

Show HN: Cold Call Manager - soneca
http://www.coldcallmanager.com

======
drewcrawford
I'm in your market

Name - it's ok. But most of my calls are "warm calls"\--following up on
inbound. This product appears to solve my problems, which is interesting,
given that is named for something different.

Run, don't walk, and implement email import. All my lead generation systems
speak email, and if I could pipe them to you I would become a customer in
about 10 seconds. Plus you have a strong lock-in effect with that, who is
going to mess with 5 lead systems' configuration to move away from you?

Your marketing targets people who procrastinate at sales calls, but just
making the calls _easier_ fundamentally misunderstands why that
procrastination occurs. You need options to nag me to make calls via email,
timed to when people get back from lunch in their timezone. Probably integrate
with heavier-duty procrastination services like Beeminder or Rescuetime, which
may end up being a reliable sales channel for you.

~~~
soneca
Thank you for every insight. About the last one, actually I was thinking about
people who do not have the discipline to properly register all the relevant
info after every single call they made. But your view is pertinent. I could
help both types, the _lazy_ and the procrastinator.

I will give some thoughts to your features suggestions.

~~~
billmalarky
With cold calls, especially for non professional salesmen (one man startups
etc) procrastination can be anxiety related. I wonder if there is anyway
software can help with that.

~~~
fecak
I've not heard of any software that solves the problem of anxiety in cold
calls, but I can tell you that experience erased anxiety entirely for me. For
the first month or two I was quite afraid of saying the wrong things or
screwing up, but within a few months it became second nature.

Some scripts may help with anxiety for newbies.

------
dmix
This is just website design feedback:

Too much movement everywhere, it contributes to the sites lacks of visual
hierarchy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_hierarchy)
and makes the call to actions harder to read. Coordinating users eye movement
is hard enough with out things moving in the background. I'd keep it simple,
not clever.

~~~
carrotleads
I too find the moving background image style irritating. can't remember which
one but only once have I found it acceptable and it was because the rest of
the content was done well.

------
DoubleMalt
It might be just me but I'm really annoyed by sites that do not have a easily
discoverable pricing page. I would probably take a look at the product if you
tell me what paid plan you offer.

Without this information I don't bother.

~~~
eli
You might be right, but it's not universally true that pricing pages are
always a good thing. Especially if you expect to be selling into enterprise.

~~~
gnoway
Can you explain this? Is it because you don't want your enterprise customers
to see the pricing, or because the pricing will be dependent on the customer,
or something else?

~~~
eli
(Sure, but let me preface by saying I have a B2B startup, but we sell
media/ads. SaaS is a bit different... this is just my opinion.)

I'd guess _most_ of the time you _do_ want to list at least some prices. My
point was just that, while annoying, it's not always wrong to make people
call/email.

Sometimes the price indeed will vary and you want to make sure you understand
what the client wants and that they understand what you're offering them. And,
either way, you want to start a dialogue. Enterprise products don't generally
sell themselves. If you have a product that will save a company hundreds of
thousands of dollars, the challenge isn't going to be whether it's $199 or
$299. It's going to be, Do I believe it will work for me? Is my data safe? Is
there an SLA? It's likely a human will be needed to navigate the sales
process. The point at which they're asking, "What's it cost?" might be the
best place to insert someone. And if your product costs $10,000 a month,
that's probably doubly true. Not many people are just going to pop a credit
card number into a Stripe form for a $10,000 buy.

Put another way, it's entirely possible that the people you lose by not
listing a price are easily outweighed by the deals you close by encouraging
people to contact you. People shopping for products based mostly on price are
probably not great candidates for your "expensive" enterprise product anyway.

EDIT: patio11 has a post about enterprise sales that, as usual, is very
insightful:
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

------
CameronBanga
A couple notes, the three card system zoom-in's get a bit pixelated/rough
looking, which isn't necessarily a super flattering look for a first
impression.

Also, I don't want to sign up before knowing your price. Turned me off
immediately, and I'm probably a potential customer and would have had much
more interest in a trial if I knew the price before hand.

------
BorisMelnik
I am looking for something like this exactly. Would love to see more features
or a full tour of exactly what this is.

So essentially this is a CRM? Can you do an import from CSV? Is it per user
per month? Multi-user?

Would also love to see a little bit more of the interface prior to signing up
sorry hope I am not asking too much.

Really love the simplicity of this, I cannot stand SaaS's like salesforce that
are so terribly bloated and hard to work with.

~~~
soneca
If you are asking what you need you are not asking too much!

I would call a minimalist CRM if you don't mind the buzzword. Here I am only
worried on an easy way to input a contact, register a interaction log and tell
you what to do next. So the screenshot you see on the landing page _is_ the
full tour.

It is per user per motnh, no multi-user for now. We are working on export to
Excel. CSV import is planned.

------
rrggrr
Nice UI, but not enough value add to justify a monthly pay SAAS. Would
recommend one of two courses of action: Sell as a library for inclusion into
existing CRM's where cards can be pre-populated with a call list, or build
this out as the centerpiece of a CRM with tie-ins to voIP and data import,
something akin to close.io.

~~~
soneca
Great idea your second option. Thanks!

------
mleonhard
This looks useful.

How much does it cost?

Is there a way for me to download a backup of all my cards?

Better remove the delay on the home page. It's annoying.

~~~
soneca
The price is $10/month. But we are planning huge discounts for some campaigns.
Try it for the 2 weeks free trial; if you want to buy it, send a email to the
contact with your HN username and you will have a great discount!

