Monthly Archives: October 2010

One comment on the story that has occupied our day, and forced us to do no fewer than five special reports on the television network: While we are expected to pass along stern Government warnings–delivered by officials with stern expressions, from the President on down, and inc … Continue reading →

Support is often an after thought for many startups in terms of the impact it has on your time, sanity, and development resources. It’s usually a tedious chore that is a second class citizen. Or…Maybe it’s not. Maybe your startup worships at the altar of Zappos. If you do, odds are the influx of support hits you from out of nowhere like a sucker punch. Here’s what I’ve learned about preparing for support, how it decreases churn, and increases sales.

Pre Sales Support Will Bring Up Patterns Of Lost Sales

Everyone seems to think that their funnel and their website copy is absolutely awesome. In reality, it comes down to not knowing what you don’t know. There are usage patterns that will cause confusion amongst potential purchasers of your product, that you could have never imagined. By implementing a strong pre-sales support system, you will start to gain pattern recognition into what is causing you to lose sales. The best way to catch these issues is to implement live chat systems like Olark, a phone system like Grasshopper, or a simple pre-sales FAQ.

Example: With PadPressed, many potential customers wanted to see a working demo on their iPad. We thought we had this clearly stated on the Demo page. As it turns out, we didn’t. After five requests in a day, we realized that we needed to heavily emphasize the working demo portion in the copy. We modified buttons on the homepage and we highlighted the links to the live demos on the Demo page. It worked. There have been more clicks and more requests about this.

Build As If You Have To Support It

I’m stealing this quote from Kevin Hale of Wufoo, but it’s truly one of the most important product focused quotes I’ve heard over the past year. Whenever you want to add a feature, especially the nifty ones that may be confusing or buggy, think about the impact that will have on support. Also think about a feature’s implementation and how it plays into cross platform compatibility. For every feature you plan on adding, expect more of the following:

• Extra support ticket requests ie- Each feature will bring about way more support tickets that require more time, which is something you’re already strapped on.
• More pre-launch documentation ie- You will have to spend more time on Q&A, writing documentation, doing tutorial videos, etc.
• More complexity in your sales and/or fundraising pitch ie- Your cool new features have nothing to do with your simple problem/solution statement.

Triage Critical Requests Post Launch and Freeze New Dev

After every launch of PadPressed, there are usually one to two specific problems that are major issues. For our most recent launch, the timthumb library was being wonky with Wordpress MU + external images. Instead of adding some of the new things we had planned, we had to focus solely on releasing a major update for this issue. The adrenaline from a successful launch will lure you into wanting to do more “cool stuff” for customers. In reality, if you don’t double down on getting past the critical bugs, they won’t be customers for long.

The Knowledge Of The Customer Community Will Save You

If there’s a way to create a customer support forum, I strongly suggest it. It could be something like GetSatisfaction or it could be a private forum. Most problems that customers would normally open up a ticket with you for, will have been solved in the past and publicly available in the forums. I suggest that all tickets are made public and viewable by users. Another benefit of having a great community is the fact, that other customers will help out new customers and give suggestions. The math adds up over time. Here’s some math:

1. Assume each support request takes an average of 15 minutes to deal with.
2. You have a total of 400 support requests per month.
3. 50% of those support requests could be solved by having past knowledge public. (200 total)
4. That’s a total of 50 hours a month, which adds up to a lot of saved time, energy, and frustration.

Support Is A Reason To Charge

Support is a reason to charge, especially when dealing with a freemium model. As geeks, we may be able to do everything ourselves, but in the real world, most normals love to have their hand held or have someone on call to help them. You could charge for premium support or you can even bake it into your price. Apple’s genius bar and training programs seem free to customers, but they’re actually a good reason why Apple products command such a premium. Look at Zappos as well. They spend good money on providing a first class support experience and it’s why they’re able to do so well. Once again, THEY SELL SHOES. The support experience has allowed them to command a dominate spot in the market and differentiate themselves by selling shoes. Apple and Zappos’ models are indirect ways to charge for support. Many open source and freemium companies charge directly for support and make big bucks doing it. Some may say that this model doesn’t scale, but I say baloney. We’re a connected and distributed world where there is an infinite amount of labor on demand to help with support.

Escalate With Discretion

As a startup with strapped development resources, escalating issues to the development team requires a certain graceful balance. Certain critical issues and larger customers require you to bring issues to the attention of the core dev team. The problem is, attending to these issues can slow down new development and an already large onslaught of bug fixes. This is also another area where you can charge for a more advanced level of support.

They Will Calm Down

Odds are you will get the fanatical pissed off customer that thinks they are entitled to everything to going perfect or ELSE. Chill out and breathe. They’ve been burned by the pain that is poor service in the past and they want to make sure your little unknown company pays attention. Respond fast, help them out, and just hold their hand. They will likely calm down and become your best friend at the end of the day.

