How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage
userscape.com
userscape.com
It was a good life. Wake up, set your own hours, do some programming on the site and automation tools, take a mental break to communicate with users via email. All in our boxers. Our friends would call us to go out, one of us could handle the emails while the other was out, or hell, we would both leave, so long as people got a reply within 6 hours, everybody seemed to be happy.
Life was good, we were both getting laid and our apartments were clean. Every now and then, a customer here and there wouldn't get it and would request a phone call. We gladly called them up, and fixed in 30 mins what normally would take us 7-10 days of back and forth emailing!
This gratification encouraged us to put our number on our webpage. We did, and closed many sales over the phone. Our sales tripled, our company grew more. we were both earning 50k/year in profits compared to last year's 20, and growing more than linearly.
What happened next? The calls grew more frequent. We would leave them to answering machine and when we would call back, the customers would be angry. Eventually customers called us out on the fact that we only answered calls as of 11:00am and they made us feel guilty about not having a phone answered during business hours.
So we conceded. 9am - 6pm our lines would be answered. After all, we owe it to the customers who brought us our livelihood. 2 guys splitting the task; it was maintainable. All of a sudden though, we couldn't work when we wanted. We had to be up and in the office at 9.
We tried maintaining our lifestyles, coding killer features until 4am, going out when our friends would call us. Eventually there were consequences for these actions.
Gone were the days of coding in our underwear, gone were the haphazard productivity blitzes, gone were the days of our startup's spirit. We lost sleep because we had to be up at 8. Lots of it. If one of us would sleep in, the other would cover until eventually the person waking up early more often would fall to resentment.
Our product suffered, our relationship suffered, our productivity blitzes? Gone. We were canceling plans with friends because we had work to do at night that couldn't get done cause we were on the phone. Nobody would outsource our calls, most of our clients spoke french. Our website hadn't changed graphic design since we put our winter theme up. It was july and our logo was covered in snow. Our phone staff kept quitting. Our sales plateaued. We even started wearing pants. I eventually sold my half.
Trust me kids, don't put your number on your homepage. Stick to email support and get by. Find a way to get by without a filing cabinet and go travel the world while working.
Again, this isn't the whole story. I'm being a little dramatic here so that the story isn't all that boring, but it's essentially what happened. It's probably a good idea for a lot of people. For me, however, it really took all the fun and all my passion out of my company.
I'm not dying to answer the phone - but until I have a good feel for what the "frequently asked questions" are, I can't pass that responsibility onto anyone else.
For Poll Everywhere putting the phone number on our website has been a great experience. When people call us up with questions we can learn more about their needs or where they are confused. When enough confused people call, you know that something isn't right on your website and you go fix it to reduce those calls.
From our point-of-view, putting our phone number has been a great way to close the feedback loop between us and our customers. I strongly recommend signing up for a RingCentral or GrandCentral number and at least try putting it in your website.
It's been used by press and users both. Some people just want help putting tipjoy on their blog. That kind of user research is really interesting actually. You practice explaining things to people who have no idea about the web.
Also, if you don't like talking to people, keep in mind others are like you. The calls have been very infrequent. And if it gets annoying, just remove it.
Someone dug up my phone number from whois just yesterday. I'm a nice guy, and I try to be helpful, even when it should be obvious from the fact that there is no phone number anywhere on our website that we aren't equipped to deal with telephone queries. So, I answered his questions as best I could. 45 minutes later, I hung up, having possibly convinced someone to spend $138 with us. For anyone not doing the math on this, even if he buys, given our long-term support and product maintenance commitments, I've already made no money on the sale. If he purchases the product, and then calls me again for help, I'm way down in the hole on this sale.
