
Calls are exhausting. Even the shortest calls take at least 5 minutes of prep, 20 minutes of worrying about, and 10 minutes more to recover from. As an introvert like me they can ruin a productive day and limit my creativity.
The trouble is limiting calls is a skill they donât teach you at school. They donât tell you that youâll spend most of your day on useless meetings when you apply for a job. After your 3rd or 4th calls of the day youâre tired, stressed, and worst of allâyou have nothing to show for it.
At HelpDocs we try to avoid demo calls at all costs. Can it be written down instead? How about an email? What about a Loom? There are loads of different ways to get the information across without jumping on a live call.
In this article Iâll explain a little bit about how we got here and how we struggled to find the right approach for us.
Creating a Limited Call Culture
How did we get to a limited call culture? Unsurprisingly we did a lot of calls and hated it. And weâre not the only ones.
There's a camera watching you constantly and it's stressful. Listening to audio can be draining for long periods of time.
"Being on so many video conferences is exhausting. Thatâs because many of the nonverbal cues that we typically rely upon during in-person conversationsâeye contact, subtle shifts that indicate someone is about to speakâare out the window."
â Laura Dudley, a behavior analyst at Northeastern University
But it wasnât the pandemic that caused us to limit calls. We actually started limiting calls way before that. When HelpDocs was barely a year old I found myself constantly on sales calls, vendor calls, and customer calls. I felt like I was living for the next video chat and getting nothing useful done.
Maybe I was a terrible salesperson but nobody ended up converting đ¤ˇââď¸
Donât get me wrongâsome calls are helpful. Getting on the phone with customers to learn about their company and experience with HelpDocs is insightful & exciting. Having a catch up with team members to understand what theyâre working on and catching up on a personal level is worth the time.
This limiting call culture extends to our team as well. We donât want our team to spend time on the phone unnecessarily. To burn out just by sitting in front of the webcam all day. We donât do daily standups and we work asynchronously.
Learning to Say No to Demo Calls
The hardest part of starting to limit calls is to say no. I understand this can be tough if youâre part of a big organization that relies heavily on calls and meetings. Iâm afraid Iâm no help with advice there.
For us the challenging part was saying no to demo calls. Itâs reasonable enough for someone to expect to get on the phone with someone at HelpDocs and ask questions.
Two things were wrong with this.
We found people had a list of questions we just werenât prepared for. If a potential customer had 10 queries, weâd quickly forget them, not have a concrete answer for them, or ask them to send them over email at the end of the call. This quickly defeated the purpose of a 1-on-1 call.
The second was that we didnât know what to show them. What was the customer interested in? HelpDocs is an extensive product and it seemed a little pointless to go through the entire app without direction. It quickly turned out that potential customers didnât really know what they wanted to see.
I canât say it was a total waste of time but it certainly wasnât the best use of time for our team. We had to learn to say no which was the most challenging part.
When we started to say no to demo calls we were quite apologetic. This was a mistake. Weâd be sorry we couldnât do a call or weâd understand it wasnât what they were expecting.
After a few months we found people to be pretty angry with us. Theyâd demand to know why we were blocking them from speaking to a team member. How did they know we were legitimate if they couldnât even talk to us?
It was crushing to hear the feedback. Were we in the wrong? We didnât have the time anymore to jump on these calls but everyone else in the industry does it. Should we just get on the phone?
A Treacherous Middle Ground
In the end we thought we found a middle ground. Weâd have group calls with multiple people at a time which meant people could book into sessions and weâd show them around in groups. They could ask questions together and weâd ask them what they wanted to see in a pre-demo questionnaire.
These went a lot better in terms of time but people still had many questions that had to be answered over email after the live demo. It seemed pointless to have a live demo, a 14-day free trial, and answer questions by email about the product. It was too much as a small team.
One great thing to come out of these calls was a sense of community between different customers. They had totally different questions and found one anotherâs questions to be super interesting.
This was a much better scenario than doing 1-on-1 demo calls but it still took a significant amount of time.
Finding a Solution that Worked
After we tried the group demo route we found ourselves in limbo. We didnât want to resume these group demo calls for the time being but we didnât have an alternative. Thatâs when we decided to record a pre-recorded demo video instead.
We decided to record a demo video with all the features weâd usually cover like multilingual, content organization, and settings. This meant we could showcase our platform without spending too much time going over the same parts with different people.
And it worked! We could cut down the time we spent on individual demo calls without offending anyone and provide a great experience all around.
And what if a customer insists on a call? We ask them to send over a list of questions by email instead. This gives us time and space to think about the best answers we can provide and it allows us to send over links to our knowledge base.
Being Happier by Protecting Time
Finding the right approach was super tough. It took us a while to get used to saying no rather than apologizing profusely. In the end it was well worth it because we got to spend way more time talking to current customers and working on the product.
If youâre a small team swamped in demo calls here are a few tips:
- Find a better way to âbatchâ calls so you have more time free. You donât need to do individual calls. We used a piece of software called Livestorm to book people into groups.
- Instead of hopping on calls to answer questions do it over email instead. Just ask them to send over a list instead.
- Learn to say no. Donât let prospective customers take your time when you donât want to give it.
In a perfect world weâd spend time with each customer and give them the ideal answers over a call.
Weâre not living in a perfect worldâespecially right now. Weâve found giving ourselves permission to say no to calls gives us the mental space to breathe and provide exceptional support by email instead.