There are several companies with the name MultiView but this one is very unique. It's unique in that it works with non profit organizations in order to make its money.
MultiView contacts associations and offers them the ability to make additional revenues with online "buyers guides". The name will be different depending on the association. Many of these associations are well known.
The ASAE, AMA, IFMA, MPI, and others. Have contracted with MultiView to create, maintain, and sell the online buyers guides.in principle it sounds like a brilliant concept. The association provides MultiView with their database of names and phone numbers. Multiview cold calls and emails the people in the database (and a lot of people not included in the database). MultiView sales people present the opportunity for the advertisor to connect to their market through the online buyers guide for an annual fee of $395 (minimum). MultiView makes money, the assocation gets 10%, and the advertiser gets an opportunity to sell to people in the association.
This is where it gets a little strange. And strange things happen indeed when you mix a non profit organization with a very much-for-profit company. The $395 is a minimum annual fee. When the advertiser is contacted to renew, many times the number of Website clicks the advertiser claims it received is much lower than that tracked by MultiView. How much lower? I spoke to several marketing managers who told me they were not going to renew their listing because they only received ten or fewer clicks the entire year according to their tracking software. When I examined the Website clicks tracked by MultiView for the same companies, it showed they had received between 200 and 700 clicks.
I tried to get answers from my sales manager, Dave Utorka but he wasn't very helpful. He just told me "sell em anyway". After talking to a few people in the company about the difference, I learned that our tracking software counts any click to their listing. I found out that search engines routinely visit the online buyers guides and spider through the listings. Each time a search engine spiders a listing, it counts as a hit in our tracking software. The other tracking software packages including Googel Analytics only count the actualy clicks that a human performs to open a Website. After I realized what was going on, my motivation to sell the listings dropped dramatically.
The two majority owners of MultiView are Dan Maitland and Scott Bedford. They are multi-millionaires who have started, built, and sold companies previously. Several weeks before they sold equity in MultiView they lowered the boom on the sales force. They informed the sales force that if anyone had less than a $750 daily average by the end of the month, they would be terminated. They were supercharging the sales force in order to complete the deal they had been working on and to maximize on their opportunity. They may have graduated from Texas A&M but they are no dummies.
Now that the sales force has grown to over 100, the daily average is $1,000. Achieving the sales goal puts $100,000 daily into the company or approximately $2.2 million each month. The non profits get 10% for their name, database, and anything else they can do to increase sales.
I was terminated recently because my daily average was not up to standards. The people at MultiView will most likely try to say that I'm just a disgruntled ex-employee and try to blow it off. Maybe I am a little disgruntled but the fact remains, the members of the assocation aren't using the online guides as much as MultiView or even the associations claims they are. Don't feel bad if you paid $395 for your listing. It's the "just sell em anyway" philosophy MultiView has that caused you to pay for the listing. You probably were better off buying google pay-per-clicks but hopefully you weren't the sucker that paid $3,500 to $5,000 for a banner ad that no one notices.
There were several people who were terminated a couple of months ago when MultiView was engaged with their prospective equity partners. Maybe some of you or past, or present advertisers can chime in and explain how the advertisers are getting ripped off by MultiView.
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