THEY SAID WHAT?!? | VLOG #13

And they sent back a pretty, like, not nice email that was like, you guys are way, way more expensive, you're like not even up to par with them, and all this stuff. It was kind of like a blow. What's up guys, good morning. Today is July 12th, it is the third day of Techstars. We're super, super excited you guys are joining us and following along in our journey. We've had an awesome two days so far. Today's gonna be an amazing day. If you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building up Bonewagon, building our company, going through Techstars, startup accelerator in New York City. We're daily vlogging every single day, 7 days a week. So I appreciate you guys coming along. Today's gonna be an amazing day. Follow along. Peace. So how is the, uh, how's the call game going?

Call game's going pretty good. Getting good responses from agencies. They all seem pretty receptive to it, open to learning more.

How many, how many demos did you set yesterday?

5. If you, if you've used call tracking before, you kind of know the value. It is just going to be simpler and easier to use. So I'll also include some available times that we have. You just let me know what works. I'll show her a calendar invite. Again, it could be tentative. I know how the summer could be. And we'll go from there. Sound good?

Cool.

All right, third demo of the day.

Good luck with that demo, man. Following the script, you're not following processes on the phone when you're answering those new customers and you're fumbling it, right? And it's like, you— we did a lot of work to even get that phone call to be— to get generated, right? So we have custom templates in here. Hey, thanks for calling. I'll call you back in 20. So basically The whole idea behind this is like, if there is a missed call, send them a text message right away. Make it look like it's a personal text message and make it look like you got the call, but you can't, you know, get to them. And what that does is it intercepts them from calling the next business on the list while engaging them in most likely their preferred communication method anyway, which is messaging, right? Which is texting. So quick update, I just got off of a demo with a customer— or with a lead, I guess, a potential customer that Nick reached out to. It was actually really, really good. They're one of the top agencies in the Midwest. They're in Chicago, have about like 80 to 100 clients. Hey guys, so one issue that we had today, I want to just kind of go over something with you, like just to keep it real, be relatable. Nick, our sales rep, SDR, he's going outbound, he's talking with customers, he's the front lines. One of the things that he ran into, so one of our, one of the leads he was working asked him, you know, how do you guys compare to this other company, this other competitor? I told him, I was like, look, they charge, you know, $100 before before they even include any like usage and stuff. And then they sent back a pretty like not nice email that was like, you guys are way, way more expensive. You're like not even up to par with them and all this stuff. It was kind of like a blow. I don't know. It's like one of the things that we're trying to figure out is like, you know, we need to be able to position ourselves against each of our competitors in a certain way. Like some of them were cheaper than, some of them were not. Some of them were easier to use, some of them were not. So it's like, How do we, you know, one of the things that I'm personally dealing with is like, how do I, you know, train everyone on the team really to know like what the competitors are doing and their products and stuff and then how to position ourselves against them. So it's like on me to train them and to get them that knowledge and then keep them up to speed on an ongoing basis, you know, because I think there's a balance between like, I want you guys to know the landscape, but also it's like, hey, let's just like pound it and, you know, kind of follow the process that we have in place. So the daily takeaway today, one thing that I do want to go over with you guys is the importance of continuing to push things forward. So what I mean by that is, you know, it's like if you ship something, whether it's a product feature or you start to roll out a new process or something like that, it's really, really important to continue pushing other things forward. So in sales, you know, that's what happens here is if you make a lot of dials and you set a lot of demos, This is kind of like the top, and then you go down into this valley. You'll make a lot of sales that came from all of that effort, but then while you're making the sales, if you don't continue to feed your pipeline, you'll hit this valley. So there's peaks and valleys, and that's why they say sales is a roller coaster. And the same thing can happen in your business or in your product or whatever it is, because it's like if you roll something out, it's like you spend a lot of time, a lot of time, then you roll it out and you're like, ah, you feel relieved. You can't get that, you can't get that sense of comfort. You can never be comfortable. You want to continue pushing things forward. So what we're doing is, you know, we're pushing out, you know, new sales stuff, we're hitting new lists, we're building new lists, we're building new features, we're building new features. As we're building them, you know, the next thing is stacking, and we're still planning. So the most important thing is to continue, like, as you're in the weeds and doing something and tactically actually doing it and shipping it, to be looking, you know, 10 steps ahead. You always want to look ahead, ahead, ahead. Right now what we're thinking, I mean, we're mid-2017, we're at the beginning of Q3, One of the things that I'm thinking about already is like, all right, how— what are we doing for Q4? What are we doing in '18? What are we doing in '19? So that we can plan ahead so that we don't ever, you know, get comfortable and say, oh, we shipped a product. You know, at first I actually ran into this problem. I was like, oh, I shipped a real product and I have real paying customers. You know, for the first like month or two, I thought that was kind of cool because, you know, a lot of people will just sell based on like a sales deck or something, but that's not good enough. Like, the thing that we're trying to do now is actually win in every single department. We're trying to win in product We're trying to win in marketing, we're trying to win in sales, we're trying to win in content marketing, we're trying to just be super, super productive so that when people look at us, they're like, how the fuck are they putting out that much stuff? How are they shipping product? How are they doing sales? How are they doing— how are they even funded? How are they putting out daily vlogs? Like, I want to just come through and in every single department beat every single other company. You know, don't be happy or over-celebrate. Like Nick Saban, by the way, from University of Alabama, as he just won the national championship, he already is talking about how he's got to get ready for the the next season. Literally on the field as the like glitter is like, like floating in the air, and he should just be celebrating at least for one night. He's already like, we got to get ready for next year. And that's what we got to do if you want to be a winner, is you don't celebrate. You don't ever take, take days off. You don't ever, you know, think about your winnings too much until you're ready to really think about your winnings. But why, while you're still playing the game, I think it's really important to, to not get satisfied. So that's the daily takeaway today. I'll see you guys tomorrow. All right, now what?