Originally posted by @Manolo D.:
@Michel Lee Sorry but I had to notice, 14.75M selling and the owner has an aol as his email/net service provider, I had to laugh though. lol.
@Mike V. It might, or might not. Let us say you have a website, each and every lead, does not matter where / who acquired it, will most likely at 80-95% rate look at your website and initiate contact there, if they email or call, how would you know they are generated by the website itself or you generated the lead, or your team did? --- In the other side of the coin, let say he is really good at his job, he can get adwords and pay per click ads running, gets you on the top 1 when you search a simple phrase like "SFH for sale in Maryland" (in short, a very broad choice and you top it, say in my case if I search "Construction Company in California" I am #1), how would you determine that it was not your team who created the lead? He might generate 50% of your leads now, but how could you differentiate the success of your team vs of digital.
Say in 2 years, you have 10 purchases a month instead of 1 a quarter. He could now sit back and relax, then claim everything that is going your way through the website. Now I have a couple of questions before you launch, who owns the domain? who controls the website? who controls the emails? what prevents him from looking at your emails? who determines that he closed the transaction and/or generated the lead or your team?
We asked ourselves the same question: How would we know where it came from. Forgive me for my ignorance about internet marketing and building websites etc, but he said it would have to be an honor system. He wouldn't be able to take credit for anything unless we acknowledged that's where it came from. He wouldn't even know we were working with the people technically right? However, we will do the right thing and ask them where they found out about us. If they say the internet, and we do anything, we would mark it down and he would get his cut. This is our starting point. If there is a better way, we want to immediately incorporate that. We are all for him making money as we will be making money as well. It's our domain name and we host with a company he suggested "dream host" I think? Dream Host is not his company although I think he said he may store our information on his server if we would like. Forgive me if that sounds incorrect.
To answer your other questions, he would never close the transaction, we would and more specifically our senior partner Dave at this point.
As far as the e-mails go, wouldn't they be forwarded from the contact us page to our e-mail or somewhere different? As far as him reading the e-mails, what would be the dangers in him doing that? Why would we want to prevent him?
We want to determine who generated the lead however I'm not sure there is a better or more integral way of doing it other than an honor system. I think we also talked about creating another website that links to the main one. If he marketed that and anyone asked to be contact, we would know it came from that website which is the one connected to him. I'm not exactly sure that's going to work, but any other ideas or concerns.
Just so you know from the point of completion, we signed a one year agreement to see how it works for us. But he's taking over all the expenses from social media marketing to blog writing etc (although I'm not sure I want him to write them, we will see). He sees this as a huge opportunity to make more money than he would charge us and we see it as an opportunity to get an inexpensive quality website and a chance for us to build our business in a myriad of ways.
Any and all constructive criticism is welcome. If we are headed in the wrong direction, we would rather know that now. Thanks for all the great questions
