Pay Per Callers Show - Manny Zuccarelli, CEO of Quote Velocity

[Ringba]

Learn how Manny Zuccarelli grew QuoteVelocity from 0 calls to a multi-million dollar Pay Per Call business in under a year!

Watch on YouTube | Listen to the Audio Version

Show Notes

• Manny Zuccarelli, CEO of Quote Velocity
• You should focus on building short and long term opportunities.
• Business partnerships take a long to nurture.
• Don’t expect yourself to intuitively know exactly what to do.
• You need to spend a lot of time understanding the consumer journey.
• Get on the phone with actual consumers!
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• It’s easy to conflate putting in hours with getting things done. It's more about what you're achieving in that time frame
• You have to make more mistakes in a shorter period of time!
• You need to make lifestyle changes, take care of yourself, eat healthy food and get lots of exercise.
• Driving internal traffic and generating consumer-initiated inbounds.
• Creating content, educating callers and providing value is key to scaling consumer-initiated inbound calls.
• Take risks, consider the opportunity cost and be patient! Everything takes time!
• Focus on generating quality traffic, maintaining relationships, and providing value to the customer.
• Create an internal disposition key for reviewing call outcomes.
• QA: You have to work through the inefficiencies and challenges to find what works and improve to improve your process.
• Quote Velocity is currently focusing on creating consumer-initiated interactions and building long-term value for consumers and partners.

About Quote Velocity
Quote Velocity is a provider of real-time web and live transfer prospects. We generate qualified leads and calls of consumers seeking assistance in most financial, automotive, and healthcare verticals. Our experience spans over a decade in delivering the right customers to the right clients.

Website: https://www.QuoteVelocity.com
Email: partners@quotevelocity.com

Episode Transcript

Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Callers Show. My name is Adam Young, the founder of Ringba, and today, I have very special guest, CEO of Quote Velocity from Boca Raton, Florida, Manny Zuccarelli. They specialize in debt, mortgage, and other type of finance pay per call, and I'm very excited to have him on the show today. Thanks for joining us, Manny.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Thank you, man. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Adam Young:
Absolutely. So what I would like to know is how you got started in performance marketing. Where was Quote Velocity born?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Come on, man, you want to go that far back?

Adam Young:
Yeah, I do.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Performance marketing started in my mid-teens. Those were the AOL days. A good friend of mine came over, said, "Hey, I've got this software. You run it on your computer and it makes money." And I mean, I wish I had something else to say about it, but that's the truth. That's how it worked. He gave me the software, I put it on my computer, and I woke up with like 50 bucks in an account. I was like, "This is crazy." So I became a hermit for about three and a half years where all I did was focus on that. At the time, servers were not really a thing. What you had were PCs in your room with KVM switches, and maybe you've been there. So yeah. So that's what it turned into. My bedroom turned into a heat box with a bunch of computers, each one running independent applications for marketing software.

And I think from there, we took the progression that a lot of affiliates do, which is into more of an advertiser role, launched a lead company in my early 20s, and saw a lot of success. I found that I was better with biz dev, per se, than affiliate marketing, right, and just specifically being honed in on a very specific task the way the role of an affiliate requires. And yeah. We brought on all national accounts. We were doing great. Everything was growing quickly.

And then '08 happened. So all of our traffic and everything we did was in the mortgage space. So that ended within six months. Spent the next seven years as a master affiliate running various offers, and then honestly, just got tired of it. Felt like a lot of the work that I was doing was just not trending in the direction that I wanted. I wanted to have more involvement at a biz dev level. I wanted to spend more time out there procuring business, working with partners, rather than sitting in my bedroom just kind of working on things all day and not having a lot of contact. I just feel like the biz dev role for me is where I do a lot better. But because I spend so much time with affiliates, I resonate with them. I understand what they need. I understand what they're looking for. And I understand a lot of what they struggle with.

Adam Young:
I see this progression a lot with smart affiliates. They realize that the spinning plates becomes really taxing, physically, mentally, and if you're really into it too, like the laptop lifestyle is horse shit, right? No real major, incredible affiliate that's changing the way that marketing is done is actually sitting on a beach with a laptop working for two hours. They're not. They're hiding in their house. They don't go outside. My record was seventeen days not going in the elevator. It's just--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Ordering food in.

Adam Young:
Yeah, exactly. Order food or like my wife would just go out and get food. I just wouldn't do anything else. That's all I did, and it's incredibly engaging, but at some point, I see a lot of affiliates hit that wall and then realize they want to open up and build a real business, and those affiliate skills are incredibly powerful when you're building a real business.

