Scaling Your Pay Per Call Business Creating a Buyer Network

Ringba

Administrator
Staff member
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Learn how to find local Pay Per Call buyers and create a repeatable process for working with and onboarding new clients.


Lesson Transcript

Hey, Pay Per Callers. Let's talk about Creating a Buyer Network.

Pros and Cons of Creating a Buyer Network

Before we go into the pros and cons, I just want to outline what a buyer network is. This is a self service or managed network of small buyers. That could be a dentist office or a chain of dentists or an insurance office, real estate office, eight or nine real estate offices, 600 real estate offices, whatever. And then all combined together in a buyer network that you're going to load balance your calls through with technology.

There are a lot of pros to having your own buyer network, but the biggest one of all is that you're going to be direct to the advertiser and as localized to the advertiser as possible. That means you're going to make the absolute highest amount of money per phone call that you possibly can. If you're running a nationwide campaign of dental calls, for instance, and you're getting paid $15 per call or $10 per call or whatever it is, there's going to be multiple people in that stack taking money from you.

Now if you're running through a network, you're going to have the network. Then you're going to probably have an aggregator behind the network. And then you're going to have the final end user that gets the phone number, a dentist office in Poughkeepsie or whatever it is.

By building your own buyer network, you can get direct to those local advertisers and they're going to be willing to pay the most money for your calls. The difference between running any type of campaign through a network and direct to a local advertiser is probably 100 to 300 points. If you're getting paid $10 through the network, you probably could be getting paid $30, maybe even $40, $50, $60, $80 in some cases direct to the advertiser. There's a huge amount of money in building your own buyer networks.

Now this is also a massive competitive advantage because if you have your own network of buyers, you can then go to a network and they'll send you traffic. Let me reword that. If you have maybe 50 or 100 of your own direct buyers in your own campaign, it's essentially your own offer. When people call in, they go to the end user, the buyer, and you get paid the most money. Then what you're able to do is actually go out to Pay Per Call Networks and say, "Hey, I have a dental offer. It has coverage in these three states. Can you please send me calls?" You become the actual advertiser and that means you're going to have the highest margins possible. Now if you're an affiliate and you're running a dental campaign and then you start building your own buyer network, then we're talking about some serious money because you're completely vertically integrated. You have your traffic sources all the way to the buyer and no one else in the middle. You're going to be talking about significant profit margins. That's why I'm a really big fan of building buyer networks.

Now you should be aware that a lot of Pay Per Call Networks kind of do this, but no one really does it, in my opinion, that well except for the really big companies. You have some really big companies in the space that specialize in a specific vertical like auto insurance or health insurance, for instance, and they're the ones that are building their own buyer networks because they see the value in it.

Now the smaller companies and the networks typically aren't doing this because it requires a lot of work and they're unsure of how to do it. Or in the case of most Pay Per Call Networks, their technology doesn't actually support it. If it's a Pay Per Call Network that's not using Ringba, they can't actually build their own self service buyer network and leverage technology like ours to do it, so they're in a position where they can't actually do this. That's a really big benefit to you if you're going to be a Ringba customer and you're going to start building your own buyer network because we have permission based control so that your buyers can actually decide how they want to receive calls, how many calls they're going to get, concurrency, bidding, all that type of stuff so that you're not doing a ton of account management.

Now last on this list but something that is really important is a buyer network is enterprise value. Enterprise value is effectively the amount of money that you're going to get paid if a company comes in and acquires you. When you have your own buyer network, you're actually a pretty solid acquisition target because it's a lot of work to build these. And then another company that maybe is playing in the dental space or insurance space or whatever space you decide to build your network in will realize that it's much easier to just buy you than it is to build this themselves. Even more important than that, because this isn't really that complicated to do, it just requires a bunch of work, is the time. If you can save an acquirer a lot of time and they can get immediately to market, well then you're going to get a really nice multiple on it if you sell your company. And that's what I mean by building enterprise value.

If you're just an affiliate, you have no enterprise value. If you own no websites and you're just buying clicks on Google and sending them to a Pay Per Call Network, your business is worth zero. It's not worth what you made. It's not worth the revenue. It's literally worth nothing because it's just you and you're just brokering. You're just arbitraging and so that is effectively worth nothing. Now if you have a team of people that's buying media and they're selling to networks and a couple direct advertisers, your business has a little bit of value but still not really anything special. Now if you have 1,000 dentist offices in the Midwest that all buy calls from you on a daily basis, now your business is worth something because it takes a lot of work to set all that up. You're not actually brokering, you're managing the relationships with all your clients. That's why I highly recommend building a buyer network.

Now depending on where you are in the life cycle of your business, this may not be feasible from day one. But with technology, it makes it pretty feasible. If you're selling dental calls to a network, there's no reason why you can't just add one independent dentist office into the fold and then route your calls automatically with technology. That's what we're going to talk about in this lesson. Whether you're a giant company or you're a mid level player, you're a network, you're just getting started, you should understand this information so that when it becomes time, you can use it to grow your business.

Now just like anything, there's cons. There's a lot of business development along with growing your own buyer network. There really is. Because you're going to have to talk to hundreds or thousands of companies to get a lot of coverage. And you need coverage. Now the more coverage you have, the more enterprise value you've actually built. If you can get this into a place where you have 100% coverage or close in the United States, you're going to be talking about thousands of independent buyers and you have effectively built your own 1-800-DENTIST at that point. Okay? The upside's really big, but that's going to take a shitload of work.

These also require more onboarding and hand holding than just going to a call center that takes calls already and say, "Hey, I want to sell you calls." Right? If it's a call center, they already know what calls are, they know their metrics, they know everything. Now if you're calling an independent dentist or a tow truck operator or whatever it is, they may not have ever bought a phone call before. They may not understand the value of it. And then if you can convince them of the value, they may not fully understand how to close these clients while they're on the phone or to use your technology, or to login to your Ringba white label and set up their settings. There's going to be more onboarding and hand holding throughout the process with these, but they're going to be paying you a significantly larger amount of money per phone call. Up front, you're going to spend more time, but over the long term you're going to make a lot more money.

