Should you take this call?

If you sell a low-priced product, one phone call may turn a sale from a profitable one to unprofitable, when factoring in the cost of your time.

Our very first paying customer paid us a grand total of $19. Our product was so stitched-together at the time that our free trial wasn’t enough to convince her to purchase the product outright (for $49, circa February 2009) – she preferred to “rent it” month-to-month. Needing a paying customer dearly to prove our business model, we agreed.

That was before the 20 internal man hours we spent over the next 2 weeks supporting our courageous first customer. Most of it was our fault, not hers. The product was buggy. She had a funky network setup that we’ve never seen before. JP, Chihab and I worked odd-hours for less than $1/hour supporting the $19 sale.

This is the crux of the oft-dreaded “support overhead” school of thought — that support is a variable cost that needs to be minimized, nothing more. If you don’t charge for support, that is supposed to be a recipe for disaster.

Why we didn’t shun our phones

When we released version 2.0 of our time tracking software last August, we decided to include free support with purchase of the product. Some of our friends initially advised against it: “That’s crazy. You’d go belly-up on support! You’re just three people, how do you expect to get anything done with support calls coming in at all hours of the day?”.

Oh well, we figured — that’s a bridge we’d be willing to cross if we got to that point. We believed a great customer experience was the most important thing. The rest of the puzzle, like handling growing support volume, we’d figure out as we went.

Once you’ve made the decision to provide good, free, customer support, what’s the best way to do it? Should it all be streamlined over email – or does the phone still have a place today?

We opted to make phone a viable option for folks who preferred it, knowing that we could take a step back from this stance if we needed to. Thus far, we don’t regret the decision at all. In fact, we’ve found “picking up the phone” to be the best channel of customer feedback, and the single most effective way to win over a customer’s heart.

Managing Incoming Calls

Below, I’ve outlined how our company handles incoming calls. These practices have been working well for us so far. If you have other tips that worked well for your company, please share it with all of us in the comment thread!

When in doubt, pick it up

First, I will take any phone call that looks like they might be coming from prospects and customers. To filter out the obvious sales calls from vendors, I tend to ignore incoming calls from people masked as 1-800 numbers on my caller ID.

You can’t beat a live conversation for connecting with someone, developing a relationship, and gathering important market and customer intelligence.

The earlier you are in your company’s life cycle, the more I think you should seriously considering answering your phone. In a product company’s early stages, achieving product-market fit should be the number one priority. Until you reach that milestone, you don’t really have anything worth scaling up!

So “going broke on support” is not a bad problem. More often than not, it means you made enough progress to actually run into it. This is why we didn’t worry about it. The symptom also signals that your customers care enough about your product (and their problem) to actually talk to you. How many times have you called a company that you don’t care about?

As a startup, you have enough immediate problems to worry about, so it’s often best to ignore issues that “might” come into play “someday” — just in case they never do.

While answering the phone is technically not the most “efficient” use of my time, I do answer our company line during regular business hours. If you’re still finding your product, market, and customer fit, I’d strongly urge you consider doing the same.

How Many Phone Calls Can You Expect?

If you’ve been to our website, you’ll notice that we show our toll free (1-888) number very prominently in the upper-right corner of each page. So is this a recipe for disaster?

What surprised us all was that the volume of incoming phone calls dropped when we displayed our toll-free number prominently at the top of every page on our website. The number of real support calls didn’t show any noticeable decline, but we did notice a drop in general information calls. These were historically from customers who would verify that our product did what they thought it did prior to making a purchase.

Building confidence in your product

You’re considering buying a new, yet-to-be-proven product. What would help you make your decision? Validation. What if this product is so new, the customer can’t find reviews and other forms of validation? That’s where a phone number becomes very powerful. Now, you can have a conversation with the vendor and get answers to your most pressing questions from a real person.

As a small business, just showing that you’re not hiding behind the veil of your computer is often enough to comfort prospective customers. Your customers are used to finding their own information online, and generally don’t need to talk to a live person to make a purchase decision. But that’s totally different from saying that your customers don’t want to talk to a live person if they had a question or problem.

