How I met Yodle

Think Thinker managed all online marketing efforts for it’s clients. This means sales calls from ServiceMagic, Yodle, ReachLocal, Dex and so on. My clients entrusted me to manage their marketing  budget and ensure their budgets were well spent.

My introduction to Yodle was bitter sweet and somewhat disconcerting. This is the email that was sent out to a few of my clients from a Yodle sales rep (I will leave out his name) it went something like this…

Chris,

I checked out thinkthinker.com, and I got to be honest Chris, I wasn’t impressed.  Because online advertising is relatively new, I understand that it is difficult to shop around.  Just check out the info below on our company, and in the future be weary of what some of our competitors will lead you to believe.  If they haven’t locked you into a long-term agreement – I sincerely hope they haven’t – I would like to schedule an online demonstration of what we can do for your company (it takes roughly 30 minutes).

Yodle, or www.yodle.com, is an official partner of Google that specializes in search engine marketing.  Feel free to click on our link to get a general understanding of our platform; I also encourage you to search “yodle” in any major search engine in order to get some third-party perspectives on our company.

Sincerely,

Sales Person

————————————
Sales Person | Marketing Consultant
Yodle.com | “GET FOUND.”

“Clicks are great but CALLS are BETTER”

WOW…Now that’s an aggressive email – not a big deal.. that’s part of sales and competition right? I was somewhat bothered based on the email and the conversation my clients had with the sales reps so I decided to e mail Yodle CEO, Court Cunningham – this was his response.

Sean,

We take sales integrity very seriously here at Yodle and do not tolerate sales reps using false or misleading formation to close new business.  In terms of the email below, I do not see anything false or misleading.  The sales rep gave his personal opinion that he was not impressed.  He did not make any statements about the quality of what you are doing. If you have any more detail that you think is clearly false/ misleading please send it to me.

In terms of harassing your clients, I do not think calling a small business owner and trying to educate them about Yodle, which  we feel offers the most value of any product in the market, is harassment.  It is a service to the owner who could be generating more business by using our services.

We are proud of what we offer and want people to know about it.

Best Regards,

Court

When all was said and done I wasn’t excited about Court’s response. The best  way at that point for Yodle or any other advertising company to win my clients over was to win me over. This didn’t happen; at least at this point.

This my friends is how I was introduced to Yodle.   This will be my last Yodle / ReachLocal post until we release our results from the Showdown – but I must say, both companies had very good reviews.