Tools for early startupsTips and learnings from Exotel's experience

Contents

Introduction

Tools for

Sales

Marketing

Customer support

Social Media

Finance

Team Management

Design

3

7

14

17

21

22

24

Introduction

@exotel

An emerging economy like India sees an average of two startups registered every day. The startup ecosystem in India is believed to be the 4th largest in the world, right after Israel and is expected to grow by a signi�cant margin by the year 2020.

While being an entrepreneur looks lovely and glamorous from the outside, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Building something from ground up requires something more than just talent and capabilities. With only 24 hours in a day and about zillion things to get done, e�ciency is of paramount importance.

Life at Exotel was pretty similar too in the early days. 3 techies came together to build a world-class cloud telephony platform. But the resources we had were limited. At one point, the same people were building the product, answering customer calls, making sales pitches, �xing bugs and what not.

What came to our rescue were a bunch of fantastic tools that we used. Not all of them were free. But we learned to prioritise and get the most out of every tool we used.

This eBook offers a quick peek into all the tools we have come to rely on at Exotel and have used over the years to sharpen our capabilities across verticals. We will tell you about every cool feature we found and used, every neat hack tried and the success (or failure) at getting the tasks done.

The idea behind this is ebook is not give you idea on how you can use free tools. But to take a step back and help you identify the kind of tools you’re going to need and give you options and tell you what’s worked for us.

We’re giving you a glimpse into the early days of Exotel and how we grew.

1

@exotel

Tools we’ve covered in this ebook

2

Sales

@exotel

Selling is one of the �rst challenges that every startup has to cross. While getting those �rst few paying customers is about networking and selling within your circle, there comes a time when you have to start casting your net wider.

It is important at this point to have a process and tackle sales in a method-ical manner.

When we hired our �rst sales person and started selling Exotel actively, we had to start thinking about a sales process. One of the starting points of this process was making sure we had a clean record of our customers and our prospects. We used to maintain our this database on Excel sheets. It worked just �ne for the �rst 50 clients or so. At this point, the team grew and so did the number of salespeople in the team. Excel sheets started failing us.

CRM

We wanted a CRM that would be a repository of information about all our customers. If someone at Exotel wanted to know something about a customer, all they had to do was to look them up on our CRM. Wanted it to be a place that held all the answers.

So, here’s what we were looking for:

We considered a bunch of CRMs, but we �nally went with Pipedrive.

Fantastic APIs (automation was a big part of what we were trying to do)

Easy on the pocket (early stage startup, of course)

Easy to customise (we wanted it to be ours in every respect)

Scalable (of course we were going to grow)

3

@exotel

Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

Pipedrive was a natural choice for us because of their APIs.

As mentioned earlier, we wanted a robust Customer Relationship Management system that provides information on everything we need to know about a client. With this in mind, we pushed a lot of information to Pipedrive. This a list (not an exhaustive one) of information we pushed to Pipedrive:

One of the coolest hacks we built on Pipedrive was when a customer signed into their Exotel account; they could pick a time to talk to his account manager. We integrated Pipedrive with Google calendar to enable it to book a slot on the account manager's schedule and add a task to Pipedrive.

Customer information (the person who signed up for the account)

Comprehensive information about the company

Exotel usage details - calls, SMS, logins, etc

Recordings of all their conversations with Exotel

A copy of all the email conversations we had with the client.

A proper record of the activities done with the client and a list of the upcoming events to be done with the client.

Information about the deal status

4

@exotel

We also did a lot of custom coding to ensure a smooth transition of account ownership from the sales person to the account manager once they �nished their free trial and paid up.

Other tools we evaluated - Salesforce, TeamGate, Zoho CRM, SalesJunction.

5

@exotel

Tools for customer conversation

Exotel is primarily an inbound company. So, we have an inside sales team that talks to every customer who signs up for the product. And obviously, we use Exotel to make these calls. But since we’re covering Exotel under customer support tools, we are not going into the details here. But one of the things you have to �gure out is this -

What is going to be your primary method of communication with your customers?

You can choose phone calls, emails, chat, or even all of the above. But you need to have one go-to channel of communication. The tools you will need to use will also depend in large part on that decision.

6

Marketing

“A great product is nothing without great marketing to back it up.”

I’m sure someone has said that. If not, we’re saying it now. The right kind of marketing is essential for the success of a startup.

The advantage that tech backed startups have is we can support our market-ing with data. Strike that, our marketing has to be backed by data.

I’m sure a lot of people outside the tech startup world have never heard the term A/B testing. But the cardinal truth is that you can only improve what you measure, and you can’t track what you don’t measure.

