IT:BD:Sales/Support

Support is a Sales consideration, in that every hour spent supporting a client is at your expense – unless you can extract opportunity out of it.

And of course you can. It's how you develop

• customer loyalty
• find out what the customer wants, for the next version, what they are willing to pay for.
• what they think of your software compared to competitors, why they chose yours (this informs marketing decisions), what they hesitated on, what they wished for (improves the conversion rate).
• it gives you a list of people to call (those that asked for support during the trial period) as to what you can do to close/improve the conversion rate.