Manny Zuccarelli:
And that's what I was going to say. I mean, I hope it doesn't sound like we're deterring people from being affiliates. It's more so I don't think that we would be where we are now as quickly as we are if I hadn't spent all that time doing that. And that's the truth. And we know that because we get that kind of feedback a lot with the way we do business, with the things that we provide, and with just the understanding of the market and what they need and the tools and tech and everything else. So it's helped us move forward.

Adam Young:
Yeah. And when we met, which was about a year ago, almost to the day. It's just a couple weeks to the day that we met.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. Yeah, we've--

Adam Young:
You were essentially at zero. You hadn't gotten into calls really yet. You were just trying to figure out what you wanted to do. And I was really excited about that because we have a lot of clients that are just starting from zero and then build real businesses, and that's the most fulfilling and rewarding thing that I get besides watching my team grow is watching our clients grow. And so let's talk about that for a minute. Since you and I met, just under a year ago, you've gone from basically zero phone calls to a rather sizable call portfolio. Can you talk about some of the challenges you faced at the beginning and what some of the hurdles were and how you conquered them?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. One of the first things we did when we came into this space was-- and I think a lot of people take this position. They try to decide where they should focus their efforts. What verticals? If you're someone without any type of experience in marketing, I think it'd be even more challenging because now you're really just kind of arbitraging everything. But what we really ran into was a case where I think that rather than focusing on both short- and long-term business, I was constantly focused on obtaining partnerships with companies who in hindsight, I should've known would take six months, a year, to nurture. And so in the interim, you're kind of sitting there and you're sort of spinning your wheels and you're trying to find your footing in a new space. You're going from tech stack to tech stack, which actually, is probably really where it should start.

When you start out, you don't really know what the needs of your company are, I mean, really, I guess in any startup, right? Things are changing very fast. What you think you need today might not be the case tomorrow, or what you might run into, which is what we did, is we do these thirty-minute onboardings or thirty-minute demos, rather, and then you go and onboard with this new SAS platform that you know relatively little about other than what was demoed in the short period of time. And you come to find out a month later, this isn't going to work with everything we need. Now you're in a contract, and now you've got all these other obligations, and now you've got to go from whatever you're using and the time you've spent on it and the time your engineer has spent on it and your partners and everyone else and now move over to something else.

That wasted a lot of time for us. On the biz dev side, I would say there was, again, just high expectations with partners that I'd initially talked to, and in the interim, just not really executing on more of the day-to-day tasks necessary to bring in revenue in the short-term. So it suffered for months, what felt like years, in trying to find a footing in a hyper-competitive market. Why? What's that?

Adam Young:
Well, I was just-- I'm not laughing at you, I just understand your struggle in a way that is intimate to my life, right, because I've been through this before. So I giggle, but not at your pain. Just this is the normal pain an entrepreneur experiences, and I think that every single successful person I know that's built a business has gone through struggle at the beginning, and it's something I like to highlight. I think that entrepreneur culture right now is very like, if you're unemployed, you're an entrepreneur in waiting, right? And that's nonsense. What it really is is suffering upfront and sacrifice upfront and getting your ass handed to you upfront, getting kicked in the dick over and over again until finally, people are like, "Okay. This guy's legit. He can take the abuse. Let's do some business." And that's--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. That, and I think because I had a very strong track record for such a long time, and when I went to pivot out, I knew, and I said to myself, I was like, "This is going to be-- this is going to be hard. Things are probably not like they were." And any time you start doing something relatively new-- because it had been eight years since I did any kind of biz dev. We were just master affiliates, eight, nine years. So you expect yourself to be better at the task. You expect yourself to just kind of know what to do intuitively, and in hindsight, it's really ignorant. It's extremely ignorant to think that that's how things are going to go because in most cases, they don't, or at least not from what I've heard from people who are truthful with what they've had to go through. I know that may not be so specific to the space, but I mention that because I think that it's something that anybody, whether they come on as an affiliate, a network, whatever they're doing, it'll be something that anyone who watches this will probably resonate with to some degree and realize that it's not just them, that it's something we all go through.

Adam Young:
So what would you have done differently that would have accelerated your progress, now that we can look back in time with 20/20 vision?

Manny Zuccarelli:
So one of the things we did right was we spent a lot of time on understanding the user journey, or the consumer's journey. So we personally, in-house, made thousands of calls. I transferred hundreds of calls a week.

Adam Young:
Wait. You actually took raw calls, qualified them with transfer scripts, and then sent them to the call center?

