High-tech companies have been using free trial offers since the dawn of the personal computer. AOL is perhaps the most notorious disciple of the "try it, you'll buy it" strategy. Seagate Software made news recently by shipping millions of copies of their enterprise reporting tool, Crystal Reports, on CD-ROM to MIS Managers nationwide.

However, free trials have their downside. They extend the sales cycle. They clog support lines. And sending out free trials is often an expensive proposition, even though the Internet now enables companies to offer trial product online and save the cost of media and shipping.

Free trials are also risky. Left to evaluate your product on their own time, prospects can develop objections, often unwarranted, that you'll never have the opportunity to counter.

The secret of a successful trial program is to balance the compelling nature of the offer with some element of control over who gets the product, and how he or she evaluates it. One way to accomplish this is to make the free trial part of the offer but grant it only to "qualified" prospects. For example:

"A limited number of trial copies of WidgetMaker 1.0 is available to qualified companies only. To learn how your company can qualify, call 1-800-WIDGET to speak to a WidgetPro representative."

Whatever you do, test. A free trial may increase your response rate, but it could also simply delay sales that you'd be able to close anyway. Try offering free trials to half your audience, code the names accordingly, then gauge the difference in response, cost per lead and close rate. Only then will you know whether a free trial makes sense in the long term.