Even though it requires more onboarding, and I'm going to call that a con because it just requires more work and most people think of it as a negative, I personally think anything that takes a lot more work and organization is something that's a pro. But that's me. That's because I like to keep people out. People are inherently lazy so I like to go do things that take a lot of work because it keeps other people from coming into my space. That's something to think about as well. Can you put in the extra hours? Are you willing to learn this? Are you willing to fail a whole bunch to get started? Because you can build a process around building your own buyer network, but at first you're probably going to have to do it yourself.

Now, it also is going to require a lot more account management. If you're not using software that's tailored to a self service buyer network, like Ringba, you're going to do a shitload of account management because you're going to have to change people's concurrency, pause them, do whatever they're going to do on a daily basis and communicate with hundreds of buyers. That's why Pay Per Call Networks don't really do this that don't use our software because it's just way too much work to try and manage all those accounts.

Now there are some companies out there that have their own software that do this on a daily basis. Most of them are big. There's a couple mid level ones. You can find some of them on the Pay Per Callers Show and they do this on a daily basis. There's a lot of challenges that come up with it, but the reason they do it is because that's where the money is. There's higher margins. You don't have to go build your own technology to make your own self service buyer network. You just need to use Ringba. At this point, I'm pretty sure we're the only call tracking platform that has self service buyer network features. We're definitely the only ones that are going to be investing into this long term until someone sees and copies us, of course. We are designing the future of our software to make sure that you guys can build your own self service buyer networks and make the huge margins of going direct simply because that's where the future of this space is.

Now it's also going to require a bit more accounting. I think that any time you're working with a large number of people, you're going to have to do a lot more accounting. Software can help you with this. You can use QuickBooks to invoice people and manage your payments. You can use Ringba to track all of the calls, obviously, and to see what's owed and what's not owed and do all your billing. But you're going to have to bill people and you're going to have to take their money. If you're going to build a big network of buyers which is where the real money is, I'm talking tens of millions of dollars or even hundreds of millions of dollars, you're going to have to set up your own accounting process.

I'm going to talk about that a little bit. But as your business grows, that accounting process is going to really have to evolve. At first, it's just going to be kind of a pain in the butt and then you're going to have to build a process around it and then if you keep scaling this you're most likely going to rebuild that accounting process three, four, five, ten times. Basically every time your business gets 300% bigger, you're going to be redoing your accounting process. You should just expect that. It's not really a con, it's just part of growing a business. It requires a lot of work. That's why I put it down there because most people consider it a con. But, man, if you could put together a really good billing system, you're in a good place and you have competitive advantage. So it's essentially a pro, too. It depends on what lens you're going to look through.

Lastly, I've already said this, but you should expect a lot of hand holding, especially when you get into this. You're going to be hand holding your account managers and your sales people when you teach them how to do this. You're going to be hand holding your clients along the way to make sure that they monetize those phone calls and they understand the value. You're going to be hand holding the accounting process. You're going to have to figure out what works for you. You're probably going to have to do some integrations as you grow. There's going to be a lot of handing holding in this process. But when you get your own self service buyer network that has a state, multi-state, regional or national coverage, you are the advertiser and you own your brand and you own the network, you've got enterprise value and now you've got a business you can go out there and sell for a lot of money. So it's totally worth it.

How to Build a Self Serve Buyer Network

How exactly do we build a self serve buyer network? First and foremost, I want to reiterate you have to use technology that can support it. If your technology does not support a self serve buyer network, well, you're going to fail, you're going to have to invest millions in your own technology or you're going to have all sorts of problems. I highly recommend you use Ringba if you're going to do this. Obviously that's a biased answer but, again, it's the only software out there right now that actually can support a self service buyer network that you can get and we're investing heavily into growing and improving that process right now. By the time you watch this, there's probably going to be weeks of improvements or months of improvements in our technology but we are going to be investing in this for the long term. I highly recommend if you're going to do this that you use technology that already supports it. If not, you're going to have to build your own. If you're new, it's going to cost you millions of dollars.

With ours, not only do you get the call tracking and all the IBR features and everything else that goes into it, our Ping Tree Technology, you can white label the whole thing your own brand so all your buyers see your agency or your brand, but it's already functional for your own self service buyer network. It's up to you. Invest millions of dollars or use software that already exists. But you don't have any other choice so I highly recommend you work with us on this one.

Next, you're going to decide on a market. What I mean by a market is a geographic area. Obviously when you get started, you don't want two dentists in Pittsburgh, one dentist in Los Angeles, one in Idaho. That doesn't serve you well. Okay? You want to consolidate a market. You want to pick a specific geographic area and then go after it. And then build multiple buyers in that area so it's redundant and you can handle more capacity, and then scale that out over time so that you can effectively reach a state or regional audience which gives you a lot more value. It doesn't do you any good to have a fragmented buyer network where your people are all over the place because unfortunately most Pay Per Call Networks and affiliates and people you're going to be working with cannot geo-target at a level that they should be able to. This is because of their technology limitation.

If you do find some great buyers and they are scattered around, talk to a Ringba rep because Ringba can actually route by ZIP Code which is a completely different animal. And we probably have clients that can drive calls into your self service buyer network if it's a bit fragmented. We can try and help you accommodate that. But, again, I don't recommend it. I think that you really should focus on a specific market and that's going to serve you well. And you build your name. You build your name and a brand in a specific market, and then you can basically take it over. Just to be clear, in almost every single Pay Per Call vertical, all 300 of them in all thousand sub-verticals within them, no one is doing this well. Okay? In insurance, people are doing this pretty well. There's some pretty big companies that have made a business out of this, but almost everywhere else, everyone's doing a really shitty job. There's a ton of opportunity with a self serve buyer network. All right?

