Aircall: We talk about people talking to people

When Santa Claus, Inc. contacted us early November to onboard on Aircall, we first thought it was a joke - sure, we’d built our own advent calendar, but we had no idea the news got all the way to Lapland! We followed-up though, and got in touch with Elf #1, Santa Claus’s main collaborator - he wouldn’t disclose his real name for obvious confidentiality reasons. We learned a lot about the way Santa’s team work, the processes they implemented throughout the centuries, and how it is now using the latest technologies to deliver all the gifts on time.

Most people think Santa’s #1 issue is to deliver all the Christmas gifts fast enough. He has 32 hours to deliver to the approximative 700 million nice children worldwide - he travels roughly at a 1,800 miles per second. Yet, all that comes with preparation: it starts with the orders - ever since the invention of the phone, the letters to Santa have quickly become the phonecalls to Santa!

Santa and his elves: an international team

Santa’s team problem was plain simple: Santa and the elves are always on the go, looking for awesome gifts for nice children, or delivering them. Yet, they wanted to let children in any country call them at any time, and as Efl #1 states:

“We want to sound local but serious as well. Children can’t all afford to reach us on our Finnish number. If we don’t provide them a local number, it doesn’t convey our value of close relationship with them.” 

Ever since Santa Claus Inc. signed up for Aircall, it has opened 5 numbers in 5 different countries.

Collaboration between the various elves teams

Another advantage Santa saw in Aircall is that although Santa Claus Inc. provides a single number to be reached out in each country, the elves can easily work as a team on each call.

Children can call at a local rate and if they leave a voicemail, it’s shared by email to the whole team of elves associated to the number, so that they can receive the gifts list.

“We’ve been saving a lot of time with the collaboration features. Every elf team member can mark the voicemails as “handled” - no overlaps or lost messages!”, says Elf #1

Santa’s challenges for the future: CRM and API integration

On the question: “What do you expect next from Aircall?”, Elf #1 makes a clear statement:

“CRM integration is the key feature we’d like Aircall to add in the future. We maintain a very complete CRM system so that we can always check how the kid behaved, his toy preferences and what previous toys he received. Ideally, a REST API would allow to plug all our call information into our Apps. We’re in pilot phase with Aircall now but we’ll certainly need it for Christmas 2015.”

Our own team was thrilled: CRM integration & API are the 2 top priority on Aircall’s roadmap (along with a mobile app) and should be ready in Q1 of 2015.

Of course, we wanted to get Santa’s personal opinion on Aircall (who wouldn’t?), but he’s a very busy man and likes to keep  some mystery around himself. At Aircall, we hate fake testimonials so unfortunately, you won’t see a quote from him in this post. We’ll try to do better next year!

One last thing: don't forget to give to the kids around you Santa's Aircall numbers!

US: +1 661 375 70 28

UK: +44 20 33 18 71 54

France: +33 1 76 42 00 33

Spain: +34 951 24 71 94

Four months ago, we launched the beta version of Aircall, an online phone system for SMBs that lets you create your phone line in 40 countries and start managing your phonecalls as a team, in a few minutes. When we got the idea, it sounded so obvious: every single small business faces issues to set up its phone-line, although it could be so much easier, someone just needs to build a user-friendly, smart product using the (now mature) web-RTC technology. Things got complicated - as it’s the case for all startups - and one of the reasons for that is that telecom is a boring industry. 

A lot of the main stakeholders in the phone industry are old school players, big telco companies, offering terribly designed products. This market domination does not fuel innovation, and therefore, is not very welcoming for innovative startups. Furthermore, telephony is just not sexy for many people, it’s just a matter of perception: most people will tell you that that they don’t like phone calls because it can be time consuming, interrupting and expensive. They more and more prefer to communicate over email, social networks or messaging apps.

To us, telephony is impregnated with what Paul Graham calls Schlep Blindness: everyone sees there is a huge issue that needs to be fixed, but everyone would rather build a recipe website startup than fixing this problem. They just do not want to do the unpleasant task of fixing this issue - and the worst part: it is an unconscious process.

And yet we launched a startup in this market. Everyday we ask ourselves: “Are we crazy? Or are we geniuses?” - I guess the answer is: a bit of both :) Here is what we’ve learned from launching a startup in the boring telephony industry.

Challenges: 

Less leverage to create new habits

When you are tackling such a market, your aim is generally to change things and make them better. Changing habits is both extremely hard and extremely complicated.

Your leverage to make people change their minds is much less important in a boring industry than a “sexy” industry. First, don’t think that people will change their habits only because what you offer is better: habits are not based on “logic”. You need to either build trust or build hype. In both cases, it’s much harder in a boring industry:

-People perceive their phone solution as something “robust”, that can only be related to companies that are old-school, that they trust, also because they use them for their personal phones.

-Try talking web-RTC or Voice over IP at a family dinner: it might create an even worse effect than your cousin who talks about insurance. No business owner wants to hear about innovative phone systems, and therefore, when it comes to choosing one, there is a great chance he or she will opt for a “traditional” phone solution.

Harder to get public attention

When launching a startup, particularly a Software as a Service, your #1 concern is to find users. There are many ways to do that, from direct sales to PR and inbound marketing. In a boring industry, most of them become harder.

-Forget being a “press darling”

Press can bring a lot of users to young startups: since we offer a product that is suited for startups and SMBs, there are a lot of medias that are specialized in these targets that could be helpful. Yet journalists simply don’t want to write articles about boring topics: we’re not launching a photo sharing app, we’re launching a phone system. Getting press attention requires us huge efforts, that we’d rather put somewhere else.

-Good luck with your content strategy

Inbound marketing is an important channel for user acquisition when you are a SaaS startup. Luckily, we have a team dedicated to it in the startup studio we work in. They know how to make SaaS and B2B software cool and interesting, but creating a real philosophy and a cool “content brand” is definitely a challenge. We spent months making boring content about the tool instead of our product. It is harder to find a nice angle to create attractive content.

   HR management is more difficult.

Not being a press darling and having difficulty pitching your product without boring your interlocutor also makes it harder to recruit. Hiring outstanding profiles (in tech, sales and marketing) is our #1 priority. But among all the great startups out there, yours need to have an awesome culture if you want to be “the place to be” for talents, and make up for the fact that you are part of a “boring industry”

Being a non-sexy startup makes it also more difficult to cheer up your team in case of a pitfall - and we all know it happens a lot in a startup’s life. Make sure you build an awesome product that really solved a problem: it the most sane basis any startup can have, and will always be there in bad times.

Opportunities: 

Boring industries crave for beautiful and well designed products.

Let’s not forget that people generally don’t like being bored. If you are capable of showing that you can make something beautiful inside a presumably boring market, chances are you will impress the gallery.

Everytime we show Aircall we get a strong “wow effect” because people are so used to having horrible looking phone products. In our team, we like differenciate ourselved from websites featuring pictures of happy people wearing headsets or showing a thumbs up: we solemnly declared we would never use that kind of visual identity, and the rest of our UI follows this philosophy. It’s way easier to get a product “wow effect” - on the design point of view - in a boring industry than if you are competing in the social networks space for example, which is considered a “sexy industry” with many high caliber designers working there.

