First Face to Face Meeting with Customer
Tuesday, August 17th 2010 @ 4:41 PM 
(2 ratings)
In this post I go into a little keyword research to verify the potential for this customer's market and then document what happened on our initial meeting.
Before I decided that this customer would be a good candidate for our case study, I thought it would be a good idea to actually do some keyword research to verify that there were active searches going on in his market.
View a short video here where I used Keyword Rockstar to verify that the searches were indeed happening.
So as you can see from the video there is massive traffic in this niche.
My plan was to contact the owner of the site and let him know that I could help him get more traffic to his site using various strategies. My goal was to schedule an initial meeting. It took a couple weeks of calls and voice mails but I was able to secure a meeting appointment at his office.
The owner of Jumptastic also owns a flooring supply company, a flooring installation company and a landscape company. It turns out that the manager of the flooring company was on vacation the day we were meeting, so Michael, the owner met me there.
I started out our meeting, as I usually do with a short rapport building session. We discussed how the business came about and what he had done so far to promote it. I learned that he had had a contract with Reach Local to promote both Jumptastic and his Landscaping business. He had been satisfied with the results of the Reach Local campaign for the Jumptastic business but had little success on the Landscaping business. Apparently, Reach Local works on a yearly contract, and Michael went back to his sales rep to see if he could transfer the budget for the landscaping business to his Jumptastic business. This seemed like a reasonable request as the revenue that Reach Local would collect would be the same. However they were unable to accommodate Michael’s request due to “company policy”.
This is when Michael decided that Reach Local was not the type of business he wanted to work with long term and he started to look at other options.
He decided to try to build his own Adwords campaign and apply the budget he had be using with Reach Local to his Adwords campaign. This was approximately $1500 per month.
After the rapport building part of our meeting my next step should have been to build an “up front contract” with the customer. Basically to state that we would go over his situation together, talk for a while and decide it if made sense for us to talk further about working together. In this case I skipped this step which may have caused a delay later.
My goal was to explain to Michael about our case study and offer 60 days of Adwords optimization services along with SEO adjustments on the site at no charge and a link building campaign to build up the results of his site in the natural organic listings.
My sales training (Sandler) teaches that right after rapport building and up front contracts you should explore pain issues. In this case Michael’s potential pain areas were, needing more business and customers, having to manage his adwords campaign himself, paying for inventory items that are not rented out, issues related to business survival and consequences of not doing so, issues related to expanding business in other parts of town and need to improve sales to prove the concept that an expansion would be feasible.
So I went over some of these issues with him and learned that he had purchased the business from a previous owner on the NW side of Atlanta. (Jumptastic was on the NE side of Atlanta). Most of his business comes from a 10 mile radius on the NE site of town, but he has a pocket of customers on the NW side of town that still us him. These were customers of the previous business.
Since the majority of these units are delivered and set up by company staff, it is better for the customer to be located closer rather than further.
We went over a few other business model issues and then focused on his Adwords results. He was happy with his adwords campaign results and felt the monthly ad spend was well worth it. We talked a little about how he judged the results and it turned out to be pretty basic. The site was nowhere to be found in the organic results so any traffic had to be coming from his Adwords campaign. The rentals that went through on the site ( about 1/3) had to be coming from Adwords. For those that called in to place their rental order, his phone order staffer would usually ask how they found the business and if the answer was on the Internet, or Google then these sales were chalked up to coming from Adwords as well.
Next time... we go over what I thought I could do to help this client.
