Hired A Great Cold Caller - Suggestions Before Beginning Campaign?

I don't know about the rent a site model so I can't help you there, but if he has 40 yrs experience with telemarketing he's pretty much a PRO lol so he *should* get at least 2 a day. When I worked in a callcenter I was averaging that and I only worked from 9am-1pm...so an hour less..But like I said with that much experience it shouldn't be hard for him at all..And you can pass him over to me when he's done with your campaign lol

Haha, if things work out then I don't plan on "finishing" with the campaign for a long time yet!!

Any ideas on maybe an opener / script for such an idea guys?

My humble opinion!

You are charging way too little. $50/month? I am not sure what niche you are working in but $50/month for a website thats already ranking pretty good is selling yourself short. People charge $50-$200 per month just to "host" the website. You are actually sending them leads.

Base your price on how much business you can bring to them and how much is that going to be worth to you. For example

If you are working with a dentist. On average each client should be worth $2000-$10,000 to them, not including the unlimited referrals they can get from one client. Lets say your website is getting 200 visitors a month or whatever number, figure out what your conversion rate is with those visitors. Adjust your homepage to get the maximum conversion rate from visitors to calls. Then track how many calls you get! you can easily do so by getting a number from services like my1voice.com. You dont have to answer the phone, you can just track miss calls on that number over a period of few days. Lets say out of 200 visitors you get 15 calls. Note that number down!

Now have your appointment setter call all the dentists in the area and setup appointment with atleast 10. His pitch should be along these lines

Hi, Can I speak to doctor X.
Whats it about? Its something urgent about his business that I wanted to discuss with him, when can I call back?

Basically get to the doctor and then tell doctor that you have a website generating 15-20 calls. I made it for a client of mine who was a dentist here but had to move out of state last month, now I have this website and its ranking on top of google. 15 people are calling every week trying to setup an appointment. I have no use for this website and I was wondering if you would be interested.

Nobody sane is going to say no. They will ask other questions or ask for price. Dont go in any details.

Tell them that you prefer to discuss the details in person and its easier for me to explain things in person.

Basically get the appointment with the doctor.

Then ask doctor few questions before quoting him. Questions like:

How many people who call setup appointment with you? and How much do you make off of one patient?

Use that number to come up with the price. Quote him that and if he doesnt like it show him the other 10 appointments you have and let him know that you are selling it to whoever pays first.

Do the same with every doctor until you lease the website. If you have any appointments left, dont cancel them or not show up. Go there and let them know what you had to offer but you sold it because you needed the money fast but if you are interested, I can build you a similar website and get better rankings than that one for $15,000. You already know I am capable of doing the work and I know exactly what I need to do to outrank that website because I am the one who worked on that other website.

Now try to close an SEO deal with them. Make them a new site do the SEO for different keywords, not the same as your other website. Get them ranked for those keywords and get the site some traffic.

Now cash the check from your 1st website and few SEO clients every month.

Instead of getting paid $50 get paid $1000+/month and sell more than one in same market but make sure you are targeting different keywords.

If you dont listen to my advice and keep charging $50/month. You and your caller will be discouraged and shut doors before you can make anything significant. It will probably take you few months before you can even hit $1000/month. If you do listen to my advice you can probably hit the $1000/month within one week and will have to do 1% of the work that you would leasing it for $50/month.

Feel free to send me a couple of bucks every month too

Peace!

One other option is to pick a good keyword like “Dentists in Chesapeake” and buy an EMD which should make it easier to rank. Build up your website so it’s getting some decent traffic. Then you can pull out your digital phone book (i.e. Google) & have your guy make a list of dentists in Chesapeake & start calling. Offer them ad space on your site for $x per month & really play up the additional money they’ll make by having the referrals from the site. Once you’ve got 3 or 4, move on & create a new site.

While you’re at it, if you’re creative you could think of additional complimentary services to casually mention or (hint, hint) get them on a list & periodically email special offers relating to your service. Things to offer would be a mobile promotion campaign or creating Twitter & Facebook pages (one time fee) and maintaining a feed on those pages (monthly service). Lots of options really.

One thing I’d definitely recommend before having your guy hit the phones – have a well thought out script & have him familiar with it. Make it friendly, conversational. Do a little research beforehand to find out the name of the owner/manager if possible. And have answers already to go for common objections.

I also agree w/Ginder that you can charge much more than $50/month. Dentists probably are willing to invest in marketing, especially since each new client is worth a lot to their bottom line. Don't discount yourself just because this stuff is easy for you. They don't know how to drive traffic but it's still valuable.

You should be able to sell those at $500 easy for that market. It's always based on the vertical. For instance, I could see a maid cleaning service only affording $50/mo (but I'd be more about $100/mo minimum) because clients for them don't pay too much.

$50 is selling your services way too short, and as others have said, it will take a significant amount of time to make any "decent" money with that model. You'd have to great thousands of websites to get paid well, so you're talking about a callcenter model, which means 10-20 guys closing MINIMUM 2-5 deals A DAY...EACH.

