My bad experience with Applegate

I need to comment on these guys.

For those of you that don't know Applegate, they are a long established industrial and business directory. Applegate has several services in the form of 'pages', which is basically advertising space on their site - except a little deeper and harder to have exposure and near impossible to get clickthroughs.

I decided to see for myself the kind of service they provide and at first glance, their directory (they call it a guide) has good rankings, and many pages within Yahoo at least and they are indeed established. So thought what have I got to lose....

The main service is as I said built around the selling of various enhanced pages, the list and charges being:

Enhanced Pages

Silver £318
Quartz £375.60
Gold £457.20
Diamond £572.40
Platinum £745.20

On payment an advertiser gets full benefits including:

add keywords
add products and services
images
company news page

- and other needed services offered can only be got by paying.

hmmmmm, but thought I would investigate them a bit - you never know, they might be good.

On submitting my company, I received a call to confirm I was the owner of the business - which basically turned out to be a pretty long selling job. Much sales patter about 'millions of pageviews a month' and that they delve in the 'buying of data' whatever that means.

The sales guy actually told me I couldn't be searched by company name and no keywords would work for my entry unless I bought one of their enhanced pages. (And they are trying to sell me their service what kind of crap sales patter is that ), so I opted for their free entry thing and thought nothing more of it.


Applegate called yet again - that makes 3 calls in 2 weeks so far. Why is it folks can't grab a freebie without being hassled sheesh!

Some sales dude - sorry, Account Manager rolleyes:cough) he rang to ask if I was interested about the Enhanced page again, but when I kept asking for proof of results, and all he could give me was the 6 million pageviews speech, which wasn't what I asked him about, this annoyed me a touch as I'm busy and want straight answers to simple questions really.

Not too difficult to deliver some basic stats for potential clients (or so I thought), but for some reason Applegate can't supply a rough idea of clickthroughs, which put me right off. I didn't expect any miracles or anything, just some reassurance that traffic would come my way, but alas, more pageview talk reared it's ugly head. So I questioned the price of this page thing, and that was met with a 'brilliant company' and "Noone can touch us for performance" pitch, and I couldn't help but to mention their nearest competitor, who could blow them out of the water hehe. The sales guy didn't like that too much.

Basically, whatever I said, they had an answer, so I couldn't win in the sense that they would back down and admit their failings, but that's wishing for too much I guess.

Change of tactic, so I commented the fee was too much for what I thought they could deliver, so the sales guy quoted lots of businesses, that bought this super-duper page and got xxxxx amount of clicks blah blah, but I know my buisness and the exact traffic required to be of any use, so questioned it again and we just went round in circles, not getting any satisfaction from the robotic answers being fired at me.

Objected again at why I should pay £320, when Yahoo costs less (got his SEO sales pitch again), and I think this was wearing him down, as he offered me a 1 month trial for £36.73 inc VAT, so might be worth trying and see.

Wow these guys never quit, even at the risk of upsetting a potential client.

Thing that lost them the sale, and you'll laugh when you hear this - I was going to pay up, when I asked if I could pay by cheque, and the guy actually refused, saying they only accept debit cards - well, okay so I offered him my business debit card but he refused it once again with a "We just take normal debit cards", so after 5 minutes explaining that it was a normal VISA debit card, they didn't want to know and after a total of 3 hours of listening to this guy's crap, they didn't get the sale.

 

I'm sure I've heard a very similar story about Applegate before...perhaps you implanted this story in the back of my head, 'cause I've definitely heard this one before.

Oh wait, it happened to me too. They still phone approx. once a month, though