So, when it comes to tools for marketing, let’s get the usual suspects out of the way �rst:

@exotel

Freemium

Our website is hosted on WordPress. We have a paid theme that we have customised. The reason we picked WordPress is that we are a content-centric company. It made sense for us to have our website on a platform that was easy to customise and edit for everyone across the team. Word-Press is easy to use and doesn’t have a steep learning curve. There are also a lot of plugins you can use (free and paid) to customise the WordPress experience. All of this makes WordPress a no-brain-er for lean teams.

7

@exotel

Free

This is the most basic tracking mechanisms every website should certainly have. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has a website but isn’t using GA. Google Analytics is the most fantastic free tool because it gives you a tonne of information that you can act upon. It tells you where people are coming to your website and what they’re doing. Even if you never master all the complicated reports available on Analytics, the basic reports give you enough data to work with.

For example, this is one of our favourite screens to look at every day

This is Google Realtime and it tells you how many people are on your website currently and what they’re doing. It’s a fantastic tool to understand how users are interacting with your site.

8

@exotel

Free

When you’re a small team, it becomes necessary to share resources, documents and everything else that you may need in your everyday job. We swear by Google Drive and it does a fantastic job. As I mentioned earlier, we are a content-centric company. And Google Drive (with sheets, docs, etc.) makes it very easy to collaborate. We use it for writing, note taking, storing documents, and sharing. It is a very convenient way to even work across teams.

We even wrote the content for this book on Google Docs. The process of getting inputs from the team and getting the �nal edits done was a breeze on docs as well.

Suggesting (like track changes in Word) is one of my favourite features.

9

@exotel

Freemium

No one is above a silly grammatical error or a typo. While Google docs, Word, etc. o�er a basic level of spell checking, we always need more when we’re writing for a larger audience. And, not every-one on the team has the same level of writing prowess.

Enter Grammarly. It’s the best thing for writers since sliced bread. Even the free account o�ers a through screening and is a great tool to have. One of our favourite things about Grammarly is the fantastic weekly report you get.

Other tools you should check out: Hemingwayapp (fantastic editing tool).

Kissmetrics is one of the pricier tools we use. And it’s also one of the best tools available to under-stand your user’s behaviour.

This used to be Kissmetrics’ tagline:Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. KISSmetrics tells you who’s doing it.

This is the most accurate description of Kissmetrics and what it does. You can track the actions of every single user on your website. You can track user behaviour based on events and tie it back to your product purchase and usage pattern. For products with a free trial period, you can track very valuable information on what your users �nd helpful on your website, what they’re doing during the free trial period, etc.

Paid

10

@exotel

Every company that signs up for Exotel’s free trial is assigned a score based on how they found us and their interaction with our product and website. This is called a marketing quali�cation score. (We will talk about this in detail at another place because this a vast topic in itself ) Kissmetrics helps us track user behaviour that is used as a part of the score.

Similar tools you can check out:Mixpanel, Flurry

11

@exotel

Freemium

We o�er a free trial of Exotel for 15 days for users to test the system completely before making a decision. We need to use this window very e�ectively to wow the customer by showing them how Exotel can change the way they do business.

As a product, Exotel can be daunting because of the vastness of its capabilities. There is an entire range of things Exotel can do. To make this a little easier for our users, we set up a drip email �ow that introduces aspects of the product that is relevant to their business based on what they want to do during the trial period. For example, if they are interested in setting up an incoming call centre, we send them information related to that and some case studies on how other companies have used us for the same. We also help them with targeted information on how to use the data from their Exotel account.

To set up this drip-email system, we used MailChimp. It was a good way for us to communicate with our customers and understand their needs better.

12

@exotel

Paid

Intercom is a tracking and a communication tool. It helps us track and understand customer interaction with our product. It also a simple point communication tool that helps with in-product messaging, chat and emails.

When we started using Intercom, the intent was to track user behaviour inside the product and use it to send event-based messaging. Since we tracked all of our user information on Intercom, we decided to run a small experiment.

When we did an a/b testing with our MailChimp account, we �gured that the delivery rates and the open rates were better when sent via Intercom. The main reason for this is that emails sent from intercom landed in the "Primary" tab of Gmail rather than the "Promotions" tab.

So, we have now moved away from MailChimp and use intercom for our drip emails.

13

@exotel

Other tools you can use -Aweber, Sendgrid, Mailjet.

Social Media

Social media is one of the most e�cient ways to connect with your customers, whether it is to �aunt a win, brag about a milestone or o�er support. Plus, it is the fastest way to connect with hundreds of potential customers at once to showcase what you can do for their business.

So, we did an audit of all the social media pro�les out there, and we zeroed in on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.

Twitter was a natural choice because it was the medium that everyone on the founding team was on. Facebook worked because it was an effective medium to build a viral effect and get brand Exotel a lot of eyeballs. Google+ worked because of SEO. Linkedin was necessary for us as a company.

