

How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage - matthewking
http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/how_to_sell_more_software_by_adding_12_characters_to_your_homepage/#When:14:08:00Z

======
edb
True story (in a nutshell): I was running a hosting company with a friend of
mine. Things were good, our sales were increasing to the point where we quit
our jobs to grow the company.

It was a good life. Wake up, set your own hours, do some programming on the
site and automation tools, take a mental break to communicate with users via
email. All in our boxers. Our friends would call us to go out, one of us could
handle the emails while the other was out, or hell, we would both leave, so
long as people got a reply within 6 hours, everybody seemed to be happy.

Life was good, we were both getting laid and our apartments were clean. Every
now and then, a customer here and there wouldn't get it and would request a
phone call. We gladly called them up, and fixed in 30 mins what normally would
take us 7-10 days of back and forth emailing!

This gratification encouraged us to put our number on our webpage. We did, and
closed many sales over the phone. Our sales tripled, our company grew more. we
were both earning 50k/year in profits compared to last year's 20, and growing
more than linearly.

What happened next? The calls grew more frequent. We would leave them to
answering machine and when we would call back, the customers would be angry.
Eventually customers called us out on the fact that we only answered calls as
of 11:00am and they made us feel guilty about not having a phone answered
during business hours.

So we conceded. 9am - 6pm our lines would be answered. After all, we owe it to
the customers who brought us our livelihood. 2 guys splitting the task; it was
maintainable. All of a sudden though, we couldn't work when we wanted. We had
to be up and in the office at 9.

We tried maintaining our lifestyles, coding killer features until 4am, going
out when our friends would call us. Eventually there were consequences for
these actions.

Gone were the days of coding in our underwear, gone were the haphazard
productivity blitzes, gone were the days of our startup's spirit. We lost
sleep because we had to be up at 8. Lots of it. If one of us would sleep in,
the other would cover until eventually the person waking up early more often
would fall to resentment.

Our product suffered, our relationship suffered, our productivity blitzes?
Gone. We were canceling plans with friends because we had work to do at night
that couldn't get done cause we were on the phone. Nobody would outsource our
calls, most of our clients spoke french. Our website hadn't changed graphic
design since we put our winter theme up. It was july and our logo was covered
in snow. Our phone staff kept quitting. Our sales plateaued. We even started
wearing pants. I eventually sold my half.

Trust me kids, don't put your number on your homepage. Stick to email support
and get by. Find a way to get by without a filing cabinet and go travel the
world while working.

~~~
Hovertruck
If answering phones was tripling your sales, why didn't you just hire someone
to answer the phone? They could at least field a majority of the calls, and
that frees you up to improve your company and make even more money. Seems like
an investment to me.

~~~
edb
You need to be moderately technical to answer alot of the questions we were
getting. In our case, the people who were good on the phone wanted to do more.
They couldn't because of the call/email volume and they ended up leaving.

Again, this isn't the whole story. I'm being a little dramatic here so that
the story isn't all that boring, but it's essentially what happened. It's
probably a good idea for a lot of people. For me, however, it really took all
the fun and all my passion out of my company.

------
ivankirigin
We have my number on <http://tipjoy.com/aboutus/> even outside a sales
context.

It's been used by press and users both. Some people just want help putting
tipjoy on their blog. That kind of user research is really interesting
actually. You practice explaining things to people who have no idea about the
web.

Also, if you don't like talking to people, keep in mind others are like you.
The calls have been very infrequent. And if it gets annoying, just remove it.

~~~
Andys
Yes! People will give you feedback over phone, that they don't over email.

------
SwellJoe
No. Never again. Customers who expect telephone support are simply not worth
it. Even if we could, somehow, charge twice as much for those customers, I
would _still_ not be willing to put my number on our website.

~~~
webwright
Why not just say: "For sales, press 1. For support, go to mysite.com/help". If
they ignore that and hit the sales #, say, "Sorry, I'm in sales. You need to
head to the support page-- those guys are generally really responsive!"

~~~
SwellJoe
Because your customers will hate you.

By the time you have a dozen customers, at least one will have said, publicly,
something along the lines of, "I had no trouble talking to them when I wanted
to buy, but as soon as I needed help, they were nowhere to be found."

There _are_ industries and products where it's possible to get away with
telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's
probably not the business most of the folks here are in. I don't know what
makes it workable, exactly, and certainly larger companies get away with it
all the time...and when you and I have hundreds of thousands of customers, we
can discuss the possibilities.

It probably is possible to differentiate somehow on your website; making
available far more expensive versions that include telephone support. I kinda
suspect that will engender animosity in the non-premium customers who feel
like they're getting second class treatment, but at least they'll all know
where they stand. But, beware that no matter what you do, you will get phone
calls for support, if you offer a number for sales. And your suggested
solution will piss some customers off.

Anyway, I think everyone is just dramatically underestimating the cost of
answering a phone.

~~~
webwright
"There are industries and products where it's possible to get away with
telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's
probably not the business most of the folks here are in."

I think it's a matter of how you set expectations around the number and
whether you have a PBX. I ran a web dev / hosting company.