Be Directly Wired Into Support As A Co-Founder

Even if you’re lucky enough to have the funding/profits that you don’t run support yourself, you should be directly piped into what is happening with pre and post sales support. I have every customer inquiry for pre-sales sent to my phone instantly and all support threads pushed via email automatically. Some I don’t respond to as the rest of the team takes care of that, but I know every issue that is going on.  A culture where support is important needs to come from the top down.  If the co-founder of a company doesn’t care, then why should anyone else?  Set an example.

Email is a Sandtrap

Users and customers will undoubtedly email you asking for support. It’s not that you should avoid helping the customers or that supporting them through email is beneath you. It’s actually the worst way possible to deliver support. Conversations get lost in the shuffle and require cc’ing and sending emails to other team members. Keep email for pre-sales support only as that is a much easier way to deal with customers. Here’s the trick to deal with email support requests:

1. Take the issue they stated.
2. Create a forum thread with that issue and copy/paste their email exactly 
3. Respond to their email with a nice note, thank them for being a customer, and give them a link to the issue you opened. Make sure you let them know the following: a) We opened a support thread so we can serve you more rapidly and b) You get the benefit of having an entire community that may be able to help you.

Bad Support Won’t Sink You, But Great Support Will Make You Rise

Listen we all complain until the cows come home about Comcast and AT&T, but at the end of the day, we still have our iPhones and Cable. I don’t advocate bad support, but somehow companies get away with it. Maybe in a world of transparency due to social media that won’t be the case in 20 years, but it sadly is right now. That’s not the way to think about it. Look at it the opposite way: Having great support WILL make you rise above the pack. People will remember it and people will talk about it to others. That great experience will let you rise above the rest.

Don’t Skimp On Awesome Tools

As a startup and/or developer you don’t skimp on your equipment and you shouldn’t skimp on the software you use either.  $50 a month might seem a lot for a piece of software, when you’re running on ramen. Guess what?  It’s a long term investment that pays off in the end.  If the lifetime value of your customer is close to $100 and you lose 2 customers a month because your support is a mess due to stringing together email, you actually lost a net of $150 per month.  Don’t be pennywise and pound foolish.  Here are some of the good tools I’ve come across.

• SupportBreeze- SupportBreeze is by my good friend Mark Bao. It’s a great, simple, and elegant support ticketing system. It’s simplicity and workflows make it a fan favorite
• Wufoo- Wufoo is great for simple contact forms that can then be integrated into other systems such as MailChimp, SalesForce, and more. They can also be sent directly to your cell phone.
• SnapEngage- SnapEngage is a module that allows customers to ask for help and get live support.
• Olark- Olark is similar to snapengage as it also allows you to receive pre-sales support requests from customer currently browsing your site.
• Vanilla Forums- Vanilla forums is an open source piece of software that also has a hosted counterpart.
•  ZenDesk- ZenDesk is a support desk and support ticket item
• TenderApp is a knowledgebase and customer support application. 
• GetSatisfaction- GetSatisfaction provides user powered support forums with employee interaction. 
• UserVoice- UserVoice allows users to leave feedback on a site with bugs and new ideas. 
• Assistly- Assistly is customer support made easier and more affordable. I love this product and would invest myself. The workflow and social media integration is very smart. What are other ways startups can use support to increase sales and decrease churn?  Leave your victories, horror stories, tips, hints, and tricks in the comments.

You should follow me on Twitter @jasonlbaptiste.

Looking for other startup fanatics?  Request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group.  130,000+ members and growing daily.

Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter: @dharmesh.

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At 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the group payment startup WePay sent an icy message to payment giant, PayPal at its annual development conference in San Francisco. PayPal, a WePay competitor, has had negative publicity in the past around the issue of freezing some of its members’ accounts. WePay obviously wanted to let PayPal customers and developers know that they would not experience the account freeze issue if they were using the WePay system.

With a limited budget, competing against a giant in the payment industry, WePay elected to do a marketing stunt to get its message across. The WePay team wheeled a massive block of ice with frozen money and a message to PayPal customers and developers: “PayPal Freezes Your Accounts.” One minute after dropping off the massive block of ice in front of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, WePay employees were confronted by security. An hour and half later, the stunt was on the front page of TechCrunch, one of the most popular technology news sites on the web today.

More Than a Cute Story?

Sure, that sounds like a fun story, and I am sure the folks at WePay had a lot of fun doing it, but did it drive actual business results?

According to the WePay team, yes it did. The folks at WePay shared the following results with us from the days following the stunt:

    •    Conversions on the stunt landing page were 3x higher        than a normal day.
    •    300% increase in weekly traffic
    •    225% increase in signups

Those are pretty dramatic results. How did they do it?

