how do you deal with people if you are not a company?

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Icecube

Icecube

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Mar 14, 2007
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I recently emailed some persons that I knew they would be interested in a new website I'm launching and one of them got back to me saying blah blah, asking some things and requested to be sent his rep contact info

what the hell do I send him if I'm the only guy behind the whole site?

I'm thinking to just tell that the support is only given via email/support form (that's true because I'm out of home 8am - 8pm)

how do you/would you usually deal with this stuff? (it's not a crap sales page trying to generate clickbank sales etc, it's a classified site)

yes, I know it sounds gay, but I'm curious..
 


Don't try to play it like you are a business. If you are solo, show that you are solo, but act promising. Some people actually do prefer to work with someone who is there to answer the phone, even if he does not have a firm.

My advice is to slowly build up a team, designer, programmer, SEO, grunt worker and definately get a blonde bimbo for the phonecalls.
 
You could outsource different departments, or hire independent contractors. Even if you are an individual, you can still keep everything under your umbrella from a project management standpoint. Put the customer inside a system like basecamphq.com, and simply bring together the customer with your outsourced contacts. That way it looks like you still control everything, even though you personally are not the one helping the customer. There's no reason to tell your customer nobody is home except for you, but that's up to you.
 
Get a phone IVR from a place like ringcentral.com or ureach.com (not affiliated with either, but I prefer ringcentral (and they have an affiliate program as far as I recall)).

Have someone record a pro or pro-sounding greeting. If you don't know anyone with a good voice for this, there are several people online that will record a script for you to mp3 for this purpose, it only costs about $30-50 to get a great one.

Get mail forwarding established somewhere professional looking.

Not affiliated, but I have used: Mail forwarding in Las Vegas, Nevada - $99 street address, mailbox, maildrop

This will allow you to give out a regular looking street address, with no mailbox number, etc.

When in the situation in the past, I've simply told people "I'll be handling your account for now since we've spoken, and here's my contact info." Give them your new fancy IVR number, and add a 3-digit extension (not 101, or 1!) for yourself.
 
Hire 3 part-time Indian workers, register yourself as an LLC company, get a cellphone as your company work phone and a mail drop as your business address.

Pretend to be a company or ...

Be straight up and honest with him.
 
Easy -
"Before we go any further, it's currently just me handling all the enquiries. Is that going to be a problem for you?"

If he says "yes".. you say "we should probably talk about that.... why don't you start", and let him get his objections out of the way. He'll ask you questions about support, stability etc.

If he says "no", check "are you sure? some people aren't comfortable with it...", then proceed.

Much better than the alternative.... you put on a show, it goes fine until customer finds out, customer feels deceived, it goes downhill from there.
 
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Nothing wrong with being a one man show, but I'd get one of those VM services if you plan on selling to business over the phone. It makes you look like you have a little more stability. In my experience, more than one person has been reluctant to sign up with my directory site, beacause they were not positive we'd be around a year from now.

Anything you can add to streghthn your credibilty helps.
A phone number
A mailing address ..etc...

When I started doing this ==> http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/21700-recipe-200k-per-year-job.html

I got a number through GotVmail. Paid a guy i found on google 50 bucks to do a really professional welcome message over music.


For sales press 1
For support press 2
For all other inquires, press 3

All 3 options came straight to my cellphone or my office phone that I run my other businesses out of.

Now that we have salesman spread out all over, They login to our CRM program and set themselves as active when they want to get sales calls. They are queued up and the incoming slaes calls are rotated.

It's not that expensinve but it helps a lot I think.
 
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outsource, hire....
I appreciate your suggestions and I would consider these options as well as mailing address, answering messages etc
thing is: it's just one of the tens of sites I have, it's NEW and has no traffic, there's no real business behind it
I can't give phone support because I'm almost always out of home and work on my own stuff in the evening and at night

thanks for your replies guys, very helpful points of view here ;)
 
Icecube said:
I can't give phone support because I'm almost always out of home and work on my own stuff in the evening and at night

thanks for your replies guys, very helpful points of view here ;)
Click to expand...

Nothing wrong with letting the IVR drop to voicemail boxes that you return calls on later.

To respond to some of the posts above, I certainly wouldn't actively mislead customers/clients but there's no reason that you need to announce to the world that you're a one man show. The more polished your outfit looks, the less chance it'll even cross their mind.
 
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