Contact page read: "To keep our prices low, we currently only offer support
via email unless you have a dedicated server with a support contract." Or
something to that effect.

Phone maze said: "For sales, press 1" (that went to a person, when we wanted
to be available). For Support, press 2" (that went to a message that said "To
keep our prices low, we don't offer telephone support. Head over to www..."

If someone circumvented it and got us on the line somehow, we'd say it
verbally.

You're right, it probably pissed off the people who read the clear verbiage
around the phone number on the site and chose to ignore it... But I was happy
to live with that. And the phone number landed me plenty of high profit
customers that I was glad to have.

Of course, this only makes sense if you have SOME premium offering and a
generous margin. Most real businesses WANT to talk to a salesperson rather
than buy online.

If we didn't have dedicated server hosting (thousands per year in revenue),
that number never woulda seen the light of day. ;-)

------
spolsky
I'm going to have to disagree here, based on data. We did A/B testing of our
homepage with and without a phone number for months (using odd/even days) and
simply could not see any measurable difference in sales. With all due respect
to Ian, he makes a great product, and having a phone number on your web site
is a good thing, but having the phone number on the home page (rather than a
contact page) did ZERO for us.

~~~
zmimon
> (using odd/even days)

That sounds like an odd way to do it - do your customers typically purchase on
the same day they first hit your web site? If not, they likely came back
several times and might have been bemused or even frustrated to find the phone
number appearing and then disappearing. Or just seeing the phone number one of
those days was enough to accrue all the benefit of having the phone number on
any day.

~~~
aneesh
Good point. A better way would be to randomly sort visitors to the site into
either the A or B group, and make that sorting sticky over time (cookies
aren't perfect, but are a reasonable approximation). No magically disappearing
phone number!

------
raffi
I'm using tollfreemax.com and added a phone number to FeedbackArmy.com weeks
ago.

I recommend having a phone number and putting it everywhere. I know when I see
it, I feel better.

No one calls me and I still get a lot of contact through the contact form. But
I still think it provides comfort to people seeing the number there. I had one
customer who was trying to get a response out of me but my email kept going to
his spam folder. I finally emailed him from another address but if I didn't
think of this, the phone number would have given him a last resort to reach
out and strangle eer get the issue resolved.

If someone does call, I'll answer in my best phone voice, help out, and get on
with what I was doing.

~~~
raffi
Oh one other thing about tollfreemax--I use them but can't recommend them. The
service is fine once I got going. However the backend user interface is the
most awful confusing thing you'll ever encounter. In fact, the whole user
experience of the site is the most awful thing you'll ever encounter. Don't
believe me? Signup and you'll understand.

That said, I called technical support, and they "trained" me on how to get
around the quirks of the system. The technical support was absolutely
excellent. I was surprised and I think it'd be cheaper for them to fix their
site rather than have every customer call technical support.

~~~
teej
I worked in technical support for a company who worked in a similar way.
Unfortunately, one great developer costs as much as 3 technical support
people, so the math doesn't work out in the heads of some people.

------
staunch
What's the cheapest way to get a toll free number?

~~~
lux
I've started using twilio.com for a new site. They offer a toll-free 866
number for $5/mo + $0.05/min. Now it's not a phone line or voicemail per se,
but rather a service for programming phone features like an answering service,
support ticket system, company directory, or anything else. You can forward
calls onto any phone too, so they can connect with a real person as well.

I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or
support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and
into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message.
voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to
listen to messages which is a big plus for me.

Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost
no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.

~~~
asnyder
There was a post several days ago either here or on techmeme showing a
conceptual system between twilio, voicecloud, SMS, etc. Since you've developed
a system that clearly implements this would you happen to know more details of
something like that. Are there any out of the box examples online that
demonstrates the interoperability between this, or did you set it up from
scratch?

The APIs look pretty straightforward, but if you have any further insight or
resources on this integration it would be very helpful.

~~~
lux
The integration really just happens in your script, it's very basic. When I
receive a RecordingUrl parameter from Twilio, I just save the file (I'm using
PHP, so file_get_contents() to get the file, and file_put_contents() to save
it) then I give Voicecloud the link to the file using their API call. I use
file_get_contents() for that as well, which returns an XML response, but since
it's so simple and I'm only looking for a transaction # to reference, I just
do a regex for it instead of parsing the XML. You need to save that # to your
db so you can reference it again in the Voicecloud response script.

The Voicecloud response handler is equally simple: they call your script and
pass it a transactionuid (the value saved in the last script) and a
transcribed_text parameter. From there you can do whatever you want, like send
it in an email or save it to your database.

The Voicecloud API isn't really completely setup right now though, so you have
to work with their support team to get an API key and to give them your
response handler URL. They have to input that stuff. One other thing is I
initially ran into issues with Twilio's mp3 encoding not working with
Voicecloud, but Voicecloud solved that for me and probably for anyone else
too.

Hope that helps!

------
zmimon
For those terrified of actually answering the phone, and who dread the idea of
having to check voice mail constantly (like me), there are outfits that will
take your call and transcribe it to an email for you. eg:

<http://www.phonetag.com/>

This way you can pretend to have a phone number but it's actually no different
to publishing an email address. (Not saying this is really good business
practice ... but it's there).

------
teej
I'd love to see how the presence of a phone number affects web-only
conversions.

