8 ms·

Show HN: Cold Call Manager

57 points by soneca 12y ago

_mtr 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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?
mleonhard 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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!
  - mhb 12y ago
    The inquiry about the cost may have been a too oblique suggestion that you need to tell what it costs on the web site.
  - kosei 12y ago
    $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 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        Exactly. Bottom tier should be $49, with another tier up at $99, and possibly a top "enterprise tier" at $199.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      If $10 is too much to spend on a tool to help you acquire new customers you are probably not doing enough business to invest any money at all in tools. A lead-to-sale conversion should net you a very large multiple of that $10 if you're doing outbound telemarketing otherwise you'll never make back your investment in time in the first place!
rrggrr 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Great idea your second option. Thanks!
yongparkk 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Better than Evernote: try Salesforce, a Developer account is free. It has saved my brain many times.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- aninteger 12y ago
  You may also want to check out Blitz LeadManager, InsideSales, or Velocify Leadmanager.
drewcrawford 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - drewcrawford 12y ago
    > actually I was thinking about people who do not have the discipline to properly register all the relevant info after every single call For me at least, I take notes during calls in a notebook. So recording the info isn't hard. It's actually an important part of my procrastination workflow, because if I don't have my notebook handy I "can't" make calls, ha ha. The hard part is more about planning followup calls and actually making them. I've tried using issue tracking systems with due dates for this, but those are both at once overkill and underkill. Overkill because they have way too many features and inevitably get infected with things that issue tracking systems are actually built to track. And underkill because they don't have things that sales calls need like "snooze this alert until the next overlap of my office hours and the contact's business hours".
  - 12y ago
brassattax 12y ago
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 12y ago
  All references are from Watchmen. Just a little bit of fun while writing copy
oonny 12y ago
looks good; Cant trello be used to do something similar? how is it different?
serf 12y ago
I don't feel as if this gives me anything over trello, which is free. Is there anything i'm missing?
DoubleMalt 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      (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/enterprise_sales https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...
CameronBanga 12y ago
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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sdfjkl 12y ago
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?
dmix 12y ago
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.
- pnathan 12y ago
  I felt literally nauseated after about 10 seconds.
- carrotleads 12y ago
  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.
lukasm 12y ago
1. I can see text after 15 seconds. I though it was broken (Chrome, Mac OS X) 2. Too much text.
elwell 12y ago
Could benefit from new logo design
ultimatedelman 12y ago
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.
AaronFriel 12y ago
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.
sami_b 12y ago
or you can use Trello If you need to integrate with other apps, think about Zapier or IFTTT
hluska 12y ago
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!!
hayksaakian 12y ago
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)
Serow225 12y ago
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 :)

57 points by soneca 12y ago

_mtr 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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?

mleonhard 12y ago

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 12y ago
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!
- mhb 12y ago
  The inquiry about the cost may have been a too oblique suggestion that you need to tell what it costs on the web site.
- kosei 12y ago
  $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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Exactly. Bottom tier should be $49, with another tier up at $99, and possibly a top "enterprise tier" at $199.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    If $10 is too much to spend on a tool to help you acquire new customers you are probably not doing enough business to invest any money at all in tools. A lead-to-sale conversion should net you a very large multiple of that $10 if you're doing outbound telemarketing otherwise you'll never make back your investment in time in the first place!

rrggrr 12y ago

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 12y ago
Great idea your second option. Thanks!

yongparkk 12y ago

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 12y ago
Better than Evernote: try Salesforce, a Developer account is free. It has saved my brain many times.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
aninteger 12y ago
You may also want to check out Blitz LeadManager, InsideSales, or Velocify Leadmanager.

drewcrawford 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
- drewcrawford 12y ago
  > actually I was thinking about people who do not have the discipline to properly register all the relevant info after every single call For me at least, I take notes during calls in a notebook. So recording the info isn't hard. It's actually an important part of my procrastination workflow, because if I don't have my notebook handy I "can't" make calls, ha ha. The hard part is more about planning followup calls and actually making them. I've tried using issue tracking systems with due dates for this, but those are both at once overkill and underkill. Overkill because they have way too many features and inevitably get infected with things that issue tracking systems are actually built to track. And underkill because they don't have things that sales calls need like "snooze this alert until the next overlap of my office hours and the contact's business hours".
- 12y ago

brassattax 12y ago

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 12y ago
All references are from Watchmen. Just a little bit of fun while writing copy

oonny 12y ago

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

serf 12y ago

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

DoubleMalt 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    (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/enterprise_sales https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...

CameronBanga 12y ago

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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sdfjkl 12y ago

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?

dmix 12y ago

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.

pnathan 12y ago
I felt literally nauseated after about 10 seconds.
carrotleads 12y ago
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.

lukasm 12y ago

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

elwell 12y ago

Could benefit from new logo design

ultimatedelman 12y ago

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.

AaronFriel 12y ago

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.

sami_b 12y ago

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

hluska 12y ago

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!!

hayksaakian 12y ago

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)

Serow225 12y ago

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 :)