Can't Give Custom Facebook Pages Away .. What Gives ??

Sounds like not a good script and/or not a good telemarketer.

Can you supply us with a gist of what the script was?

Yes, which WSO had this amazing script?

You want honest feedback?

$29/month for hosting is too much unless this is multiple tabs and multiple features. For the average small business custom page I have seen there is no way you will get many businesses to pay it.

Charge $9.95 a month and i suspect you will get some customers. Add in a setup fee if you need it. But $29 isn't going to fly for most of the people on the other end of those phone calls. No matter how good the script is the ROI isn't gonna be there because most business owners who know facebook know it needs to be about interaction.

If you can be profitable with this model at $9.95 I suggest going for that price. I would suspect the closing will be much easier.

This might help:


Cheers,

~Dexx

You have got to be giving them a lot more value than a simple custom page.

And honestly I'd love to know what you are giving them since to pay that amount they see the value in what you are doing.

I see a lot of people on here post big numbers. The kind of numbers that as the guy you are pitching to I laugh at. Now if you are approaching large corps and such I am sure their budgets are higher but honestly I am sure most of them consider moving this in house anyways.

I'd really love to see people here actually show me an example of a fanpage they are running and tell me what they are offering for this kinda money.

Of course for $500 it is a lot more than hosting which is what the OP said he is offering.

A business willing to pay $500 a month for a fanpage has to be getting a great ROI or they would never consider it or continue paying it.

There are places such as eBay where we personally spend a whole lot more than that but I would love to hear the pitch for a $500 a month fanpage.

That's what I figured. You can charge a lot more when you have value built in. OP is selling $30 a month hosting. I'd be more likely to pay him up front for the custom fan page and then $10 a month hosting.

Free plus $30 doesn't work because as the guy on the other side here is what I her.
Free fanpage = "I'm going to take an hour or less and build you a really easy and simple fan page"
$30 a month hosting = "He didn't charge me for the fanpage so he is going to try to get over priced hosting out of me."

So I see the original product as low value and see him screwing me on the monthly fee. So I don't see a long term relationship. And building passive income is about building long term relationships.

Let's say the OP charges me $299 for a custom fanpage and 9.95 hosting.
Now he has paid himself for the time to build me a good fanpage. If it has value he will continue to get my $10 a month with no effort and guess what when I need another tab I will call him. When I need a mobile website I may just call him. When I need a managed social media campaign guess who I am going to call first?

He is now my expert. Most of the people being sold to do not have someone like me working for them. Once they trust you they turn to you. I've saved my company money and honestly got my company to spend money. Because I showed them what we should be doing. And either i would do it in house or when it was smarter we outsourced it. Our current webhost gets a lot of this business because we trust the company. They charge us a very fair rate for what they offer. Some on here thought what we paid was too high but they honestly have no idea what our industry needs and what kind of backend a website for us requires. They charge us about $100/hr for all the work they do for us. And that is on top of what we pay just for the hosting and basic service.

They are getting another $300 bucks from us for the mobile site. And we are looking into having them do some seo work for us.

And all this started because they charged us about 1/3rd of what our last web service did. They charged us a price that made sense and that gave us great ROI. So now we trust them to do other work as well.

Yeah i know I can get a lot of this stuff done cheaper from outsourcing it here but why risk it when I know i get quality work from them?

So to the OP I ask you..... Do you want to be the go to guy for these businesses? If so your original offer has to have quality, value, and a great ROI.

55 phone calls is not nearly a big enough sample size. Unless you are on a strict budget, which if you are then I would consider telemarketing yourself, I'd suggest scaling up the calling. Also make sure that your script is on point and that it brings up their objections before they have time to bring them up. Why should they pay you $29/mo when they can make one for free?

You say that the page looks great but how would they know that? They're not going to take your word for it. For a service that requires a design you might want to consider setting up meetings to show them the value in person if the over the phone sales continue to not work out.

Another thing, I don't think $29/mo is crazy to charge, but they'd also have to know how to utilize it. A fan page is only as useful as the person running it, otherwise you might as well have a high end boutique in the middle of the desert.

