Back in June, Yodle agreed to give three months of free advertising to Brea Buettner, a solo bankruptcy lawyer, to prove its worth. We called it the Yodle Challenge. Here is my debrief of Brea, and after that, my own thoughts on whether Yodle triumphed in the Yodle Challenge.
Yodle Challenge
Guest post by Yodle VP Mike DeLuca. (Mike wanted an opportunity to weigh in on the ongoing Yodle Challenge, including our last video update.)
So, if you are taking the time to read this, you’ve probably been keeping tabs on the Yodle Challenge. Here’s a quick refresher to bring you up to date; a couple months back, Lawyerist published a not so glamorous post detailing the efforts of one of Yodle’s sales people’s attempts to pitch our offering to the man behind Lawyerist, Sam Glover.
The Yodle Challenge started on June 18th, almost a month and a half ago. To date, Brea Buettner has gotten about 25 leads—people actually looking to talk to a Minnesota bankruptcy lawyer. But only one came into the office. In this ten-minute video, we catch you up on the Yodle Challenge so far.
In the 12 days since Brea’s brand-new, Yodle-built website launched, she has gotten a few nibbles. Unfortunately, the only bite was someone interested in free advice. Yodle says results will improve with time, but I also wonder if bankruptcy, like landlord-tenant, is an area of law prone to bum leads.
Watch the video, then leave us your thoughts.
A week and a half in, our Yodle Challenge guinea pig, Brea Buettner, just posted an update to the Yodle Challenge.
Here is what Brea has to say so far:
Yesterday, I sat down with Mike DeLuca, Yodle’s Senior VP of Sales & Marketing. I tried recording the video chat, but Pamela let me down. I feel badly about that, because Mike is a nice guy and I think he was pretty excited to have the chance to get me back for being so mean about his sales team, but I totally cannot do his wit justice by reporting his zingers myself.
Instead, here is a summary of our conversation. We touched on four main topics: Yodle’s strategy for advertising itself, the breakdown of fees for Yodle’s services, how Yodle is different than other services, and what kind of results Brea can expect to see.
I said some pretty unfriendly things about Yodle’s sales staff recently, and Yodle took it pretty hard seriously. In response, Mike DeLuca, Yodle’s VP of sales and marketing, issued the Yodle challenge: Yodle would give away 3 months of free online marketing to prove Yodle can deliver real value.
We chose newbie lawyer Brea Buettner as our guinea pig, and met with Mike as well as sales and marketing specialists Matt and Marlo. After the meeting, Brea and I debriefed on video.
To summarize, Brea and I are impressed with Yodle’s offerings and excited to see whether this does give her practice a boost. We will be checking in with video updates about every two weeks, so you can follow along and see how it works out for Brea.
Yodle promises to advertise your law firm or business on Google, Yahoo!, and other sites, and build you a website that will get clients to call. They also promise to gather detailed information about your site visitors and callers to both help screen out low-quality from high-quality online leads, as well as to optimize their online ad campaigns to improve the traffic to your site.
But what Yodle actually does, as far as I can tell, is employ a bunch of jerks to call me (four times last week, plus an email for good measure), insult me, and try to bully me into becoming a client. Judging by the buzz on several email lists, my experience is typical.
Yodle’s hard-sell tactics do not inspire confidence. Nor does this listing they created for Chicago lawyer Barry Kreisler (trust me, you’ll love this):
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