Rainy Day Ideas For Things You Can Build To Grow Your Business
training.kalzumeus.com
training.kalzumeus.com
I wouldn't mind at all if I received such communication via any means I had provided to a business, but I'd be fairly upset if Random Startup B - whose service I demoed for a month and ultimately decided against - suddenly called me on a number I never gave them after I had already decided not to do any further business with them.
An email asking for a phone number would be perfectly acceptable. It would positively affect my opinion of the company and could go some distance towards gaining me back as a customer, but calling me on a number I never gave would be a pretty significant final nail in that coffin.
Therefore, if an app owner genuinely felt that his app was going to fix your problem, and you have displayed an interest in having your problem fixed by signing up to his app, why wouldn't you want the app owner to understand more about why his app didn't work for you? Hypothetically let's say that the 5 minute conversation he had with you then led to a change to the app that actually solved your headache - would that make the phone call acceptable?
I completely understand that we all hate cold calls, me included, I'm just trying to understand why you would be so upset.
I have made it a point to put myself on the national Do Not Call registry, so I know that any phone calls I would receive during the day are generally important enough to justify the interruption and I will try to answer rather than let it go to voicemail.
You know that junk mail you'll get sometimes that has no sender information, but is made to look in some way important or personal? Maybe it looks like a bill, or it's in a greeting card envelope. So you have to open it up to find out what's in there, and lo and behold it's an offer for 50% off six months of DirecTV and three months of free HBO to boot. Maybe it's just me, but that's the sort of thing that drives me crazy, and I look at those sorts of phone calls the same way.
- Unplug it/turn it off - set to silent and turn off vibrate - "Do Not Disturb" setting - "Send all calls to voicemail" - etc.
Calls that are not covered by the Do Not Call registry include:
- Any survey by telephone (even if they are being conducted by a for-profit company)
- Any charity
- Any political campaign, candidate, or committee
- Any company with whom you have had contact in the last 3 months, or done business within the last 18 months
In short, saying let's always answer phone calls because of the Do Not Call registry is like saying let's open every email because of the CAN-SPAM Act.
The only way to reliably manage telephone interruptions is on the client side, i.e. the phone itself. When I don't want to be interrupted I send all calls on the landline to voicemail, and put my cell phone on vibrate--only picking up numbers I recognize, like family or friends, in case it is an emergency.
The highest priority is receiving a phone call, because it means that someone wants to talk to me in particular, can't find me, and can't wait for an email response. Because all the other methods of communication have been bypassed, it must be rather important, and so I will answer it. If it is not important, I will then be annoyed.
I actually have a reverse order of priority in communication, which is interesting. It'd probably be texts (seen immediately), emails (seen quickly, acted on if urgent), then phone calls as low priority (may or may not answer). This is because I dislike interruptions and many people have my number, and most of my contacts don't consider phone calls urgent only.
Since for you it's a high priority interrrupt, you wouldn't be entering the number into website forms, and would not be called. You can easily fill in nothing or junk if a phone number is requested and you reserve the phone for high priority contact.
This FTC page has a list of places to go to opt-out:
http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...
If one hypothetically is mortally terrified of sounding like a salesman, you could preface the call with "I don't want your money since $SOFTWARE wasn't right for you, but if you have two minutes, I'd like to hear what went wrong so I can fix it and help our other customers."
I'd like to gingerly suggest that you carefully reconsider any advice you get on a message board about the propriety of directly contacting customers and prospects. Message board nerds like us are terrible at evaluating these situations, and it really holds us back.
Out of those 100 customers, 81 picked up the phone, and of the 81 that did, exactly 3 didn't want to talk to me. The rest graciously provided amazing, actionable feedback.
Do not make the mistake of listening to a bunch of really smart, technically-inclined HN'ers when it comes to business advice -- unless these are the guys you're selling to. Everybody, no matter how savvy, is really bad at predicting how a market will react. You just have to do these things and see for yourself.
So what people really hate is an annoying phone call by a sleezeback asshole (which, I admit, is everybody in sales).
So maybe the real lesson here is that people don't hate what you do, so long as you aren't an asshole.
"Out of business. Too little, too late..."
"Working on-site with corporate clients for foreseeable future, so using their project management software."
"Not integrated with zapier or basecamp."
...Which I would not have been able to get just by seeing so-and-so canceled. Very rarely does anyone Christmas-tree the textarea, and it literally takes a few minutes to add to your "Close Account" page.
(Takeaways for future planning: Help low tier accounts stay in business, e.g. education; Whitepaper on convincing your clients to use Planscope; Think about Zapier/Basecamp integration)
Not everybody is offended (actually very rarely). Also a lot of your potential customers are probably doing their business mainly over a phone.
My assistant loves doing stuff like this, and paying her $MUCH_LOWER_THAN_MY_BILLABLE_RATE to save me time is a no brainer. (patio11 will be along shortly to encourage me to switch to weekly rates to avoid this scenario entirely, but yeah.) Calling up prospects to get their feedback on a product idea and chatting for 10 minutes, sending emails saying "hey, thanks for meeting with us today! We're especially excited about X and you can expect to from from us next week about Y", gently nudging clients about overdue invoices, etc. There's an upfront investment, but then you are able to focus on more higher-level stuff looking forward.
Oh and for the record, she has had instances where she had to track someone down via googley means because their cell changed, or business address changed, etc... and she was never reprimanded for "How did you get my number?!?!?" Usually they were grateful. Granted not always ;)
And that's fine, but just be aware that you're leaving money and customers on the table.
