Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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. (:

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.

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.

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