Years ago I was doing some marketing for a client when I told him to stop his Yellow Pages advertising.
“But why?” he asked.
“Yellow Pages generate me most of my leads,” he said.
He was right. Yellow Pages did generate loads of leads for his business.
And that was the reason he was going broke.
Yellow Pages Prospects Were A Waste Of Time
You see, when I analysed where all his profitable customers were coming from I saw that the people who contacted him from his Yellow Pages ads were a complete waste of time.
I can’t remember the numbers, but it was something like 10 leads a week coming from Yellow Pages.
10 people a week taking up his time in having him:
- travel to their house to measure up the job,
- spend an hour or 2 writing up the quote and
- then trying to hammer him down to the lowest possible price.
Hardly any of the Yellow Pages leads turned into a sale. It was because they were essentially ‘cold’ – that is, they didn’t know or trust my client.
With every business you’ll notice some common themes – and one of those common themes is that prospects who find you from trusted independent third party sources are almost always more profitable (it’s partly because they trust you a bit before they speak with you. You’re not some random they found in the Yellow Pages.).
I have a neat little example of this just happen to me now. Will write up for my next post.
Cheers
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