After leaving Facebook (now Meta), Jocelin and I started Cooby in the hope to help companies to work better together as they face the shift from emails to messaging. We've witnessed this global trend firsthand by consistently traveling between Asia and North America.
I'm thrilled to share our company narrative which is essentially the problems we're solving, why they're important to solve, and how our product will solve these problems🔥.
How Cooby Supercharges Instant Messaging
Sales is personal connection. It’s a relationship, built through the human touch. It always has been. In an always-on world, instant messaging (IM), not email, is how you maintain the human touch. Instant messaging still feels personal. We haven’t dehumanized it with automation and spam. We feel a reflex to answer when that little chat bubble appears that we just don’t feel any more with email.
Instant Messaging Is The New Email
IM services like WhatsApp and LINE may be absolutely indispensable to the sales relationship. But despite what it does for you, WhatsApp is not strictly an upgrade to your sales capabilities, at the frontline, team, or department level – there are tradeoffs.
You Don’t Own WhatsApp
As a business, your most fundamental WhatsApp tradeoff is that it’s not yours. You neither own it nor subscribe to it. It’s neither your software nor SaaS. You basically just use WhatsApp, and you don’t have your data. It’s not on your servers. And neither are the sales contacts kept within the app. Both are tremendous risks.
It’s Not Transparent
Data analysis separates winners from losers in the business world. But with WhatsApp, there is no data. No way to see customer interactions firsthand. No way to know if Jack actually wrote something that could trigger a lawsuit. No way to know if Sarah is being too pushy, and no way for her team leader to nudge her in the right direction if she is, before the problem starts manifesting as lost customers.
WhatsApp Was Not Built For Sales
WhatsApp is a personal communications tool. It was not designed for juggling sales relationships, especially if you have personal communications mixed in. And if you’re a sales leader, you have an even bigger problem. With few meaningful metrics available besides end results (i.e., sales made or dollars made), there’s very little meaningful feedback you can give your team besides “good job” or “do better.”
Such all-or-nothing guidance is not the most effective way to improve team performance or chemistry, and it leaves you and your company almost completely dependent on the innate individual skills of each team member and what they learn, or mistakenly think they’ve learned, on their own. Knowledge, insight, and wisdom cannot scale.
Bottom-line? Having all of your sales relationships on WhatsApp is not that different from having them all on a rolodex, which means your account management ability has regressed in time to the 20th century, and it’s very hard to scale a business this way, individually or as a team. You need something more. Something that helps you scale. Something that raises your ceiling.
Cooby Raises Your Ceiling
Cooby blows the lid off WhatsApp, by supercharging your ability to scale. We transform, streamline, and enhance the in-app experience through tools that systemize, analyze, and optimize your sales operations.
We provide full transparency into WhatsApp, enabling a smooth flow of data, information, and feedback that empowers each and every level of your sales organization to evolve and get better – from frontline to the directors.
Cooby Extension: Your WhatsApp Organizer
If you’re a WhatsApp-dependent salesperson, you need more ways to sort and organize your chats and contacts. You need meaningful ways to prioritize and determine whom to answer first, who needs more attention, and who can wait. You also need to declutter your screen. If you have 12 chats going simultaneously, and your mobile device’s screen can only display eight without scrolling, those out-of-sight chats risk being neglected.
But with Cooby Extension, you can prioritize your contacts (VIPs, referrals, new customers, etc.) and your chats (unread, awaiting reply, needs reply), and save time entering new ones. Establish new communication flows in only 30 seconds. Handle more chats and more customers at once.
As the top-rated Chrome extension for WhatsApp, Cooby Extension helps you chat more, do more, and sell more.
Cooby Workspace: Your WhatsApp Management Console
Cooby Extension raises the ceiling for an individual salesperson, by empowering them to raise their own productivity. But Cooby Workplace raises the ceiling for your team by a lot more, by empowering sales leaders to raise everyone’s productivity, by unlocking WhatsApp’s data, statistics, transparency, and knowledge sharing potential.
Managers can see everything happening on the app concerning your sales activities, your sales team, and your customers, and give timely feedback, lessons, insights, and nudges accordingly. With Cooby Workspace, sales managers are empowered to teach, salespeople to learn, and sales directors to optimize and experiment – making for a stronger and more cohesive team.
Full Transparency & Ownership
Cooby Workspace brings your WhatsApp data onto your infrastructure, providing sales leaders full transparency into any and all WhatsApp-relevant activity and information from our intuitive dashboard.
This includes your team’s sales contacts, so nothing gets lost during account handover, and a complete record of all sales chats, easily referred to when providing individual feedback, team instruction, or verification of an irate customer’s claim they’ve been wronged or misled.
Statistics and analytics are also available, both real-time and long-term. You can see who’s been doing what, compare individual metrics (time-to-response, keyword mentions, message tally, etc.), access sentiment analysis, and more, providing ample fuel for insight for sales leaders. And the data is yours.
Sales Optimization
With Cooby Workspace, sales leaders can learn many useful things, like who works most efficiently, who seems disengaged, and who’s falling behind. Build up a library of insightful customer conversations, so everyone gets better. Encourage healthy competition, and determine which metrics have a bottom-line impact at the same time. If Jane, a leader in three different Cooby Workspace metrics, is your top seller, your team can focus on improving one of those metrics each month and see which drive sales.
Customized alerts are also available, so sales leaders can be informed if key messages from customers are just sitting there without response, or if a customer is unresponsive.
Better Teamwork
Team coherence can suffer on a WhatsApp-driven sales team. But Cooby Workspace can improve your dynamics, through timely accurate feedback and communications between management and the frontline.
Newbies and stragglers need not struggle alone. And veterans can feel more stimulated in their jobs, by learning more, by selling more, and by being less tempted to leave.
Bottom line? Cooby Workspace raises your ceiling by enabling teamwide learning, adaptation, and improvement, providing a flywheel for better morale and performance.
Cooby Is Building A Sales Engine
Cooby provides the tools and capabilities you need to build and strengthen sales relationships, by helping you organize customer relationships, and enhance internal relationships. We empower sales teams to be more responsive, more adaptive, and more effective. We help your business scale.
Your team can evolve and get better, by empowering every team member to evolve and get better, through tools that evolve and get better.
And we’re just getting started. Cooby already works with WhatsApp, LINE, and more are on the way, along with new features and capabilities e.g. virtual calls, SMS. We’re as hungry as you are. We’re already in 50+ countries, with 86% of surveyed users either happy or extremely happy, and we’re working to raise that.
Raising ceilings is what we do.
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- Originally published on LinkedIn
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