Transcript
Joe Troyer: All right. Jared Knight. All right, so we are going to wrap up with this one. And this is a goodie. This is a goodie, for sure. And it’s something that I feel like a lot of people get wrong.
Joe Troyer: So essentially Jared is asking, “How do you handle the billing of pay per call customers?” So let’s just change it to that. Let’s say, “How do you bill pay per call customers?”
Joe Troyer: So let’s say that you just got done with a 30 day test with a prospect, right? You turn off the ads, you collect all the data, you meet with the prospect, you meet with the customer, you present him with the data. The guy liked the calls, he got a return. Let’s say you had to negotiate a little bit. You had to drop the CPA by 5% or 10% to get him in and lock it in at that rate. You got him in. Right? Now, how do you actually collect your money? So at the end of the day, one of the biggest problems that I see agencies making in general, I see local marketers making in general, whether you’re doing pay per call, you’re doing SEO or you’re doing any other types of services, is I see people playing bill collector. And it’s bullshit, right? You’re literally spending so much time following up on overdue payments. Because you’re sending payments out or invoices out one at a time and you’re not auto collecting on the payments. All right?
Joe Troyer: So first and foremost, like the rule of thumb just needs to be, “Don’t play bill collector.” Like you shouldn’t have to have people on your team or somebody that you outsource dedicated to being a bill collector and following up with people and getting them to pay what they told you they were going to pay you. Like, excuse my French, but that’s fucking bullshit. Right? Your job is to do what you do. You’re a marketing company. You need to focus on being the marketing company and delivering as much value being that marketing company as you possibly can. How many of you guys would admit, give me a one in the chat, that you spend way too much time being a bill collector? Yeah, it’s ridiculous. So we’re going to fix that. I’m going to give you guys some rules that you can take and you guys can apply to your businesses, whether pay per call or otherwise.
Joe Troyer: So you never want to play bill collector. Okay? What that means is you shouldn’t need authorization to charge their credit card or to make the payment. So how do I say this? That doesn’t mean that you bill them for $5,000 worth of shit, they have no idea that you’re doing it, and then you’re just taking their credit card. Obviously, you’re going to have problems, right? So the goal is that you don’t need authorization to charge the customer. The way that we do this and pay paper call is that they either give us ACH or credit card, right, authorization.
Joe Troyer: Okay. The way that we do it in pay per call is we collect a retainer in advance. The amount of this retainer is essentially our expected call volume for 30 days. So let’s say the first month, right, running call only campaigns. We got what we would consider 10 billable calls at, let’s say, $65 a piece, right? And we think that this month, right, with a little improvement and based upon how things are going that we can double that and we can do 20 calls at 65 bucks a piece, and that’s where our customer locked in their rate at. Right? Your retainer would be this, which is essentially, correct me if I’m wrong, but 1,300 bucks.
Joe Troyer: Does that make sense? Yes or no? Let me know in the chat. This amount is paid in advance. Okay? And this amount moves. This is the expected call volume for 30 days. So as you continue to deliver more and more and more volume, the retainer continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Okay? Or if you don’t make the retainer bigger, understand that you’re going to have to audit the calls and effectively subtract from that retainer more often. Those are your two options. Okay? So once you run, basically your billing then, what we do is we would audit phone calls. Okay? We would mark the ones that are billable. Right? We would then multiply by the lead price. Okay? And we’d say, “This is how much money is left in your retainer.” And we would essentially, every Monday, send this to our customers. It’s really that simple. Okay? When the retainer falls below, right, and you don’t have a balance to charge, you refill or replenish the retainer.
Joe Troyer: So you can do this and say, like when it’s empty, you could say … you could do this. When it falls below, you know, 100 bucks or whatever it is that you want. Okay. If they don’t pay, we go to charge them, their card doesn’t go through, what do we do? Let me know in the chat, what do we do?
Joe Troyer: What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? We go to build a customer, let’s say they got a hundred bucks left on their retainer and we can’t bill the customer and ads are running right now, right? We’re at risk of having to front money for the customer, and frankly at risk of them not paying us back. What do we do? We stop the calls. Okay? In this example, call only, we pause the campaign. I’m telling you guys, don’t make the mistake that I have made and let the customer get away with, “I’ll make the payment on, you know, on Wednesday,” right, when it’s Monday. “I’ll make the payment on Wednesday. Don’t worry about it.” No, you’re going to make the payment right now or I’m pausing your campaign. Okay?
Joe Troyer: I have lost my ass on a couple of pay per call campaigns early in my career that were freaking crushing it because I got stuck being the bill collector and I let the customer kept getting further and further and further behind. They’d pay partial of their bill, but not the whole thing. And what happened over time, they ate up all my margin. Right? And then left me with a bill. Don’t make that mistake. Okay? Pause the campaign, or if you’ve got multiple customers in a location, redirect the calls to another customer. Okay?
Joe Troyer: It is a good idea to create some redundancy and have multiple customers in a single service area or territory. So if this happens, your call volume, the amount of money that you’re making per call, doesn’t suffer. AKA, you’re still able to run your pay per call offer in that area and in that market.
