1Author 0Consumer 0Employee/Owner
I signed a contract with Millenium Marketing Group in March. I was VERY disappointed. While they were attempting to win my trust and to sign a contract with me, I received very personal time and attention from both the marketing rep, James McDonald, and the President, Scott Norman.
Once the contract was signed and I paid them their upfront fee, I had no one specifically assigned to work with me.
A college student worked on the development of the prospectus that they were contractually obligated to put togethe. She was a nice person but very inexperienced. She had a shell to work from and I ended up providing her with most of the content. At the time, I didnt mind, thinking that a great prospectus would help them help me. It seems various Millenium employees (never named) went to different trade shows and reportedly included information about my patent in their discussions with folks at those tradeshows.
After each tradeshow (there were only 4), I received a form letter that stated things like depending on where you are in our process, we will either add the contacts that were made at this show to your working file or if your database is complete, we will. Well, it seems to me that they could at least look up my file and determine whether they had a database built for me or not before they send the letter. I mean really couldnt they at least have 2 different form letters? Couldnt they also include in these letters the names of the companies that they spoke to and were theoretically adding to the database?
On two occasions, I received Status Reports that read, in part, If we have received written responses from these companies, you will find them enclosed. Again, cant they at least have two form letters... One to send if they have responses and one if they dont? Very very impersonal!!! I felt like my patent was just buried in a stack of hundreds of others. I got no sense that anyone felt any ownership or had any real vested interest in promoting my product.
In my mind, the money that I paid Millenium Marketing Group was a total ripoff. I clearly understood that success was not guaranteed but I didnt even get the sense that they tried very hard.in hindsight, I would love to know what percentage of their revenue comes from fees paid by clients like me versus royalties from successful marketing! My contract with them ended in March. They didnt even contact me to acknowledge that the contract had ended.
Unfortunately, I enthusiastically helped them create a very complete database of prospective companies to contact, so it wont make sense for me to hire another marketing firm until March because if any of the companies in the database that I helped them build become interested before then, the contract says Millenium will be entitled to their cut.
Thank God for the internet because I really feel like I need to share this information with Milleniums prospective customers. This is information that I wish I would have had. I now see why it took them some time to come up with references for me to talk to. There were only 3 and all had some sort of a contract that had resulted from the relationship. Even so, none were overly exuberant about Millenium.
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