Once you've decided on your market, you need to determine the buy and sell leading call pricing. You need to understand how much it's going to cost you to generate a call, whether you do it on your own and by media or you do it through your portals or you go find affiliates or you buy those calls from networks. However you're going to buy the calls, you need to understand what your buy prices is going to be for all those things. And then you need to understand what your sell price is going to be. What are these dentists or tow truck operators, whatever they are, going to pay you per phone call? And, depending on your market, that price is going to wiggle around a bit because obviously dentists in Beverly Hills have a lot more money. You should take advantage of that. There's a lot more competition in Beverly Hills than Kansas City for media. You should take that into account.

In the future, when you have five or six buyers or 10 or 20 clustered into a smaller area, then you teach them to bid against each other for those calls and they automatically raise your prices for you. That's the beauty behind clustering your buyers in specific markets is you create your own competition which drives the price of calls up, but your cost remains exactly the same. You just reap the benefits of bigger margins.

Now, once we know what market we're going to work in, what buy and sell lead pricing and call pricing we have, we're going to make a list of potential buyers. Just like anything else, we're going to make our own list of potential buyers. There's no reason to buy a database. There's no reason to try and systematize this process at first. It is as simple as you opening up a Google Sheet and researching it yourself. I'm going to show you how to do it. Then once you have your territory laid out, you have your geographic area, you know who all your potential buyers are going to be, you work it like a territory. For those of you that are not traveling salesmen or have never done any door-to-door, just aren't sales people in general, a territory is typically assigned to a sales person and then they go work it. They make a list of all the potential customers in that territory, they go visit them, and they build relationships over time, and they keep calling on those customers until they land them. All right?

It's the same thing as any type of business development. We do it with Ringba, too. We make the list of all our potential customers, which ones are the most important to us, and then we repeatedly reach out to them over and over and over again until we onboard them onto our platform. You're effectively going to have to do the same thing. It's not that complicated, though, and we'll walk you through it. Then once you have your list and your territory built up, you're going to contact all your prospects. This is just normal cold calling and sales. It's not hard to do but you probably should personally do it so you understand it and can write scripts and teach your team to do it and build a team around this. You need to do it yourself first so that you understand everything about it and then you can hire people to do it for you.

Obviously next we're going to have to deliver calls to the buyers. People who paid us for phone calls. We've got to deliver. So don't take a $10,000 prepayment from a dentist, you'll probably never get one, but you can take a $200 payment from a dentist and drive them a few phone calls. You can ease them into this. Then you're going to need to QA all the calls for all your new buyers. You bring on a dentist office, you send them five calls, you're going to have to QA all of them. All five. You're going to have to listen to all of the calls, you're going to have to see what their employees are doing because if their employees don't understand what's going on and don't sell people, well, they're not going to want to buy more calls from you. But if they sell 80% of the phone calls and they make a lot of money, they're going to be super geeked about buying more phone calls from you. You need to know what your clients are doing.

This can get a bit sticky, because doing quality assurance requires time and you're going to have to build a quality assurance team over time to do this. But it's really important because if you know your clients are closing these calls like wildfire, you can force them to bid against each other more for the calls and your margins go up. Again, you're going to be putting in more work up front, but long term you can see huge benefits from doing the QA. Also, if you have a client that takes a phone call and they paid 40 bucks for it and they just botch the phone call, they're going to blame you for it. Maybe they end up charging back the transaction. Maybe they call you and complain and say, "Your calls are no good." Maybe they just simply don't buy more from you, which is all bad. You're not going to understand what caused that unless you QA the calls.

So what I suggest is that every single new buyer you bring on into your buyer network, you say, "Look, we're going to send you five calls, we'll do it over the next four days. And then on Friday or Monday of next week, let's do a follow up call to review the results." You QA all the calls, you've called back the office manager at Bob's Dental or whatever it is, and you let them know, "Jenny is amazing. She closed every single call. Judy is not. She doesn't understand what's going on and I have notes for you so you can train her. If Jenny would have taken all the calls, you would have gotten 100% conversion rate. We just need to train your people a little bit more and then you would have made X dollars by booking all those appointments."

That way, you can preempt any complaining about quality by just helping them through the process. Then once they train their people better, next thing you know, bam, they're paying $40, $50, $60 a call and trying to get as many as you can possibly send because it's like adding gasoline onto a fire for their business. Hopefully you can see how powerful this is just from my story problems.

Then once you have a few buyers clustered into a small regional area, small city or a small suburban area where there's like 20 dentists, you start expanding to the neighboring areas. You start just really working and building a territory. While you're doing this, you document it all and then you create a repeatable process and you build a team that does this for you. Now if you're going to do dentists or towing or plumbers or anything on Home Advisor, for instance, you could have a biz dev team of 30 people. You could have your very own call center, essentially, doing nothing but calling companies like this and bringing them into your buyer network. Up front it costs you a bunch of money, but once you have them on if you do this process right, you can literally make millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars just doing this process.

Then you could literally fill all your calls with affiliates or networks or have your internal media team, whatever you're going to do. But this process alone, just this 11 step process, can easily turn into millions of dollars. This is ... If I were doing Pay Per Call, I would be building buyer networks in every single vertical I could get my hands on. That's how I'd build my business.

Deciding on a Market

When you're deciding first on a market, you want to think about what markets do you personally know or where have you lived. This is the easiest way to do this the first time because you understand where the customers are located, you understand the geography, you can build a territory, you understand how far people are willing to drive and you can look at a Google Map from above and see where all the dentists or all the plumbers are. It's going to feel familiar to you. Any time you're doing something new, you want it to feel a little familiar. It just helps you through the process.

Most people that are watching in the United States have lived in maybe one or two cities or they've lived in suburban areas, right? Those are the ones you probably want to start with because it just makes more sense to you, so it's going to be easy. Now if you grew up in downtown San Francisco, that may be a little bit trickier to get started just because of the immense cost of operating a business there. There may not be that many plumbers that are actually located in downtown San Francisco just because of the real estate price. You then have to move to the suburban areas, but you should have a general idea of the geography of where you're going before you get started. It's just going to make your life a lot easier.

