A salesperson named Spero was a real a-hole after my company decided to reject their offer of putting us at the top of google business listings. After doing our own research on how they can justify charging a large monthly fee for checking an Adword and Places listing twice a month did not make sense to us. This is something you can do yourself with Google and Google will only charge you the fee they charge everybody else for using Adwords. Google places is already and always free to use.
After a friendly 20 minute conversation with the salesman, I told him that I would have to discuss their service with my partners. I did and we decided this is something that one of us can take care of on a regular basis for free.
When he called back the next day, he didn't ask me anything and just presumed we were up for this. After I told him we were not interested at this time, he got arrogant and defensive. He exclaimed that he will then call our competitor, which he NAMED, and that we did not know the value of what they could do for us and then he hung up.
You would think that a company selling a service that promotes your business in on online search engine would know the value of user review and should be able to do a google search on their own company. You want my money to put my company on the Internet when I can do it for both of us for free.
Use this company at your own risk.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
David H
Las Vegas,Nevada,
Dear Jason,
#2UPDATE Employee ..inside information
Mon, December 23, 2013
It sounds like you had the misfortune of running into a salesperson who did not understand the product that he was selling, we sincerely apologize. This sales person is no longer with the company.
Our salespeople go through a week-long training process where they learn our product inside and out, and they should have been able to tell you that we do not monitor AdWords and Google Places placement.
At the time of this complaint we did not offer AdWords at all, so we are not sure why this salesperson would mention that program. Today we do offer AdWords campaigns as an added service, but generally this is for existing customers who we have already placed on the first page for their key terms and only after we’ve determined this program would be beneficial in their industry and in their area. Not to speak too much of a service we did not offer at the time but; we create an optimized landing page specifically for those keywords and terms, optimize the CTR of the landing page, and carefully monitor the campaign for as long as the customer continues this service, constantly adjusting the landing page, key terms and more to ensure the client is getting the most return on their investment. We do not simply monitor any of our services. Again though, we did not offer this in 2010.
Please allow us to give a proper breakdown of our starting services:
As you can see there really is not a single thing we offer which is as easy to do as perhaps our salesperson communicated. And we believe that if you compare that price you mentioned to others who offer only the optimization and not all of these other marketing tools, you will find our prices are quite competitive. You will also find that employing anyone to do a fraction of this work in-house will cost you exponentially more.
As for the salesperson mentioning the name of a competitor--
Yes, we research businesses intensely prior to offering a deal to them to ensure that we are able to live up to the promise of first-page Google Business Listings according to those popular key terms discussed above. This is a good thing. Whether a business hires us or not they should see what competitors are doing online. And while it may have been the case that we had found that we could offer a similar plan to a competitor, he or she certainly should not have framed it as a threat.
We hope that we have been able to clear up any confusion, and again we sincerely apologize if you had a negative experience with one or our representatives.
Let us know if there is anything else we can do for you,
Thank you.