Manny Zuccarelli:
So no, no. We sent them directly to our clients. So we had a flow where, after the consumer would complete the online application, the thank you page would display a phone number for them to call. They could click to call or we would call them automatically, and my phone would automatically ring and bridge into them, sort of like an SMS, IVR flow is now. And I had conversations with a lot of consumers in the different verticals that we're in. Some of those conversations were difficult to have, where in some, we do death settlement, we're credit repair, and some of these people are not in a great place. But it educated us a lot on what they really needed. It educated me on the amount of time that you need to spend on the phone with them in order to both hear them out and convey potential value, which helped us better understand what was going to happen down the funnel when our partners would take the calls, what types of average call lengths we should expect. And I know I digress a little bit here because you asked about what I would change.

I think what really I would change would have more so to do with the way that we operated from a-- I almost think we bit off too much, just way too much, like way more than we could chew. It was just kind of like, "Let's pick up all this traffic. Let's try to align with all these leading partners in the space." And in some regard, it took a year for those relationships to come to fruition, sort of like I said before. So perhaps, it worked out better than we anticipated, but again, it put is in a position where during that initial period, it was a real struggle. Yeah. I think just-- and it's a real dichotomy because you look at it and you're like, "Okay." You want to come into the space. You want to add value. You want to build quality content. You want to do all these things. You want to have a refined flow on how you're generating traffic and what you're doing, but at the same time, you want to build long-term value. And deciding how much time to invest in each of those can be a lot harder than people think, especially when you're taking the role that we have, so.

Adam Young:
I completely agree with that, and I'd like to highlight it. It's really important because I see a lot of affiliates that want to transition into advertisers or move into a space and build a real business, and that takes commitment and long-term thinking, whereas in the affiliate space, you're like, "I need to hurry up and get some traffic, convert some offers," and it's like a constant, "Let's go as fast as possible." But when you're building a business, you have to slow down part of that thought process and invest in your future constantly, which is that long-term value. And what you get with that - and I learned the same thing with Ringba because you and I have similar backgrounds - is enterprise value. You get a business that's then worth something that you can sell one day for a multiple of revenue or profit, and that's a completely different animal than I think affiliates are used to thinking about, but it's the one where you really set yourself up to be not rich, but wealthy. If you want to make real money - and I don't mean $1 million a year, $2 million a year, and maybe that's real money to some of our viewers, but I'm talking about like hundreds of millions of dollars - the only way to effectively do that is to build a real business and think long-term. So I really appreciate how you're looking at this and trying to balance your short- versus long-term approach. I think that's something that a lot of people don't talk about.

And I also want to highlight what you said about actually taking the calls. So you're the CEO and the founder of Quote Velocity. You've been in the business a long time. And there you are on the phone, probably with a headset - I wish I had a picture - taking phone calls and then transferring them, like doing the work of an 8-to-12-dollar-an-hour employee in a call center that has no life experience. That's you so that you can understand the customer journey. And I just want to say that I think that's incredibly commendable and I admire you for it because the vast majority of affiliates that I know in the pay per call space don't take the time to listen to their phone calls, definitely aren't taking a phone call. They're not trying to understand the campaign from front to back. They're approaching it from the laptop lifestyle mindset of be lazy and drive traffic. And so I think that's the true biggest mindset change that has to happen between an affiliate and a real entrepreneur, because an affiliate that drives traffic and has an LLC isn't an entrepreneur, okay? He's just a guy that figured out how to arbitrage some traffic. But to turn it into a real company, you have to start actually giving a shit. And so I really appreciate how you do that, and hopefully, our listeners will realize that you're going to have to put in real work to build the business.

And that leads me to my next question. How many hours when you got started were you working on a daily basis, and how many days a week were you taking off?

Manny Zuccarelli:
And I mean, we've talked about this before, and you know how I run my schedule, man. I'm hard on myself.

Adam Young:
Well, share it. I want other people to hear it.

Manny Zuccarelli:
[inaudible] extremely self-critical. So on average, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday is twelve to fourteen hours. I try to make sure that I have enough time to get home, take a sleep stack, pass out, headspace, and just zone out. Try to get seven hours in and try to get back up, usually around 4:30 or 5:00. Wednesday, make it home a little earlier. Spend time with my wife and son. The weekends, normally about eight to ten hours on Saturday and about eight hours on Sunday.

The thing is with that, it's easy to conflate-- and this goes for books also. It's easy to conflate putting in hours with getting things done, right? So it's more so, what are you achieving in that time? But this is the thing. In order for you to actually get to a point where you can achieve more in your space in a shorter period of time, you have to put those many hours in. Unless you're comfortable with things just taking way longer than they should, you have to make more mistakes in a shorter period of time. I've just never seen a situation where somebody's gone into something, and maybe people are just way brighter than I am, and in six or eight hours a day are able to just make extreme progress without sort of burning the midnight oil, as they say, right? I mean, to me, it was necessary. I had to make a lot of mistakes and I had to go through all that in order to get to a point where-- even still, I'm usually here ten, twelve hours a day and it's fine. I don't complain about it. In fact, I think that we should be grateful that we even have these kind of opportunities.