Here are the problems with talking to people on the phone:
1. You don't have a lot of customers today, so it's cheap and easy to answer a couple of calls per day. But, if you have any level of success, you will have more customers each day--and if you do your job, the number will only ever increase, forever and ever. 10 customers having your phone number aint so bad. 1000 customers having your number is bad. 10000 customers having your number is a nightmare, and an expensive one, at that. You have to hire someone, at some point, to handle the phones...and if they're technically savvy enough to help people, they won't be cheap. It's also a soul-sucking job. Nobody likes doing phone support. It's high stress, low satisfaction, and overall just sucks. Turnover will be high, and the low morale of this team will hurt morale in the rest of the company. You could outsource it, but that'd be admitting you're willing to provide shitty service. You could put them in a different building, but that hurts morale of the support team even more--and makes your developers no longer accountable for their products ease of use.
2. The kind of people who refuse to buy if they can't call you for sales assistance will insist on calling for support. And they will call a lot. This was a definite trend with my previous company. If I had to talk to someone for an hour or two to make the sale (expensive products back then), I expected to talk to them again for several hours through the life cycle of the product. If they can't call you for support, but could for sales, they will be angry--loudly, publicly, angry--about this difference. "You're easy to reach when you want my money, but when I need help you're nowhere to be found." No matter how aggressively you help people online or via email, you will be described as being unsupportive and unhelpful, and only interested in the sale.
3. Expense and opportunity cost. I did the math on this during the last couple of years of operation of my company, and I should have done it the first year of operation and every year after...I was losing money on every box I sold, because of the time I spent on the phone with folks. When I "closed" the company and stopped selling systems, and only provided contract services on an hourly basis, I had the most profitable year of my companies existence.
4. You can't help people with technical products on the phone, but they expect you to. You can't send them links to relevant docs, you can't send screenshots back and forth, you can't suggest commands for copy/paste usage. What you can do is spend five minutes explaining that "slash" and "backslash" are different characters, and that when you say "slash" you actually mean "slash" and not "backslash", likewise "dash", "underscore", "pipe", "hash", upper vs. lower case etc. So, 45 minutes into the call, you've finally gotten a sane description of the problem. An hour after that, you've solved their problem. So, it is deeply frustrating for everybody concerned. Two or three emails or comments in a ticket tracker would have solved this problem in a tenth the time, and that's time you could spend helping other customers.
I'm sure there are products and businesses out there that will be well-served by having a phone number. But, if your product is technical in nature, and doesn't cost thousands of dollars, I would argue that you'd have to be an absolute fool to make a promise to help people via telephone.
Taking phone calls costs money. Typically, people who would prefer to call are going to be not as technical, and will indeed require 'support' that goes beyond your product, because if your product isn't working, you have to fix it or at least diagnose it on that phone call, even if it's because their networking is down. You essentially become their "IT" department.
So, not having a phone number will cause you to lose sales, but probably with those sales are the 'expensive' customers that you probably would not have made money on after factoring the extra support costs.
That being said, if you must have a phone number, increase the cost of your product to cover the extra cost of that.
As you said, the cost of the product must cover the anticipated support. If you are covering the cost, then make this an opportunity to differentiate your company even more by offering excellent support beyond what your competitors do.
You cannot satisfy everyone, but early on, when you have very few customers, you may tell yourself, "This customer would be worth doing something very different for." It is tempting to do anything you can do make a sale.
Sometimes, this is just a sign that you aren't targeting the right people yet, and it's time to evolve and grow. But, if you aren't careful it just leads to you trying to be all things to all people. I had this problem with my previous company...the questions would come, "Can you do X, Y, and Z?" And my thought process would be, "Yes on X and Y, and I could totally make Z happen, if I just spend two weeks developing it, making this a losing sale, but I'll amortize across future sales of Z." And I'd respond, "Yes." I'd make Z possible, and then I would never sell to another customer that needed Z. To be fair to this thought process, Virtualmin wouldn't exist had I been successful about saying "No, that's not something we do." But, counting up the successes vs. the things that merely distracted me from my real goals, that's batting about .025. And, I had wanted to make something like Virtualmin for years (and I'd even taken a stab at it three or four years previous and written 10kLoC, or so, and had some basic functionality and a half dozen users)...this customer just gave me an excuse to spend enough time/money on it to make it a reality.