   Fewer startup competitors.

Since these industries appeared to be “boring” fewer startup founders will actually launch a product there.

Once again, it does not seem to be related to logic: there is a greater market need for phone solutions than, let’s say, photo sharing apps. Yet how many people launched and crashed their sexy photo sharing app? It’s not a question of need but simply of “hype”.

If you combined this opportunity with the one previously mentioned, you have all the more chances to avoid competition: a slick UI and nice branding can stifle competition pretty efficiently in a boring industry.

  Easier to get investor attention.

 As we said it will be harder to get attention from the press and end users but it will be easier to get attention from investors and potential acquirers. As fewer startups are operating in this space and as you build real industry expertise you have more chance to get attention from them (compared to the number N photo sharing mobile app).

After all, our target market - that is to say not telecommunications at large but phone lines, for SMBs, at our price range - is $21B. Considering we have few competitors, a irrefutable product need and a real market-fit, let’s just say we do not sound so boring to investors.

In the end, what does Boring mean?

BORING

Highly technical, backend issues tend to overcome frontend issues

Crowded by clumsy solutions, typically B2B

Commoditized market

Perception that it doesn’t change people’s life / unconscious need for a change

Examples

Payments

Waste treatment

Telephony

FANCY

Everybody understands

B2C more than B2B

Linked to high money or emotional value

With a clear impact on people’s life / people realize easily there’s a pain to fix

Examples

Fashion (for instance: Selectionnist)

Taxi VS Uber

Team collaboration (for instance: Slack)

Cold calling is not dead. In fact, almost every single startup or small business has to do it at some point. And when you’re a small company, you do not necessarily have the means to hire a professional sales person to do the job. When you’re not trained to do it, picking up your phone and start cold calling can seem terrifying - yes, let’s admit it, we are scared of the phone. Fear of cold calling is not something to be ashamed of, on the contrary. We’re here to help!

This article does not aim at giving you a whole class about sales. We merely want to focus on phone-calls - because that’s what we know best - and give you practical advice, directly actionable. To do so, we started from a blank page, and answered all the questions you would ask yourself before diving in.

What is cold calling exactly?

Is cold-calling suited for my needs?

Should I prepare my cold calls?

How should I target contacts for cold calling?

How do I find phone numbers?

Should I send an email before cold-calling?

When is a good time to do cold calling?

What tools do I use for cold calling?

How do I introduce myself when doing cold calling?

How shall I present what I offer when doing cold calling?

What warning signs should I be aware of?

Should I define some call to action at the end of a cold call?

What if I’m rejected on the phone when doing cold calling?

Should I send a follow up email after a cold call?

What tools should I use to keep track of cold calling sessions?

 ***

Again… What is cold-calling exactly?

Basically, it means picking up the phone and calling strangers - or almost strangers - and figure out if they’d be up to buy your stuff. Why “cold”? Because “warm calling” is contacting people who have expressed previous interest in your products or services. By the way, it is not necessarily done via phone but can also be done in face-to-face, although we’ll be exploring phone strategies in this article.

Is cold-calling suited for my needs?

  In the book “Traction” by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg, the authors recall a quote: “As Steve Barsh, former CEO of SECO - acquired by MCI - said, “You get you first customers by picking up the phone”

  You might have noticed that people did not necessarily go straight to your landing page once you published it to sign up for your beta. Even worse, they did not open your email when you offered them a discount. Poor them: they probably did not realize how hard they needed your product.

Cold-calling might seem not scalable for a lot of startups, because you imagine that submitting your product to HackerNews will be enough to get numerous and faithful users. In reality, as Paul Graham said: you need to do things that don’t scale. Taking 15 min to call a potential customer can seem like forever compared to launching an Adword campaign that will bring you a hundred signups for your free trial. Yet, imagine the cost of having to loose these 100 beta users because you’re building the wrong product? Having a great phone conversation can get you incredible insights in terms of customer needs and feedback, and helps building a strong relationship with your customers.

  BEFORE YOUR FIRST CALL

Should I prepare my cold calls?

Yes, and here’s your homework:

Investigate a little about who you’re calling.

Just Google or search Linkedin to find information about your contact. Information you come across might come in handy when trying to break the ice or during the conversation.

Preparing your call also makes your more confident. According to Sam Richter, author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling: "Even if you're not going to use the information, you will come across more confident and more powerful when you have information on the other person and their company" 

Practice your intro speech to yourself 

Yep, in front of a mirror. You need to do it once or twice at the beginning, after a while, you won’t need to do it anymore.

Don’t spend more time on investigation than calling.

You will get more information from the call itself than the research!

How should I target contacts for cold calling?

Remember that cold-calling will have no outcome if you do not target who you’re calling. You’d rather call 10 well-targeted potential users than 100 people who have no potential  interest with your product.

You should target people who have some power level, but not too much.

why not too high? because it’s less stressful for you, and there’s less chance of rejection.

why not too low? because it’s a waste of time if you call someone that can make no decision. 

  Do not underestimate the power of the welcome desk!

That is what we got from our personal experience at Aircall. Employees working at the welcome desk have a key role in the company: they know everyone and most of the time, completely have the power of deciding whether you’re worth the time of their teammates or not. If they like you, they can help you, so be nice.

How do I find phone numbers when I cold call?

 According to your targets, there are many ways to get phone numbers, even on a low budget. Here is a non-exhaustive list of places you can start digging.

obviously, personal contacts

open startups databases like Crunchbase or AngelList

contact pages on companies’ websites

press rooms on companies’ websites

local chambers of commerce

Linkedin profiles

emails’ signatures: they often contain a phone number. Don’t forget to install the gmail plugin Rapportive which displays additional contact info.

your competitors’ clientele

You can also invest in some tools to access qualified leads lists, such as Iko Systems or Mattermarks.

Should I send an email before cold-calling?

Yes, that can help in two ways:

First, if you’re lucky, you’re interlocutor will have read your email and recall your name - or at least, it will ring a bell.

Second, it can become your conversation ice-breaker: “Hey, did you get my email?” 

When is a good time to do cold calling?

Time management is a real pain when doing cold-calling. You might often read advices who tell you “dedicate 1 hour per day to cold calling” when in fact, you will soon realize that people are not just waiting for your call behind their desk right when you are ready to call them.

You might just spend one hour calling cell phones that don’t pick up. So, be patient, and once you’ve started your cold-calling sessions, be ready to answer the phone if someone calls back. 

Obviously, avoid times of day when you wouldn’t want to pick up your phone: lunch-time, such as Monday-morning meetings, Fridays after 5p.m.

  What tools do I use for cold calling?

Headset is your best friend.

Science has not been really clear on whether we’re all gonna die of brain tumor because of cellphones, but, hey, better safe than sorry. Plus if you don’t have a headset, your phone is just going to burn your ear after a while, and it’s really uneasy to take notes while holding something in one hand.

Consider cloud-based solutions

Depending on the nature and volume of your cold calling sessions, your personal cellphone might be enough. Yet, be aware that there are phone solutions much more efficient and cheap that can help you empower your phone-calls. We, at Aircall, developed a product that enables you to set up your company’s phone number anywhere in the world in 3 min and cascade calls across your teams, on existing devices. It also offers great productivity tools such as shared notes and a feed of all activities.

