Development of cloud service sales. First experience

Hello! I want to share our first experience related to the development of sales of Zingaya web-telephony cloud-service. In order not to describe again why our service is needed, I suggest everyone to get acquainted with its website , and I will go straight to the point.

Strategy selection

To begin with, we did not receive any investments, we initially made everything with our own money, that is, bootstrappili, and we continue bootstrapping. From this it follows that we do not have too much cash and we need to use them as efficiently as possible. Placement of contextual advertising by keywords, we tested one month and realized that for our service it is inefficient and there is not enough money to debug such a channel to attract customers. It’s better to keep silent about the cost of media advertising on the resources that our potential customers visit, even if we received investments :). We have a fairly new service; in fact, the market for this type of service is not yet fully formed, and we need to convey information about our service to a large number of people. As a result, we came to the conclusion that we need to sell our service to large companies that have a large site attendance, that is, in fact, have gone the way of direct sales to large companies (direct sales). The idea is this: some companies will catch up with large ones, and we will process those that do not catch up in other ways in the future, when additional free funds appear or we try to use other people's sales channels. Small ones need to be processed en masse to make it make sense. There are a number of advantages in the direct sales model. Firstly, this is a great way to find out what your customers really want (this is the most important information at the initial stage). Secondly, you are not dependent on partners and you can flexibly change your offer to meet customer expectations. Thirdly, you get all the money from customers and do not need to share with partners :). Fourth, it will allow you to learn how to sell, which is certainly a very useful skill.

Choosing the right verticals

Understanding that not all companies need the “Call from site” function, we began to look for verticals in which our service will be in demand. For this, you need to ask yourself a series of questions and determine: for which companies the service will bring the greatest benefit, whether this client is solvent, the size of this vertical, how difficult it is to sell to such a client, who is a competitor in this segment, etc. For example, in our case, it is desirable that the company handles a large number of customers through a call center (many calls), and it is desirable that the call center number be clearly indicated on the company's website and the site should be visited. A very big advantage of our service is its availability around the world, the main thing is to have the Internet, so if a company has traveling clients, then this was also a plus for us. The main competitor is still number 8-800. After the analysis, we identified several main verticals: financial services (banks, insurance), airlines, large e-commerce / retail and travel companies.
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Collection and analysis of the first statistics

We managed to put our function to collect the first interesting statistics on the site of the following companies:

• Airline Siberia (S7)
• Bank Renaissance Credit
• Qiwi payment system
• Softkey online store
• Megaplan
• some more travel company sites

I must say that the statistics helped us a lot, we started to represent what approximately% of calls from the total number of calls to the company can go through our function, what is the approximate average call duration, geographical distribution of callers and got a lot more other useful information. After analyzing it, we were able to more clearly formulate our message for one or another vertical. In the future, we will prepare relevant case studies and post them on the site. It should be noted that when working with large customers, the sales cycle can stretch for months, so you need to constantly develop as many leads as you can, because not all of them can ultimately agree to purchase the service. Sales is a system that needs to be built and debugged, boasting that we have already achieved this, unfortunately, we cannot yet, but we are working and we hope that in the end everything will work out.

Price Policy Correction

Despite the fact that we were selling to large customers, small ones also pulled up and it turned out that the minimum tariff plan that we offered earlier ($ 30 per 500 minutes per month) was too expensive for them, and they didn’t need so many minutes, so we changed tariff plans for Russia and made a cheap plan ($ 10 for 150 minutes per month), which is currently subscribed to by small companies that sell something over the Internet. In general, the main task is to determine the minimum price threshold of entry for your service.

PS If you liked the article, we will be happy to discuss it in the comments and, if the response is positive, we are ready to continue writing similar articles in the future as we gain experience.