Then you're going to want to look around the markets that you know and that you've lived to look for a high concentration of buyers. If you really think that Cincinnati, Ohio is where you want to specialize and they don't seem to have a lot of dentists for whatever reason, that may be troublesome. The good news is, though, most Pay Per Call verticals have a high concentration of these service providers literally everywhere in the United States. If you grew up in the middle of nowhere in Montana, there's nothing wrong with that, big fan of Montana, but there just may not be a concentration of buyers there so this may not be productive for you. You may just have to pick another city.

What you're really looking for here is a city or a suburban area that has at least 10 or 20 buyers in it. If it only has two, well then your business is hinged on those two buyers. If you move out into surrounding geographic areas and you pick up some buyers where there isn't a high concentration, that's fine. I just don't recommend you start there because you're going to have to do a bunch of cold calling. Cold calling is just like internet marketing, some will, some won't, so what. Someone else is waiting that wants what you have to sell. But you need multiple people because you should assume that people are going to tell you no. They are. They're going to tell you no. People are going to hang up on you. Some office managers aren't going to take your call. Whatever, it's just part of the process. Part of the process here is failure in getting new buyers and you should expect that. If you get 100% of everyone you call, you're self serve buyer network cold call Jesus. It's not going to happen.

You're also going to want to take a look at what markets in your general geographic area seem less competitive. This is real simple. Any downtown market is going to be a lot less competitive, but there's going to be a higher concentration of businesses and potential calls so it's a trade off. But this is why I prefer suburban areas because a lot of these business owners in suburban areas aren't getting bombarded with sales pitches. It's going to be a lot easier to get the office manager on the phone. Essentially, the farther out from an urban center or major city that you get, the easier it's going to be to convert a customer. If you go out in the middle of nowhere, it may be really easy to convert the one dentist out there but, again, you can't build a network around that. So my suggestion is to start with suburban medium concentrated population areas. That's what I'm going to show you in our example.

Another way to do this is to look, if you already have calls. I will tell you right now that if you're going to do this you probably should already have calls. If you're asking, "Well, Adam, how do I do that if I don't have a buyer of calls?" Well, go get an account at four or five different Pay Per Call Networks that all have a dental or whatever offer, start driving calls to them and then you can stack your own independent buyers on there and prioritize your own independent buyers with Ringba so that the majority of your high value calls that can go to a direct buyer are automatically routed there. And then the rest go through a network as you build this out. You need capacity. Probably should already have calls available.

Otherwise you're going to bring on some buyers and then you've got to go figure out how to drive them calls. If you don't know how to do that, maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes two, maybe you lose money, I don't know. It's totally possible, all right? If you want to just jump into this and vertically integrate from the start and forget about the networks or having other buyers, do it. Just expect to have to really hustle this out so that you can deliver. Because if you don't deliver those calls, your buyer is not going to be super excited about working with you and so you want to set reasonable expectations with them. If you tell them that they'll receive calls tomorrow and you've never generated a dental call before, or you don't have a way to do that and know the quality already, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

Now, I will touch on if you want to just get hustle and gangster about it and sign up two dentist offices in a normal suburban area and then are like, "All right. Great. I got two clients. Let me get some calls." I would suggest setting reasonable expectations with those dentist offices. I would simply say, "Look. We've got a ton of demand in your area for these calls. I'm really excited that you're going to be coming on board but we have to deliver calls on a first-come-first-served basis so it could take us up to two weeks for you to start receiving those calls. We just want you to be aware. That's because there's just so much demand for this so we got to go find more customers." If you tell them that, they'll be even more excited about it and they wont' be worried about it. You just really need to make sure that you get them the calls within the first two weeks.

And you want to be reasonable about this, too. You don't want to promise someone that you're going to send them 30 calls a week from the get-go. You want to start with, "Yeah, we're going to send you two calls a day. Ten calls a week your first week," or, "five calls." Just get them started because you're going to want to coach them through the process before you burn thousands of dollars of their money because they may just be like, "Screw you, I'm out," if you don't actually have the time to coach them and train them on actually closing these people. If you have some really great buyers and they just get it and they just hammer these calls and close a lot of them, great. Ramp the volume. But you want to use your judgment.

You should also ask yourself can you focus on suburban areas that have higher levels of income because that means that the service providers in those areas charge more money. The services they offer are going to be more high end, so you can charge more money, too. For instance, if you go to a dentist that's in an expensive area like La Jolla, California, they're going to be doing a lot more than just general dentistry and discount cavity filling. They're going to be using the newest medical procedures for dental and cosmetic dentistry, they're going to have really high end clients, they're going to have a much better experience for their customers so they're going to be charging their customers more money. When they charge their customers 50%, 100%, 200% more money than Bob's Discount Dentistry, they're going to be able to pay you a lot more money for those calls.

Granted it'll cost you more to generate them, but theoretically it should cost you a little more to generate them, you should be able to have a wider margin on those calls as well. You want to think about what the demographics are of the areas that you're targeting and you want to focus on at least middle class demographics to get started. Maybe what you're going to offer is better to lower class or upper class or whatever it is, but it's just going to be easier to penetrate a middle class market getting started. A lower class market's going to have thinner margins, maybe higher volume, maybe significantly higher volume, but you're going to want to have your game tight before you move into those spaces.

Determining Lead and Call Pricing

To determine the leading call price, this can get a little bit tricky and it's a bit of an art, but you can always just ask someone else. That's the easiest way to do it. Are there already networks in the vertical that you're going to use? For instance, if you're going to do dentists, well 1-800-DENTIST already exists and it does exactly this. All you have to do is call 1-800-DENTIST as a buyer or call Brighter.com or whatever it is as a buyer and ask for information. "How much do you charge per call? How many calls per week can I get," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You want to look specifically for your market. "I'm calling about the Kansas City market or the Independence, Kansas market. I want to know what the calls are. Blah, blah, blah," and then you say, "Well, we also have a location that's in [Taloosa 00:33:11] or whatever, Springfield, Missouri," it just doesn't matter. Whatever your market is, ask for different pricing in different markets. Maybe it's the same. Maybe it's not ... But this will give you an idea of how other companies are pricing based on geographic location so you don't have to do all of this on your own. You can just go in as a buyer to someone else's network like you own a dentist office or you own a towing company or whatever it is, and they'll give you the information. Okay? Then when you have the information, you have a baseline.