DURING THE CALL

How do I introduce myself when doing cold calling?

Three steps here:

Be direct and clearly states who you are and what you do.

Do not ask “Am I disturbing you?” but say “I hope I’m not disturbing” and proceed.

If possible, explain how you got the contact: “I’m calling on behalf of your client Z..” - or even “I read about you in this article and …”

See? Easy as 1,2,3.

How shall I present what I offer when doing cold calling?

You should FIRST ASK QUESTIONS to your (potential) customer

You should then LISTEN to your (potential) customer

I mean it, you should REALLY LISTEN: it is the only way you will figure out what your interlocutor needs. If your product or service cannot do anything for them, you will save you both a useless conversation. If it’s the perfect fit, it will be much easier to convince him/her to try it out. 

Once you’ve figured that what they need, follow this advice from Todd Vollmer, an enterprise sales professional with 20 years of experience: get answers for 5 specific areas he calls PNAME:

Process: how does the company buy solutions like yours?

Need: how badly does the company need your solution?

Authority: who can make the purchase happen?

Money: do they have the funds to buy your solution? how much does it cost them not to have your solution?

Estimated Timing: what’s the time-frame for decision making?

(example from Traction, by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg)

What warning signs should I be aware of on the phone?

People who are making you talk about your technology, your emerging market… you might end up just giving free consultancy advice but close no deals.

People who claim your solution is going to change the whole company’s process. They usually are new to the company and think they will revolutionize it.

Should I define some call to action at the end of a cold call?

Yes, you should always have a call to action in mind to end up a phone-call. If you’re lucky enough, your contact will want to close the deal right away: in that case the call-to-action is pretty obvious. If you need them to try out your product, schedule another call with them, asking: ‘Let me call you back, same time next week?’

What if I’m rejected on the phone when doing cold calling?

THAT is the number 1 reason why people are afraid of cold-calling. Unfortunately, it will happen. A lot. There is no magic recipe against permanent rejection: it’s hard and it takes a lot of energy. You just need to be aware that it’s gonna happen and remain polite. Our personal advice: you might wanna prepare a piece of chocolate in your secret drawer and add 9Gag as a bookmark just to clear your mind every once in a while.

AFTER YOUR FIRST CALL

Should I send a follow up email after a cold call?

Yes, now that people have your name and voice in mind, just add the last touch to make sure they will remember you. Make sure to finish your email with a direct question, like “Do you agree with this closing agreement?”, for instance. 

What tools should I use to keep track of cold calling sessions?

You’re about to call tens, maybe hundreds of people, it’s hard to remember who replied what. In addition to the collaborative notes you might want to use in Aircall, you can use a basic Excel sheet. 

Here is an example that we’re using internally:

And then?

Like many young SaaS startups we’re thinking about ways to get visible from our potential customers. One of the most widely used tactics in our industry is the “Powered by” one. (see our slides here)

As you’ve probably guessed the “Powered by” tactic consists in leveraging your existing user base by displaying your logo or your link on a part of your product which is public / visible to your customers’ visitors or partners.

As we are thinking about it for Aircall we’ve benchmarked a bit what was done by other SaaS players and thought it would be interesting to share the examples we've collected.

So far we found that the “powered by” tactic was mainly used in 5 different situations :

on users’ public pages

on product widgets

during users’ communication

on shared documents

for the “transparency” trend

In the rest of the article we'll cover each of them with real examples and  insights.

This guide is meant to be a source of inspiration for you: check what other SaaS players are doing, in which context and see if you can think of something creative for your own product. Of course it has to  be user friendly and shouldn't  hurt you brand or your product experience (you don't need to be too aggressive with "Powered by").

We're also well' aware that this guide is not exhaustive so if you find some great examples that we missed don't hesitate to add them in the comments. Thanks!

On Companies’ Public Pages

With product widgets this is the most obvious place where to add a “Powered by” link: on your customer’s public pages.

This works especially well if your SaaS enables users to build and maintain pages they absolutely need but for which they don’t want to spend time and internal resources (a career page, a pressroom, a knowledge base...).

Here are some examples:

Workable is an Applicant Tracking System which enables companies to build their “career page”:

Pressking is a PR tool which enables businesses to build their pressroom:

Wistia is a webinar SaaS and it offers a “public page” which centralizes all the webinars made by a company.

statuspage lets businesses create their status page for their app or website:

In the same spirit few companies want to re-build a knowledge base themselves, making it a perfect opportunity for support startups to offer this feature and brand it with their name like Zendesk or Helpscout.

Another good use case for “public pages” is marketing. The majority of “landing pages” software brand their landing pages with their logo and link. At least for the free or cheaper plan users.

See products like Launchrock, Instapage, Unbounce etc...

It's worth noting that:

your branding must stay relatively "subtile" (black and white link / small logo in the footer)

the url can also hint at the service used: the eFounders job page page is located at: efounders.workable.com

most of the time this branding disappear with more expensive plans

On Widgets

Widgets are also a perfect place for “Powered by” links and logos. The difference here (compared to public pages) is that widgets are generally part of a product experience and must deliver a great value to the customer and its users.

The more value it delivers the better the virality. This is a reason why for many high value added widgets you can’t remove the “Powered by” link, even for pro plans.  

Olark immediately comes to mind when thinking about successful branded widgets. How many of us discovered Olark simply because we were impressed by the efficiency and simplicity of this chat system.

Another great example is Qualaroo, the customer feedback / survey widget. Again I know many people who found this widget really useful and hence wanted to try it.

Customer support is a very important topic for many of us. The need for high quality customer support / communication tool is so high that whenever we see a cool support widget we generally want to try it just for the sake of trying it. Intercom and GrooveHQ are the latest which come to my mind.

Another fertile ground for widgets is social media. In this case it’s the targeted crowd (marketers) which is at the heart of the virality.

By now you’ve probably already seen a Coschedule Click to Tweet widget on a blog and a BounceExchange popup asking you to register to a newsletter. For both services the “Powered by” widget was key to their virality.

  We also have a pretty cool voice widget allowing our users to add click-to-call on their website:

(this feature is still in beta but feel free to contact us on [email protected] and we'll add you in line!)

Highjacking your user’s Communication

Another “Powered by” classic: take advantage of your user’s communication to spread the love a.k.a the “Hotmail” strategy.

Mailchimp is the email marketing version of hotmail, I bet that many of the newsletters you have in your inbox contain Mailchimp's logo at the bottom.

Our friends at Front even made that a feature in their pricing plans. The collaborative email client includes a “sent with Frontapp” link in every message a free account sends and this signature is removed for paying customers.

If you think that this tactic is only used for the “email” medium then you are wrong. Some startups are creative when it comes to getting visibility.

This the case of uberconference a video conference solution. Every time somebody joins a room he will hear: ““This call is provided by Uberconference, you are the first to join etc…”. The voice version of the Hotmail message.

And when it comes to highjacking communications don’t forget IRL (in real life) opportunities!

