Beta: Public or by invitation?

Public Beta

In case of a public Beta program for a B2B web service, anyone can sign-up from the website.
Thus there is:
- No control on who will be using the Beta.
- People need to be aware of your Beta (Press release?)

As any company can visit your website, any company can participate.
Thus you cannot control the market segment. It is likely that smaller companies will sign-up in greater numbers than larger ones (if you even get larger ones).
Thus chances are that the testing audience will not be representative for your future customer base.

As even your competitors can sign-up too, this is an additional drawback. Especially if you have the Beta sign-up process fully automated. Kicking the competition out once they have used it, might be already too late as they have used and investigated your web service.

Beta by invitation

In case of a Beta by invitation, only a selected number of companies are invited.
One can carefully select the number of companies and target the market segment.
If a there is a bias towards certain type of companies, efforts can be made to change this by inviting other companies.

Of course the companies need to be persuaded to take part in the Beta test.
As there is exclusivity in this ‘By Invitation’ only, people will feel special. This could help persuading people to sign-up.

Problem: who to invite?
Using our own LEADSExplorer web service we know the companies who have been visiting our website and are interested in our offering by the pages visited. They are likely to be interested in participating in a Beta.

If you don’t have such a website visitor identification service, it will be hard to select companies from a list (Yellow pages? or bought list). As this is similar to lead generation using emails or cold calling, many companies need to be addressed in order to get enough users.

Relations sharing Beta by invitation

This method consists by gifting the existing Beta users with additional Beta invitations they can send to their relations.
This might work between friends in social website and B2C, but it seems less likely this viral method could work between employees of different companies.
Still it can be experimented and could work.

Back door

As the Beta program needs to get enough participants in order to cover the entire market segment the solution is intended for. If not your feedback will be biased and you might have developed the wrong solution not meeting the demands of your future customers.
Leaving a back door entry by email inquiry should be possible allowing you to choose from several inquiring companies: info (at) LEADSExplorer (dot) com