In the last month I’ve cold called 159 businesses. Full transparency, I have not closed a deal yet.
Below I’ll share some reflections… what I’ve tried, how it’s going, what I plan to try next. Perhaps it will be helpful to another entrepreneur out there.
So, why isn’t this business working?
That’s a question for you, the reader. I’m open to suggestions or ideas… drop me an email at ryan@vibbn.com.
After I finished building the first version of Vibbn.com, I made a commitment to myself to not do any more development / coding until I had my first 3 paying customers. As of now, 3 paying customers is my goal.
Admittedly, I broke my own promise after finding 2 small bugs. I fixed them quickly and got back to selling.
Ideal customer profile:
Vibbn, the software system I sell, provides a career website and recruiting system, enabling candidates to apply to jobs and recruiters to see a list of people who applied.
My ideal customer is a business that has the following components:
- hiring at least 3 people per year due to either growth or turnover
- spends money to promote their job openings on places like indeed and linkedin (which is normaly $20-$50 per day)
- potentially uses recruiting firms to source candidates (which charge 10-20% of an employee’s first year’s salary… that the company pays, not the employee of course!)
- oes not have a dedicated career website linked from their company website yet.
- their company website gets a substantial amount of visitors / organic traffic.
A company that fits the above criteria will see a cost savings if they use Vibbn.
I came up with a value equation to try to help customers put some numbers down and consider that Vibbn will actually help them save money:
Value equation: We believe Vibbn can reduce recruiting costs by half, by enabling customers to rely less on job boards + staffing firms.
Current recruiting costs = job board spend + staffing firm costs =
Plugging in some reasonable numbers above, let’s assume a company hires 10 people per year, it takes them an average of 2 months (60 days) to hire someone for each open role, and they spend $30 per day on job boards for each open role. Let’s also assume that each employee hired has a salary of $75,000 per year, 3 out of 10 of those employees are hired through staffing firms, and the staffing firm takes a fee in the amount of 10% of an employee’s first year salary.
Job board spend = $18,000
Staffing firm costs = 0.1 * 75000 * 3 = $22,500
Total = $40,500
These costs are not insignificant. With Vibbn, by leveraging a company’s existing website traffic to drive potential interested job candidates to a career website, we believe companies will not need to pay as much money to promote ads on job boards and they won’t need to hire staffing firms as often to find candidates.
We believe a 50% reduction in spend is reasonable.
And given Vibbn’s cost of $100 per month, the yearly cost of running Vibbn is well worth the investment because there is a potential positive ROI.
Sales Process: List Building
I typically find these businesses by running a search using Mergent Intellect / D&B Hoovers, filtering by revenue, employee count, location, etc. to find companies.
Prospective customer segment demographics:
I filter for companies between $15 and $100M in revenue across all industries, with greater than 50 employees across the United States.
The reason for this revenue size is that I believe they are big enough to get value out of my product, but also small enough that they might not yet be using a one of my competitors (Vibbn, the product I’m selling, provides a recruiting software system with a few core features).
Targeting businesses with over 50 employees serves the purpose of suggesting that they do at least some hiring on a recurring basis, and are more likely to have a need for the product.
Company research:
Once I run a filter / search, I end up with like 900,000 businesses in my list. I start from the first company on the list, and as I mentioned, I’ve called about 159 as of today.
The first thing I do is check the company’s website. All I’m really looking for is to see if they have a career website setup yet.
If they don’t, then they’re a prospect, and I add them to my call-list. About half the companies do end up having a career site already, and I have not yet been calling them, because they’re usually using something like ADP, Workday, iCims, or one of the other hundred competing Applicant Tracking Systems out there. I’m thinking it’s highly unlikely that I will rip and replace a well-established software system from one of the big competing firms.
For the actual prospects on my call list, I do a quick read over their website’s About page to get an idea of what they do.
Then I simply pick up the phone, and call whatever number they have publicly available on their website.
These are small companies, and about 5-10% of the time that number ends up ringing an actual decision maker, someone like the Owner or General Manager.
The other 95% of the time I get the receptionist on the line or no one answers.
Why are my prospects so nice?
Before I share my call script, I’d just like to say that I truly believe I am getting EXTREMELY positive responses from my prospects.
Literally no one I’ve called has been rude to me and I almost never have them hang up on me.
This suggests that perhaps my pitch is quite good, but maybe I simply don’t have product market fit?
Or do they just feel bad for me? In any case…
Sales Process: My call script:
Introductions
“Hi, this is [state my First + Last Name].
If someone wanted to apply for a job at [Company Name], what does that process look like?”
(Say the above SLOWLY, clearly, and pausing briefly between each of the first few words… I feel that slowing down my voice gets the person on the other line to pause, and take a minute to really listen to my call)
Then, I let them answer. They usually initially assume that I want to apply to a job, and respond with something like “Well, what job do you want to apply for?” or “What skills / experience do you have?”
After this, I give them my pitch:
“The reason for my call is I was interested in setting up a dedicated career site for [Company Name] so that your hiring team can post jobs and candidates can apply directly from your company website. Who would I need to work with if I wanted to submit a proposal for something like that?”
Say above at a faster pace, with a positive tone of voice, a slight chuckle at the beginning, a smile on your face, and a sense of excitement.
At this point they will usually say the department or job title of who they think is the decision maker. Keep in mind I am still speaking to the receptionist 90% of the time. Sometimes they will give me their name and offer to transfer me, but not always. They usually take down my information. I always offer to send over information to them by email.
Decision maker conversations:
Sometimes I get lucky and actually get the decision maker on the phone.
When I have managed to make contact with the decision maker, my pitch above is pretty similar, but each conversation does go slightly differently, and I always try to contextualize my statements to what the other person has already told me.
Most of the people I talk to say things like,
- “we don’t hire much”
- “We don’t hire at all”
- We use indeed and job boards
- “We had one setup but don’t use it”
- “We recruit by word of mouth”
- “We’re a really small company and don’t need that but thanks”.
- “We do’t need to hire for another 6 months..”
I always try to mention things from my value equation I shared earlier.
I don’t have a script at this point. I’m just trying to set next steps and ask questions to understand more about the challenges the company has.
I say things like: even if you aren’t hiring today, by getting a career website setup now will enable you to build a pipeline of candidates so that 6 or 12 months down the road, when you do start hiring, you have a list of potential people to start screening.
Other strategies
I have promoted Vibbn’s website / landing page on places like Product Hunt and EveryATS so far. I have a signup form on my website and have had 1 in-bound lead who has not answered my calls nor called me back. I have called him once, left a voicemail, emailed him as well… all of this happened last week. I will follow up, though. (Sorry if I sound like a complainer here or sound like I’m making excuses… even writing this down is giving me some more ideas.)
I also have emailed proposals over to some of my clients. In the proposal emails, I offer a 3-day setup and then $100 per month afterwards.
What will I try next?
I plan to look for commonalities between the companies I’ve had the most high-quality conversations with.
I aim to see if any of the 159 companies I’ve called on so far has anything in common with each other. Perhaps, certain industries are more likely to need this type of system?
I have also improved my sales script a bit over the last couple of days.
Changing my pitch to an implied “No”, because a lot of times people who are getting cold-called feel the need to go against whatever a sales rep says, as opposed to go with whatever they say. I am thinking to try something like, “So, you probably aren’t even in need of any help recruiting but I had to call you…”
Finding influencers that talk about recruiting out there. Reaching out to them to see if they would be open to some kind of affiliate deal where I pay them per revenue generated.
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