Startable - Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Prasad has a new piece on Small Business Trends on Turning email newsletters into customer insights. I’m a little partial to this newsletter since I helped OfficeDrop create these testing tactics (I’m not claiming that these tactics are unique, just that I was the person to bring them to our marketing efforts.)

I really like the point about allowing replies to the marketing emails. I send a lot of emails our to our new subscribers, and let customers reply to me directly. This helps cut off customer service issues early in the process, and also can get a good dialog going with individual customers.

One point that that did not make Prasad’s piece is that we also let customers know about upcoming new releases/products via the newsletter. It is a great way to get early-bird signups to new products.

I’ve been one of those quarter of US households without landline service for the past… I think five or seven years. (The last time I had a landline I was living in San Francisco and I needed one for my Tivo. I don’t even think Tivo needs a landline anymore.) Much ado has been made about the slow death of landline telephone service…

from ReadWriteWeb article

This is a very clear trend (as the ReadWriteWeb article mentions) “younger adults under 35 are more likely to have cut their landlines, but the CDC also reports that the number of wireless-only households increased among all age groups. About half of all adults aged 25 to 29 now live in households that are wireless-only…”

But all that changed last month for my house, as my wife is starting a SEO/marketing business - and she has realized that she can’t rely on her mobile phone connection. (We are on AT&T). She can simply not rely on the constant dropped calls when she is talking with clients, so she needed the reliability of a landline. (No one needs to mention Skype; I’ve never found it to be reliable enough to speak with clients.)

Pundits are now mentioning the upcoming strain on AT&T’s network that will come from the new iPhone 4.  Also, it sounds like Android is really taking off - will this stress other carriers networks too?

If cellular networks become clogged, will people who actually need/like to talk on their phone switch back to having landlines?

I have no idea, but in my own little world this has just happened. Has anyone else seen this/experienced this/thought about this?

Vivek Wadhwa had an interesting post today on selling in TechCrunch. I’m learning some serious lessons on selling now that I’m the head of marketing at Pixily - although I am very much still a novice sales manager! I reserve the right to be completely wrong/change my mind on any or all of these points

1. Aspiring to a touchless sales model is great, but small business customers like to know they can reach you on the phone. Many great SaaS companies have a great sales funnel that terminates when a customer signs up online without speaking to a sales rep. I think most small business SaaS startups hope to create this type of sales cycle. After all, how can you have a profitable company if you need to have a sales person on the phone closing $15 per month sales? But, at Pixily, we’ve found that phone calls result in sales and great free to paid user conversions. We offer a free trial, and a decent number of our paying customers choose to sign up for the free trial and eventually convert to paying customers. The highest converting (free to paid) lead source is the customers who call us and who we sign up for the free trial over the phone. The convert to paying customers by over 3x vs. the next best source. (Note: “source” is probably not the right word to use, but it’s Saturday and my coffee isn’t kicking in quite yet…) Is this sustainable in the long term? I’m not experienced enough to know at this point.
2. Customer service reps make great sales people too! Vivek mentions how developers make great sales people. I’d very much agree, since our developers often drive closed leads from networking events they attend and from conferences they speak at. But we are having success with our customer service reps doubling as sales people. First of all, they know the product. Secondly, they understand how live customers are using the product. Third, when a free user calls in to ask a question it’s the time to try to sell them on an upgrade!
3. Customers do the darnedest things with the product - asking them “why are you interested in my product” is really helpful in selling. For example, one of Pixily’s products is a simple document scanning service. We happen to be pretty good at scanning documents, and can offer it profitably as a stand alone service. We had a bulk scanning customer who was a magazine publisher. He wanted to get his old magazine issues (from the 80’s and beyond) online, but only had them stored in print. Once we actually really understood how he wanted to use our product we were able to sell him - even though we were more expensive than a couple of local scanning providers in his area. We’ve sold this particular product a few more times, mainly because we “get” what the customer’s end goal is.
4. Managing a sales pipeline is harder than it looks. When you are the VC, you get to see all these pretty sales funnels at board meetings. When you are the person trying to grow the business, keeping the different campaigns and leads all moving along in the funnels is much more challenging! I guess it’s just in my nature to enjoy playing/measuring our sales channels by output, but I have to fight the instinct to not spend too much time in analytics and not enough time in selling/content creation.
5. When selling online, content is king. I’ve had a ton of luck getting great content out of a marketing intern we recently hired. Not only has he built an entirely new site dedicated to document scanning, he’s also put out some very helpful blog posts and made content upgrades to our web site. All this content is producing - both in terms of us moving up on Google, getting more traffic and improving our conversion rate.

I was at a private luncheon 10 days ago with Scott Cook, the founder and Chairman of Intuit. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially withdrew MS Money from the market on the same day - a huge achievement for Scott Cook and Intuit. When asked how he managed to stem off competition from Microsoft, this is what he had to say:

Solve Customer Pain Point(s)

Most companies are founded with an objective to solve a pain point but only few firms continue to focus on the customer after they have achieved success. What Intuit has done in the last 25 years and is relentlessly focussed on what the customer pain points are and then go about solving them. They engage the customer before, during and after each release cycle to ensure what they build is what the customer wants.

Delight the customer

Solving the customer pain point is not just enough but doing it in a manner that the customer loves it is what counts. The customer interact with a company and its products in various ways and various times. The post-sale customer experience is even more important than the pre-sale experience. How the product satisfies the needs, how accessible the company is (customer service) and how involved the user community is play a major role in enriching the customer experience.

These according to Scott, will create a loyal customer base for life and continue to generate word of mouth. When Scott asked Bill Gates what the main reason to acquire Intuit (in the mid 90s) is, Bill responded by saying that they could replicate everything that Intuit did but not the word of mouth. No wonder, Microsoft pulled out of personal money management market.