However, I do counter that with-- and I know this might be going totally off-topic, but I counter that with lifestyle changes in the way that I live, the way that I take care of myself, the food that I eat, the fact that I train. I just, I counter all that with other stuff. I don't spend my weekends wasted. And of course, the argument there is, "Well, there's plenty of people who don't live that way that still achieve great things." It's like, okay. I get that, and that's just about as ignorant as saying that there's people who smoke that don't get cancer. It's like, well, where would they be if they actually had things in order and didn't-- we're knowledge workers. Everything that you do should be directly aligned with improving that. I mean, your career is predicated on what you're able to do with your brain, if you have a family, I mean, just anything. And I don't want to go too off-topic here, but yeah. I mean, that's something I take really serious. I spend a lot of time talking to people about it.

Adam Young:
[crosstalk].

Manny Zuccarelli:
And what's great--

Adam Young:
It's not off-topic at all. I don't want you to feel that way. I think it's a very important thing and I don't know a single entrepreneur that isn't trying to optimize their time and improve their lifestyle. I mean, I don't get up at 4:30 in the morning. I think that's very commendable. I mean--

Manny Zuccarelli:
You have to learn what works for you.

Adam Young:
That's gangster as fuck, bro. I'm not to that level, but at 7:00 AM, I get up every morning and I do yoga with my wife and I start my day and focus on my goals and do all those things. And I think it's really important to highlight that if you're going to be an affiliate and you're going to transition to be an entrepreneur or if you don't know any of what we're talking about and you're getting into pay per call right now and you want to make more time in your life and just improve your life in general, that starts with self-improvement, and then it bleeds into your business. I don't think people
realize how much that what you do in your free time and who you spend your time with and your activities--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Thank you.

Adam Young:
--bleed into your business [system?].

Manny Zuccarelli:
Thank you. Thank you. Everything, the music you listen to, what you wake up to, what you look at the moment you wake up, all of it, all of it. And I think the faster people realize that, the faster they'll find that their life is heading in the right direction. And look, I'm no feat of human performance. I make mistakes every day. You've seen it. I keep a mistakes log.

Adam Young:
It's true, guys. I was at a Ringba dinner and Manny was kind enough to join us, and I asked him how he handled mistakes and whatever, and he literally pulls out his cell phone and opens up a file and hands it to me and there is like a list like this of all the mistakes he had made over the last six months. This guy is literally keeping track of them and filing them away to create, I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong here, mental triggers so if you're ever in those similar situations that you just immediately go left instead of right or whatever the case is.

Manny Zuccarelli:
This logging is just to kind of keep track on what I'm doing right and wrong and yeah. I mean, I think all of that has helped. I think all that's helped get us to where we are and hopefully, that compounding interest will move us forward even faster.

Adam Young:
So let's talk about some of your favorite wins because you started less than a year ago and you've made a significant amount of progress and you can disclose whatever you would like to the audience, but I'm not going to do it. I just want the audience to know that Manny has literally gone from zero to what I consider significant progress inside of a year building a business. So what are some of the big wins, and if you're willing to tell the audience, how did you create those opportunities? What did you do?

Manny Zuccarelli:
I wouldn't say it's a specific win. I would say it's more so a constant iteration to reach a point where things are running much smoother. Driving more internal traffic to consumer-initiated-- generating more consumer-initiated inbounds. I know a lot of your interviews have-- gentlemen have talked about the importance of quality content. I think that's so hard for people to understand because everything in this space, at face value, operates in a very expedient manner where you just kind of think things are going to happen. They're going to happen right away, and if they don't, then something's got to be wrong. Actually, focusing on content and improving that flow in such a way that the consumer's better informed about their product and what they're coming into so that by the time they do reach your client, just the receptiveness is way better, which strengthens your partnerships. Getting away from clickbaity-type ads, which we're just as guilty of as anyone else, and anyone who tells you that they've never run traffic like that is lying.