Now if you don't want to do dental, maybe you're going to do cosmetic surgery and that doesn't really exist in Pay Per Call, but it should. You don't have a baseline. So you call every single other medical network you can find and create a spreadsheet and then get an idea and then feel your way through it based on whatever information you get. You're going to adjust your pricing, too, based on the competitiveness in the market. As it gets more centralized into an urban area, like a downtown location, you're going to adjust for more competition. Or really rich areas are going to have more competition. And then you adjust based on your cost of acquisition as well.

Over time, you're just going to have to work with your clients and let them know that their costs can change. Built into the agreement you write with the dentist office or the tow truck driver or whatever, you should tell them that the costs are going to change. If they want more calls, they can bid more money inside their account or they can bid less or whatever, but you should never tell one of these companies that the price is going to be static because you're doing yourself a disservice. As competition changes, you want to lift the price up. And what will happen is these buyers start to become dependent on your calls for the growth of their business so you obviously are going to need to work those prices up over time.

Or if you have a glut of phone calls and no one to take them, you depress the prices so that they're willing to buy a lot more phone calls so that you can spend your time adding more buyers into the fold. It's a supply and demand market just like anything else. But you do want to set up front expectations with your buyers that you aren't going to have static pricing. It's not like you're going to pay 30 bucks forever for these calls and we can just give you more or less, it's market and season driven and it's going to be a dynamic process from the beginning.

Making a List of Potential Buyers

How do we actually do this in practice? It may or may not seem simple, but I want you to know it is simple. The first thing we're going to do is pop open a Google Map and pick the city we're in. Now, I picked Kansas City. I've never lived in Kansas City. I don't even know much about Kansas City. I'm not sure, as an adult, I've ever been there. But it's completely irrelevant. I'm going to look at this map and I see this whole thing as my first territory. Now when you look at a Google Map, the bigger the text, the more the population. So if you look at this, you can see Independence and Overland Park are bigger, Lee's Summit is bigger. And then you have Raytown and River Bend and Liberty and Gladstone and North Kansas City. And they're smaller. Okay? That's based on the size of the area and the population, but this is how I'm going to work a territory, basically.

I'm going to take a look at this and I'm going to see all these little suburban areas. And then as I pan away and move further from the downtown area, there's just tons of suburbs all over. Each one of these cities, these suburbs, is a market in itself. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open a Google Spreadsheet or Excel or whatever you want to use, and I'm going to create a list of businesses that want to buy my calls or may want to buy my calls in a specific city. That's it.

For this example, I picked Independence. Like, "Great. Independence sounds great and that's where we're going to go." It's really that simple. There's no rhyme or reason to it. I'm just going to pick a larger suburb. You could start with Shawnee or Overland or whatever. You could do the whole thing. It's up to you. Yeah. It's just that simple. You can hit this whole list in a day. You're going to have to keep following up, but you can hit most of metro Kansas and get a general idea of how many buyers you can pull into the fold in maybe a week or two worth of work just you, and not full time, either. That is an exciting opportunity.

We already know we're going to search in a specific geographic region you want to target. And then if I were going to be doing this, I would get real ambitious about it. I would find at least 50 plus targets. At least. Bare minimum. Why? Because I'm not going to pick up my iPhone and dial all of these people. I'm going to put them into a dialer and I'm just going to hit it. I'm going to go. If I were going to do this, I would make a list of every single suburb and downtown in this in one shot and then I would load it into a dialer and then I personally would just call them all and then I'd document the entire process and figure out how to sell these people in whatever field that I'm going to be choosing.

Now, if you don't want to do this research and make this spreadsheet yourself, but realistically the entire Kansas City metro area can be documented in maybe three or four hours you should do it, you can hire a virtual assistant to do it for you. But then you are not going to get a feel for the area. You're not going to get a feel for it. So I highly recommend that you do an entire metro area yourself and just put the elbow grease in and actually do it so that you can build a process around it and then hire the virtual assistants to do the research and then eventually sales people and the whole thing. And you should document the entire process. If I were going to do this, I would record my screen, I'd take lots of screen shots, I'd write up a step by step guide, I'd take tons of meticulous notes, and I would create a step by step process that I can show someone else for this.

If you want to hear about people in Pay Per Call that actually build their own step by step processes, I recommend you watch the Pay Per Caller Show with Manny Zuccarelli, the CEO of Quote Velocity because he is an entirely different animal than most people that are operating in this space. He is incredibly meticulous, is really great about building processes. We talk about those processes on the show. And he's super detailed so that he can build a real business around what he's doing. Please, watch that show and you can hear about his process. It's quality assurance but the same type of thing applies. Okay?

You're just going to record everything you do and create a process around it so that you can replicate yourself and have other people do this for you. Because if you're going to get thousands of businesses in your buyer network, you're not going to do that alone and you need to train the people that you're going to have do it for you. So you might as well do this yourself. You have to do this yourself if you're small anyways, just record and document everything. And then when you want to expand it, you already have the raw materials, you just have to move around and do a training program and you can train someone else to do it.

Otherwise you're going to have to have to do the whole damn process again yourself and document it or, like most businesses, you're going to create piss poor documentation of the process. And then when you hire someone on, they're not going to get the results you want or expect. And then you're in a bad position and then a lot of entrepreneurs blame their employees for a shitty training process and not getting the results they want. But typically it's the entrepreneur's fault for not putting together a great training program. I'm a victim of this. I've put together training programs that didn't get the job done before. And that's why I highly recommend that you record everything. It's easy, it's cheap, and then in the future you can just chop it up. You can have someone else edit it into a program, whatever you want to do. But then you have a training program. Just start doing that from the beginning.