Because I (almost) never have to spend an hour on the phone with anyone, either to make a sale or to support the product, I can spend that hour helping a dozen people solve their problems. Thus, sales are cheaper for us...so we can charge less. Support is cheaper for us, so we can do more of it, without having to charge extra as our competitors do.
If I ever said, "Yes", to the question, "Can I call you?" all of our math about how we make a profit on software that is as large as ours, while being as cheap as it is (and being 90% available in an Open Source form), would completely go out the window, and our prices would have to become too high to be competitive, or we would just start losing money on every sale, as I did in my previous business. I'm not saying answering a phone now and then would put us out of business...but I am saying that I don't want to be a telephone IT support business ever again (you're spot on in your assessment that you become every customers IT department, because you're the only company that answers the phone and has smart people on the end of the line--I can't even count the number of times I've fixed peoples routers because they couldn't afford a Cisco support contract). Before offering to answer phones, think about whether your business can support pricing that high (if you're unfamiliar with Cisco support pricing...do a little digging...be prepared to gasp), or if it will price you right out of the market.
By the time you have a dozen customers, at least one will have said, publicly, something along the lines of, "I had no trouble talking to them when I wanted to buy, but as soon as I needed help, they were nowhere to be found."
There are industries and products where it's possible to get away with telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's probably not the business most of the folks here are in. I don't know what makes it workable, exactly, and certainly larger companies get away with it all the time...and when you and I have hundreds of thousands of customers, we can discuss the possibilities.
It probably is possible to differentiate somehow on your website; making available far more expensive versions that include telephone support. I kinda suspect that will engender animosity in the non-premium customers who feel like they're getting second class treatment, but at least they'll all know where they stand. But, beware that no matter what you do, you will get phone calls for support, if you offer a number for sales. And your suggested solution will piss some customers off.
Anyway, I think everyone is just dramatically underestimating the cost of answering a phone.
I think it's a matter of how you set expectations around the number and whether you have a PBX. I ran a web dev / hosting company.
Contact page read: "To keep our prices low, we currently only offer support via email unless you have a dedicated server with a support contract." Or something to that effect.
Phone maze said: "For sales, press 1" (that went to a person, when we wanted to be available). For Support, press 2" (that went to a message that said "To keep our prices low, we don't offer telephone support. Head over to www..."
If someone circumvented it and got us on the line somehow, we'd say it verbally.
You're right, it probably pissed off the people who read the clear verbiage around the phone number on the site and chose to ignore it... But I was happy to live with that. And the phone number landed me plenty of high profit customers that I was glad to have.
Of course, this only makes sense if you have SOME premium offering and a generous margin. Most real businesses WANT to talk to a salesperson rather than buy online.
If we didn't have dedicated server hosting (thousands per year in revenue), that number never woulda seen the light of day. ;-)
That sounds like an odd way to do it - do your customers typically purchase on the same day they first hit your web site? If not, they likely came back several times and might have been bemused or even frustrated to find the phone number appearing and then disappearing. Or just seeing the phone number one of those days was enough to accrue all the benefit of having the phone number on any day.
You then use cookies to track which user is in what bucket, because you have to know which treatment the user was in when they converted. As you said, that may or may not be on the same day they were treated.
That's still kind of weird, though. You should just randomly assign each user as they arrive to one group or the other.
If he's doing what you're suggesting that's bad methodology for all the reasons you said, and I wouldn't trust the results.
One theory might be that your audience is comprised of geeks. Less likely to pick up the phone, and less emotionality dependent on voice contact in terms of comfort/credibility. I wonder if A/B testing on Cabelas.com or LLBean.com would yield different results.
I recommend having a phone number and putting it everywhere. I know when I see it, I feel better.
