Ryan Shank onboards a new sales rep at PhoneWagon, a Techstars startup that helps agencies prove inbound calls come from their campaigns. The team is pushing a Content Week of Medium posts to drive free-trial sign-ups and just added a direct-purchase option that generated automatic conversions.
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Get a $5 umbrella. Get another $5 umbrella. Good morning, Wagoners. What's going on? It is Monday. Today's gonna be a massive week. We got Brett Johnson in town from Ohio. He is our new sales rep. He's gonna be doing an SDR role for us. I'm super excited to get him started. He has— his follow-up game is mad real. That's why I hired him. So we're gonna be going over training this morning. We're gonna go over like who I am, who the company is, our product, our competitors, and then tactical things that we need to do to get on the phones to start start calling into these digital marketing agencies. We also have a bunch of content going out this week. We're calling it Content Week. Mike did an awesome job getting all these like Medium posts up, so we're pushing them and we're just going to be pushing a lot of content because we're trying to drive free trial signups on the website because we, we kind of got encouraged because we added the ability for people to purchase directly from our pricing page and we saw some auto converts, which is like the coolest thing in the world when humans don't have to do anything and then people buy your stuff and then use it. Insane. If you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up, no outside funding. We're going through Techstars in New York City. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagon-mears. Welcome to the vlog. I mean, the ultimate goal is to get the demo to show up. It's kind of two paths. So they're either using it or they're not using it. If they're not, you gotta educate them on why they need to be using it. They need to show their clients that the phone calls they're getting are coming from them or else their clients aren't gonna know it and they're gonna get fired is the pain point. You know, they wanna retain clients. Do you wanna say that again, John? I wasn't recording here. Pitch the Medium articles. It's good content. Definitely recommend sharing. Actionable, authentic, original. Just like that shot was authentic. Bam! The next time, instead of saying X, like, just say a dollar amount. Just be like, so, like, for example, you're spending $1,000 a month for your client. It's their money, you know. You said X, just say like $1,000. And like, $1,000 is a pretty typical, like, ad spend, like, ad budget. So you can use that. All right, let's do it again. Like every single one of these is like a client or a potential client for us. Ooh, I just got a guy to engage in a conversation. He's using, uh, I said, how much do you pay for work? And he goes, I get a deal. What do you offer? I offer a better deal. People get together, they make deals. I beat any price. Just get a $5 umbrella. No, I got one. I got one and I left it in an Uber. Don't get another $5 umbrella. Yeah, so this guy that chartered, he basically bought on Friday and he chartered on Monday, so he was never really a customer. He basically got spooked because he didn't want to pour in all of his numbers because he reached out to some of his clients and he just thinks it's too risky to pour in all of his numbers. So it was never really a client because he never used the platform, right? Because really, they're doing retention to your lifetime value. They're just like not a part of the calculations. This is— I would track it separately. This becomes a problem. I would track it as like a cancellation. It's like basically like a quick refund. Yeah, that's like a separate thing. It's not that typical. We just got out of this KPI meeting where we just update all the other companies and Alex, which is the managing director at Techstars with our metrics, and they kind of go over everything. So one of the things that they asked me is like, hey, what can you do to just like increase everything that you're doing? Again, like I told you guys earlier today, is that we've been focusing on this like content, getting leads to come to the site. And the other thing is just like hiring SDRs to get more demos, to get more sales. So overall, good day. We're gonna leave the office, it's around 8 PM right now. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Peace!
