The 30 Second LinkedIn Job Change Experiment

Ever experienced the Facebook Happy Birthday phenomenon? You know, on your birthday your Facebook wall gets plastered with dozens of “Happy Birthday!!!!” messages.

Except the people who post Happy Birthday on your Facebook wall are, well…not exactly the ones that’ll be at your actual birthday party!

Here’s a similar trick you can try with Facebook’s business coworker, LinkedIn.

Log into your LinkedIn profile and change your title. But don’t make any material change to it…maybe become a “Technology Consultant” instead of “Consultant”, or “Assistant to the Regional Manager” instead of “Assistant Manager”.

Wait 24 hours and check your inbox.

Instead of dozens of Happy Birthday messages on your wall, you’ll get dozens of “Congrats” emails in your inbox. And again, they’ll mostly be from a bunch of people you don’t care about. A great way to ID the salespeople in your network too!

 

Continue reading →

Customer support is a great way to differentiate yourself as a SaaS startup. Instead of support being an annoying cost and burden, approach customer service as a competitive advantage.

When customer service becomes a competitive advantage you then run into the tough decision of how and where to to provide support. How do you truly make it a competitive advantage – walking the walk instead of talking the talk – while not diverting too many resources away from the rest of your company?

While sites like Zendesk and Desk.com streamline support, at the end of the day there’s still a large degree of manual effort required for some of these channels:

• Phone numbers
• Live chat
• Detailed how-to articles
• Community forums
• FAQs
• Dedicated contact email

Adds up quick, right? So two weeks ago we turned off one our customer service support channels at Less Meeting – the Community Forums.

However our dedication to customer service remains unchanged as this is just part of the natural evolution of a Community Forum.

Continue reading →

Buy-In, by John Kotter

A great idea is in fact a bad one without any support. Buy-in is critical to save good ideas from getting shot down.

Everyone needs buy-in from someone. Founders are no different; they too need lots of buy-in.

Buy-in from potential investors. Buy-in from new employees…from early customers…from partnerships. You get the point…

Buy-In, by John Kotter, is for anyone who’s interested in how well-planned arguments can be strategically used to derail seemingly well-intentioned ideas, and then more importantly how to effectively counter those arguments.

In reading Buy-In you’ll also start seeing these strategies all around your daily life, just as I did with the recent GOP attacks toward Obamacare.

Continue reading →

Have you ever sent this email?

Hey Team,

Can someone take care of XYZ? Should only take a minute or two. Thanks in advance for the help!

Sincerely,
You

If so, what happened?

Did you see a mad dash between your team to help you out? Any go-getters take care of that quick task? Anyone even respond at all?

Didn’t think so…

Continue reading →

You WILL Lose Customers

Stephanie wrote in to Less Meeting today with the following, disappointing request:

I am writing in to cancel our subscription. Should you wish to discuss our reasons for canceling or need any additional information, please feel free to phone/email me. Otherwise, kindly cancel our account and refund our purchase price.

What to do?

We could kindly say “No” as it states in our ToS. But does that ever result in a positive customer experience? The reality is that the  policy is little more than CYA and rarely gets used.

Or we could oblige, sending over a full refund ASAP. Sure that would leave no room for complaint, but we’d still have an unsatisfied customer, not to mention the lost revenue.

Continue reading →

Are You a Handyman?

Do you know a good handymen?

Do you have a go-to guy that’s dependable AND you know can solve about any problem?

Growing up that was my Dad. The epitome of a DIY-er, I vividly remember the projects we’d undertake. Installing a car stereo, replacing spark plugs, building furniture…you get the idea.

Continue reading →

Over at Less Meeting we’re constantly thinking about pricing. If you follow startup blogs or hackernews you’re intimately familiar with this topic already.

Nathan Barry recently wrote a guest post on Jason Cohen’s A Smart Bear blog  about An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales that helped clear up some of the questions I’ve had lately.

Stop telling me to just “charge more”

It seems that the common theme in SaaS startup pricing is that 99% of the time you’re not charging enough. This seems easy to fix, right? Just hike up your prices like the Hill Climber on The Price is Right!

But simply charging more hasn’t been that easy a change for us. Lots to wrap our heads around before we test or implement anything.

• What’s that mean for our (currently) free mobile apps?
• Should we have a free version at all?
• Should we even offer a single user version?
• What’s the top tier we should be charging?
• What tiers should we even have?
• …and on and on

So while “charge more” is a nice catchy phrase, we’ve found there’s a lot more to it – and Nathan’s article helps to spell out some of the details. Continue reading →