Takeaways From a Successful Marketing Stunt

1. Have a Dedicated Landing Page – WePay had a dedicated landing page for its stunt: UnfreezeYourMoney.com. On this page, WePay had two separate calls-to-action for its buyer personas: new users and developers. This landing page converted at a 10% higher rate than the company’s homepage.

2. Be Ready to Make a First Impression – The WePay team had prepared for a spike in engagement. They were ready for more emails, calls, and tweets than normal. With lots of new potential users talking about the stunt, the team needed to be ready to respond and make sure it created a good first impression.

3. Have Fun With the Stunt - When you create something interesting, people always want to know how you did it. It is important to understand that the stunt is meant to be fun, and while you are putting it together, you should plan to take pictures to share with your community. For example, the folks at WePay documented the process on their blog.

What do you think of this stunt? The numbers seem to indicate that it was effective.

Save Your Seat: ROI of Real-Time Webinar with David Meerman Scott

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Thursdays and Fridays are great in this building–as I’ve noted before–because when SNL is “in season,” you can see selected rehearsals and promos as they happen in Studio 8H. Continue reading →

You would think by looking at this new MarketingSherpa chart that B2B marketers are more worried about generating quality leads than creating new demand for their products and services.  Of course, 13% more of those surveyed ranked this challenge as tops compared to last year.  But, every marketer – B2B, B2C or anything inbetween – should always be conscious of the quality aspect of lead flow to their sales team.  Perhaps marketers in 2010 are just more cognizant of the demand gen issue within their organizations and understand that without quality leads, sales cannot be successful.

What is not so readily apparent is the almost 26% increase in the challenge (2010 to 2009) of getting MORE leads into the pipeline.   That’s where this data is critically important.  And, adding to that large year-over-year increase is a 33% upward tick for the “competing in lead generation across multiple media” selection.

More – and Better Quality – Leads, Please. 

During the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2010 this week, speakers talked about how B2B companies were hard hit by the recession, and marketing departments took the brunt of it. Not only were their marketing budgets and staff cut, but the pressure to continue to feed the lead funnel was just as intense as it was before the recession hit.

So what did they do?  They turned from outbound to inbound marketing.  The trend shows that the majority of B2B organizations are increasing their marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics in order to generate more – and better quality – leads for their sales teams.

What is your organization doing to generate more leads? 

Learn How To Generate More B2B Leads

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You’ve heard time and again that posting frequently and consistently on your blog is one of the keys to generating traffic and leads.  Finding the time to blog weekly or daily can be tough – but there are some easy ways to get ahead of the curve so you can post with the right frequency at the most optimal times.

How often should you blog?

HubSpot’s studies of blogging prove that companies that blog more frequently have a higher likelihood of generating real customer wins from their blogs.  Companies who are producing great content at a consistent cadence usually plan for their success – whether through an editorial calendar filled by members of a team or with a single blogger who is crafting a lot of content at once and then publishing it in separate posts. 

What day or time should you publish & promote?

Once you’ve got that great content ready to share – why not publish, tweet or post it on LinkedIn / Facebook at the times most likely to help you achieve your business goals.  There is no ‘perfect’ time to post since your audience is unique to your business – just as your business goals are unique.  Here are a few results from studies that might help you decide when to schedule that post:

• Blog Views & Links – If you seek maximum readership to educate prospects and convert them with offers on your blog, then check out some HubSpot data that indicates 11AM is the time of day blog posts get the most views.  Other data suggests that just after lunch is ideal with Thursday as the prime day, but whichever study you adhere to, both say early morning isn’t optimal.
• Facebook Shares – If you want social reach, perhaps for a consumer product, then getting your content shared on Facebook might be a priority.  In that case, a recent study by Dan Zarella shows that posting on Facebook in the mornings, especially on weekends is your best bet.
• Retweets – If your aim is to increase brand awareness by getting your URL, name or brand in front of the most possible eyeballs, then perhaps you want maximum retweets.  The time of day that is most ideal for retweets seems to be in the 2^nd half of the work day and just as people are wrapping up in the evening.

Ultimately, your goals and audience are unique. So try starting with some of these guidelines and then do some testing to see if they work for you.  You may find that your audience or industry has a different pattern that you can optimize for over time.

Ready to schedule your blog posts?

Now you’ve figured out when you want to post.  If you choose post-dating to get organized, you can do a little bit of up front work to set each month up for success.  Instead of getting into the groove of blogging once a week, consider writing several posts at once.  Once you’ve gotten your brain into writing mode, it is much easier to crank out four posts.  Then you can input them into your blogging platform and post-date them to publish on a timed cadence to keep your audience and SEO fresh.  Each blogging platform handles this differently, but here’s how you could do it using two tools: Blogger & HubSpot.

