The truth was, the Web site was damn near genius. Bosco had divided the country up by state and
then broke each state down by its various Designated Market Areas (DMA). A DMA is a unique media territory that each
major market holds. For example, White
River Junction and Lebanon were considered one DMA, while Boston alone had 8
DMAs. It all depended on the ability of
the various TV, radio and newspaper outlets to service all of the subscribers
in a given area. New York and LA could
host lots of DMAs and this was what Bosco had been counting on. His plan was to have the studios in the many
DMAs to buy the exclusive rights in their territory (which he alone would
define) to all of the leads in their area that the site would pull in. They would pay a monthly fee to secure that
right and then they would also be charged a fee for every lead that was
generated on their behalf. Bosco took
out advertising in a number of publications, including Men’s Health, which
proved to be the most strikingly bold and brilliant part of his plan. The Men’s Health ad was so simple it was
almost criminal. There was no graphic,
just a half-page black panel with white print that read:
“Losing
your hair? You don’t have to put up with
it:
theresnohaironmyhead.com.”
The response was extraordinary. Within 2 days of the ad hitting, we received
over 300 leads. After that, it really
got heavy. We were averaging over 500
leads a day for a while before we saw the tide begin to recede.
“You gonna run the ad again?” I asked Bosco a couple of weeks
later.
“Nope. You have to go
sell the leads we’ve got first. Bring me
some cash and we’ll talk.”
Pierre helped out by cataloguing the leads according to the
DMAs they came from and I started making phone calls. I’d call up a studio
owner and tell him or her that I’d gotten a lead in his market.
“If you like, I’d be happy to send it to you.”
“Yeah?” they almost always asked. “You want my address?”
“Yup. Just give me
your email address and you can have it in five minutes.”
Well of course, very few of these studios had Internet
service then, let alone had an email account, so they usually asked me to fax
the lead to them, which of course produced some very nasty unintended
consequences, once they signed up for the service. If a studio picked up 30 or more leads on a
given day and we faxed the individual survey sheets we had received from the
Web site to our client, the result was either a masse of paper strewn all over
the studio floor (which pissed off the owner no end), or no leads received at
all (should said owner’s fax machine be out of paper at the time that we sent
the leads). It was a remarkable example
of a “lose/lose situation”. Once the
owner got the lead sheets off the floor, or managed to get them out of his fax
machine, the circumstances often deteriorated further.
You need to picture what life was like for the studio owner
to understand why things like a flood of fresh leads would prove to be so
problematic for him. A well-run studio
had an efficient and polite receptionist whose job was to channel all of the
foot traffic, while simultaneously handling the incoming phone call requests
for bookings. The receptionist would
handle the book, making sure that the workload was evenly divided between the technicians,
whose job it was to deal with the care and maintenance of the hair replacement
systems that the clients wore. Flood a
tech with too many clients in a day and nothing would get done properly,
causing the overflow of work to fall on the owner’s back. This was never a good thing.
The receptionist was also the gatekeeper who prioritized the
many calls from customers asking to speak directly to the owner. A successful owner was able to establish a
strong following by virtue of the personal relationships that he or she was
able to develop with the client base. If
the owner had properly cultivated a close bond with the clients, it meant that
the studio could enjoy the loyalty of its client base for many years, allowing
the business to flourish. The downside
was that a really popular owner could find himself flooded with personal
requests from his clients.
“C’mon, just let me talk to Angela for a minute. Please!”
“Rudi swore he could take me on Tuesday! This thing is falling off my head! I look like someone scalped me!”
Meanwhile, the owner would be running around, putting out an
endless number of fires. The 1 o’clock
slot is triple booked and none of the three clients wants to reschedule. The
dye job on one unit is no good and the tech asks if it’s okay to grab a new
one, or should he/she try to re-dye the one that got screwed up? The client who came in to have his hair
system cleaned up hasn’t been in for 6 months, the unit is toast, but he
doesn’t want a new one (“Just fix this one now, so I can get outa here – but
make it look good!”). The stockroom is a
mess and no one can find anything in it.
The stockroom is empty and there’s nothing to find! In short, our happy studio owner didn’t have
time to deal with an ever-growing mountain of aging leads. Thusly, our office received a series of angry
calls from studio owners shortly after the Web site began to crank out leads to
our new clients. As luck would have it,
those calls came to me. They were all
quite similar. The irate owner would
complain that the leads were useless. My
job was to isolate the reason why said owner held our leads in such low
esteem. More often that not, the reason
was that the lead had not included the prospect’s phone numbers. They gladly offered up their email addresses
though and as such, they expected to be contacted that way. This was a new kind of prospect, an Internet
prospect and as we were learning, they had to be handled differently than the
late night, TV watching moles we were all used to dealing with.
This was only appropriate, given that our Web prospects had
requested information from a Web site.
While the form that each prospect was asked to fill out did request a
telephone number, we had decided not make this a requirement. Lots of sites did and the failure to fill out
a required field meant that the site would refuse to process the form,
reminding the prospect to supply the information requested. We figured that people who wanted phone calls
would give us their numbers and that this would also identify them as higher
quality leads. Unfortunately, much of
these subtleties were lost on the studio owners. They wanted leads that they could close with
as little effort as possible. When they
didn’t get what they expected, they literally exploded.
The next episode of SlipNot will be published on August 2nd.
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO
HERE.
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