Best of luck to you.

Thanks to everyone for your input.

Please Note: I have edited my original post because I realised that I had not mentioned that I started out by selling Custom Fan Pages @ $297. I could not get any interest at that price.

I would suggest that your potential clients are viewing the cost of the facebook fanpage as an expense , not a worthwhile investment. By reducing the hosting fees, they are probably thinking, oh, instead of losing $29.95 a month, I will just lose $9.95 per month, and end up wasting my valuable time having irrelevant conversations on facebook.

I would say it better to offer some local companies a 30 day trial of a facebook page, then demonstrate during this time how it will be profitable. Once you have social proof, you will no longer have to justify your hosting charge, because they will be paying for your system, not hosting.

if you are competing on just hosting, you have a lot of competition, but companies like hostgator do not offer businesses solutions to profiting from their online presence.

55 calls is not statistically significant. Your telemarketer hasn't "failed."

Small businesses are notoriously stingy with their cash--after all, it's the blood of the organization. Personally, $30/month is nothing to me, but you would definitely have to show me how your custom fan page results in more conversions/Likes/business and that it will make a profit--ie. bring in at least $90 inside two months and pay for itself. If you can show me that it will result in more than $300/month in sales dollars (remembering the business axiom that it takes $10 in sales to justify $1 of expenses), then I would say go ahead for sure.

Giving away free stuff requires a sale also. Prospects are so skeptical and educated about traditional selling tactics today that they understand the 'trojan horse' or 'puppy dog' approach.

So I'm not sure that your problem is price; it's probably value. Prospects aren't understanding the value of your offer under your current setup.

The first thing you should do is build a fanpage either for yourself, or for a client, and then spend your effort in making that fanpage as successful as possible. It's much easier to make a sale if you can show some previous, or on-going success. If you can show an example of a fanpage you've built that has a ton of fans on it, then it will be much easier to make a conversion. Business people know that people = money. So if they see a fanpage with a lot of people being attracted to it, they'll have less of a problem making the investment.

I can also say that 55 is not a big enough sample. And your price is way more than right, IF you can show them value.

What's in it for them? How much is one client worth to them? Could this better Facebook page get them a couple of new clients... in 2012? Most would say yes for the next 12 months! And realize that $29 a month is nothing, especially if they can cancel at any time.

IMO the price is NOT the issue (do NOT go to $9 a month IMO!), it's the perceived value. You have to stress how and why it will benefit them.


BTW nice to "see" you, Dexx "Personal" videos are such powerful tools to stand out from the random masses of names we deal with everyday.

The Warrior forum is some of the most effective advertising ever....

So I have a test for you.

Try putting up your BEST BEST BEST ad copy, and send 55 untargeted prospects to your page and see what happens.

Its ridiculous to change your business plan because a ten dollar per hour worker bee told you after 55 dials that your business model needs tweaking.

Who is the business owner here?

Who is the man with the plan?

They need to get back on the phone and dial 500 more numbers.

Its not as much about your offer as it is the work ethics of the telemarketers. You can sell ANYTHING if you work hard enough... it looks like this one is taking you for a short ride, then telling you its YOUR fault they didnt succeed.

Because what?

Nobody wants face book pages?

Does that make sense?

NO offence at all, but I would suspect that you are not doing a good enough job of explaining the benefit to them of having a customer facebook fanpage. To us it only makes sense to make a pretty fanpage, but to them they don't know the difference between one that they made and one that you show them. All they are going to know is that their's is free and yours will cost them money. I don't care if you are giving it away, changing $29 a month in hosting or charging $297 flat if you don't show them value you won't make a sale.

Also, be careful in under valuing the product. $29 a month is NOT out of this world to charge the customer for a couple reasons. One you have to pay to host the fanpage so that's a cost to you. Second, you have to design and upload the page which takes time and energy. Third, you are solving a problem for them that without your help they would not have been able to solve on their own. That is providing them with a more friendly fanpage to hopefully drive up their "Likes" or whatever goal you are working toward.