Post Dating an Article in HubSpot

Jump in to ‘Create Article’ and  draft your post using the blog optimizer; this ensures you’ve crafted a keyword rich post that will help you rank on the terms relevant to your target audience. Save your draft and then use the ‘Advanced’ tab options to change the ‘Start Date’ to reflect the date & time you’d like your post to go live, then press ‘Publish’.  The post will be saved as a ‘Pending Post’, so you can sit back and enjoy watching your content roll out for the rest of the month!

Post Dating an Article in Blogger

The steps are similar and also start with drafting your post.  Next, save and select ‘Post Options’, then click the button for ‘Post Date & Time’ and type in your desired publish date, hit ‘Publish’.  Your post will be in your list of posts ready to go out as planned.

Get ahead of next month by keeping a list of ideas for several blog posts so that when you feel the urge to write again you’ll have some great content to kick start you.  Don’t let ‘lack of time’ or poor planning stop you from producing great content on a regular basis.  Use all the tools in your arsenal to find a blogging strategy that works for you and your company!

Try HubSpot for Free!

Want to improve your online marketing through Blogging, SEO, Leanding Pages and Analytics?

Start your free trial of the HubSpot software today!

Connect with HubSpot:

Continue reading →

You’ve heard time and again that posting frequently and consistently on your blog is one of the keys to generating traffic and leads.  Finding the time to blog weekly or daily can be tough – but there are some easy ways to get ahead of the curve so you can post with the right frequency at the most optimal times.

How often should you blog?

HubSpot’s studies of blogging prove that companies that blog more frequently have a higher likelihood of generating real customer wins from their blogs.  Companies who are producing great content at a consistent cadence usually plan for their success – whether through an editorial calendar filled by members of a team or with a single blogger who is crafting a lot of content at once and then publishing it in separate posts. 

What day or time should you publish & promote?

Once you’ve got that great content ready to share – why not publish, tweet or post it on LinkedIn / Facebook at the times most likely to help you achieve your business goals.  There is no ‘perfect’ time to post since your audience is unique to your business – just as your business goals are unique.  Here are a few results from studies that might help you decide when to schedule that post:

• Blog Views & Links – If you seek maximum readership to educate prospects and convert them with offers on your blog, then check out some HubSpot data that indicates 11AM is the time of day blog posts get the most views.  Other data suggests that just after lunch is ideal with Thursday as the prime day, but whichever study you adhere to, both say early morning isn’t optimal.
• Facebook Shares – If you want social reach, perhaps for a consumer product, then getting your content shared on Facebook might be a priority.  In that case, a recent study by Dan Zarella shows that posting on Facebook in the mornings, especially on weekends is your best bet.
• Retweets – If your aim is to increase brand awareness by getting your URL, name or brand in front of the most possible eyeballs, then perhaps you want maximum retweets.  The time of day that is most ideal for retweets seems to be in the 2^nd half of the work day and just as people are wrapping up in the evening.

Ultimately, your goals and audience are unique. So try starting with some of these guidelines and then do some testing to see if they work for you.  You may find that your audience or industry has a different pattern that you can optimize for over time.

Ready to schedule your blog posts?

Now you’ve figured out when you want to post.  If you choose post-dating to get organized, you can do a little bit of up front work to set each month up for success.  Instead of getting into the groove of blogging once a week, consider writing several posts at once.  Once you’ve gotten your brain into writing mode, it is much easier to crank out four posts.  Then you can input them into your blogging platform and post-date them to publish on a timed cadence to keep your audience and SEO fresh.  Each blogging platform handles this differently, but here’s how you could do it using two tools: Blogger & HubSpot.

Post Dating an Article in HubSpot

Jump in to ‘Create Article’ and  draft your post using the blog optimizer; this ensures you’ve crafted a keyword rich post that will help you rank on the terms relevant to your target audience. Save your draft and then use the ‘Advanced’ tab options to change the ‘Start Date’ to reflect the date & time you’d like your post to go live, then press ‘Publish’.  The post will be saved as a ‘Pending Post’, so you can sit back and enjoy watching your content roll out for the rest of the month!

Post Dating an Article in Blogger

The steps are similar and also start with drafting your post.  Next, save and select ‘Post Options’, then click the button for ‘Post Date & Time’ and type in your desired publish date, hit ‘Publish’.  Your post will be in your list of posts ready to go out as planned.

Get ahead of next month by keeping a list of ideas for several blog posts so that when you feel the urge to write again you’ll have some great content to kick start you.  Don’t let ‘lack of time’ or poor planning stop you from producing great content on a regular basis.  Use all the tools in your arsenal to find a blogging strategy that works for you and your company!

Try HubSpot for Free!

Want to improve your online marketing through Blogging, SEO, Leanding Pages and Analytics?

Start your free trial of the HubSpot software today!

Connect with HubSpot:

Continue reading →