Ryan Shank and a colleague discuss aggressive outbound sales for a SaaS startup, including calling prospects on weekends when owners are less defensive. They cover tracking conversions with Google Analytics, managing burn rate, and how a quick demo closed a $450 sale by showcasing unfinished features.
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I was like, yo, but I had the footage. Yeah, I didn't. No, you're gonna have so much like blackmail. See, Nick's making cold calls. You hear him down there? Got him on the phone. I want to hear him pitch. I want to hear him battle. Yeah, now he is. He used to like— because I'll get on the phone and like, I'll like battle with people. I'll be like, what are you talking about? You don't want to do— are you kidding me? I was like, how much are you paying now? I was like, how many clients you lose? Like, I'll like go to war because like I don't give a shit anymore. Not that I don't give a shit, but I've realized that they like want to battle you sometimes. Yeah, they're like respected. They're like, alright. I was like, dude, if you just roll over, like— Yeah, don't roll over. Yeah, it's like fuck that. But the one thing I do want to figure out though is like about, about the burn. Like, alright, realistically, how much are we gonna burn to get us to like cash flow, break even? Just go to the kitchen in the back. There's clean dishes to make. On Saturdays you can get in touch with people. And the other thing is like a lot of people who have more of like corporate jobs or for instance like agencies and stuff, they're not gonna be at work But if we go after businesses directly, you text, like, if you text the phones, you can see when it turns blue, like their cell phone numbers or their numbers go directly to their phones.
Okay, okay, totally understand. We actually just partnered with Google Analytics and AdWords, so you would actually be able to track all the conversions.
What I'm talking about, we should do this!
Tuesday, did you have a quick time that we could grab 15 minutes of your time?
Every day, bro, whatever.
Tuesday at 10 o'clock. Okay, did you mind if I sent you a calendar invite just to confirm that? Okay, what's the best email I can get for you?
Bye. How about a Saturday, Tim?
Dude, she was like fucking fighting me.
You're gonna have so much like blackmail on me. So like this dude that I was talking to, he was literally— he's an HVAC guy. I'm sure the phone number was his cell phone. By the way, also their cell phone numbers and like literally when they sign up for things online, a lot of people are just using their cell phone anyway. So a lot of times their cell phone number is the number that we have. So it's like when you call, you're gonna be able to get them on the phone. The other thing is like even if they're not working, you're able to get in touch with them and then punt like a demo out, right? So it's like we don't necessarily need to not work weekends and I feel I feel like weekends are the time to, we can get in touch with them. They have time, they can talk to us, 'cause during the week everyone's so reactive. They're like in defense mode, and they're like, you know, doing stuff, and they're like having to manage their employees, but on weekends is when they can actually spend time on their systems, they can work on their business versus in their business. And that's why I think it's actually a good opportunity for us to set a lot of demos and get ahead and stand out. It's like, yeah, 'cause they understand, it's like, yeah, it's the weekend, we're like, yeah, I'm working too. We're willing to— I heard you say it to that one dude, you're like, yeah, I know, man, like I'm grinding too. Right? Yeah. And then we're gonna like stand out too. It's like, yo, you just called me out of the blue on a Saturday in mid-July, like beautiful Saturday on the East Coast. Then I feel like that stands out and then they're willing to, like even if they don't do a demo today, like they're gonna set it and then they're gonna remember us during the week when they're like, you know, hands up, super defensive, you know, probably typically wouldn't take a sales call. Now it's like, yo, I talked to you this weekend. How was the rest of your Saturday? Haha, blah blah blah. And then it's like, now we're able to stand out amongst the pack of people, by the way, that are getting like, these guys get like, Think about it, if you're a small business, you're getting called by like 10 times a day. They're trying to sell you payment processing, merchant fees, they're trying to, people are trying to sell you websites, local SEO, marketing services, there's like office people that are trying to sell you like printer paper and like trash bags and shit. Like people are trying to sell these guys stuff every day, so to stand out and like call them on the weekend and stuff, I mean, that's what we gotta do. So that's like what I'm thinking today. I mean, it's 5:30 on a Saturday and I feel like we had, even we didn't even hit it that hard realistically, We hit like, it was a chill session that we still produced 2 demos out of. Yeah, so it's like if you think of, we could have like tripled our output and got, had like a serious fucking day. So I'm like relatively happy. Plus we made a sale today, $450 that came from, actually that came from a demo on maybe Wednesday. Tuesday or Wednesday was the demo. The guy, we had to just get out some features, but that's the good thing about being small is that we can actually move really, really quickly. These other guys couldn't. These other guys would have taken them like 2 months to even get designs for those things. Like we had shit live that we were able to show showed them plus designs for some stuff that wasn't quite ready yet, and then we were able to win the business. That's it. That's the daily takeaway today. See you guys. Pff, pff.