Also, to beat a dead horse at this point, 55 dials could be made in less than hour. Give her a few hundred numbers to call before any decisions are made weather to continue or stop your cold calling efforts.

Hope that helps,

Sean

Hi Seantrepreneur, I appreciate your comments. The Telemaketer took 5 hours to call the first time. Then, because a lot of business owners were'nt available, she had to call them back ... another 2 hours.
All I could see was money down the drain!

Zoro: I touched on this in the side thread this one inspired.

You are seeing money down the drain because the profit doesn't fit the time. You are not getting enough ROI based on what you are charging.

The business owners are not seeing the value as well.

Telemarketing works. But I personally don't think i is how one gets started. Telemarketing is what you use when you are ready to scale up. When you have a product that you know will sell and be worth it just having one or two sales a day(or less) from your call staff. Figure $100 bucks a day per call staffer. Is your profit able to justify that expense. Do you have a product ready to scale?

I am a big believer in starting local. I get about 10 people or so a week calling or emailing me to offer me some IM service. I've never had a local person contact me. I'd give that local person the time of day before another faceless call. Consider that. Get started. Give value and grow them into a multi-service longer term customer who will give you referrals.

What have you done to show them the value.
It seems to be in person or using telemarketing that is the problem. No one is seeing the value.

Have you targeted places where repeat business is a key? Because fan pages like SMS are best to get customers back in the seas more often. Have you talked to them about how much each visit is worth? How often the average customer comes in? And how much more they could make by increasing the number of times a customer comes in each month? Have you talked to them about the 80-20 rule? About giving out exclusive coupons? How about you managing it all for them since that sounds like hard work?

Notice how in the end you're gonna sell a lot more than a basic facebook fan page? Notice how it's not about the fan page but about getting the customers in the seats more often?

A facebook fan page in and of itself does not give any ROI. Even a lot of really active ones don't. But they don't have to worry because you can help them use it to get a real ROI. You're their expert. They know they should be on facebook. Even if they tell you otherwise they know it. Or they will after you explain why.

You are not selling a product or sevice you are painting a picture of the money they will be making. Money they are right now just giving away to the wind by not doing this.

You're welcome. As the guy on the other side i think I can offer offliners a great perspective. I basically tell you how to sell to me. How to be different from everyone else who contacts me each week.

I hope i help people get some business. I also wonder how many of the people who contact me don't realize I am the same guy on here.

Zoro:

Have you thought about building a fan page for their competitor?

Example:

You decide to target pizza restaurants. Build a fan page for a popular pizzeria that doesn't have a fan page, then use that fan page to show to your prospects. (Even though you have not sold that fanpage to that particular restaurant it doesn't mean you can say you built it for them.) Your prospects will probably not want to be outdone by their competition.

Then take the opportunity to explain the benefits, like lordauric explained in an earlier post. Sell the benefits, sell the benefits, sell the benefits, that is all a prospect will buy.

Also, how about doing some warm sales? Have you contacted anyone you know who has a business and offered them a fanpage, free or discounted? This will build your portfolio quickly and give you examples to show prospects.

Unless you are physically unable, you should do some telemarketing yourself. This is your business and you should be able to handle all aspects of sales (revenue producing tasks) yourself. Telemarketing is a great teaching tool, a really good way to learn more about your business and prospective customers. Besides, how can you instruct and guide your telemarketer to produce, when you haven't done it yourself? Unless you know how to overcome the objections a prospect will throw out, how can you help you telemarketer overcome them. You will only learn by doing it yourself, and analyzing your failures and successes, getting to know what works and what doesn't.

Finally, don't be afraid to ask for the money! Don't undersell your services, they are valuable. You just have to find away to make your prospects see how valuable they are. Again, sell the benefits.

Wishing you much success.

digichick. What you are suggesting makes a lot of sense. I fully understand that in order to make sales one needs to first show value. I guess my biggest disappointment was with the WSO's I bought. I followed them to the letter. I now realize that that many WSO's are just ideas and theory.