Why startups should use the phone

I think of the phone as one of the most valuable tools you can use during the unscalable part at the beginning of the startup.<p>To this day, a face to face meeting trumps all other forms of communication in sincerity and authenticity. If I&#x27;m willing to fly halfway around the world to meet you, it says a lot. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, a phone call means more than an email which means more than an SMS.<p>So yeah I think startups should use the phone, but I&#x27;m admittedly a bit biased since I&#x27;m so deep in the telecom industry.

Not sure why there&#x27;s such backlash against the idea of calling customers. You signed up for a service. If you&#x27;re at all serious, there&#x27;s a good chance getting a call right away will either 1) help overcome some stumbling blocks with activation or, 2) leave you with a feeling of personal connection. Both are good things in my book.<p>But yes, of course, no one wants to get a used car salesman calling them and stuffing a sale down their throat. That&#x27;s not what this post is advocating. But in case you&#x27;re worried (or not serious about using the service) there&#x27;s an easy way to avoid getting a call: don&#x27;t enter a phone number (or at least a real one).

I received one of these type phone calls from a company who had recently purchased an antivirus company we are in contract with so they were sort of in startup phase.<p>We were having major issues so I was happy they had called out of the blue promising to fix after I explained (we had no support contact info after the acquisition, old numbers were just cut off with zero notice to existing customers). After a month of emails, conference calls, and remote sessions we wound up back at square one with a product that does not work.<p>The kicker: he tried to upsell us to their new SaaS antivirus after being unable to fix our problems! Then they stopped returning our calls&#x2F;emails leaving us with a broken product we spent a lot of money on.<p>Bottom line is I&#x27;m no better off for them having followed the advice given here. I think they didn&#x27;t care and that initial phone call was only a sales call.<p>Please never call me ever again, you are scum the same as pop up surveys on corporate websites. If I have a problem I will call you.

I was a bank teller in college -- we would call new account signups after one month of having signed up to double check that they got their debit card, checks, etc., just to make sure things were going ok.<p>People were blown away that we were doing this, and the ones that had something go wrong were really grateful we were proactive in helping them before they had even asked for it.<p>It was a quick 2-3 minute conversation, but really was extremely valuable in client retention.

Don&#x27;t bother calling me unless I&#x27;ve explicitly opted in. Otherwise I&#x27;ll be the first to cancel your service.

I hate to be called, I prefer to receive an email and check it <i>when I have time</i>, yet many companies seem reluctant to use email and prefer to disturb me over the phone. Sadly for me I have ended up developing a (really) defensive stance, because most of the calls I receive are &quot;spam&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I don&#x27;t mind receiving a call when something <i>that really requires my attention</i> happens.

Calling is definitely harder to scale than a simple email campaign, but the effects of calling are much better. I experienced it both as the prey and the hunter :) I think every startup should at least try it and then decide whether it&#x27;s worth the effort to scale it.

I&#x27;ve had bad experience with company calling, namely, it was TechNet people. (I guess, that was more of customer retention, though.) But still, they demonstrated one of worst example of how to call their customer. For example, they would call me every other day until I respond, and they never left a single voice mail.<p>If you&#x27;re going to call me... 1) If I don&#x27;t take a call, leave a voice mail, telling me who you are, and leave a number I can actually call back, and 2) Don&#x27;t check back on me after I already said no.

We call every sign-up, but only about 5% answers the call. While we leave a nice voicemail message, and offer a free setup session, very few users take us up on it. Almost none of the people that we leave a voicemail with call us back.<p>Are there are metrics available for companies that do this? So far I have not seen any increase in LTV from the people that we do reach.

You don&#x27;t even have to wait for the signup either - you can often get them on the phone after a well-written cold email. I run a marketplace for trips planned by locals (Tripzaar.com), and when we are recruiting locals, we try and get them on a call before they even sign up. Then once we get on a call, we&#x27;ll actually listen to their problems, offer to help, then manually create their account for them. Not only does this get more people onto the site, but we get a considerably more loyal community as well. I&#x27;ve heard this &quot;sign them up yourself&quot; strategy work very well for quite a few other companies too.<p>It definitely won&#x27;t scale, but we&#x27;d rather have a few people who really buy in than thousands who wouldn&#x27;t feel comfortable dropping us a line with suggestions.

Depends on what the service is. I like it if Windows Azure calls me to see if they can help me with work. If I&#x27;m just trying out your social networking app and you call me, I will log out and delete your stuff because I don&#x27;t want that sort of relationship with you.

If anyone plans on using this strategy for their start-up, I hope that they&#x27;re explicit about it on their webpage. That way, I&#x27;ll know which SaaS start-ups to avoid like the plague.<p>Not everyone is an extrovert.