How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Yes, this is the secret to how to sell more software. I’m the first one to break the sacred oath of profitable software companies and reveal the secret of how just 12 characters can make you significantly more money. Are you ready to hear it? Are you sure.....
OK here it is. Put your phone number on your website. Just like this:
It really is that easy, it WILL lead to more sales. If you sell B2B it will lead to bigger sales as generally people making large purchases like to talk to a human.
Now I know all the excuses you people use in not publishing a phone number. It’s all BS. I don’t care that 37 signals only does email support. I don’t care that you only do this part time and you can’t be there to answer the phone. I don’t care that you hate talking on the phone.
It’s time to suck it up, especially in this economy where people are going to be shopping around. Having a phone conversation puts you in a much stronger position with the consumer than just an email. Just having a phone number clearly available improves your product positioning in peoples mind. It implies you’re here to stay, you’re approachable, if they ever had a problem they could call. The biggest secret of all is that most people don’t call. We still only get a call or two a day on average and often no calls at all and we’ve been in business 4 years, are linked from everywhere and have a sizable customer base at this point.
So let’s go through your excuses.
1) 37Signals only does email support, why should I have to do phone support
Of course this one is the easiest. Because you’re not them. You will never ever ever ever be them or anything close to them. You’re trying to make a solid living. The chance of you hitting the jackpot is slim, don’t pretend it isn’t. You can’t tell customers to go scratch like they can. Every single potential customer is hugely important to you (or should be).
2) I only work on my business part time and am not there to answer the phone
Umm, so what. Get an answering machine or digital voicemail box. You don’t have to answer the phone every time it rings. Let it go to voicemail and respond once a day or when you get home from your day job. It’s a big myth that if you have a phone number you need to have someone there to answer it every time it rings. Sure that’s better, but having a phone number is still way more important than not having one and at this point everyone is comfortable leaving voicemail’s as long as you get back to people in a reasonable time (say 1 business day).
3) I’m a programming dork, I don’t want to talk on the phone
If you’re reading my blog you’re likely trying to be in business. In business you have to do stuff you don’t like doing, oh… 75% of the time. That’s just the way it is. If you want customers you have to understand your customers and the phone is a great way to do that. If you’re serious about having a business then working with people is going to be key to your success and the phone is a big part of that.
Listen, the phone is your friend. The phone is the key you making your business approachable to customers. It’s also how you’re likely to get some of your best customers, so bust out your website code and throw your number up there. The worst case scenario is you get lots of phone calls and if they’re not relevant you can always pull it down. On the other hand you may get great calls that lead to sales and happy customers. It’s worth a shot.
Discussion
Great advice and one I'm going to implement straight away.
Created by Derek Organ on 01.29.2009 11:03 am
Great, let us know how you make out with it.
Created by Ian on 01.29.2009 11:07 am
It defies common sense not to have contact information on EVERY page of your website. I hope that this article gets lots of exposure for the sake of every software vendor out there.
Best
BArry
http://IrishDev.com
Created by Barry Alistair on 01.29.2009 11:18 am
++100 Ian.
Always done this. People do appreciate it. Rarely had any problems, in fact only ever had one problem from a competitor who was, shall we say, a few cans short of a six-pack and got upset because I wouldn't engage in price fixing with him. In other words one jerk as opposed to the many paying customers over the years.
Created by Scott Kane on 01.29.2009 11:43 am
Ummm ... I don't know.
I agree with the notion, in general, and Antair does post it's phone number and other contact information on the website, but the number is more for sales and media inquiries rather than general support.
There are orders of scale at work here. For B2B orders, especially for mid-to-large cost point items, this makes sense more than for consumer based products. We're talking about comparing hundreds of phone calls per day vs. dozens. Support costs are not trivial -- and until you know the topic of conversation, you can't discern between support and a sales question.
Created by Andrey Butov on 01.29.2009 12:05 pm
Someone looking for support will probably hunt down your number though no matter where it's posted. A potential customer though probably isn't going to look to hard which is why the number right on the homepage is great for them. I would suspect if you already have a number up someplace that adding it to the homepage will increase sales calls and not add that many support ones.
Sure, if you're selling a $10 product maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe. But you could always just send them to a VM and then see what happens over a week. Call people back once a day and see how it goes.
Created by Ian on 01.29.2009 12:13 pm
Sorry to be pedantic, but didn't you highlight 14 characters?
Created by David Mitchell on 01.29.2009 2:49 pm
Yes I did. In my post it's only 12 though, I left out the 1- which generally you can safely do. Thanks for keeping me honest though 
Created by Ian on 01.29.2009 3:08 pm
It's also a great motivating factor to talk to a customer on the phone. We get the occasional call, usually when there is a problem with the payment system.
Listening to someone who uses your product and has a problem gives you a really great sense of how people are using what you're doing and tells you what you need to improve on. It's also a great way to treat someone really well, so that they'll happily recommend you to their friends. And it gets you away from the computer for a while, which is good too.
I'd agree - this one is a no-brainer. 
--david
Created by popup chinese on 01.29.2009 4:03 pm
This is so true! But I'm a little sad that you've let out that great secret. I was hoping to keep that to myself.
Created by Mark on 01.29.2009 5:04 pm
I think you'd want some sort of system to raise urgent calls, next day is fine for a sales call (usually) or a minor annoyance but no help for a mission critical software app that just chewed all your data ...
Created by welsh website hosting on 01.29.2009 5:51 pm
We're primarily a technical bunch here and none of us particularly enjoy answering the phone. I changed the ring on the business lines to be a ringtone from Money by Pink Floyd - that went a long way to getting us in the right frame of mind to answer the phone.
Roger
Created by Roger on 01.29.2009 6:04 pm
@Roger: You obviously haven't listened to the lyrics to that song.
Created by dude on 01.29.2009 6:42 pm
I count 14 characters for that phone number, including hyphens. Maybe you forgot the leading "1-"?
Created by Steve on 01.29.2009 7:14 pm
@steve Yes, we covered that higher up in the comments. Thanks though
@Roger I like the ringer idea
@Welsh Yes, that's true. A homepage phone number will primarily (not exclusively though) drive sales calls. You could use different phone numbers for sales vs support as a test which would be interesting.
Created by Ian on 01.29.2009 8:18 pm
I agree if you are going to be a "real business" you need a phone number, however reason #2 is a valid reason in my opinion. I had a phone number for ChimSoft and people would call it during the day when I was at work, and then by the time I got home, and returned calls no one was at their work anymore, this phone tag got a little shady. Then the people I did reach would want to have 30 minute sales conversations along with several follow ups, which with software at your price point it's worth it, but not at what I was selling for at the time.
Andrey is also right that people will use any number for support questions, so you have to at least be ready for that.
Created by Phil on 01.30.2009 9:05 am
This is absolutely true. At my previous startup, I, just like everybody else, totally hated the phone. It was disrupting my work and thought it was a waste of time. Most of the time, I wasn't picking up and let people hit voicemail instead.
Then one day I realized that people were annoyed by not being able to talk to someone and that I was losing sales because of this. I started picking up every single time and my sale volume literally tripled.
Even in this Internet age, it seems like the phone still has its place, whether you like it or not (I don't).
Created by Carl Mercier on 01.31.2009 7:11 pm
Hi, sorry if this isn't the right place to comment, but I'm using RSS Bandit and for some reason I can't get your feed anymore.
This is the error it gives me
Xml Failure
Refresh feed 'HelpSpot' failed with error: Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 267, position 75.
I think this started happening after you switched to Expression Engine.
Created by Jake on 02.13.2009 4:13 am