This past week was a fairly eventful one.
By the way, I’ve noticed that ever since I put my rule in place of making at least three phone calls per weekday, each week has become more eventful and interesting.
On Saturday, 2/8/14, I got a new trial signer-upper. I found the salon’s website and saw an interesting testimonial there: ” ‘Magic hands’ – Jennifer Aniston.” So I guess now I have the claim to fame that one of my prospects is evidently the hairstylist of Jennifer Aniston.
On Sunday, 2/9, I released a new feature: text appointment reminders. I try to work on the product (as opposed to the marketing side of the business) as little as possible these days, but a lot of prospects ask for text reminders and I know this is a valuable feature. Plus, I had (foolishly) promised this feature to existing customers. Don’t ever do that.
Monday, 2/10: I have a prospect who I’ve been doing a dance with since around October or so. I really want them to go ahead and pull the trigger, so I sent a certain special time-bound offer: get onboarded by March 1st and I’ll give you X. I also met with one of my existing customers and got her to upgrade to the higher pricing tier that includes text reminders. So my revenue went up a little this week.
By the way, I don’t make phone calls on Mondays because salons are usually closed on Mondays.
Tuesday, 2/11: I made my three phone calls, plus I talked on the phone with another existing customer. She had a bunch of feature ideas and she reminded me of one outstanding bug. I also got a positive response to that special offer I had sent out Monday.
Wednesday, 2/12: I got sick and didn’t do anything.
Thursday, 2/13: I visited a salon owner who was referred to me by a mutual acquaintance. I had actually visited this guy’s salon in, I believe, the summer of 2012, but since I sucked at following up back then I never reconnected until now. Anyway, he and I sat down and looked at Snip and he said he was in, he just had to talk with his stylists and take care of some other shit that’s in the works right now (building renovations or something). I know by now that this is far from a done deal, so I’m gonna make sure to keep on top of this guy (LITERALLY) until he either shits (again literally) or gets off the pot (this time not literally). He and I agreed to sync back up in March. Since I have a goal to get one new salon onboarded each month of 2014, I hope this salon can be March’s salon, but I’m of course going to continue pursuing other leads as well.
Friday, 2/14: I made seven phone calls, all to warm leads who I would have called on Wednesday and Thursday. I found out that the Canadian lash bar who was interested in using Snip for multiple locations is no longer interested. They were able to strike a deal with their current scheduling vendor. All the other 6 were some form of unavailable. Natch.
Also, I forget which day it was, but I learned that clients aren’t always receiving their reminder emails, and then the next day I got an upset text from a salon owner about a scheduling mishap. So before I continue to move forward with the website redesign I have in progress, I’m gonna work on making my reminder features more reliable, which I started today.
As of this moment I have 8 decent leads, 4 of which have basically said, “I’m in.” So hopefully I can get one of those 4 onboarded soon, and hopefully the leads keep flowing in the way they have been so far in 2014.