Had first two appointments for SMS and this is what both said.

So far I've had my first two appointments to sell my SMS service. The first one was a pizza shop which also had a restaurant and bar. The second one was simply a pizza take-out only shop.

Both places previously used an SMS service in their marketing and both were dissapointed.

Pizza-Restaurant said that they used table tents and flyers to get the word out. They also used flyers in their bar. They had about 200 people sign up but the owner said that these people were already regular customers anyway. He paid $350/month and never got any extra business out of the campaign to make it worth it.

I was speaking to the guy in charge of marketing and he still believes in the idea, but the owner (who's also his dad) is totally against it because it was a terrible experience with the other company (yourareacode.com).

My service is cheaper and I also showed him how to include QR codes on the flyers. I did a demo of it and he liked that idea. I also gave him a few other ideas such as having one of their beer suppliers sponsor a month or two of the SMS service. For instance, have Budwiser sponsor a "Free Bud when signing up" sort of thing. I was hoping to get the owner to see how he can do SMS marketing without paying for it. We'll see what happens but I doubt I'll get this guy as a customer.

Pizza-Take Out said that he tried it for a few months, put cards in the hoagie bags and flyers on the pizza boxes. He had a few sign up but not enough to make it worth the money he was spending. He was paying $300/month. I also showed him the QR code for quickly signing up and he also liked that idea. He also liked my price and that he could cancel anytime.

For a second there, I though he was about to pull out his check and give it another try....but then he said he needed to crunch some numbers to see if it was worth it or not. I'll be following up with him in a few days if he doesn't call me.

Also, one thing he showed me (which I tried to position my service with too) is that he advertises in those Val-Pak envelopes. Not sure if you've ever seen them but it's basically an envelope that gets mailed that has about 50 businesses advertising their businesses with coupons and such. It goes out to about 6800 homes. I told him that would be a great way to advertise the SMS signup keyword and number. That's 6800 new people that may come in for your free offer. He's also going to be advertising in a local magazine that goes out to over 16,000 homes. I told him that would be a great place for the SMS sign up too. One reason I tihnk he may be going for it is because he asked how small a QR code could be to add it to the ad that he uses.

So I guess my biggest obstical so far is talking to business owners who've already used the service and have negative feelings about it because of the service they hired or because people never signed up.

I have another appointment tomorrow. We'll see what happens.