No one calls me and I still get a lot of contact through the contact form. But I still think it provides comfort to people seeing the number there. I had one customer who was trying to get a response out of me but my email kept going to his spam folder. I finally emailed him from another address but if I didn't think of this, the phone number would have given him a last resort to reach out and strangle eer get the issue resolved.
If someone does call, I'll answer in my best phone voice, help out, and get on with what I was doing.
That said, I called technical support, and they "trained" me on how to get around the quirks of the system. The technical support was absolutely excellent. I was surprised and I think it'd be cheaper for them to fix their site rather than have every customer call technical support.
I have no problem talking to people on the phone but I doubt they'll call at a good time (yes, not an ideal situation) so I may as well cut to the chase and try to find something cheaper.
Search results for "toll free voice mail" yield plenty of choices ... anything good? Is the strategy itself bad (I wouldn't advertise it as a voice mail box)?
I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message. voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to listen to messages which is a big plus for me.
Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.
The APIs look pretty straightforward, but if you have any further insight or resources on this integration it would be very helpful.
The Voicecloud response handler is equally simple: they call your script and pass it a transactionuid (the value saved in the last script) and a transcribed_text parameter. From there you can do whatever you want, like send it in an email or save it to your database.
The Voicecloud API isn't really completely setup right now though, so you have to work with their support team to get an API key and to give them your response handler URL. They have to input that stuff. One other thing is I initially ran into issues with Twilio's mp3 encoding not working with Voicecloud, but Voicecloud solved that for me and probably for anyone else too.
Hope that helps!
This way you can pretend to have a phone number but it's actually no different to publishing an email address. (Not saying this is really good business practice ... but it's there).
Now does that actually mean I buy from newegg more often as a result? Who knows ;)
It is psychologically reassuring to think you will be able to call if you have a problem.
Nice looking Web 2.0 websites just look reliable, so I don't check for phone numbers on them. The older the page looks, the more i look for a number.
Well, in those cases, neither make their phone number easy to find. Amazon has it hidden very deeply in their "help" site, and eBay requires an account to get at their number. I assume, anyway -- I browsed for a few minutes and didn't find any phone numbers at all.
Big companies prefer email just as much as small ones.
Historically, I've been a terrible customer service person (when I worked as an usher for a movie theater I hated customers), yet when it's your own product, and it's something you're excited about and something in which you truly believe, it really shows through in voice communication.
Those customers that get the rapid phone support are frequent sources of referrals, especially the repeat callers.
That said, I've been in business now for 2.5 years, have always had the phone number on the site, and have had more than 3,000 customers with a few hundred thousand users, yet I probably average maybe 30 minutes on the phone per day, sometimes more, sometimes not a single call for a few days. Most users use the contact form or the forums. I'm still honestly surprised I don't get many calls. As a one man shop, I was expecting to spend a lot of time on the phone, and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. I was originally hesitant to post the phone number, but it becomes a very helpful tool, in my opinion.
But like some other users have mentioned, the phone number helps users be reassured they can get instant support if it's needed. And like the article says, you can always let it go to voice mail if you're too busy.
Overall, great advice, imo.
(I know this is structured poorly as a sort of stream of consciousness, and for that I apologize).
Unless you are a huuuuge company with millions of customers -- end consumers really -- then you are better off doing it yourself or hiring dedicated, in-house staff.
The more directly you handle customer's questions and problems, the better equipped you are to enhance your product, your sales materials, you self-help resources, etc. If you outsource it, they have no incentives to help you reduce call volume, which indicates reduced questions and problems (hopefully not reduced interest!). In fact, they have incentive to INCREASE call volume, because they charge you by the unit.
1. Meet
2. Phone
3. Postal Mail
4. e-mail
It is difficult to navigate and understand what is going on. Of course we get the idea and understand, but think from the perspective of a prospective customer. This is typical of the type of website that has a phone number on the front page. It looks unprofessional. When you get larger you can post your automated answering line (like 1-800-NOSOFTWARE for Salesforce.com) on the front page, because it's limited overhead.