Wisembly is a SaaS solution which enables conference and meeting participants to ask questions and participate more easily through their phone. Real life events were a big driver in their success as they got exposed to many potential customers during huge conferences.

Another good example is the calendar application Sunrise. Some people already told me that they tried the app after I sent them meeting invitations through it.

Prezi and EventBrite are also in this category of “online tool for offline events” and are leveraging the “Powered by” lever. For instance Eventbrite logo can be found on printed tickets and badges.

on shared documents

Your SaaS enables your customers to create and share documents? Chances are high that you can leverage them in a way or another to get exposed to more people.

Most electronic signature SaaS manage to add their logo somewhere. It would be too pushy to do it directly on a customer document. No, it’s probably cleverer to add it on the confirmation receipt for example (since it has to be sent has a proof). Here’s the example of HelloSign:

Many eDocument tools use the trick of redirecting the document recipient to a lighter version of their product (with limited features like visualization). This is what apps like quoteroller, Pandadoc or Tilkee are doing.

The designers' equivalent of eDocuments are mockups and prototypes. And guess what, these tools also use the same tactic: when you create a mockup / prototype chances are high that the person you’ll send it to will see a logo a way or another. Here’s the example of the excellent Marvelapp:

The transparency trend

The last interesting case concerns a very recent trend: startup transparency. More and more startups decide to share what was once very private data (like revenue, number of signups etc…) and they do it through public versions of their dashboards.

Two obvious examples are Baremetrics and Trello.

Buffer public revenue dashboard:

More and more companies create public Trello boards for product roadmaps or customer feedbacks.

Expect more and more reporting SaaS to offer “Powered by” version of their dashboard.

In a "transparency" perspective I wouldn't be surprise to see one day customer support SaaS like Zendesk, Helpscout etc... offering public versions of their customer analytics dashboard.

We're really glad to announce that we are teaming up with the coolest video-conference tool: Speek. Both of us startups share a similar vision that the future of voice conversations will happen online, from anywhere, on any device. 

We both use the latest technologies like WebRTC to deliver advanced communication services, through any web browser or web-enabled platform. We both focus on hassle-free, easy to use solutions. Speek provides a simplified conference calling and screen sharing tool. Aircall is the easiest way to set up company phone lines.

Here are the pillars of the new easiness provided by the package:

Multi device: both solutions enable their users to make calls from mobile, desktop and tablet.

Collaboration: both solutions make team work much easier, thanks to phonecalls cascading with Aircall, and a simple visual interface including advanced features like file- or screen-sharing for Speek

Keep track: both solutions have great interfaces making it easy to keep track of customer- and conference-calls right inside the tool, and share info with everyone.

Worldwide: both solutions are cloud-based and can be used from any country, using an internet access or local phone numbers.

We're offering our customers a unique 15% discount on Speek, for a whole year. Go to hello.aircall.io/speek get a preferred onboarding on Speek with special discount

Our partnership is only a first step towards a true revolution, allowing respective customer base to get a preferred access to each partner’s product... Expect more feature integrations in the future :-)

Hypnosis, on the contrary to common belief, is not necessarily done through eye-contact. Voice plays a strong part in hypnosis tricks. How can it be useful to my daily phone-calls, you ask? Well, even if these techniques are used mainly for the show, they rely on true convincement and persuasion tricks. Indeed: hypnosis is a powerful psychological tool - and marketing is all about psychology. Here is how you can use hypnosis to improve your telephone conversations with customers, either when doing support, sales, or cold-calling.

Listen to this 3-min podcast if you want to get the jist of the article and hear examples of our tricks!

Convince your customers that “Everything is gonna be just fine”

Which is also basically what hypnosis is supposed to convince you to believe (unless you’re facing a bad, bad person). Well, that is what your customers want to hear when they call your support line for a problem, or when you happen to have the product that will drastically improve their lives. The key is to use arguments that seem perfectly logical to illustrate what you’re saying. Do not use words like “I believe”, but base your arguments on external, objective elements: this will work on your customers’ persuasion on a subconscious level.

For instance, use logical connectors to structure your argumentation: “as”, “because”, “that is why”. In this great post on Kissmetrics’ blog, “3 hypnotic power words”, Bnonn Tennant asserts that “Because” is actually a hypnotic word and gives a pretty convincing example:

This is expertly illustrated by Robert Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, where he cites a study you’ve probably heard of, performed by Ellen Langer at Harvard. Langer asked to push in line at the library to photocopy some papers:

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”- The number of people who agreed: 94%.

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” - The number of people who agreed: 60%.

You’d be inclined to think the difference was because of the reason she gave. But a further experiment indicated otherwise…

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?"

The number of people who agreed: 93%. Notice that no real reason was given this time—obviously, everyone waiting for the Xerox machine had to make copies. Yet nearly as many people agreed as when a real reason was given.

  These techniques are often used by politicians. For instance, in his Denver acceptance speech, Obama declared: “We need change" - an assertion with which pretty much everyone would agree to – and added "that is why I will become your next president", creating a logical link between the two assertions.

Tip #1: improve customer support by using logical arguments to illustrate your answers.

Listen to your customers carefully and engage with questions

In order to determine what kind of personality you are and what types of hypnosis a professional will use, hypnotists often start by asking subtle questions. Indeed, the key to tell what your customers want to hear more is to let them talk so you can understand them better. Even more importantly, you should manage your timing so they don’t get the feeling they’re giving away too much information without getting something in return.

Be aware, though, not to comment so often that it seems you are just interjecting the same phrases like "I see," "right," "OK" without really listening.

When you feel you have gained some sympathy from your customers, engage them with questions - the reason for asking is to encourage your interlocutor to tell how good they feel: it makes this feeling stronger.

Tip #2: engage with meaningful questions to your customers to gain sympathy

Find a “happy place” for your customers

Hypnotists often let you slip into a “happy place” of your own by telling you a story. This is very important when phoning your customers - even more than other means of communication such as emails - because you are taking a very valuable amount of their time to talk with them. Always remember that people like to hear a story and feel they understand its whereabouts.

Here is a great example found in Ryan Hoover’s article “What’s missing from your growth hacking strategy?”

Every Thursday, Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity, picks up the phone to call 25 to 30 users and asks how the company can make a better product to suit that user’s needs. Dubbed "smile and dial," he gathers direct feedback but he isn't just doing customer development--he's inspiring word of mouth. How often do you receive a phone call from a company that isn't trying to directly sell something? Almost never. Dan delights his users with genuine interest and conversation. This manual, human touch is memorable and sharable.

Tip #3: storytelling is central to a successful phonecall with customers

Watch your tone

Ever heard the saying “bewitching voice”? Some people get the gift of a voice that would make anybody do anything, just like a spell… And most hypnotists get this gift, only they work for it. Forget pinching voices and speaking fast: your #1 concern is to enunciate, speak at a rather slow pace, lower your tone, smile, and sound confident.

Stressing certain words also changes the meaning or the tone you give to certain sentences. For instance, here is an example with the phrase “What would you like us to do about it?”

Say it defensively (emphasizing the words "would you"): "What would you like us to do about it?"

