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> You don't get Bob's phone number on sign-up? Oh come on, that's a weak excuse. You have his name, email address, and Google. You an almost certainly locate most customers in this circumstance if you cared to.

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.

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This is feedback which, candidly, you just won't hear that often when you call up office manager Mary at Happy Teeth Dental at the landline number (distributed to several hundred thousand people) which routes to a box on Mary's desk that she is, quite literally, employed to answer. Mary can authorize purchases of thousands of dollars of software. In addition to not being offended by phone calls (Mary is quite good with cutting them short, politely, if she doesn't want to continue them -- c.f. this is her job), Mary can give you very useful and immediately actionable feedback on them, such as "We couldn't use your application because it doesn't work on the doctor's iPad and that's the only screen he can access in the back of the office." You want to hear that even if you have 0% chance of ever getting a penny from Mary.

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."

Another option would be to simply ask someone when canceling why they're canceling. It's not as conversational as a phone call, but you can get juicy bits of info like...

"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)

I would say there's a significant difference in this scenario between calling a customer company and a customer individual. Your article painted the picture of calling an individual named "Bob", not "the receptionist of Bob's Law LLC". I think the practice would be perfectly acceptable in the latter case.

The reality is that most people who pay real money for software and computer services don't think this way. They hate cold calls from salespeople, sure, but a human call from someone who actually wants to hear what they think is so rare that you'll stand out in the opposite way you're suggesting.

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.

This is really true in my case. Last year I called up 100 of our highest GMV customers at Shopify – these were busy merchants who almost certainly had better things to do than talk to me about how they felt about Shopify.

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.

Asking for feedback is much different than selling a product. I'm not sure your experience would have been the same if it were a cold sales call.

Wish I could double-upvote that.

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.

and it really holds us back. Which means that the fear of being called a salesman/spammer/sleaze ball costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in sales. Thats the truth about this attitude. But, on the other hand, I love that people act like this. It makes making money sooooooooooo much easier for me.

If I could hack my brain I'd program it to not fret so much about that time I interrupted someone 2 years ago and worry if they're mad at me about it.

Everybody deals with such things. Some just choose to not pay much attention to it. (:

Yep, the last time I called someone, they were overjoyed that they didn't have to communicate with me via typing. We really do need to keep the norm in mind.

If you are calling them to sell them something, doesn't that imply that you are a salesperson?

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.

"Contacting a person" vs "Contacting a business" is an important distinction. In some places (e.g. EU), if you (as a business) were to cold call a person who hasn't given you their phone number for a sales call, you would be breaking the law. Contacting a company is different. Be careful you don't break the law here.

This is such good advice and it works. For anyone who's afraid to do this, let me know and I'll do it for you, I'll call it CCCAAS (calling cancelled customers as a service) and I'll generate a report that shows all customers contacted, why they cancelled, or didn't renew, and as a bonus, how many we reactivated for you!

That's genius. Seriously. In a few months I might take you up on it.

Please don't hesitate. I am serious and I like talking to customers. Reactivating someone who already decided to trial or subscribe to a product is a fun sale.

People. Read this every day. Then hit the phones. Patio just made you a million bucks with this comment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.

I sell a SaaS product with an average price of around $18/month. We (my wife and I) aren't afraid to pick up the phone and call someone... even if it means finding their phone number on a website or online phone book.

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.

You're sold to on a daily basis by people who you've never had the faintest communication with...

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'm personally rather sensitive to unsolicited phone calls because they are both interruptive and unexpected. There are only a few windows in my day when I would be interested in talking to someone on the phone, and if I need to communicate with someone outside of those windows of availability I generally need to take some special actions to make myself available.

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.

Every once in awhile you call someone and they have exactly your attitude. So you politely get off the phone and move on. That's all there is to it.

FWIW, the opt-out process for junk mail seems to be reasonably effective. Since adding my name to DMAChoice I receive very little junk mail (spam drives me crazy too).

This FTC page has a list of places to go to opt-out:

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...

So then just don't answer the phone.

Why is this being downvoted? If it's important that you not be interrupted by the phone, there are a variety of easy ways to make the phone not interrupt you.

- Unplug it/turn it off - set to silent and turn off vibrate - "Do Not Disturb" setting - "Send all calls to voicemail" - etc.

Because phone calls are already very high up on the "This could be important." scale. Email is usually low priority, to be answered when there is a free moment. Next comes texting and IMing, to be used for organizing day-to-day things, such as where people are meeting for lunch. Above that is people stopping by in person to ask a question.

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.

If you use the phone in that way, you obviously restrict who you give the number to, because most of the world does not use the phone in this way - many people use it because they find it easier than tapping out an email and organising their thoughts, and many companies use it as a way to contact you for trivial queries. I have lots of clients who would rather just pick up a phone and call, not because it is urgent, but because it is easier for them. If I'm busy that just goes to voicemail and I'll deal with it later, because I can't control how other people use the phone.

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.

Because he's replying to someone that explained, explicitly, why he answers the phone even when he doesn't want to be interrupted.

I'll expand on my previous comment to make this more clear: the grandparent's approach is terribly flawed because the Do Not Call registry only covers a narrow range of annoying phone calls.

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.

Because it's a shocking invasion of privacy.

Words mean things. Nobody in America is shocked to get an unsolicited commercial phone call.

Let's say, "depressingly unshocking", then.

Sounds suspiciously like 'I don't like people phoning me. I don't like phoning people. I don't want to do this'.

And that's fine, but just be aware that you're leaving money and customers on the table.

I hate calling people like that (as all developers), but nice follow up call does wonders. Much more than follow up email.

Not everybody is offended (actually very rarely). Also a lot of your potential customers are probably doing their business mainly over a phone.

> I hate calling people like that (as all developers)

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.

I agree with this, My wife has worked at a couple companies in billing a/r and specifically has encouraged the bosses to let her make collections type calls just to find out what's up. more often than not, she was able to not only get lots of positive information, but a significant return on past due invoices and whatnot, thereby justifying her employment. There were often cases of "oh, I didn't realize I had an invoice" or "oh, I moved and it must have gotten lost, here's my CC number to make the payment" etc...

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 ;)

I think this is directed towards paying clients who are cancelling. Not to someone who demo'd an app.

I should clarify, sometimes I'll pay for a month of a service and consider that a demo/trial.

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