Finding Buyer Clusters

Now what we want to look for now that we're zoomed into Independence, we want to look for a cluster of businesses. You can see here in the map that this one's good. It's got pages showing results one through 20. There's multiple pages of dentist offices. You can see Aspen Dental here is advertising already so they're going to be a company that's receptive to bringing in new business and growth. But, man, there are a lot of them. If you live in Independence, or even down in Raytown, all of these dental offices are accessible because, let's see, from Raytown, how many we got, one mile? From Raytown, two, three, four, five to the farthest dentist office is let's call it five and a half miles, not as the bird flies. Maybe six, worst case scenario. Someone will drive six miles to go to a dentist even if there's one closer. This is an example of a really great territory.

Now when I click next on here to show the next list, you see a bunch more dentists and you can do this yourself. There's like 60 dentist offices in the neighboring area of just Independence. That's a lot of opportunity to find buyers. All these people are fighting over the customers so they want your services. That's a really exciting opportunity. If you just think that this is Independence and there 50 or 70 more metropolitan areas, man, that's thousands of dentists just in Kansas City metro. That means there's tens of thousands or a hundred thousand or more dentists nationwide, probably more, probably hundreds of thousands. All of them want calls every day. Now we're talking about, with dentists alone, a multi-billion dollar opportunity for Pay Per Call. Hopefully you understand the gravity of this simple business process that we're talking about.

We're going to work this like a traveling salesman. I'm just going to start from start to finish and copy every single one of these into a spreadsheet. I'm going to do their business name, I'm going to their address, I'm going to do their phone number, I'm going to do any other information that they have on their page, their website. I'm going to do everything. I'm going to get maybe their star rating, how many review they have in there, because that information is important in determining budget. Independence Family Dental Care has 153 reviews, they're mostly positive. That means they're able to handle a lot of clients. Aspen Dental only has 11, but they pay for ads. That means they want to grow. That's how I'm going to look at which targets are going to be the best.

Now Dr. Matthew Wiley DDS only has one review and is probably not a very big office. He's not going to want to buy a ton of phone calls. Do you get it? I'm using the review volume and whether they advertise or not take look at their potential budget because obviously I want the buyers that can handle 10 calls a day, 20 calls a day. But regardless, I'm going to call them all because maybe Dr. Matthew Wiley DDS can take three calls a week or five calls a week and he'll pay $50 a call. Doesn't matter. We're going to do it all with technology. We're going to manage all the capacity with technology so it's irrelevant how many calls they buy and you want to get really good at this.

This is what I consider a cluster. If I were to change the page, I'll get another cluster. But I want to work within a visual area of a map that makes geographic sense to a potential caller, which is a ten mile radius at most. This is about ten from corner to corner. And then I'm going to call every single one and I'm going to sell them. And this isn't complicated. You're going to call the office and you're going to ask for the office manager. If they ask you why, you tell them, "I'm with a local agency. We specialize in dental marketing and we have an overflow of calls. So we work with a lot of your competitors in the area, but we have so many phone calls from people that want to go visit a dentist, they can't buy them all and I'd like to send you guys some." That's a really weird phone call because of the way I positioned it. I positioned it as, "I have so many clients that your competitors can't buy them all or handle them all and so I need to talk to more dentists in Independence."

It's going to get the office manager on the phone. And then when I get the office manager on the phone, I personally am going to address this differently than a lot of people will because I believe in long term vision as opposed to short term gains. I'll just give them some free phone calls and then show them where the value is. But you have to decide how you want to do it.

Now once you have a bunch of buyers in here, it's going to be much easier to target calls in this geographic area. If I have ABC Dental and also Dental Excellence, I have basically ten miles in either direction of them, so a 30 mile radius that I can drive calls in. That's really what I want is physical geographic location. Coverage so that I can really, truly market and generate a lot of phone calls. I'm going to want a lot of buyers, especially in the same area, because whether I have the calls or not to support all these dentists doesn't matter. Once they understand the value of those calls, I'm going to make them bid on those phone calls and I'm going to start a bidding war because someone's going to be willing to pay more than someone else for those clients. I want them to pay me the most. Bidding war only makes me more money. It doesn't cost me more money. That's what I want to do.

I also am going to want to implement Simuldial into this because I'm working direct to advertiser. None of them are really going to have phone systems. Those phones are going to ring until someone's able to answer it. Simuldial allows me to automatically dial 10 different dentist offices at once, and then whoever picks up the phone first gets the call. Now that may be counterproductive based on bid, so I may create target groups based on bid levels so that I'm dialing three dentists at a time or whatever the case is, but I want to make sure those calls get answered and no one drops them.

Contacting Prospects

Contacting prospects can be a complicated process. If you've never done cold calling before, I think you should do this just to get the experience because most successful entrepreneurs have cold called at something. You have to or you're not going to win. For instance, I was a door to door salesman in downtown Detroit. I literally worked 100% commission in the winter selling phone service through bullet proof glass. And it sucked, but what it taught me was how to be extremely resilient, not worry about getting told no, and to be a just absolute killer sales person. If you're unsure about doing this yourself or you don't like cold calling, get over it because it'll make you a monster in business.

Also, how are you going to lead by example? If you can't cold call and do this yourself, how are you going to expect someone else to do it for you and how are you going to coach them? You're not. It's not going to work. So just don't be lazy, get yourself a headset and put on this dude's attitude because this dude in the picture, that's the attitude you need to win at cold calling. You've got to be excited, you've got to be ready, you've got to love people. A no is a buying sign. A no is a buying sign because they're talking to you. Just get excited about doing it. Smile a lot. Get a headset so that you can walk around and talk like I am now because motion creates emotion. If you're sitting in a chair like that and trying to give this class, think how boring this class would be if I were sitting down and giving it for, God, what are we at, 25 plus hours? Hell no. You wouldn't watch it. You wouldn't be engaged.