Say it with curiosity (emphasizing the words "like us"): "What would you like us to do about it?"

Say it with apathy (not emphasizing any of the words): "What would you like us to do about it?"

From Improving your inflection on the phone.

Being aware of this technique can help you a lot on working on your tone.

Tip #4: a slow and clear voice can make you sound more confident to your customers

Breathe

Hypnosis sessions all start by a long series of breathing exercises. These exercises, like yoga, basically aim at relaxing you. During our work-day, we rarely take the time to focus on breathing, arguing that it is no priority to our productivity. Well, knowing that just a few but regular deep breaths can lower your oxygen consumption, get you more energized, repair cells faster, decrease stress and anxiety, and ultimately, increase your empathy, don’t you wanna give it a try?

Before picking up any phone-call, just take a long breath to start fresh.

When hesitating on an answer over the phone, consider pausing as a valuable moment: it gives you time to gather your ideas and relieve the stress rush. Both of these tips just require the time-span of a breath, about 2 to 3 seconds.

Tip #5: breathing is no waste of time when phoning your customers

When you’re a young SaaS startup everything comes back to this:

We’ve seen this awesome graphic from useronboard countless time, we’ve liked it, we’ve shared it and yet we did the mistake of selling the flower instead of super mario throwing fireballs.

Reason is that for us it felt more like this:

  Is your SaaS a tool or a solution? 

The idea behind this graphic seems obvious, yet finding the benefit your product really delivers to whom and more importantly articulating it properly are not that easy and in fact depend on the type of your SaaS you’re selling.

Some products fall naturally in the “tool” category while the others more in the “solution” one.

Let me illustrate it through two examples:

Aircall: we’re a phone system, we’re enabling users to get a number and make / receive phone calls (with extra features like taking note, call forwarding, answering machine etc…). As such we can be used by many types of customers for many different use cases  (sales, support, internal communications, marketing etc…). We fall naturally into the “tool” category.

close.io: is the “inside sales CRM of choice for SMBs”. close.io also enables sales to make / receive calls and shares a lot of features in common with us (call forwarding, notes, answering machine etc…) but there are completed built and dedicated to one use case: sales. Thus close.io falls more in the “solution” category (they make you close more deals). 

A “solution” is focused on solving a limited set of problems. Ex: close.io, Zendesk, Workable...

A “tool” SaaS usually attracts a wider set of customers for many different use cases. Ex: Dropbox, Algolia, HelloSign...

If we come back to the useronboard graphic above then it’s clearer why for some startups it’s easier to become fireball resellers while others are more flowershops. This is our case.

The last 4 months we’ve been selling flowers and here are the 5 lessons we’ve learned along the way.

1 Vision: It’s harder to find the right path to your final vision

  This picture can actually be used not only for product development but also for your business vision. The majority of founders have a clear vision of where they want to go (that the vision changes or might be wrong is not the question here). But when you’re selling a tool it’s much more difficult to come up with the right playbook as your options as where to start are infinite.

As a phone system aiming at SMBs in general we could have started by targeting ecommerce companies first (dedicated features, specific value proposition, targeted acquisition channels) or SaaS companies or brick and mortar shops… and then expand from there to other verticals. It’s an option we didn’t choose as we didn’t spot our obvious niche from the start.

Another strategy is, rather than starting with a specific target, to start with a specific use case / feature. A good example of this is Intercom.

Intercom now sells itself as a communication tool between businesses and their users, whether this communication happens during onboarding, for support or for marketing reasons. As such it appeals to a wide variety of businesses for a lot of use cases.

But Intercom didn’t start as a “global” communication tool, it started as a customer lifecycle email solution, enabling startups to send emails to their users based on their behavior. From there, they later added support features (the intercom discussion box) and recently marketing features (to send newsletter).

2 Product development: the feature creep monster is waiting for you

A corollary of the first mistake is that by having a very “global” approach rather than a “laser focused” one the feature creep trap is easier to fall into. By not restraining the use cases we wanted to tackle, we ended up developing too many different features in parallel.

We’ve mapped on this diagram three types of customers we currently have (small ecommerce, startups with international offices and freelancers) and on the right the features they use / need. As you can see a lot of the features we have developed don’t overlap between these customers.

We clearly underestimated the resources required to build and maintain all these features leading to an average user experience on some of them.

The positive aspect is that by having really sold our product we could see which features our customers were really using. The learning here: don’t assume that their usage pattern will match the studies / customer development you’ve made beforehand (what they request is not necessarily what they end up doing). So a lot of good data can be collected at that point.

3 Customer support: you won’t be able please everybody

As we appeal to many different types of businesses we got many types of different early users: from a hairdresser to freelancers, startups in the sharing economy, a fortuneteller, companies needing a hotline etc…

Having so many different types of users is not a problem by itself, the problem is that at early stage you have few resources (time and people) and it’s almost impossible to please all of them. Also you’ll get more contradictory feedbacks and feature requests that might go in completely different directions.

Again restraining your targets or your use cases might reduce the noise to signal ratio.

Be careful when you have too many types of customers as their feedbacks / requests might lead you in many different directions. At Aircall we have users asking us for tens of different features: from sms to number portability or hotline features. The difficult thing is to focus on the right subsets of customers who share the same needs (at least at the beginning)

4 Marketing: your marketing effort will be diluted

From a marketing point of view selling a tool rather than a solution is way, way harder. When you don’t have a clear audience and that you don’t focus on a single value proposition you generally dilute most of you marketing efforts:

poor content marketing as you’ll have a very “cold” approach trying to appeal to many different people on a wide range of needs (and content needs to be hot)

higher competition in paid acquisition channels as you’ll compete with many more opponents and potentially way bigger than you (they don’t care about spending tens of thousands of dollars on very general keywords like “buy a phone number”, you do!)

5 Pricing: your pricing plan will lack of coherence

A good SaaS pricing is in general coherent, meaning that the price increase from plan to plan is indexed on the usage volume (the more I use it the more I pay) or better features (I keep the features from the previous plan + extra ones). 

So a customer who starts with the cheapest plan (plan A) might buy more expensive plans (B and C) as its company grows and as he needs to use your tool more and more.

An “incoherent” pricing plan is a plan for which this evolution is not possible (no upsell).

This is what we discovered with our two plans “Starter Plan” ($6 /month) and Pro Plan ($24 / month). We assumed that the starter plan would be a good entry point for people to start using Aircall and once they perceive the value they would upsell to the Pro plan (to invite more collaborators.

In reality the majority of our startup customers directly bought the $24 plan and the Starter plan mostly attracts freelancers which will never upgrade to Pro as they don’t need our collaborative features, more users or more phone usage.

Our problem is that these two targets have totally different needs  and in term of support we cannot handle all of the requests / feedbacks. We’ll probably kill the Starter plan for the moment and maybe come back to a specific offer for freelancers later as we grow.

Selling your product to very different types of customers is possible but only once you’ve reached a certain size and that your brand start to be known. At very early stage it’s more complicated.

How to avoid these mistakes

Short answer: you probably won’t avoid them and you probably shouldn’t.

