One of our clients will be making a fairly large splash this summer by doing some online marketing. So I do the research, understand the demos and fire off five emails and five phone calls to media companies that seem to be a good fit for my client’s goals.
The emails and voicemails end with something to the effect of “….I would like to see what you can do for about $20k per month for a three month time period.” – So $60k is in play here. Granted, I’m not buying millions but in this day and age $60k goes a long way.
Of the five inquiries I made, only one of them got back to me immediately. The second claimed a spam filter issue, fine, and got it to me on the weekend. Good there. The other three? Sad times in America, folks.
One, just flat out forgot about it and is now scrambling to get in play. Sorry junior, I presented last week. The 4th, sent me an online questionnaire that took me about 30 minutes to fill out. Which I did. Then sent me another email proposal. No phone call, no “do you have any questions”, nada. The 5th? Well, I never heard back from the 5th.
Want to get America moving again? How about answering a call, calling me personally or getting the email back in a reasonable amount of time? I told everyone I had a couple of weeks on this and most were still scrambling.
And another thing…I have purchased from all of these companies in the past. And only two of them had the same people employed there. Meanwhile, long time sales reps who built good relationships with me have been slashed so a company can save $20k a year to hire someone at $30k. New blood just isn’t cutting it. If these company decision makers are reading, I hope they realize that the $20k they are “saving” a year by getting rid of the more seasoned folks comes at a price of more than $20k per year.
And for me, I’ll be hard pressed to call you again.
Author: Josh Fleming
