Running Demos for Clients
Sep 10th, 2007 by jared
If you provide a Web-based service like I do, there are two tools that I can’t live without. Although Webex can provide both of these features, it can be expensive for the growing company. The first thing you need to be able to do is have a phone conversation, and it sometimes may involve more than one person at different locations. For this I use a service called www.freeconferencecall.com, and it’s just that–a free service for conference calls. There are a lot of great administrative features. You can have as many people on the call as you need, it will email everyone the details of the call as soon as you set it up, and everyone is emailed a reminder the day before the call. It also allows you to record the call and play it back, which is great if you are training sales people. The only downside is that the area code they provide is their local number (like 719), so everyone picks up his own long distance fees. The problem here is that if you have a major prospect, they might think you are too cheap to afford a toll-free number. If you think this is possible, no problem– freeconferencecall.com offers a premium service you can use whereby you can provide a toll-free number and pick up the tab at about $.06 per minute.
Now that you have your call set up, you are going to need a program that allows your clients to see your computer screen so you can walk them through your demo at your pace. The easiest and best program I have seen so far is www.glance.net. Once you download it, all you need to do is click on the Glance icon in the task bar and in two seconds it provides you with a four-digit session key. You simply tell your client to type into the browser companyname.glance.net and enter the four-digit session key. If you prefer, you can press a button, enter the client’s email address, and send them the session details. Up to 100 people can connect to your session at the same time. Pricing for a business starts at $119 per month. There are a few downsides, however. The first is that the client sees everything on your screen unless you remember to hide your screen, Just make sure to turn off your instant messenger or close Outlook during a demo. The second is that there are no collaboration tools like chat or the ability to let the client drive, but for the price, you can’t beat it.
Best of luck closing deals!
Once again showing how SaaS (software-as-a-service) makes it cheaper and more convenient for a resource-challenged small business to do business. Tap that SaaS!
If I had the money, team and time, oh the number of SaaS compaines I could start! This is the way the world is moving.
How does glance.com compare with gotomeeting.com (which is $50 a month)?
We use TeamViewer as it is cheaper since you just pay for the software once. We can chose to demo by allowing our clients to view whats happening on our PC or even better by actually controlling their PC (so that there is no latency for them).
The client has to download a viewer software which we have available on our website. We just call them using Skype and then work away. It works well and we dont get any problems with firewalls.
Cronan, I will definitely check this out and send this to my VP of sales. I always like cheaper! Thanks for the feedback. I should have included skype on here because you are right, it is a great tool, plus you can do video conferencing.