So getting away from that, focusing more on-- and I remember Anthony covered it in one of your previous interviews, and it's just so true. Actually providing some degree of value and information to the customer, and that wouldn't be a win as much of just like a shift in the way that we do business and in the way that we generate traffic. And one of the things that I just think is really important is that you really kind of know where your place is in the ecosystem and what your goals are because anything that's going to drive you revenue that quickly is probably not going to last very long. And when we really recognized the truth behind that was when there was more focus, more money invested in, all right. How do we just do this the right way? How do we actually take-- and what will it cost us, right? And then being willing to take those risks at both the financial level and time. All these things take time. We run a lot of traffic internally and it's cumbersome. I mean, it's not an easy task to get the right traffic. And in fact, I would say, just to kind of end with that, there's very few teams in this space that I think that are really doing that and doing it right.

One would be like an Excel Impact where they're truly focused on generating quality traffic, maintaining very large relationships, and really just providing value to the customer and not in some woo-woo way. And a good question to always ask yourself, which I think will help you win right out the gate is, would you use the services you market? There's a huge misconception in the debt settlement space that these customers are not helped and it's just not the case. So a lot has changed since 2009, especially with regard to that vertical and with mortgage, so we do a lot of finance. So we spent a lot of time just understanding this. Even just there, right? So and this goes back to what we were saying about understanding the customer's journey. So in this particular vertical, so when it comes to debt settlement, say, consumers now, they're making payments to a third-party escrow account. The settlement company, assuming you're dealing with a legitimate one, does not receive any form of payment until the creditor has provided an offer of settlement that the consumer agrees to. And then this third-party escrow account releases the funds to the creditor and to the-- and I'm sorry. Releases the funds, right, to the creditor and as well as to the settlement team.

So having faith and having some degree of confidence in what you're actually marketing will help you be more creative. It'll help you reduce that negative feedback loop of doing something that is perhaps not right and feeding some demon. And I think that if people go into this with keeping that in mind, I think they'll spend less time copying their competition, which brings up another point that usually, if you are out there, especially, and I got to say this to affiliates and I guess, really even networks as well, but if you're just copying what other people are doing, you have to really think that you're probably copying work that they had in place for like a year or two. How long does it take for you to take an idea and actually get it out there? We move pretty quick and it can take us months. And I'm not talking about iterating a page or changing something. I mean, really implementing something that might significantly shift your performance. It could take you months. Could take you a year or more. So yeah. And again, I know I'm kind of going on these rants with you, but yeah. Just kind of looking at all of that, I think, and taking all of that serious was what helped us really move forward a lot faster. If you're just sitting there arbitraging calls and traffic like a fax machine, I mean, you're always going to get undercut. You have to have in-house traffic. You just have to. I believe that that's crucial for any long-term value, like you said.

Adam Young:
I completely agree with you. And something I see as the attitude of an affiliate that comes from the CPA space, which I know you're familiar with, they think a little bit differently. It's like, how do I go as fast as possible, copy a landing page, just get some cap and run with it? And in pay per call, and a lot of lead gen, that just doesn't fly because there's a lot more nuance that goes into it. You need to create your own value. And then when you're able to generate calls and you do the biz dev and you have a great direct buyer relationship, that's a wall, right? No one's climbing that wall. It's not as simple as copying a campaign. You actually have to put effort into building it and promoting it. And what you get is something of actual, tangible value. And that's why I love pay per call because a human's got to answer those calls, which means that a human has to be sitting there and gets paid. And so it's not like campaigns can scale like a rocket ship overnight because humans have to be hired, trained, put in place for that. And so you can't really just run the affiliate rip-off game in pay per call, which some affiliates aren't down with, right? They don't see that as a big opportunity. But the margins and the longevity and the enterprise value and the personal growth and knowing that your business is going to be around in three years from now is just so much more appealing. Maybe that just means I've grown up a lot over the last ten years.

Manny Zuccarelli:
[crosstalk].

Adam Young:
I'm not sure. But it's true, right?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. Of course. Competition's greatest at the bottom too. Be patient. It's hard. I get it, man. I get it. We come from an expedient background. I get it. I get it. You're going to waste a lot more time and have much more of a roller coaster, and it's just the hardest thing to understand, I think, especially when you haven't gone through it all or you haven't really seen all of it. The people who are doing the best are the ones who have just built the right product, iterated it, and taken punches to the face year after year in a way that is not just so like smash and grab. And unfortunately, it's hard to get-- and we see it a lot because we have affiliates that come to us and they're like, "This is how we want to run traffic." And I'm always like, "Just be honest with me, please. Tell me what you guys have going on." And they show me the flow and I'm like, "Come on, man. We can do better. We can get better than this," honestly. And I understand and I get it. I really get where they're coming from. I do. But yeah. I think conveying that to people's very hard, especially if you're just starting out and you're just trying to make money, like you're just trying to make things happen, and you want to see those stats increase, and it'll only get you to a certain point and you'll end up falling back. And then you'll come to find that the teams that spent, or even just the individual advertisers, marketers, affiliates, that spent time just building things right ended up way ahead of you and in a way that didn't keep them up at night.

