I can’t believe I have to say this, but I keep running into people who are just throwing their money away.
Every dollar you shave off the bottom line is a dollar in your pocket
You need to be thinking of ways to cut costs every time you spend money! Again, that doesn’t mean you have to be cheap. But if you have spontaneous tendencies and on a whim decide to go get some embroidered polo shirts or some foam fingers with your logo on them and you run right over to the local t-shirt, trophy and tool rental shop — stop and ask yourself these two things:
- will this purchase make me money
- Did I check for cheeper sources. (probably online)
I understand that sometimes you want something for your business even if it will not have a direct return on investment in terms of sales. There could be benefits that are hard to quantify – such as exposure and reputation. As long as you don’t do this all the time you will probably be ok. For those times that you choose to spend some money on something silly make sure you are getting the best price. Salespeople are good (sometimes) and we can all be sold… so just be careful.
It amazes me when a client comes to me and tells me about (insert cool thing here) that they just bought and I ask them where thy got it from and I just want to take that (insert cool thing here) and smash it over their head because I could have directed them to a place where they could get it for HALF what they paid.
Bottom line: Don’t throw your money away. Do your research and talk to others in your network and find the best price. Chances are that 10 minutes on Google will get you a better price.
Ringcentral Vs. Grasshopper Vs. Phone.com
Feb 11 2010
Posted by Ken as Productivity Tools, necessities
Lately we have been asked a lot to compare Ringcentral and Grasshopper. And to be honest, I don’t want to spend hours comparing features etc… And I have to include a third competitor (who we currently use) in the mix Phone.com so I’m just going to list some of our personal experiences with each service.
RingCentral.
We used to be huge Ringcentral fans. Even to the point of evangelism. We have recommended Ringcentral to countless businesses as a way to cut costs. Our loyalty was strong, and for good reason. In the early days Ringcental customer service were happy to help is out, they were willing to do what it took to keep longtime, loyal customers happy. Well, it appears those days are gone. There does not appear to be any loyalty in the other direction. When we needed to make changes to our services we knew we could get what we needed elsewhere with more features included and get it all cheaper! But that wasn’t enough to make us jump ship alone. All we needed was 5 more extensions. That’s all… We gave them plenty of opportunity to make a small concession to keep us. But sadly, they stood fast in there position not to work with us…. So, we jumped ship.
On to Grasshopper.
Grasshopper seems to be a great company with even greater potential. All of our dealings with their support and sales reps were fantastic. The only thing that kept us from staying with grasshopper was a lack of some features, or more specifically a limitation of the flexibility of those features. We were coming from Ringcental, with many phone numbers and extensions. The problem lied with our extension numbers. There was no way to Create extensions that matched our Ringcentral ones. That would mean new business cards as well as annoying the people that call us on our current extensions. For this reason we set out once again to find the perfect replacement for Ringcentral. If you are setting up your phone system for the first. Time go ahead and give Grasshoppeer a try… but for us…
On to phone.com
When we got to phone.com we felt like there was a party going on but we weren’t invited. How was it that we didn’t know about phone.com before… That question still haunts us. But what doesn’t haunt us is the decision to switch to phone.com. They have every feature you want and need plus more. They have amazing call routing and automated response system. You can even route calls based on their caller ID so when joe’s client calls it is routed straight to Joe. No prompts, no extension. Awesome. They have so many features we have only begin to scratch the surface. I’m looking forward to giving the conference call feature a try when I get a chance. We wanted flexibility and we got it. Wow. You can do anything you want with this system.
Phone.com gets our vote for sure. Give them a try, here is a link: Business Phone Service – Increase Productivity Reduce Cost