In spring of A yellowbook sales rep walked into my office and started his pitch about how great and wonderful Yellowbook is and how they are the biggest in the country and have the highest customer satisfaction etc... Etc... Etc... As a new business owner I was looking for some advertising and thought that it may work, may not but I was willing to give it a shot. Right out of the gate the rep was telling me how he would get me a special tracking telephone number and I made it CLEAR AS DAY to him that I wanted to advertise my vanity numbers that I was paying alot of money for. He really tried the high pressure close about how they could trac all the analytical data for me and it wouldn't cost extra and my answer was the same "
I pay alot to have these numbers Lawrence and they are the only numbers i will pay to advertise" My thought at the time was that if i bought the ad and it didnt work that first year, I wouldnt renew the ad the next year but i would still have the benefit of having my ad that I paid for in all those books that were published at that particular time and who knows? That book might be on someones coffee table for years. So he sent me a proof with my website address and my phone numbers that belonged to my company and i gave him a down payment of $746. When the book came out, it had thier tracking telephone # and thier website address printed in the ad and not a single one of my numbers.
I called the sales rep and told him that he screwed my ad up and that i thought i had made it perfectly clear to him that i did not want to pay for advertising a phone number that didnt belong to me. I mean how stupid is that? I pay for advertising a phone number that belongs to you and then next year if i dont buy the ad then you go sell that phone number to an identical business... Anyway, he tried and tried to re-sell me the idea of that tracking number and website and my answer had never changed. I wasnt the least bit intersted in paying for a number that wasnt mine.
So, he said he would have someone from corporate call me and we would get it straightened out. They offered me various degrees of discounts and my bottom line was " i didnt approve that ad, im not paying for it, i want a refund" they are now harassing me for the money and have been threatening to send me to collections. What a shady, shameful company. If you are reading this report because you are thinking about putting an ad in the book let me tell you this, nobody reads the phone book. When was the last time you used one? I dont care how many other people advertise in it, let them waste thier money. Heed my warning and save your marketing money on something else.
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