Adam Young:
And those campaigns are going to run for months, years. They're not going to--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Well, you'll learn how to build something that will last that amount of time. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Young:
Cool. So let's talk about quality assurance because I know that's fun for everybody in calls. Tell me about your quality assurance process, what you've learned about quality assurance over the last year. Let's just spend a little bit of time on this.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Okay. So what we did was this. Once the call volume started to grow, you don't really notice-- well, I shouldn't say that. I guess when volume's very, very low, you're paying attention to every last detail, right, what's going on. But as the volume began to increase for us, I actually didn't realize how many inefficiencies were occurring until we instituted a real QC on every call. So we listened to every single call between fifteen seconds and usually ten or more minutes. We generally cap around ten minutes. Just depends how many hours there are going through that week. So I can tell you what we-- I'll sort of break this into a few parts. So what we've done to review it is we've developed an internal disposition team. It kind of comes back to the same thing. Or internal disposition key. We would not have developed that if I didn't sit there and listen to every possible outcome of a call, like all of them. So consumer said this. Agent responded with that. What I found was we initially had reps taking notes. I would take notes. We were all taking notes on what was occurring on calls and then I was like, "Okay. This is insane to navigate," so what we developed were these two-character disposition keys, essentially outlining-- so, say, for debt settlement, qualified debt would be QD, right? Unqualified income would be UI, just to give an example.

And what that then allowed me to do was take these long notes that just seemed like run-on sentences at some point and condense them into searchable keys, which then would allow me to find problems in the process. So what are we getting a lot of? Well, we're getting a lot of qualified debt, unqualified income. Okay. Is there anything we can do about that? Is there anybody who can provide a service to these people if they're on a fixed income or retired or what have you? It also helped us catch bounced transfers, clients that were not taking transfers during hours and under concurrency caps that they had committed to, which is crucial. We're constantly refining that process. I think we have it running really well now where we are able to take any concern from a client, any concern from a publisher, a call center, and quickly find an answer to it. And so what used to take us-- you'd have to dig through calls or figure out where or what happened. It's instant now. And yeah. I mean, that helped a lot.

Regarding quality assurance and quality control, that was what we instituted. And I would share that disposition key with everyone. I think it'll help. You refine your process and there's a few things that I actually tried to do sort of in the industry which is share things like this because I mean, let's be honest. This is a very sort of incestual industry. Everybody's working with everybody. It's just a big mess. So I think the more that we have some sort of conformity there, I think just really helps everybody. As a network and as a team, we're extremely transparent with everybody that we work with on the advertiser side, on the publisher side. So we provide answers and share all kinds of information that I think some people think we're crazy for doing.

Adam Young:
Well, if you'll provide it to me, I'd be happy to give it to our audience. I think that's an amazing thing. And I love that type of quality assurance because it's a profit center. Would you agree that your quality assurance is not overhead? It's actually a profit center.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's like looking at staff as an expense. I mean, if it's an expense, then you're a pretty shitty leader, right? That should be an investment. How is that an expense? You're investing in people to improve from within your company. And I look at it the same way. Yeah, no. Absolutely. It was all kinds of found money there, even just looking at it at face value. We learned a lot about the data. We learned a lot about things we were doing wrong internally, the way we were routing calls. We learned a lot also regarding-- there are certain things we institute right now with a lot of our partners. We require that they don't have an IVR in place. Ringba cannot perform its logic unless that phone keeps ringing, and you guys know very well, I've come to you and I'm like, "What's going on here?" And if this helps anybody, we ran into an issue recently where the PBX was picking up and playing a ringing sound. So we're like going crazy to try to figure out what's happening here. Why aren't these calls being rerouted? We have coverage from other buyers. The phone already rang, say, five or six times. It should've routed to another person or another team and it didn't. And these are the things that just take time to learn. It's just you have to go through these inefficiencies and run into these things to improve your process. And yeah. That helped a lot.

Adam Young:
[crosstalk]--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. QC was huge. It was a huge thing for us. Huge.