From vision to product development, customer support, pricing and marketing we don’t regret any of the mistakes we’ve made simply because:

1 - The knowledge learned far outweighs the mistakes done

2 - Reading the theory beforehand is nice but the reality is that selling a “tool” is necessarily more complicated at the beginning than selling a “solution”. If I go back to the Intercom example you can, on the other hand, check all the other competitors which also started as lifecycle email tools and are still stuck at this stage. Choosing a specific audience or a specific use case from the beginning is risky as it can be harder to expand later if you chose the wrong path / don’t know how to expand it.

3 - Having explored many types of use cases and customers during the last 4 months what we might have lost in “efficiency” we definitely got it back in knowledge. We were able to better identify what were the different needs of our targets and more importantly to understand which ones we cannot / shouldn’t address at the moment (knowing what not to do is really important too). Now we’ll adopt a more focused approach but with much more experience and data to back it.

So no, the point is not to try to avoid these mistakes, the point is to be prepared to make them so you’ll know when to stop and which path to follow after analyzing the situation. As Tawheed Kader explains in this fantastic post:

“it takes roughly 3 years for you to truly figure out if what you’re working on can be a business.

Once you hit that 3-year mark, and you’ve figured out a way to stay alive, some magical things do happen.”

We still have a long way to go but at least we’re starting to understand how it’s going to be.

When your service is innovative reassuring your customer is key

tripndrive is a car sharing service dedicated to travelers: it connects travelers who leave their car at the airport, when flying away, with travelers who arrive and need to rent a car. Instead of spending a fortune at traditional rental companies (Hertz…) tripndrive enables leaving travelers to rent their car to arriving travelers for a fraction of the cost and without sacrificing the quality of service.

tripndrive is a great example of these new services operating in the sharing economy world, connecting people with each other to exchange goods or services. And as we’ve already explained it here, building trust and providing outstanding customer support is crucial for startups which value proposition is innovative and which have to build new habits (extremely hard). 

“Car sharing between travelers is still very new and for most of our users it’s the first time they hear about it and the first time they actually decide to try it. So our main focus is customer satisfaction as we want every user to become a happy Tripndriver. This is why answering all their questions and concerns as efficiently as possible is crucial.“

Trust must be built at every step:

When users first arrive: to educate them and create credibility

During the transaction: to make the customer experience optimal

After the transaction: to answer any question / collect feedback

How Tripndrive is using its phone support

“An open phone line is a very good tool for this purpose. Not only it enables our customers to contact us for any question but this voice contact is great to communicate more information about their reservation.”

Tripndrive creates several points of contact for “voice interaction”:

Visitors: a phone number is available on the homepage

Before / during Tripndrive transactions: travelers can call Tripndrive team at anytime

After sales: customers can still call for any question following their experience

Of course phone is only one component of their support playbook:

As startups born from incubators and accelerators ourselves, we know how important it is for early-stage entrepreneurs and hackers to have access to the right tools at the right time.

That's the rationale behind the Growth Pack.

The goal of this pack is to help leading incubators and accelerators provide their startups with a range of services for free or at a highly discounted rate, so they can focus on growing their businesses without having to worry about the cost of doing so.

Our current partners include Startup Pirates, EuraTechnologies, Founder Institute France, Le Camping, Blue Factory, The Family, StartUp42, Le Booster, and Projective Space.

Here’s a breakdown of what we do and how we help companies scale on a daily basis:

Aircall

Create company phone numbers and share calls across your team. Instantly, anywhere.

-50% off any Aircall plan during 3 months

Mailjet

The all-in-one solution to send, track and deliver transactional, notification and marketing emails

-6 months free Silver plan

TextMaster

A professional crowdsourced translation, copywriting and proofreading platform.

-20% bonus on any order below €3499

PressKing

An all-in-one affordable solution for managing PR online.

-3 months free Enterprise plan

Mention

A professional monitoring tool that helps manage your online reputation.

-3 months free Growth plan

Front

A tool that enables your team to collaboratively answer incoming customer messages.

-3 months free Enterprise Plan

Hop on over to our Growth Pack page for more details.

  If you’re a leading incubator and/or accelerator and you’d like your startups to benefit from our Growth Pack, check out us out at growthpack.io and apply directly!

  If you’re a startup and want your incubator/accelerator to offer the Growth Pack, fill out the form at the bottom of our site and we’ll be in touch!

Breaking news: magicians are not so because they got a gift from the Beyond! Let’s just say it: they’re mostly quacks. If your ambition is not to become the next David Copperfield, this article might still be useful. Indeed, illusionists master the art of voice-based convincing, and can be a practical inspiration in your daily customer relationships over the phone.

Tell a story

Magicians have their audience enter a wonderful world at the beginning of their show. It sets their minds outside of their daily life and gives them elements of context that unconsciously generates connections in their mind. A particular story will make them recollect to a particular moment of their lives and therefore will put them in the same emotional mindset. Create a story around your discussion will make your arguments stick longer in your customers’ minds and also, will make them enjoy the conversation more.

Silence is golden

Convincing people is about managing the time factor: leaving blanks so people integrate and reflect on what you said is key to their understanding. It can also be a good way for you to gather your ideas, stay calm and not rush into things. Just think of an illusionist who would use a moment of inaction so people reduce their concentration to find the trick.

Be calm

Illusionist never show a sign of stress nor hesitation: it would raise their audience’s attention to mistakes, who would then find tricks more easily.

When trying to convince over the phone, people tend to get over-excited or too enthusiastic. While it can be a good thing under certain circumstances, if your aim is to provide a solution to a problem (in customer support or in sales), you’d better stay calm. First, enunciating your arguments clearly helps with understanding. Second, people tend to trust calm people: it gives the impression that you are self-confident.

Keep your head up

Magicians use micro-movements to imply emotions for their audience. For instance, during their show, they can make us believe they are screwing their trick by bending their head. Keeping your head up, on the contrary, automatically makes you sound more confident.

If you are facing an issue, a doubt or a hesitation, you can use a technique called “energy intake”: use the ground or a piece of furniture to support you. Using a physical item gives your body a concrete basis for getting energy that has a direct impact on your voice confidence.

Don’t be too nice

The audience of illusionists is necessarily suspicious at first, as are most of your interlocutors over the phone. The natural tendency is to be nice to tame them. On the contrary, you should consider niceness as an attitude that should be deserved, not self-proclaim yourself nice. If you are nice from the beginning, your interlocutors won’t feel the need to adjust their suspicious behavior, whereas being neutral would tend to make them want to warm relationships between you.

Keep your “wow” for the end

Illusionist always keep a “wow” moment in their magic hats that concludes the show. Keep in mind something you’ll say or offer to get this waouh moment - that will help you as well wrap up a call and terminate it in a proper way and leave a great impression that will stick in your mind’s customers. Last impression is as important as the first one!