There were a couple of other things that further reduced incoming calls:
1) Product improvements and bug fixes meant fewer people would have problems to begin with. This reduced our call/email volume by probably 50%
2) Redesigning our website (clearer copy, video demos, easier navigation) filtered out calls and emails asking fairly basic product questions. Reduced call/email volume by 20%
3) Better support documentation (a Quick Start Guide, GetSatisfaction, and common support Q&A’s) further reduced call/email volume by 25%.

These days, we get one our two support call per day, on average, even though our user base and feature set continues to grow.

Dealing with Telemarketers

Again, if you’re a start-up, that’s pretty easy. I politely explain that we’re a tiny software company, and we’re probably not the best prospect on their calling list. That usually does the trick, and keeps things on the up and up as we each part ways to continue about our respective days.

Setting Up Your Phone System

We use Grasshopper for our 1-888 number. I’m not affiliated with them, but it’s been a very good product for our requirements. We’ve set up 2 extensions when you call the main line: #1 for Sales, #2 for Support. You can route each one to a different person – right now both are going to me (so you know where to find me if you want to chat).

You can route you calls to any phone number – so a mobile phone, landline, or VOIP line. This is pretty cool stuff, you really can take phone calls anywhere!

Google Voice (invite only) also has good call forwarding options of course. Skype has a cool plan where you can dial out anywhere, unlimited minutes, for just $2.95/month – I actually use that too. We didn’t have a landline in our office for awhile, so I used Skype for outbound calls to save on my mobile minutes.

Bottom Line: We Like the Phone

We remain fans of the phone to talk with people. In the early days of our company, we would gladly talk with anyone who wanted to talk to us. That feeling still holds today, even though we’ve certainly progressed quite a bit from those earlier stages.

So maybe we remember our roots – maybe it really is a beneficial business practice – maybe a little bit of everything. So far so good for us on the great “phone answering” experiment – we’d recommend you give it a shot.

Further reading: Here’s a great piece about the importance of answering customer calls and e-mails from the folks at Jackson Fish Market.

Has it every been more challenging to get work done than it is today?  It’s quite ironic that, as fortunate as we are to have all of the technological innovations we enjoy today, these “productivity boosters” can be too much of a good thing.

Sometime late last year, I found myself really looking forward to a free weekend where I had nothing planned – which would allow me to get “a lot of work done”.  So starting Saturday morning, I plowed away at my “to do” list.  Same thing on Sunday.  I knocked off more things than I would have during a normal work week, and in only two days.

These weekend work sessions have become a real boon to my productivity.  And many people I’ve discussed this with have shared my experience.

“Absolutely, I can’t get anything done during the week, there are just too many interruptions,” they’ll say.

But recently I got to thinking – wait, there’s something really wrong with this picture.

First off – I love what I do.  I’m building my own company, I’ve gotten to choose everyone I work with – so absolutely no complaints.  BUT – is it healthy to work for consecutive weeks on end, without breaking away.

I don’t think so.  Hard work is great, and absolutely required for entrepreneurs.  But often our best ideas will come when we least expect it – when our mind is free to relax and drift.  This can’t happen if we work 24/7/365 – we just never get the opportunity.

So recently, I’ve started devising a system that would help optimize my personal/business productivity, AND bring a little more balance to my life.

I started by immersing myself in many of the time management and productivity methodologies out there – and there are no shortage of them.

I actually have traditionally avoided these, because, well, I fancied myself as being relatively productive.

So here’s an overview of a hybrid system I’ve developed.  One thing I learned is that, as an entrepreneur, my playbook is always changing.  So I need to develop a very flexible system – beyond just optimal efficiency.  Sure, it’s great if I get a lot done, but if it’s not the right stuff, who really cares anyway.

The three principles I’ve been successfully incorporating:

1. Always be prioritizing – most things don’t actually matter.

Classic 80/20 rule – 20% of the things you do will provide 80% of the value.  If you have 10 things on your “to do” list, the top 2 are much more valuable than the next 8 combined.

I’d encourage you to chew on this concept a bit – it’s simple, yet very powerful.  I try to reprioritize my top items on a weekly basis (this is a better use of weekend work time).  I’ve found that many of the “next 8” are no longer important anymore.

