Idea: 14
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
By. Alex Foster
Caller
Have a product or service that can be sold over the phone, but don’t want to hire, train and manage an in-house sales force? Caller provides cold calling as a service for commission.
Today’s idea from Alex Foster. In Alex’s words:
“Two hours a month. That’s how long I promised my friend I’d do cold calls for his startup. Even though I’m busy, I’m going to anyways, because I think it’s great practice. To practice confidence, practice rejection. I hate rejection, more than I care to admit. But there’s a way of doing it genuinely and humbly. Enter Caller. Practice cold calling on real people. The callers get practice (and up to 20% commission), the vendors get sales — and Caller takes a cut.”
Opportunities to use software — provide UI with script and funnel, record calls, scrape websites for prospects? Probably an army of sales people out there who want to work from home, but don’t want to do sales, something with upside, not technical or administrative work paid by the hour. Search for “Sales As A Service” startups yielded only ElasticSales. It validates the model, but the team moved on to sell sales software because it is easier to scale. On oDesk, too, you can hire someone to cold call for you, but the quality may not be good, as it has no system to vet or train callers.