~~~
babul
Through enhanced confidence. Many consumers like to see a phone number on the
site (especially for companies/services they are not familiar with) even if
they have no intention of calling (at least in the purchasing phase).

It is psychologically reassuring to _think_ you will be able to call if you
have a problem.

~~~
teej
I agree with you. I think it would increase confidence as well. But I like to
back things up with numbers.

~~~
jjs
More importantly, with those numbers, you could decide whether it's _really_
worth the hassle (or expense, if you're hiring sales people)...

------
herval
One day, long 2 years ago, one of my website's users did a whois on my DNS
name, found my phone number there and called me (in the middle of the night)
to tell me he had a problem with his account. Guess I didn't hide my phone
well enough :-P

------
chops
This is especially excellent advice. For my business, I list the phone number
on the "contact us" page and I've scored countless sales simply because
someone was there to answer the phone (the phone number is just my cell phone,
no real need for a toll-free number these days - everyone gets free long
distance).

Historically, I've been a terrible customer service person (when I worked as
an usher for a movie theater I hated customers), yet when it's your own
product, and it's something you're _excited_ about and something in which you
truly believe, it really shows through in voice communication.

Those customers that get the rapid phone support are frequent sources of
referrals, especially the repeat callers.

That said, I've been in business now for 2.5 years, have always had the phone
number on the site, and have had more than 3,000 customers with a few hundred
thousand users, yet I probably average maybe 30 minutes on the phone per day,
sometimes more, sometimes not a single call for a few days. Most users use the
contact form or the forums. I'm still honestly surprised I don't get many
calls. As a one man shop, I was expecting to spend a lot of time on the phone,
and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. I was originally hesitant to post
the phone number, but it becomes a very helpful tool, in my opinion.

But like some other users have mentioned, the phone number helps users be
reassured they can get instant support if it's needed. And like the article
says, you can always let it go to voice mail if you're too busy.

Overall, great advice, imo.

(I know this is structured poorly as a sort of stream of consciousness, and
for that I apologize).

------
bprater
Does anyone know of a company that this could be outsourced to?

~~~
snprbob86
I think the best answer is: don't!

Unless you are a huuuuge company with millions of customers -- end consumers
really -- then you are better off doing it yourself or hiring dedicated, in-
house staff.

The more directly you handle customer's questions and problems, the better
equipped you are to enhance your product, your sales materials, you self-help
resources, etc. If you outsource it, they have no incentives to help you
reduce call volume, which indicates reduced questions and problems (hopefully
not reduced interest!). In fact, they have incentive to INCREASE call volume,
because they charge you by the unit.

------
inovica
I'd love to have a phone number on our site, but our market is global, so
wouldn't it look negative to have a UK number, or a US number, for people in
other countries? We are based in the UK, but we mainly sell outside of the UK
(www.sourceguardian.com). I might try to put a number prominently on the site
and see if this achieves anything or maybe gives more of a comfort factor to
our visitors and I'll report back

~~~
matthewking
I use skype with a skypein number, I also have an 0845 (UK local rate) number
pointing to that. For my customers in other countries I intend to get an
additional skype number that is local to those countries, but then we're only
1 hour time difference. You'd still get difficulty with that if you're UK and
US, but then at least you'd have some overlap plus an answering machine.

------
donniefitz2
I think this is a great piece of advice. It seems especially valuable if you
are selling B2B and your clients are not all web-savvy. I am going to take
this advice and try it out. What could it hurt? I might have to talk to
customers who come to me and are already somewhat interested in my product and
close the sale (potentially). It's worth a shot.

------
ewiethoff
Aside: Whether or not your site shows a phone number, make sure your contact
information and the FAQ/Help areas are usable _without_ Javascript or Flash.
Google is sure to find it. So are customers and potential customers with
peculiar disabilities. (Asus, I'm looking at _you_.)

------
Jem
The company I work for designed and built a new e-commerce site for one of our
clients in the first quarter of last year. Although it's been a huge success,
there are still customers of theirs who will ONLY place orders via the
telephone.

------
known
I like the way Gibraltar solicits business
<http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/main_framesets/bus_frameset.htm>

------
nas
It really depends on what kind of customers you are serving. There are many
industries where it is the norm to call a vendor if you are interested in
their product.

------
ScottWhigham
Live chat will help out those programmer dorks who want to "stick their toe in
the water" and talk to customers yet not talk to customers...

------
known
Communication priorities:

1\. Meet

2\. Phone

3\. Postal Mail

4\. e-mail

------
jpwagner
Does your website have to be uber-ugly too?

~~~
jpwagner
Check out: <http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/>

It is difficult to navigate and understand what is going on. Of course we get
the idea and understand, but think from the perspective of a prospective
customer. This is typical of the type of website that has a phone number on
the front page. It looks unprofessional. When you get larger you can post your
automated answering line (like 1-800-NOSOFTWARE for Salesforce.com) on the
front page, because it's limited overhead.

