee, prospective customers naturally assumed there was a catch somewhere. First they checked if we meant we would just give them credits to buy something else from us down the line. Then they checked whether it is a money back guarantee where they pay us, and at the end of the month they will face a months-long struggle to get the money back. Nope. This is different. You don’t pay us until you see the impact. For payback guarantee deals, we ask to be paid at a point 30 days from signing, so if we don’t show payback in the first month, you simply don't pay us. Think of it like the famous Domino’s “30 minutes or it's free” offer – without the driver running red lights.
Once prospective customers realized the guarantee was real, they probed the definition of payback. Well, we went with an honor code approach to it – essentially the customer has the sole discretion of deciding whether they have received payback, and if they haven’t, we mutually end the contract. The key here is that Aible actually makes it very easy for you to see the impact of Aible AI on your business, in the very first month of working with us. Thus, if you see value in the first month, you are not incentivized to cancel, and if you don’t see value we don’t want an unhappy customer anyway, so this is again a win-win from our perspective.
So what is the catch? Customers need to help us make the sales process painless so that we can focus our efforts on customer success, to make them successful instead. Look, every startup is resource constrained. So, we can either spend money on pre-sales and sales, or spend money on customer success. For the same sized deal, if we have spent a lot of money in the selling process, we can’t profitably spend that much on customer success. Again though, we believe this is a win-win. The customers who can be flexible: commit to a simple and quick sales process in return for the one month payback guarantee. The customers who can’t be flexible: either pay more so that we can still offer them a payback guarantee, or pay less and take on implementation risk. We are clear and open about our incentives, and the customer chooses the right approach that works for them.
So, if your buying process requires months of meetings with approvals from different stakeholders and free pilots, we can’t offer you the payback guarantee, unless you are willing to pay more. In that situation, think of the extra price for the payback guarantee as buying implementation insurance. But, if you make the sales process easy and quick for us, we will give you that implementation insurance and the customer success resource for free as a thank you.
You make the sales process easy for us, and we guarantee you impact. This is the Aible way of doing business.
Best Regards,
Arijit