Adam Young:
We're very grateful for clients like you that ask amazing questions and run into problems like that. I think it's awesome that you do the QC at the level you do because it challenges our support team to get better and being the only company in performance [inaudible] that provides call tracking that actually gives true one-on-one engineering support to all of their clients, we run into this all the time and it's really important to do that quality assurance. There's too many variables that are in there and then it's also really important to learn this and understand it and overcome those problems. And I mean, they're frustrating problems. I remember when you had the one where the call center was playing the ringing sound after they answered the phone and we thought that was crazy too. But unless we are actually diving into these problems, we can never find them. So if you just let your calls flow, especially as you scale, there's all this money that's left on the table that you don't even know what's going on. And I will tell you this. Most people do not have any idea what's going on in their call flow, and I mean, there's literally probably like tens of millions of dollars a month across the [crosstalk]--

Manny Zuccarelli:
Easy. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Adam Young:
Yeah. It's just like, on fire.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Absolutely. Yeah, no. And it took us maybe-- sometimes you have to hit a frustration point to make [inaudible] and that's what happened there. Honestly, I got to where I'm like, "What's going on here?" And yeah. And it was just one of those weeks where I just tuned everything else out and I was like, "We're going to refine this process." And that eighty hours or so of chewing glass and trying to figure problems out ended up being extremely valuable, and it still is. We actually really got serious about that, I think. We implemented that like early November.

Adam Young:
Now, are they outsourced, your QC (Quality Control) team?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yes. Yes. So and I'll completely share what I did and what worked for me.

Adam Young:
Yeah. Let's talk about it.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. So what I did was I found a few outsource reps or outsource teams that do quality control. I listened to about maybe forty-five or fifty calls and I dispositioned them myself. I provided the team with-- I've provided actually like six teams with all the recordings and asked them to disposition and tell me what happened on those calls. And then I had my own. So I was able to determine-- because they are offshore, I was able to determine whose English was the best based on how close to mine theirs came in, very simple process.

None of them were perfect, but one of them came in exceptionally well. And probably if you scored it, it would've been like over 90%, was extremely accurate. And then what I did was provided them with my responses and said, "Okay. Look. This is what I found," and had them re-listen to it and they were like, "Okay." Now, we don't just let that run blindly. That offshore team that is reviewing these calls is still supported by an in-house, domestic team that will review the calls and just catch any errors and always update the team with, "Hey, you dispositioned this this way. It should've been dispositioned that way." And why do we catch those things? How do we catch them? We get returns in and when those returns are reviewed, if they were improperly dispositioned, we catch it through this process.

And it worked really well for us. It wasn't really that arduous and again, it's proved to be extremely useful. So I would say, if you're not somebody who currently monitors all of your calls, even though you've been given every bit of utility and tool to do so, that is an approach that worked for us. It's going to dramatically increase your revenue. I mean, you'll catch all kinds of stuff.

Adam Young:
Well, not only that. It says to all your partners you are on top of your shit, which gets you a lot of respect, and it opens up a lot of big brand doors because you're not going from zero to Fortune 100 right away. They want to know about your processes, and guys, if Manny here wants to go open up a relationship with a Fortune 500 company and they're like, "Tell us about your business," he can just send them the QA grid and send the disposition results in aggregate and be like, "Here's how we do our process. Here's how we run our teams. Here's how we do quality." And then the big brands are going to be like, "Oh. We can trust this guy. He's not going to harm our brand." And then that's why Manny's going to build a giant business in this space, and you can see that it's all just essentially hard work and process-oriented where most people are like, "I don't want to spend the money."

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. And we're proactive on issues. Again, might seem trivial. When you bring up a problem to a partner, a client, an affiliate, anybody before they do, the amount of respect that they have for that, that bank account increases, and I mean like sort of the relationship bank account, right? It just shoots up. The trust factor shoots up. The confidence in what you're doing is magnified tenfold. And really, what you're doing is you're addressing a problem that they're probably going to catch anyway. So and again, I know a lot of this, it just seems like common approach or common sense, but I don't see a lot of people doing that.

Adam Young:
They're not.

Manny Zuccarelli:
And we're lucky. Yeah, I know. We were lucky we work with some great people, have great relationships, and yeah. And I think that when they see that you've taken the time to point out the problems, they can respect it because I think everybody's usually just trying to, I don't know. There's no proactive movements towards being like, "Hey, we just caught this. This might be a problem for you. We've already addressed it. Here's what we did. This is what we did to solve it. Just letting you know." Very--
Adam Young:
[crosstalk]. People are scared that if they notice--

Manny Zuccarelli:
[crosstalk]. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Young:
--a problem that it's going to bite them in the ass, but in reality, if you expose a problem and you open it up transparently and then at the same time give them what you did to solve it so it doesn't happen again, they're like, "Oh. This is going to be a great long-term relationship." So how do you see your business evolving over the next year?