2. Don’t get too busy – fake it if you feel guilty.

Resist the urge to fill up your day with meetings, phone calls, and items that you need to get done.  I constantly ask myself: “What’s the worst that will happen if I don’t have this meeting?  If I don’t get this done?”  If it’s not that bad, axe it.

Sure, it feels great to be busy, and to “get a lot done.”  But I think as an entrepreneur, this is a trap.

If I look back at all the time I’ve invested in Chrometa since we founded it, most of the things I’ve done haven’t mattered at all in the long run. I’ll bet just 5% of my efforts have yielded 80% or more of our benefits.

Since I realized this, I’ve tried to sit back and think that if I only had one hour to work today, what would I do?  That usually helps push a sales/marketing activity to the forefront.  It’s never administrative work, that’s for sure.

And if you want to project a busy façade for the rest of the world to see?  Go for it – nobody’s going to know you’re not really that busy.  Heck, Ben Franklin used to run through the streets of Philadelphia carry reams of paper by hand back to his printing shop.  It was all for show – because not only did Franklin value hard work, but he also valued the appearance of hard work.

3. If it has to be done, then just focus and do it.

The old weekend phenomena revisited.  On weekends, with no incoming distractions, I can just focus in and knock something off.  Weekdays it’s been a challenge – emails, instant messages, phone calls, clicking over to the web (what’s the DOW doing today?).

So here’s how I am trying to emulate the weekend experience, during the week:

1. Practice time boxing for the items that I need to do – specifically, what is it, and how long will it take.  The list is a manageable size for the day, thanks to the vetting system we’ve discussed.  Never more than 5-6 “to do” items for a given day, and preferably even less.
2. Just do them – minimize interruptions until it’s done.  If it’s a long task, break it up into sub-items.  I’ve been quite amazed that even the most daunting task can often be knocked off in 60 minutes or less – provided the focus is there.
3. See how long it took.  This is something I use our time management software for, and it’s quite helpful.  I can see what time I started something, what time I finished, and how long it took.  Interruptions are also there.  Since I know I’m “on the clock”, and will be graded afterwards, I’ve been on my best behavior.

In sum, I’ve found that the key to my personal productivity is exactly what small business and time management guru Brian Tracy has been preaching for years – focus on just one thing at a time, your most valuable activity, and don’t stop until it’s completed.

Further Reading: The First Rule of Productivity: One Thing at a Time

I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

These are two paragraphs that any aspiring entrepreneur should read over and over again – this is the essence of why so many wannabe companies never get off the ground.  And why so many wannabe entrepreneurs are forever waiting for the stars to align for them to go whole hog after their vision.

Here’s an unfortunate fact of life: The stars will never align.  So if you’re waiting around for a few things to “fall into place”, you’re wasting time.  Just get started and get after it.

As Adam mentions, most problems you’re planning for right now will never come to fruition.  At least 95% of your planning time and energy is likely being wasted.

On the flip side, there are obstacles that you’ll never anticipate until you start off on your journey.  That’s OK – you’ll deal with them as they come.

The important thing is to “fail fast” – if something is not working, stop doing it, and start doing more things that are working.

But – what if nothing is working at all?  That’s OK too – actually it’s completely normal, especially for a startup.  See, you don’t have to be that far off for it to feel like nothing is lining up.

If I may, let me use Chrometa as an example.  One year ago at this time, we had very little working.  Our messaging and value proposition was not connecting with the market – people would go to our website, and wonder what the heck we (and our product) did.  Not good.

Our product itself was a little better.  It had evolved to the stage where trial and beta users would say “I can see where this is going.”

So we kept tweaking everything – our focus, the product itself, our messaging, etc.  It can be a maddening process, quite honestly, because you can make a lot of incremental improvements, and have nothing to show for it.

“How’s the startup going?” is a question people love to ask.  And it’s a question a pre-revenue company usually hates to answer!  Because it’s tough to say things are going well when you don’t yet have a product that people will gladly pay for.

But eventually, it came together for us.  We defined who we were.  We kept honing the product (and continue to do so).  And eventually things started to click.

Moral of the story – inaction is the enemy of the entrepreneur.  Get moving today.  You’ll figure out what works, what doesn’t (that’ll be a real long list initially), and most importantly, you’ll be able to go from there and start building something of real value.