14

@exotel

Bu�er, the now ubiquitous social scheduling app, was a good way to integrate all our updates in one place and at one go. We stuck to the free account, but even that made our lives in�nitely easier. We only had to decide what we wanted to go out and when, and Bu�er would take care of it for the entire day. Sometimes, even two days, since the free account allows up to ten updates on each of our four identi�ed social media pro�les.

What we like best is that Bu�er o�ers valuable insights into how our posts are performing on each channel, across a single dashboard.

Obviously, posting on separate media pro�les was not only time- consuming but also left us lurch-ing in the dark about what exactly was working on various platforms.

So, in came Bu�er. esting (like track changes in Word) is one of my favourite features.

Freemium

15

@exotel

Free

As mentioned earlier, Twitter is our social media platform of choice because everyone in our founding team and the core team are on Twitter. We saw this medium as an excellent space for forging relationships and interactions with other people in the startup ecosystem.

However, Twitter on the web has limited capabilities. For a more user-friendly experience, Tweet-deck is the tool of our choice.

How it works:

Tweetdeck allows tracking of terms and hashtags relevant to your industry. It’s also designed to allow the tracking to be super-easy by bringing it all together on one interface.

16

@exotel

Other tools you can look at for social media management:Hootsuite, Echofon, Seesmic, CoSchedule (particularly useful if you have a content platform).

Here are some more marketing tools we’ve tried over the last 5 years. But aren’t going into detail about:WebEngage, Visual Website Optimiser, Qualaroo, Survey Monkey and Dropbox

Customer Support

Paid (with a 15 day free trial)

For an early-stage startup, it is important to be accessible to customers. An open channel of communication with your customers is one of the most essential things you need to establish when you’re �guring out product-market �t.

At Exotel, we believe in eating our dog food. We are one of the biggest users of Exotel.

For an early stage startup, here are a few ways in which Exotel can help you:

Gain customer con�dence:

Even when we were working out of a home o�ce with 5 people doing all the jobs, our customers never knew that. When they called us, they were always greeted with a professional IVR that asked them to select the team they wanted to talk to and connect the call to the right people. In fact, even today, for the number of customers we serve, we have one of the smallest customer success teams ever. This is possible through the right kind of automation and having a clear IVR is the �rst step.

17

@exotel

Typically, people use their mobile phones to handle customer calls in the early days of the company. Exotel’s features capture all the typical loop-holes of handling customer service on a mobile number - call misses on the cell phone, missing a call record of your conversation or feedback from your clients.

While the points mentioned above are mostly right for early stage startups but those of you who have a few customers (say, 10-50 paying ones), Exotel opens up a lot of possibilities.

Using a centralised system to talk to customers allows you to

Monitor calls for quality

Use real customer conversations to give feedback to the team and train them better

Understand agent productivity

Track call patterns and �gure out your busiest times

Gather customer feedback

Integrate calling into the core of what you build - apps, website, etc.

Improve operational e�ciency by maintaining SLAs, not missing calls

Establish product-market �t:

We used to have endless conversations with our early customers to understand their feedback on Exotel. These discussions helped us understand what we needed to build vs. what we had built. We always used Exotel for these conversations because the recordings of the calls were accessi-ble for later use. System Monitoring:

We set up automatic alerts that would trigger an SMS and a call to the team if there were any issues with our website or the product. If there were usage spikes that crashed our systems, we were able to respond even before our customers realised the problem.

18

@exotel

If you run an e-commerce or logistics startups that have a �eld workforce as well, you can improve your operational e�ciency to a great extent:

We have scaled Exotel over the last 5 years to the extent that we now handle almost 3 million customer conversations every day.

USP of Exotel: Well-documented Rest APIs, 24x7 support, detailed usage reports and call analytics.

Safeguard customer privacy by anonymising their phone number

Do COD veri�cation calls before delivery

Delivery status noti�cations

Proactive customer communication on order status

Proof of communication calls by delivery person in the case of a failed delivery

19

@exotel

If you’re an early stage startup, come and join the Exotel Startup Pack family. The idea behind the startup pack is to support startups with minimum resources and help them explore the power of telephony.

Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

While phone calls were at the crux of our customer support, we wanted to o�er email support as well to supplement it. To begin with, we used Gmail to manage all support queries. Not surprising-ly, we soon realised that it was impractical to try to scale on a mailbox. That’s when we started looking out for a helpdesk software.

The early days were, well, the early days and so we couldn’t a�ord FreshDesk for more than one dedicated agent. When short on cash, always do jugaad. We paid for one user and came up with a bunch of hacks to make it work for 5 users.

We used "tags" with usernames of all our support people (which was pretty much the whole team at that point) to measure things like Service Level Agreements. It wasn't the most accurate way to work, but we made it work for us.