Same thing goes for sales. You need to stand up. You need to put a smile on your face and you need to go. No matter what vertical you're going to work in, you're going to call all of them. No cherry picking, no whatever. Just call all of them. Doesn't matter if it's dentists or someone else, you're going to ask for the office manager. Or in some scenarios, like towing, you're going to probably talk to the owner or whatever. These are small business owners, their time's valuable, make it quick and get to your value proposition. You can build a relationship, sure, but just get to the value proposition. If they're not available, ask their name, put it in your spreadsheet. Put it in your disposition report if you're using software or dialer so that you know who to call back and ask for next time.

Then keep calling. Call on Monday, they don't take your call, great. Call Tuesday. Call Wednesday. Call Thursday. Call Friday. Don't stop calling because there is no TCPA requirement for business. If they say, "Take me off your list," take them off your list. Fine. I would say, if they told me to take them off their list, I'd say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I'm not calling from list. Hold on. Hold on a second. I work with your competitors in Independence. I need to talk to the office manager. I have something for them. I'm not even selling something, I'm here to give them something. So just chill out. I'm going to have to call back."

And if they're like, "No, take me off your list," well then you need to. But I'm going to try and talk them into thinking that I'm here to give them something and not this instant take me off your list response. If they do that, just act confused like, "Wait, what? Wait, hold on. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, you're not on a list. All right? I'm not in a call center right now, all right? I'm not telemarketing. Listen, I need to talk to your office manager, it's important." And if you do that, most of the time the gatekeeper will transfer you because no one has the balls to do that. It puts you ahead of the game.

Now also, they're going to have emails on their websites. They're going to have emails on their Google listings. Get that information and if they won't talk to you, send them email advertising, too. Start building an email list and just send them case studies and whatever. But the key here is the squeaky wheel gets the grease in any type of cold calling. You may not get them the first time, you will get them if you keep trying and what you have for them is something that they need and delivers great value.

That's the thing. If you can help someone's business grow, eventually they'll listen to you and eventually they'll become your client. That's my philosophy with Ringba and we're exploding. Usually we get told no the first time, that's fine. We expect it. But once people realize that there's more value there than they're getting, they're like, "Wait, I need to talk to them." And this is the same thing. People want to grow their business. You have something to help them grow. You're offering them something that helps their future. So invest in your future and give away some free calls.

"What, Adam, you're crazy. Just giving away people free calls? I could sell those calls to a network, even. I could just sell those calls, blah, blah, blah." Because let me tell you, guys, if you call an office manager at a dentist office ... If I were doing this myself, I would have a hundred people making these phone calls. But every single time we'd be giving away free calls. We're like, "Look, we're going to give you the first five calls free. They're $50 apiece. That's a $250 value. We have so many calls that we just need a home for them. So, listen, I'm not even here to sell. Take my five free calls. I'll give you five free clients, okay? No questions asked. Is that fine?" And the office manager's going to be like, "Yeah, sure, what do we got to do?" I'm like, "You've got to do nothing. Nothing. We'll just make your phone ring five times and I'll call you back in a week and I'll let you know what happened."

And they'll be like, "Oh, okay," a little confused, whatever. And then we'll have a follow up email, probably, that was like, "Oh hey, Judy. Thanks for talking to me today. Your five calls are going to start being delivered during your business hours." I would add the business hours into the spreadsheet so that the research doesn't have to be done twice and then our team can set up the hours of operation for the client. The hand holding we talked about. And then after they get the calls I'm going to email her again, "Hey, you got five phone calls. Our quality assurance team listened to them. Did you know that your team closed four out of five phone calls? They got four new appointments out of five. Two of them were families. So you got eight new customers and, from the sounds of it, you guys charge $350 a cleaning so there you go. I just gave you thousands of dollars worth of revenue. Can you spare 15 minutes to talk to me about it? Just want to review the results." She's going to be like, "Hell yes."

Or you can do it the hard way. You can call them up and say, "Hey, I'm Adam from Media Busters and we specialize in dentists. I got a ton of phone calls. I have so many that I don't have dentists to buy them so we're selling them at a discount right now. They're usually $50. I can sell them to you for $40 a call. There's a $250 minimum. Grab your credit card for me, this takes a few minutes to set up." But then there's a financial transaction there and I may be a stone cold killer at that, but the people I train to do it will take weeks or months to become killers on the phone. So it's better to give away the freebie.

What's easier? Get your free trial of diet pills, only pay shipping or give me $499? It's the same thing. Invest in your future, give away some free calls. It's going to open up every door. No dentist office or plumber or kitchen remodeler or whatever you're doing is going to be like, "What? Free phone calls? That's dumb. I don't want those. Keep your calls." No. No. They're going to take the calls.

So, yeah, maybe you give away five free calls to a dentist. Your cost on them is 10 bucks a call, you're in 50 bucks, the upside's $250, you get them on it and the next thing you do they make a $4,000 prepayment for more calls at drastically higher margins than the network because you gave them a little bit of love for free. This is an easy sell if you do it right, guys. I'd be giving away $50,000 a day worth of free phone calls on a call center floor at scale because it would just be so much money in upside. Just think about it. Even one guy in his mom's basement can come up with 50 bucks to give a dentist office free calls. There's no excuse to not use this model unless you just can't handle doing it the easy way.

Speaking of doing it the easy way, please don't do this on your iPhone or your Android and manually typing phone numbers in there. Don't do that. Get a Cloud based dialer like Dialfire. Dialfire is great. No contract, no seat fee, usage based just like Ringba. You don't have to spend any real money, just deposit like 25 bucks, dump your phone numbers in there, get yourself a headset and go to town.

Now if you're not going to take my advice and, as crazy as that sounds, 100% of people listening to this aren't that try it, do me a favor and at least get yourself some ear buds so you can stand up and walk around while you're talking to people. If you're going to manually do this and waste your time, at least get yourself a headset. Don't be the guy who's like this and trying to sit at a desk and hold the phone and blow your shoulder out doing this. Don't do it on speaker phone because you sound like a jackass. Just get yourself some headphones or a headset, or use a dialer and make your life easy. It doesn't really cost any money. A headset's like 20 bucks on Prime.

