It helps salespeople get more sales

Every day and across the world, salespeople make prospecting phone calls. My name is Sylvain Courcoux and I used to be one of them: I cold-called my way out of homelessness. It was in Silicon Valley where I worked in the mortgage industry for 6 years, cold-calling just about every day with a phone and a binder; no CRM. After my stint in financial sales, I started a mobile marketing company to connect local businesses and their customers via SMS. To scale that company we hired about 200 salespeople throughout the US to sell our service door-to-door; it didn't work. A better strategy would have been to put 50 salespeople in a room and make a million phone calls but the investors didn’t want to hear it. In a nutshell, I was fired from my own company and left with the idea of using my cold-calling experience to build the prospecting software I had always wanted because when I looked at the market for telemarketing software, there was nothing I liked.

Call it prospecting, telemarketing, cold-calling, telesales or inside sales: it’s all the same job. You make 100 to 300 phone calls a day to find people who didn’t know they needed your services. There are two aspects to the task: making the calls and following-up. Imagine dialing the phone hundreds of times a day: 99% of calls lead nowhere. Part of the difficulty is staying focused because you never know if the next call will be the one that’ll make your day. And in addition to the boredom and frustration of making cold-calls comes the problem of managing the follow-up. Prospecting is not an event, prospecting is a process that requires making lots of cold-calls, sending lots of emails, and then remembering everything you do as you go along. A real pain.

The goyaPhone is everything a salesperson needs to prospect, in one complete package: it combines the phone, the email and the CRM. For starters, the dial button saves salespeople the trouble of manually dialing each phone numbers. The other hassle is sending prospecting emails so with the goyaPhone, users create email templates to avoid endless copy-pastes, especially in the early stages of the sales cycle when the initial emails are often the same. Making phone calls and sending emails is important but what matters even more is what happens after: the follow-up. Traditional CRMs help salespeople remember their sales activity but in order for a CRM to remember anything, salespeople must manually enter their sales activity into the CRM. Called someone? Log it in the CRM. Sent an email? Log it in. Called someone but they didn’t pick up? Log it in. To the frustration of cold-calling, CRMs add the pain of manual data entry. On the other hand, the goyaPhone combines the phone, the email and the CRM into just one tool that automatically saves every sales activity as it happens: no manual entry.

The goyaPhone makes the work salespeople did 6 months ago count today. For instance, 6 months ago a sales person had a great 20-minute sales conversation with a prospect who even agreed to receive an email, but who just wasn’t in the market at that time. Today, the salesperson forgot about that prospect: 3 hours of cold-calling to find him and 20 minutes of high-quality sales time wasted? Not with the goyaPhone: in just a few clicks, users can find sales opportunities based on the work they do every day. Now some people will look at the goyaPhone and its 4-color palette and say "it doesn’t look like a professional business software, it looks like a toy", without thinking that this might actually be the intended purpose. Using efficient web design, gamification techniques and the psychology of colors, I think the goyaPhone reduces stress, keeps its users in a good disposition for the few meaningful sales conversations of the day and increases the motivation to make more calls. CRMs are data-focused. The goyaPhone is user-focused. If the goyaPhone can make cold-calling not only less frustrating but also more efficient, gamified and, dare we say, addictive, then salespeople will have more prospects, and more sales. That’s what the goyaPhone seeks to deliver: everything salespeople need to prospect.

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