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Comment by nibs | Hacker News Reader

How do your customers contact you? That is how you should approach prospects. If they use the phone, so do you, etc.

A) It depends on the market you are selling into. I think for people >35 or non-tech people, the knowledge of live chat isn't there. We have found in our sales efforts that offering people 1. An email we monitor regularly and 2. A phone number that reaches a competent person, is best. It is pretty much 50/50 how people reach out, what matters more is how quickly you clue in to their actual problem.

B) Our market is not tech-savvy and requires us to communicate using more typical business communication methods such as email and phone (as opposed to live chat). We tried live chat, and no one ever used it. It was more overhead to support (be online, etc.) than it gained us. The answer lies in who you sell to.

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Thanks for you sharing your thoughts.

How did you tried live-chat? As a website widget? or "add me on skype" ? Both are totally different than our solution.

Website widget is inbound so it has a different focus than outbound live-chat, like we are offering. There are many differences between live-chat widget and our tool http://www.chatpage.io/#why-not-livechat-widgets

I'm curious what you tried with live-chat, if not website widget I assume Skype?

Skype has also I high friction, you need to add the person and it's kinda personal. What we offer brings you in a chat page by just a click.

We used a website widget. On reflection, it would have been nice to have Skype integration, but it wasn't possible at the time. I see what you are referring to. I have no experience with outbound chat. That seems like a good idea. I have found my favourite way to receive cold email is to email back whether we are interested or not and if I am, it is nice if the sender links their calendar in their signature so I can schedule it based on what works for me. I don't think I would take the step to live chat either way though because usually I batch process emails and have other things on my mind in that moment.

I'm glad to get insights of how people perceive cold emails, thanks.

The thing with the schedule link is interesting. The tool has a schedule form that can be set as default...after the prospect clicks on the link, the schedule form will appear.

I thing it depends on the email you are getting and the timing you open the email. If you don't have a big "batch" to process, like in the middle of the day and the mail says "are you free on __ for a call or if you prefer, we can have now a 3 minutes chat" ... or something like this, I think busy people are more likely to click the chat link instead scheduling phone calls.

Worth trying if nothing else than for the novelty. The other thing we learned with cold emails is don't even bother unless the email is so well targeted you are speaking to an actual customer problem. Obviously 100% hit rate is not the goal, but we have become more ruthless about eliminating companies on the fridges of qualifying as a lead. Lots of activity is only good if it is to genuinely qualified leads. We don't send many emails but have a very high response rate (~20-30% depending on the campaign). It helps to be in a mature market, though.

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