Olivier Pailhes - Aircall CEO

We recently came across these two articles from intercom “Redesigning in-app messaging” and Buffer “Buffer August Update” and several arguments resonated with our vision concerning customers to businesses interactions: 

“We believe in the value of personal conversations between businesses and customers. We believe the future of customer communications will be much more like the chats you have with friends, and much less like tickets, applications and transactions that you formally submit to siloed departments.” @intercom

and

“We’re very excited to start to transition some of our “back and forth” customer support channels like email to more conversational channels such as live chat. We’ve also started experimenting with voice-based customer support.” @buffer

As a phone company we’re totally aligned with this and think that voice will be an essential medium for online companies to communicate with their customers along with live chat and in-app messaging. And not because we are selling a phone system but because we deeply believe in the value of “voice” interactions (and we are also well aware that we need to go far beyond the current phone model that we are offering, don’t worry).

1- You can solve problems faster and create a stronger relationship through a voice call

We’ve experienced it countless time with ourselves and our customers. Sometimes picking up the phone and directly speaking to a person is simply more efficient and faster than having a 10 messages long email thread to solve a problem. And there’s also no doubt that you’re building stronger relationships too. I have in mind a very recent example of that. Yesterday, I got a call from StackOverflow. In 5 minutes, they managed to raise my interest on their Career program - while an email (even written “in person”) would probably have ended up in my trash bin.

The real problem is not voice itself but when voice should be used and how the interaction should be started. If the “when” and  the “how” are not aligned then you have all the ingredients for an unpleasant call (it’s not the good time to call you, you’re not the good person etc…).

2- As “customer success” is getting more important for SaaS companies, voice will become key 

Okay, you’ve probably heard of this new buzzword “customer success” (yep growth hacking is so 2013) but if you take the time to read this post from Tomasz Tunguz you’ll learn that this term covers a “decade long discipline” which banks and telco companies are expert at and that SaaS companies must use in order to control their churn.

As competition is heating up in the SaaS space and as churn is a key metric for every “subscription” based business, creating a real relationship with their customers from the start and, most importantly, following it during their lifetime is a crucial aspect.

You can expect to see more and more voice, chat and in app messages interactions between customers and customer success teams.

3- Voice products still suck, we’re still waiting for the “Olark” of voice

Let’s face it, very often if companies choose not to use phone for their support it’s because voice products suck: either you have a traditional phone line from a telco company and then you have 0 flexibility (no intelligent features) or you have a “software phone” (a SaaS solution) and most of the time it fails to really integrate your conversation flow with your customers.

Trust is a single point of failure for sharing economy marketplaces

The Sharing Economy is broadly defined by the meeting of 2 persons who don’t know each other,  “do business” together and (generally) don’t meet anymore.

Obviously, the first question any new user would raise is:

What if my Blablacar or Lyft driver doesn’t show up? What if the expected apartment is a ruin?

  So trust is key, because :

people don’t know each other

they won’t meet again so there’s a priori no consequence of behaving badly.

A US study actually showed 60% of the barriers to sharing come from a lack of trust.

  The way Sharing Economy companies ensure this trust is by:

Applying a strict rating of the experience and the users after all deals. Rate your Uber driver. He will rate you. Rate your AirBnb host, see if he answers within 24h or not, rate your Blablacar driver, etc

Building guarantees within the platform, be it an insurance in case of a problem (see our examples below), a well-designed deal details to avoid as many surprises as possible, a payment process completed after the deal, etc

Providing an outstanding support before the transaction and in case of problem. But in the sharing economy, there’s no such thing as “after-sales” - most of business happens at the moment of the transaction, so if there’s an issue to solve it has to be immediate.

...and of course they encompass all this in a strong brand to convey the trust.

  Phone calls are used here at 2 levels :

I want to reach the other person. You’d typically do that from the Uber or Airbnb app to actually meet the person. A phone call can make more sense here as you need to make sure you get an instant answer (as opposed to a written message which will not necessarily be treated immediately)

I want to reach Support to solve a situation or give me re-assurance on the deal I’m going to make

On the 1st point, as users don’t know each other, and don’t plan to become friends, it would be awkward to share people’s phone number and connect them (plus they could escape from the platform fee:-) 

So, direct (phone) communication can be built through IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) like Plivo or Twilio. It enables the marketplace to provide voice communication without sharing a number. As transactions usually happen “on the spot”, we can expect to see more and more voice features baked into services like Blablacar or AirBnB.

  The 2nd point is actually key and is well illustrated by the example of Airbnb which rolled out 24/7 phone support after a user got a “traumatizing” experience. AirBnB reports to have now a 80-people department dedicated to ensuring trust and safety (quoted from the very interesting and dense article from Philip Lay).

  We ourselves have a few customers operating in the sharing economy space. They are new players, not (yet) as known and structured as an AirBnB or an Uber, but we found a common pattern to build trust with their users.

Examples from the French sharing economy

France is famous for its “Cuisine”, its wines, and its Sharing Economy. BlaBlaCar is obviously the country Champion after its $100 fundraising round, but it hides tens of smaller companies operating in all types of markets.

We have the chance to serve a few customers of the French Sharing Economy and here is how they use their phone support.

  Costockage - share your basement

TripNdrive - share you car at the airport when you travel

JeLoueMonCampingCar - share your motorhome

Homerez - Rent your home for vacations

  Homerez has an international scope. Offers locations in 15 countries (Aircall helps them to provide a local support line, that can be routed to the appropriate teams anywhere they are). In their case, they provide a value-added service to home owners who want to rent their place on any third party site (homelidays etc), or on Homerez.com. Providing phone support is one channel to deliver these advice.

  JeLoueMonCampingCar or Costockage need to help the renters get the whole information on the product. There’s always a concern from motorhome or basement owners about the insurance they benefit from in case of problem, the conditions of service, etc.

As the cofounder of jelouemoncampingcar.com states :

“Having the owners to trust the service enough to let go their $70’000 motorhome is critical, especially for first-time users. Providing phone support is one of ways we have to re-insure them : we receive many calls from people who want to test our reactivity, even on simple questions, get details about the insurance coverage we provide, or even just repeat what’s written on our website but from a real, “live” person.”

As they see it, phone support conveys the message that there are people acting as trusted 3rd party to make sure the transactions go fine. As the brand develops, and as users repeat a positive experience, the need for this support could become less critical.

  TripNDrive actually makes the deal over the phone. When your plane lands, you call them to indicate you’re here so they can bring you your car. As such, it’s not a “typical” sharing economy example as it doesn’t work as a “peer-to-peer” deal (TripNDrive ensures the interface between the traveller and the car renter). Yet it’s a good example of the need to make the deal happen at a precise moment - phone contact has been the preferred option to smoothen the experience.

  Now, you may wonder: “Ok. Now you’ve told me some companies offer phone support… awesome but...so what?”

  Well these startups are quite new but count amongst our most active customers with several thousands of calls per month each. The volume of calls they generate (at comparable sizes) is 10 to 20 times more than our e-commerce customers - not to mention our SaaS customers that limit phone support to their most expensive plans, as we describe it here.

  We observe that phone support is an important way to deliver trust, especially in the earlier stage of a sharing economy startup, when the brand is not yet widespread and when most customers are first-time users. As the company grows, phone support takes its place amongst the customer relationship channels, but probably loses its prominence over more impersonal tools like email or chat.

  PS. Sharing your phone?