EDIT: And about the backup, we are already building the feature to export
everything to Excel!

~~~
kosei
$10/month seems a bit expensive considering the functionality and feature set.
That said, I don't know too much about the space.

Also, you should build a better pricing page. The "Buy" tab just sends you to
a free trial registration with no explanation of pricing or anything. I'm
usually reticent to sign up for the "free trial" without having any idea of
what the end pricing structure will be.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Funny. My thought was exactly the opposite: too cheap.

I pay Netflix about $10/month for a significantly less valuable service than
bringing in new customers. That to me sets the pricing floor for any business
webapp.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Exactly. Bottom tier should be $49, with another tier up at $99, and possibly
a top "enterprise tier" at $199.

------
hluska
I have some feedback for you:

\- Within moments of getting to your page, my first thought was 'Wow, this
would be a great way to use Trello.' Then, I went to Trello's homepage before
I started digging deeper into yours.

\- Your favicon's colours are close enough to Netfirms that, while I was on
Trello's page, I actually thought that your tab was an advertisement.

\- A scrolling background is all the rage, so I can't blame you. However, in
my browser, the animation isn't very smooth. The loop point is quite jarring.

\- The other animations don't add anything.

\- What if I have a list of 300 contacts and have three people making cold
calls? Can I import the list of 300 contacts and have those numbers
automatically divied up among my three callers? Can I make sure that the same
customer does not get called twice? Can my contacts use your app to update my
Do Not Call list?

\- When I have done cold calls, I use a spreadsheet. It is free, I can add a
limitless number of columns, and I can easily share the document. Why is your
product better than my method?

\- I found it jarring that the 'Buy', 'Contact' and 'Log in' menu items took
me to a page with a different main menu. This is one of my longstanding pet
peeves, so at this point, it might not even be rational anymore.

All in all, I think this is a good idea and there might be a good business in
there. But, these things kept me from converting to your free trial. You've
done some great work so far and best of luck with your product!!

------
AaronFriel
I'm possibly in the market for this, and I have a few suggestions to grow your
market.

Cold calling is often done in the United States by political campaigns,
political action groups, etc, to get people to vote. I'm not sure if it would
go by other names, but we call it phone banking in my area. It would be great
if a tool like this existed which added support for:

* Importing lists of people to call

* Support for multiple callers to pull off that list

* Connecting callers with an app that can provide them a list of #s to tap, and then fill in responses

* Step-by-step / flow-charted interaction builder with feedback options if a user has a laptop or second device in front of them. For example:

> "[Sir or madam], I'm [name] calling on behalf of [organization] > to ask
> questions about the upcoming election. Do you support > the right to
> marriage equality?"

Square boxes should be filled in, bold, auto-magically provided. Then it
should have a prompt:

> [Yes] [No] [Refused Call]

And then it takes you to the next stage of the flow chart, asking more
questions.

* Beautiful, smart, geographic data visualization. (Sadly this might actually be the hardest ask, because making geographic data look "good" is hugely domain specific.)

If these features could be implemented, you could probably sell it to
political groups for quite a bit.

------
hayksaakian
Serious question: how is this better than trello, or a Google spreadsheet?

Your target market seems to be small companies who don't have an entrenched
'system' who are probably using one of your alternatives.

(I solve my problem w/ spreadsheets, so if you convince me, I'll switch)

------
yongparkk
This is cool. Would have used it in my previous role as I cold called quite a
bit.

Not sure if I would have paid for it however. Excel and Evernote seem to do a
good job in keeping track of all my call details.

Also to reiterate everyone else's statement, the landing page takes way too
long to load.

~~~
sogen
Better than Evernote: try Salesforce, a Developer account is free. It has
saved my brain many times.

------
ultimatedelman
In 99.9999999% of all cases, an animated background is a bad idea. I'll echo
the sentiment that there's far too much animation on the page, nearly
reminiscent of GeoCities websites. Intro animations are fine, but speed them
up and start with something on the page.

------
Serow225
Good job! One small nit that I noticed - on the 'How it works' page there's a
sentence that reads " Interaction cards > This is the only type that includes
inumerous cards." At least for me, 'inumerous' is a pretty awkward term, it's
a little too formal and uncommon IMHO. What about just going with a simple
word like 'multiple'? Good luck :)

------
sdfjkl
I manage cold calls by telling the caller never to call again and making a
mental note never to do business with them. Oh, that's probably not what you
meant, is it?

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brassattax
Why are the dates in the screenshots for the years 1984 and 1985? Is this a
reference to something? Date arithmetic overflow? Dead clock battery on the
demo server?

~~~
soneca
All references are from Watchmen. Just a little bit of fun while writing copy

------
serf
I don't feel as if this gives me anything over trello, which is free. Is there
anything i'm missing?

------
lukasm
1\. I can see text after 15 seconds. I though it was broken (Chrome, Mac OS X)
2\. Too much text.

------
elwell
Could benefit from new logo design

------
sami_b
or you can use Trello

If you need to integrate with other apps, think about Zapier or IFTTT

------
oonny
looks good; Cant trello be used to do something similar? how is it different?

------
_mtr
Way too much animation. I shouldn't have to wait 10 seconds for all the
content on a landing page to Powerpoint its way onto the screen.

~~~
soneca
Yes, sorry about that. It is direct result of startup advices "launch before
you think you are ready" and "don't worry about building a great design on
your first landing page, buy a theme on themeforest".

I see the flaws, but I don't regret following those. It is sufficient to
validate a few things of the core product for now!

~~~
swombat
I think the page doesn't gain much from the animations, particularly the
mouseovers. A lot of my browsing is on my phone or tablet anyway, where those
would not work. It makes me think that perhaps the same kind of approach is
used in the product, which would make it mobile-unfriendly...

~~~
pestaa
My opinion is that very few pages gain anything from animations, but the trend
is heavily followed on Themeforest. I was enthusiastic about our first
purchase from them for a project at work, but ended up fighting and tossing
out the garbage for 2 days.

Does anyone know a theme marketplace with serious designers?

