I wanted to share this story to illustrate why you need to be careful with whom you use for a service provider. We all want to assume that people who share our networking groups are the people we want to support with our business. As with anything in life, do your due diligence and use caution.
I have a client who was excited to tell me about the company he had just hired to help him with website promotion. They were setting him up with Pay Per Click, guaranteed his website would be at the top of Google and were going to work with him on his email newsletter. They were in the same networking group and had just done a one on one meeting, which was how my client had learned about him.
As it happened, I had just had a phone conversation with a company offering similar services, so I asked a few more questions. A telling answer was cost. My client was going to be charged $500 a month for this service. That raised a red flag, because the company I had been talking to charged half that.
I don’t want to say that paying less is always the best approach. That’s not what this is about. Price is only part of the picture. The “guaranteed top of Google” was another red flag. I’ve been doing some research on SEO, and it’s certainly possible, but it’s difficult, and that guarantee is a pretty high bar.
So I did some research on the company. My client gave me the website, and when I visited, I was unimpressed. There was little to no content on the site. Each page was a description of a service with a “Get a Quote” button at the bottom. There was a page for “Sample Website Design,” but to access that page, you already had to be a client! To contrast, the company I had been talking to gives away a lot of information and uses those give-aways as a way to gauge interest in their services.
I did one final test. I did a search for the company on Google. I tried various keyword combinations, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t find them on the first six pages. I don’t know anyone who searches farther than that.
I wrote back to my client something to the effect of “if they can’t do what they promise for themselves, what confidence do you have that they can do it for you?”
By the way, the company I had been talking to, Hubspot, does show up on the first page of Google if you search for “Inbound Marketing” and on the second page if you search for “Internet Marketing.”
The moral of this story? Just because you share a networking group with someone does not guarantee they are the best company for you to use.
Anyone else have a good story to share?
Tags: Networking, Networking Groups, Referrals