@Aircall we are not part of the sharing economy BUT we’re doing all we can to join! First, we allow your users to share contacts, share voicemails, call details, comments on calls. That’s already a little bit of love :-)

Olivier Pailhes - Aircall CEO

Having a ‘solid’ user onboarding experience on a SaaS product is particularly important. First because most SaaS users try a new software in the hope of finding a useful tool that’ll make them more productive (usefulness vs fun). Second because they generally try it during “work” time, meaning that they cannot lose too much time understanding how it works. Third because the SaaS landscape starts to be really crowded and chances are high that your user has many other options available if he doesn’t understand the value you deliver in less than 5 minutes.

The 3 aims of a product onboarding

Onboardings are generally useful for:

explaining the concept / most important features of a product

engaging the user to complete important “configurations / setups”

avoiding the “ghost town” effect when the user arrives on the interface for the first time

Getting Started

This is probably the most obvious goal of a product onboarding: an onboarding is here to clearly explain what your product is and what a first time user should know in order to get started.

Want to dicuss about this post or to know more about our business phone solution? Just click the button underneath. It's free. Really.

As a phone software company we can see from our customers that far from being dead, phone is, in reality, still widely used and appreciated by startups.

People often think that companies use phone mainly for sales purposes but in reality it’s only the tip of the iceberg.  For instance many of our users leverage phone numbers for their marketing content. Here are 4 use cases we regularly see:

Phone Numbers as Call to Actions

Fact: as marketers we’ve all learned that “Call-to-Actions” are important. What’s the point of creating a landing page, a homepage or some marketing content if there is no clear call to action? And in 99% of the cases we create online forms (to collect emails, for signups etc...).

Protip: a phone number is a great alternative (or an addition) to the traditional online forms that visitors are sooooo used to fill. For instance we add to every article we share a phone number on top of it. And we’re pretty happy with the results as we get several calls from qualified leads per week . Don’t hesitate to try it yourself and add a phone number on your whitepapers, landing pages or articles (click to call is coming, you can try ours at the top of this page :-)).

Phone numbers to inspire trust

Fact: we’re living in an age where any employee has access to potentially hundreds of online software, where buyers have access to thousands and thousands of online shops. Trust is an increasingly important aspect in any buying online cycle (B2B or B2C). Most startups don’t start with an already well known and trusted brand, and as boring and obvious as it may seem displaying a phone number on your website is a great way to build trust.

Protip: A lot of our users buy local phone numbers (even if they have nobody in these countries) and add them on their website / emails / marketing materials. Just create US, British, German etc… phone numbers and redirect them to your team members. Even if you don’t get tens of calls per day the fact that your visitors see a phone number from their own country is a big, big plus.

    Phone numbers for offline marketing materials

Fact: for a lot of startups offline marketing materials are an important piece of their overall strategy whether it’s for business cards, flyers, posters for conferences etc...

Protip: as phone numbers on Aircall are not tied to a particular person but are just “addresses” that you can route and cascade to anyone, we saw several customers using them on their offline marketing materials. Some even bought several numbers and tied each of them to a particular material (a phone number for their brochure, a different one on their flyers, on their goodies even) in order to track where their leads came from.

Pricing a product for a SaaS business is tricky. Very often you have no variable costs and what you really do is “guessing a price” based on the time / money your users save or the incremental revenue / margin they can generate with your solution.

The good thing is : you can change easily your pricing over time, add or remove plans, features, and price levels.

However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be right when you open your product to the public.

The usual way of getting around pricing in SaaS

From what I could exchanged with other SaaS founders, the process often goes along those lines:

John             “We have to charge a lot. If people can’t pay >50US$/month then we’re not delivering a real value”

Alice            “But let’s start conservative. We’ll be adding features later and we can add plans with a higher price”

Eric              “I’m not sure we should price per user if we want customers to invite all their team. But if we price with thresholds, the guy in the 10 users plan will feel bad if he has only 6 users”

John             “Ok. Let’s keep it simple. What’s the competition doing?”

And it can go on and on.

The point is, each co-founder has his own experience and references. If you’re a copycat or if you have a clear competitive landscape you can start from here. But if you’re building something “new”, you’ll find it very hard to resolve opinion-based arguments.

Leverage (more) your users

We had these discussions - plus others given the fact that we do have variable costs and more complexity being in the telecom space (you can have numbers, inbound calls, forwarding, outbound calls… and that differs a lot per country)

We sent emails to hundreds of users asking them a feedback about our pricing. We wrote down our target pricing and requested a OK / NOT OK feedback (we felt that asking an open question like “What would be ready to pay?” would not generate honest answers)

We had the feeling most users tend - naturally - to kick-back on your proposed pricing asking for a lower price that what they would actually accept:

Low-usage customers want a free plan - of course!

Heavy-usage customers are ready to pay for your pricing as long as you have the 10 missing features they’d like

But we called as well over 50 users. First because we provide them their business phone system and we wanted to reach them via our own product :-) Second, because we wanted more qualitative feedback. Indeed the input we got wasn’t statistically relevant but it was of great interest to understand the blocking points in the purchasing behavior, and how people relate our offer to their existing solution.

All-in-all it cost us 5 hours (including missed calls and voicemails). Most calls didn’t last more than 5 minutes as we’re talking to busy people. But the amount of information you get in these 5 minutes probably corresponds to a 2-page email. And it’s interactive of course, so you can challenge and go deeper as you talk to more and more customers.

The risk here is what Des Traynor outlined in his last (awesome) speech at #B2BRocks in Paris : anyone can take 4 users and build a general rule from it… until you find out you had 400 users you haven’t ask who think differently.

[Thanks, Des! :-)]

That’s where messaging to your users + deep-diving over the phone with some of them is so complementary.

So what's the awesome result of this exercise?

Well, let’s be honest : our pricing is quite « classical » and I can’t pretend that we found the holy grail of SaaS pricing.

But pricing as such is not so important as knowing the underlying drivers of your pricing, which hypotheses you’re testing and the variants you can try later.

We have gained a much clearer understanding of the way people value our product, whether on incoming calls, outgoing calls, collaborative features, mobile vs office usage, etc.

For instance, our product (Aircall) generates increasing value as you increase the number of users (because it’s collaborative and because it remains super easy to use even with 50 users) but at the same time decreasing value because the more you add people in a team phone line, the less calls each of them gets (marginally).

Another example: we want to make the management of your calls as easy as possible - so we started off with the idea that our plans should include unlimited call forwarding to any device, so you don’t have to worry about a number of minutes per month, whether to mobile phones or to landlines.

We still love that idea but we realized that many users just want a number to look local or to be contacted only a few times per month. Unlimited call forwarding is a vast overkill for them.

Conclusion: We’ll add a very low cost plan with a very low limit in incoming calls

In the end, we have defined a pricing roadmap and we’ll be able to build it over time to meet the key user patterns - with the minimal complexity.

If there’s only one thing we've learned and we’d like to share with SaaS startups : if you have the opportunity to gather phone numbers from your beta users (or Skype IDs or if you can invite them for a quick chat during the beta), don’t waste the opportunity of a few one-to-one calls with structured questions before you go public.

And if you need a phone line to make & receive these customer calls, register to our beta :-)