Working with Buyers

Now I'm going to say this again because I really believe that it's the way to do this. Give away for free to establish a track record. When you go to the store on free sample day, do you take the free samples? Yeah. Some people go to Costco on free sample day only for the free samples. And then they end up buying a bunch of stuff. Because as humans, there's the power of obligation. Someone gives you something for free, they feel obligated to reciprocate unless they're a sociopath. 95% of the population, if you give them something for free, they feel obligated to reciprocate. If you give them five free phone calls that makes them thousands of dollars, they're definitely going to take your call back and they're going to feel like they owe you to become their customer, to become your customer. They feel like they owe you. Giving it away for free is more than just your foot in the door, it's almost a guarantee of success.

Now, the next one here is very important for two reasons. Bill buyers in advance, don't issue credit for two reasons. One, people don't pay their bills. Just because a guy has a beautiful dentist office with a grand piano that plays itself and a waterfall and a 300 inch TV and a Bentley parked out front does not mean that he pays his bills. Maybe his office manager sucks. Maybe he's got a ton of debt. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Or maybe he's just a dirt bag. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Some people don't pay their bills so just make people pay you in advance. What you're selling is worth its weight in gold so they should, especially if you gave them some freebies and proved it to them.

Second reason is if you issue people credit, then you've got to go collect it. You've got to all them. You've got to invoice them. You've got to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so giving people credit is not a good idea unless you hook up with a dentist office that has like 12 locations and then you prove yourself and they're like, "Hey, listen, we've done $400,000 in business, can we get monthly terms?" Then the answer is, "Yeah. I will have an accountant work on that because I get paid $40,000 a month. Sure. No problem." But if you're dealing with a guy who buys four calls a week, do not issue credit. It will be nothing but a headache.

Then you want to get yourself a merchant account. Stripe, Square, Circle, I don't know, hexagon, whatever shape merchant account you want. And so this is important so that you can bill people. You take their credit card, you make sure that they sign a form for it so they can't charge back. You make sure you have an IO with these people that they understand they're buying X number of calls for X dollars. And then they can eventually change their bid inside of the portal, whatever. And then you bill them with the credit card.

Now in 2019, something that's on the Ringba road map is integrations with merchant providers so that people can literally log into your white labeled account under your brand, put in their credit card, say they want 20 calls this week and it automatically bills them like Facebook ads. That's coming. I apologize at time of recording we don't have that. Maybe by the time you're watching this it's already there. Talk to your Ringba rep. They can let you know where it's at or what's released or where our self service buyer features are. I'm sure we're going to have tons of innovation by the time that you're watching this simply because we do two pushes a week and this is a big deal on our road map.

Now you're going to want to QA the buyer's calls the first couple days or any new buyer. And then you're going to want to do it on an ongoing basis. A lot of people that are watching this probably won't follow all my instructions, and that's disheartening, but I'm telling you right now, just let me give you the answer. Give people the free calls, QA those calls, call them back and sell them more calls, and then when you take their money, pre-schedule a review with them so that you can go over their process. Track their conversion rate, take notes on their pitch and then coach them and tell them which agents are better, which people are worse and help them close the calls. Because the higher the close rate, the more they'll bid for those calls, the more you can create upward competitive pressure and then you just make more money.

That does require you to do more upfront work, but if you think about it, is that dentist office going anywhere? Let's assume they're not. They're going to be around for at least 24, 36, 48, 60 months, who knows, five years at least. If you do right by them, maybe they're your customer for five years. And if they buy 20 calls a week, they spend $2,000 a week with you for five years, that's a lot of money, guys. That's a lot of money. All you have to do to do right by them is a little bit of quality assurance and schedule follow up calls to make sure they're doing it right. Your effort in training your customer is going to pay itself back in dump trucks of cash. Don't get lazy on the front end even though you're not making a ton of money on the client when you first onboard them.

As you go through this process and you learn what works for you and you learn what works for your clients, create a best practices guide and info for your clients. A one to three page PDF that gives them examples of what to do, how to do it, the best way to close customers, the best way to do these things so that they're more successful. You need to invest in your client's success because then they'll keep buying from you.

Creating a Repeatable Process

Lastly, once you've done all this, if you're smart you've recorded all of it. You've taken lots of notes. You've documented your scripts. You have every single call recorded. You've created a CRM to keep track of your accounts. Now what you're going to do is take those recordings, your scripts, and you're going to create a training program for people to find more buyers for you. And then you can hire a BPO company or people in your office or a call center or build a call center or whatever you want to do to then repeat this process for you so that you can grow your business.

Now any time someone gives you a no, you want to mark it in your spreadsheet or disposition it. You're going to want your people to do this, too, as you grow so that you can reach out to them. You can create segments of people: nos, call me laters. Just like online marketing, you want buckets of users in different spaces in the process so that you can market to them differently. Direct mail is extremely powerful. Do you know who the office manager is? Write her a letter. Do a personalized letter. There's all sorts of on demand mailing companies where you can just API the information over and they'll send mail for you. Even a beautifully written letter with your logo on it signed by you in blue ink. It's amazingly easy to do these things and they're very, very powerful.

And then you're going to want to follow up with all new buyers about their experience. Maybe 30 days in, maybe 60 days in, maybe 30, 90, 120, whatever, maybe twice a year, maybe once a quarter. You have to figure out what works best for you so that you can get their feedback on how you could improve quality or problems they're facing. After you develop a relationship with them, you're a digital agency, you have all these buyers, maybe they got a crappy website, maybe there's other things wrong with their business. By talking with them and following up with them and having thousands of people in your buyer network when you're at scale, you will have the opportunity to take this information and create more service offerings to your already existing happy customers. And that's how you make a lot more money.

Now, once we've conquered Independence, then we go to neighboring suburban areas, then we go state wide, then we go regionally, then we go nationally. Then, when we have a national network of call buyers in a specific industry, we can sell our business for so much money we don't know how to spend it. That is exactly how you do this. It's very simple, start to finish.


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