If this new sales guy is as good as you think he is, then selling at $500 to a dentist should be cake.

Having said that, I definitely think you could sell the organic rankings at $500/mo and then sell additional services, like Google Places optimization at $299/mo and then do PPC management for another $199/mo. - then you've turned the client into a $1000/mo client. I can't tell you how many times I've done this...just to show my sales reps (or customer service reps) that it can be done. Once you've got them on the hook, build rapport and TEACH a little bit, they'll buy anything (in a ethical way on my part, of course).

My advice would be to build tremendous value for the product before letting them know what the price is. By the end of the presentation, the customer should believe the product to be worth twice to three times your actual retail price. Then, once you tell them what it is, they will think they are getting a good deal. It's not the deal they get, but it's the deal they think they get.

Thanks has been given to ALL of the above replies because I felt they were all really well thought out, and honestly great contributions.

Instead of responding to one at a time, I wanted to write a more general response to all of the points above.

I am actually a few month into the 'rent a site' model and I have 5 websites ranking organically for "dentists" around the area. They are on avg. generating around 2 leads per month. There is more SEO work that could be done to maybe bring the average up to around 3 or 4 tops (leads per month).

What I was intending on doing was to include GPlaces in my price, as that could essentially turn the 2 or so leads per month into around 10 leads per month realistically.

However, the problem is that in Aus the local suburbs don't quite get the # of searches you guys in the US etc tend to get. Making it harder to actually provide real value with just a website at the top.

I was thinking at $50 a pop it might be possible to get around 8-10 per week (that means 2 per 5 hour work day) and thats around 40 a month and so $2000 recurring. If we do the same for the following month, then that's now at $4000 recurring. Etc, etc. I realise $50 is dirt cheap, but that was kind of the whole aim - make it so cheap that really, that can't say 'no' purely on a price objection.

Realistically, with the sites I provide, they can likely see around 3-4 leads per month for their business (once the SEO is all down pat).

I will be tracking visitor numbers etc, but I just want to be realistic here.

I am thinking $100/month might be a bit more suitable and still within the affordable range.

I am thinking of going after plumbers, electricians for the time being. Will open to some other markets too, but I think those types of people don't often have websites but would be interested in getting some callers and since most of the time you'll get the owner on the line (no receptionist like with the dentist) then it should be easier to close.

But you know what, I think you guys are right. Right in the sense that I could be making a lot more per client, but that only comes in if I offer better value - which means GPlaces MUST be included in the pack.


What I am thinking of doing for now is, still following through with the simple websites + SEO for their local towns (only a handful of keywords will be ranked - the best ones) and charging them either $50 or $100 a month and then should that work well for me, I'll have some recurring income to help pay for my telemarketer to continue and then I will continue with my original plan:

Which was getting higher ticket sales, like signing up dentists at around $400-$500 a month (which was my initial idea but I have not had much luck with it as of yet, only had two meetings with dentists but no sales).

Keep the ideas coming guys. Mainly what I have taken out of this is that I should likely be changing the price from $50 to $100 a month, but otherwise I think I should stick it out, at least for a few weeks just to see how it goes. I know it's cheap, but if I can get 8 new clients a week (this is all hopeful ATM) then thats ~32 a month which would come to gross $3200/month recurring. Not so bad, especially after month 2 or month 3 (assuming it was working that well).


The idea behind this is also that I won't have to go in and meet up with them for a meeting. That takes a lot of time, and while I understand it is necessary for signing some bigger deals (like $500 a month) - I have also purposely tried to make the price point so low that a meeting isn't really needed.

The idea was to establish interest. Do they want to present their business professionally online, and in front of where their customers are looking?

If yes... then I will go and make the site from them up front with all of their details on it. We call them back, give them the URL, have a bit of a chat and then ask for credit card information and inform them that the SEO work has begun.

Nice 'n' simple.

And should allow to pick up clients quickly and easily without meetings. This is what I 'think' could happen, at the moment. If they start requesting meetings, then I don't see it working out as well as I had planned.


After all, I am only offering a website with their business info. on it + ranked on top of Google. If we show them the URL of the website and they like what they see (and they will like it) then all that's left to deliver on is the SEO.

And when they see that we have already done the website up front for them, I think that will build enough credibility to now ask for credit card information to start processing the payment.

That's, at least, how I am hoping the whole process will work.

Ideas?

I'd love to hear your progress in a month, krzysiek... so don't forget to update this thread

I've done a lot of IM/Web Design work for Dentists. I just closed a Dentist on a $4500 custom website and I've sold $1000/month SEO services to Dentists. My point is that they have the money to invest. Just gain their trust and show them results! I have a Dentist client who is generating SERIOUS revenue from his website being ranked high in Google.

50 a month is cheaper than most local online directory listings

The key to a higher close rate is the quality of the list. If you have your TM call the dentists who are already spending money on Adwords PPC on the same SERPs, then the price you charge will look very affordable.