Manny Zuccarelli:
I know I mentioned this before. We're really going to focus a lot more on consumer-initiated actions. I think what people don't realize is consumers' sort of bullshit detector is at an all-time high, and it's going to continue to get that high. And we see this everywhere. This is not just affiliate marketing. This is not just calls or anything. You see this a lot with big influencers, right? So on social media, say, people who have a million, two million followers. What's really happening now is there is a shift where companies who are looking for these influencers are not looking just at followers. So in our case, you can say that that's just traffic, right? What they're looking at is the quality of those followers. And I'm just using this to kind of draw a comparison here. And so what they're looking at is engagements and not just likes, but the questions that are being asked, the things that are being said. So what you're finding now-- and I know this because we've been spending some time focused on it, and I'm not going to get too into it, but what we've found is that there are-- especially in the influencer space, influential area, you'll find that there's people who have a hundred thousand followers that make ten times what those with a million followers make, and it's because the amount of trust that their audience have in them. So when they say something, people are truly receptive.

So if you're some chick with a million followers and every time you post a picture, it's just a bunch of guys with a bunch of weird emojis drooling over you, there's no value in that. And we're seeing that happen more and more in online marketing, and it just kind of rolls back to the whole content thing. So what I realized was a huge flaw of ours is that we were spending too much time modeled on this approach where you're essentially working on high-volume of data, call center is reaching out to these consumers. There's no real intent. Look, can you build a great business off of co-reg? Yeah, of course. There's plenty of people doing it. It works great. It's just not how I want to grow. And this comes back to when I referenced Excel. I'd rather have a more efficient system in place where we are driving higher-intent consumers to landing pages that are conveying real value, keeping engagement. You'll also, by doing so, have much longer-term-- just a higher ROI on that consumer altogether, or a lifetime value of that customer. You'll be able to re-engage them better, and a lot of the email teams that are actually successful are seeing this happen, right? So rather than just annihilating everybody with a bunch of garbage, they're really spending time to nurture and sort of drip on these consumers. And they'll hit them with all kinds of valuable information, maybe for months, before they ever push them anything with a CTA built into it. So yeah. I--

Adam Young:
Well, you're also going to get a lot more enterprise value for your business versus co-reg. Co-reg versus providing value. You're talking about night and day if you're going to sell [crosstalk].

Manny Zuccarelli:
It's a lot of time. And this comes back to what we were saying. It does take a lot of time. It's not really inexpensive, both mentally and financially. So you're going to have to-- again, sort of the mistake we made in the beginning, I think. You'll have to figure out how to divide that time. That has to be a focus. It has to be. It [crosstalk]--

Adam Young:
I just want to point out that you called pretty girls who are Instagram models the pop-ups of social media.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Listen, there's nothing wrong with being a pretty girl on social media. The point that I'm really making--

Adam Young:
[laughter].

Manny Zuccarelli:
The point that I'm making is that, are you doing anything other than just snapping pictures of yourself?

Adam Young:
Yeah. Is there real value?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Are you conveying any sort of value such that people will actually engage with you and ask questions? And then so we'll probably remain focused-- not probably. We will remain deeply focused and entrenched in the insurance and finance verticals. I would like to begin spending more time on lead gen, or say consumer acquisition, however-- in areas that are more important to me as a person. So we've started to look a lot more at cancer prevention, cancer screening if you are high risk, and I would say sort of deeper into the health space. That's really an area that I see us probably transitioning deep into at some point, I would say, within three to five years. That'll be a--

Adam Young:
You're going to have to create that market, right?

Manny Zuccarelli:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Young:
And so, guys, that's where the real money is. That's where you look at a space where pay per call fits with lead gen and everything else everyone's doing that doesn't exist today. And you said cancer research. I mean, plastic surgery pay per call. All different types of medical procedure pay per call. There's a ton of legal that's still untapped. There's a ton of finance that's still untapped. Huge amounts of B to B pay per call doesn't exist. And so the real pioneering is what Manny just said here, and that's going out and applying the pay per call model to industries that don't already have it that fit and that's when the next billion dollar company is going to come around owning a market from the pay per call space. And based on the way we see things progressing, I see that as a legitimate possibility for numerous people to achieve in all sorts of different verticals.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Absolutely.

Adam Young:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. I appreciate it.

Manny Zuccarelli:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Adam Young:
So if people want to do business with Quote Velocity - and I highly recommend that you guys do; Quote Velocity is amazing - how do they get ahold of you?

Manny Zuccarelli:
You can email me. Manny@QuoteVelocity.com-- you can find us online. It's QuoteVelocity.com. You won't miss us.

Adam Young:
Great. Thank you so much.

Manny Zuccarelli:
You got it. Thank you.


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