The typical account expired / billing problem call is usually along the lines of the customer saying something like "I got your emails and have been meaning to get my billing info updated... can you help me with that now?". Customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.
The occasional cancellation request call often starts with us saying "I understand you had some questions about [our product]. How can I help you?". Next, the customer says "I like your product but it [was too expensive / did not have feature X / seemed hard to use] and I want to cancel." We always agree to honor the request but also add a "well did you know...". Our save rate is over 75%. Again customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.
If a customer took the time to sign up for your product, try it out, and maybe even give you money... they recognize they have a problem that needs solving. Sometimes a personal call can be a great way to help a customer find a solution to their problem.
I can't recall the last time we had someone be anything but appreciative when we called them. The world moves so fast nowadays and life gets in the way, so people can easily become distracted. A little personal touch can sometimes go a long way.
With Improvely, I follow up and re-try the charge after 1 day, then 3 days after that, then 7 (with an e-mail each time about when the next attempt will be), which gives them almost two weeks. Enough people fix the problem after a few days that this retains a lot of subscriptions that nobody meant to cancel. Often it's just a matter of giving someone time to call their bank to tell them not to decline the charge -- with international customers especially, it's often the bank doing the blocking for fraud-prevention reasons.
Which brings up another thing -- if you can build an "inactive" flag into your app, that's 100% better for retention and recapturing past customers than deleting accounts. If someone accidentally lets their payment lapse and tries to log in to find their account no longer exists, and all the work they've put into setting up or configuring your service has to be redone, they're very likely to stay cancelled. If they log in show them a "welcome back, your account's still here, enter your payment info to reactivate immediately" screen.
As far as Patrick's advice for handling plan upgrades, I'd add one more tip: Build in some logic to never upgrade someone within X days of their billing date. Combined with the automatic warning at 80%/90% usage so they know they're getting close to needing to upgrade, making sure you never surprise them with a higher bill 2 days before their renewal goes a long way to keeping everyone happy. I've only ever had one customer reply to a mail about nearing the limits of his plan that he didn't want to upgrade and pay more, and he was completely happy after I offered a discount off the published cost.
It just "feels" too high and one that we'd have assumed would affect hundreds/thousands of other SaaS UK companies who bill the bulk of their customers from the US. But there are few (if any) reports of it online.
In fact, there's almost no reason you can't give them a week or two to pay since it's SaaS we're talking about. They may need time to get approvals, to get the new company CC number/expiry, etc. 3 days is super short.
2) I like the idea of picking customers who are near the upper limit of their plan, and pitching them a small incremental upgrade to a (not advertised) higher level plan.
So if someone is in the 90 rabbit range, they may be intentionally trying to say below their 100 limit. If you offered them a 200 limit for an extra $X a month, < than the next higher plan of 500 rabbits), they might bite and that would be free revenue.
3) What about ABC? Should you or could you pitch another product as part of the cancellation/update your cc emails? That is an important customer touchpoint and a time to remind them what else you sell.
4) What about offering a pause option? I've had companies (like Audible.com) who contact you when you attempt to cancel and ask if you would rather put your account on hold for a few months. Maybe what they need is more time to make a decision.
I really don't want SAAS companies calling me to ask why I canceled. Email is great, thanks. Maybe it's different for larger customers, but if I get a random phone call from a company I pay <$100/month, I'll probably like you less.
I'm going to take this idea and every time there is an issue like the above, I will have the web app automatically email me AND the person. In this way, the conversation will get started automatically. This will help me to communicate with users and hopefully increase engagement.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to apply this to applications for internal company-use, please post!
I did it with one client and credit cards came out way ahead on conversions (this was for a B2B app) - as in low double digits better.
Was this with American businesses?
I'm asking because I find the use of credit cards to be somewhat rare in the most of Europe. I may be mistaken though. I'm wondering if this is likely to hold for Europe.
No. UK. I didn't think the US generally had direct debits in the same way the the UK did?
I'm asking because I find the use of credit cards to be somewhat rare in the most of Europe. I may be mistaken though. I'm wondering if this is likely to hold for Europe.
You can't really talk about "Europe" when it comes to general CC usage - some countries it's normal and fine. In others it's a little more unusual.
In this particular instance it was the UK. However it was only one test in one context so I can't say whether it would generally apply. I wouldn't be surprised if it did for B2B - since there are very big usage differences in the way that businesses of different sizes manage direct debits and credit cards.
(For example - there are several places I've worked where I've had a company card. I have never had the company bank account number and sort-code outside of my own companies. So at the very least asking for me for a direct debit would have removed all possibility of an impulse purchase. I would have had to go to my boss, or my boss's boss, to arrange for the accounts department to setup the direct debit.)
I am delighted to report all unsolicited SMS es and calls, and get a kick out of "This telemarketer has been disconnected for unsolicited marketing" reports.
The system doesn't work uniformly well across the country yec, but it is getting better and spam SMS and call levels have come down to almost non existent levels, and any occasional calls are reported pronto. Anybody trying these tricks in India had better be prepared to get their telephone disconnected and pay some heavy fines.
Whether a company has/had a commercial relationship with me is irrelevant, especially in a case like the OP provides, where I have not given the company my phone number and the caller got it through some sneaky data mining. If it is an unsolicited call, and the recipient feels it is spam, register a complaint and the caller gets punished.
Pretty good policy imo, keeps such nasty shenanigans down.
But, like other's have said about the phone #... I think it's largely generational, but I won't sign up for a web app that requires my phone # unless I really really have no other options.