| Agree with this on many levels, however: * Right now (as with many startups) we don't have the bandwidth to take out a 30 minute gap to speak with an interested customer - even if we wanted to! We just physically don't have enough people and can't hire fast enough already * The cost of senior developers doesn't work for support or sales calls. And we don't want to have junior developers on the team this early because of the management overhead * Talking on the phone effectively and efficiently requires a whole different skillset to technical, and it comes with experience and training * The temptation is to outsource call handling in the early days, but from first hand experience, I know how easily these sub-par 'virtual assistants' can kill your brand as an educated customer will quickly see through the veil of BS that these sort of people put up. This one is a total no-no for tech startups. If there was a virtual assistant who specifically worked with tech startups, and had great product knowledge across the industry and could speak the language, now THAT I would pay for * The prices and margins we're talking about don't always make sense for a sales call. How can I justify a 1 hour sales call on a $9 /mo subscription service? Forgetting all customer acquisition costs, hosting costs etc. I'd have to keep that user for 10 months just to break even on that very first phone call I personally think the different business model of SaaS means traditional sales methods like phone calls where the customer decides the time of the call just don't work. One-to-many methods like webinars and screencasts, and pre-scheduled Skype calls for BIG leads, are the only things that make sense. For support via phone, that's something which we CAN accommodate but as an upsell incentive. For example, on our $299+ plan, yeah sure you get a private support number, because I can justify the $90 per hour it costs for that engineer to speak with you. Sorry to disagree on as many points as I'd agree on. However, I'd STRONGLY suggest looking into the "Tech Startup Friendly Call Answering" service with your Beta users as a possible pivot. An end-to-end solution, rather than a sexy PBX solution, would catapult the relevance of this to startups in my opinion and puts you as a market leader rather than in a market with 10+ strong competitiors |