At the peak of our jugaad, we even tried to build features like gami�cation of support using Fresh-desk (it comes with freshdesk when you pay for multiple users, but we sought to do this outside the system).

Freshdesk eventually shut us down, and we had to pay for multiple users. But the good things is at that point; we were able to a�ord multiple users!

We use Freshdesk to measure the following for our support function:

1. SLA2. Agent productivity3. Resolution of issues

Other tools for ticketing:Helpscout (we love their blog), Zendesk, Desk.com, Groove (we love their blog, too).

20

@exotel

Finance

Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

When we started out, we had one admin person maintaining our balance sheet manually. Natural-ly, it took up a lot of time and e�ort, and we were looking for ways to automate this.

Around the same time, Quickbooks launched in India. Their APIs impressed us, and we were their �rst customer in India.

We use their APIs extensively and have managed to automate the entire bookkeeping process.

Team Management

When you’re less than 10 people in the startup, you don’t need any tools to keep the team in sync. All you have to do is stand up from your seat and yell, and that’s exactly what we did for a long time. But as we grew rapidly, the yelling business wasn’t practical.

21

@exotel

Freemium

We wanted a software for project management. We need to keep track of the pending tasks and know who was working on them to ensure we did not duplicate tasks. One of the �rst tools we tried was Asana. We spent a fair amount of time integrating Asana into our daily process.

One of the best features of Asana was that we could look at a calendar month and see how much we had achieved over the entire month. It gave us a sense of accomplishment and kept us feeling appreciated.

But, over time, we kept adding tasks on Asana but did not follow through on the status. The work was getting done but we weren’t updating the status of the tasks. So, one day, when we looked at Asana, it had become a dumping ground for tasks. And the number of open tasks we daunt-ing. While this is not a proud thing to admit, we abandoned Asana because it was past the point of �xing.

Even after we abandoned the tool, for a while, we had the illusion of everything going �ne before we realised that the chaos was back.

22

@exotel

Freemium

After Asana, we tried Trello. We still use Trello for a bunch of team activities.

Trello is a good way for us to keep track of things like roadmaps as it has a very visual representa-tion of the task. It is also very simple to categorise tasks and know exactly what everyone in the team is working on. The user interface provides a visual dashboard to brainstorm ideas virtually and display your thoughts in a stream.

For example, we use Trello to manage our content calendar.

It’s a great way for us to visualise our content pipeline and know exactly what who’s working on.

23

@exotel

Free

The marketing team currently uses Basecamp to keep track of our tasks and our roadmap of tasks.

The most useful feature for us is the “Daily check-in.” At 5 pm every day, every person in the marketing team does a small update on the day they had. This particular feature supports the idea of keeping the entire team informed and involved without the need for micromanagement. Also, a remote working member is never left feeling isolated with this regular “check-in” feature.

Other tools: Wrike, Quip, Smartsheet.

Design

Designers are always a scarce resource in any startup. In fact, they are almost a luxury. For a company like Exotel that was built by a bunch of engineers, we survived without a designer for the longest time. Two tools became our absolute favourites when we didn’t have a designer.

24

@exotel

Freemium

Not enough can be said about our love for Canva! Canva is one of the easiest tools to use. It has umpteen templates to help someone without any background in design lay it out fairly well.

Even today, we use it extensively to make quick graphics for our blog and social shares. Unsplash and Canva are a formidable combination.

25

@exotel

Free

If you’re looking to build an entire website that has basic functionality, you can do so without any tech or design background. When we launched exotel.org, we used Weebly to create the entire site. It came together in less than two days.

If you’re looking to get something set up quickly, Weebly is a nifty and able tool.

Freemium

One of the tools that have helped us immensely is Noun Project. It has a bunch of icons you can use for free if you pinky promise to credit the designer or just pay a small amount and buy an account as we did!

126

@exotel

Parting words

Just having a very good idea will not be su�cient to catapult you into the ‘success’ zone. You should always be on the lookout for tools and tactics that will strengthen your plan and widen your reach.

Hopefully, after reading about our journey and the kind of tools that have helped us, you have a better idea of which ones �t best with your current approach and plans.

Some gyaan from us:

Frugality is a great trait to have. If there is a free tool and a paid one, even if the free one has 90% of the features of the paid one, use the free tool. Penny saved is a penny earned.

There is a particularly great tool that you want to use but the price is above your reach. In that case, just write to the company. We have done this loads of times. We have written to people and asked for a startup discount if we felt like the tools were priced too high for us. There are only two things that can happen - they can say yes or say no. If they say no, you at least tried.

If you’d like to bounce off some ideas with us or just have a chat, drop us a line on startups@exotel.in.

27