Can anyone explain to me why there are expats that want a job but don’t seem to think they have to work for there money. At Costaeye we are offering 40% commission for a minimum of 5 sales per week. We have had 5 people start but they give up after the first week!
Do you think it is spain-itus that is the problem?
its hard two sell now adays and that why people give up so fast , that want easy money and easy street , not all the markets on Quality Street , as people , companys have halfed there spending
jurdy
We have over 9,000 business in our CRM system and the sales people have leads allocated to them to follow up on. I would say selling has always been hard but you need to keep knocking on doors… Business need to really think outside of Spain as it is visitors who will be looking whats available before they come… Nothing worse than landing and not knowing whats round the corner. What we offer to businesses is really good value ... 199? / year for our gold package which gives you a something like a mini website and you also come up higher in the search results.
We see businesses spending 300-400? / month on paper ads that are read by the same readers ... This is called stale readership where your readers don’t even see the ads anymore. What the web offers is fresh visitors everyday and the option to change ad’s quickly and cheaply.
In my humble experience, I pay my people a straight hourly wage for their time with some, albeit more limited, opportunity to participate in the upside. It’s fair, they like it.
Your site doesn’t have many visitors yet though, so until that happens your sales people will have a really tough time selling those packages to anyone IMHO. Until you hit around Alexa 200,000 it will be very very difficult. There are plenty of other business directories out there as well, hence why ours on SpainExpat.com is free, including straight, no redirect, no no-follow links.
Traffic is generated in a lot of ways and yes our directory is free also but there is no reason not to offer businesses the chance to rise above the rest. Google does the same with sponsored links. With regards to payment, we have found that if you pay a basic wage there is no incentive to sell, I am not saying all people are like this but this is our experience.
Hehe, Google has the #2 most traffic in the world. 😊 I’m not saying your model doesn’t work because it does (I’ve seen it) but it’s a long slow process to get there since there’s lots of competition and I’ve yet to see anything unique from your site (please point me in the right direction if I’m mistaken).
Hi Mark, IMO sales is one of the hardest jobs. Let alone in a recession.
What you say about coverage, VFM to advertiser is true. But as above poster says, you are a new site and
do not have much ‘on paper’ to show any prospective advertiser as yet.
I hear what you are saying about ‘stale advertising’, but many traders buy an up front years paid box ad/other
esp when they are offering an ‘essential service’ (plumber, drain clearance etc) in the English print media. This is mainly as I think many potential customers knoow if they ‘ever needed’ X Y or Z, they can just pick up a copy and find the tradesperson they remember having seen before.
I wish you luck with your online site. It seems very East Coast orientated?
As for people not wanting to put in the hours, many employers have the reputation of ‘promising the earth’, then not paying up when the time comes. I’m not saying that is you, but there is a real phobia about commission only jobs due to the bad reputation others have set up. (Again IMO).
Every other job ad in the paper is usually sales orientated here. Always has been and likely always will.
Thank you for you constructive response. I completely understand what you are saying but the statistics are saying that people are more likely to look on the internet for services now and that paper advertising is on the decline. There are many reasons for the decline one of the major one being the cost of print but don’t take it from me http://www.deathofprint.co.uk/decline.html 21st century mediums are the way forward, Spain has more mobiles than people and there are more and people becoming web aware. Everyone talks about a global economy and how the world has got smaller, well the internet and the way we mine information has done this.
You are correct in saying we are not the type of company to not pay people… We issues a contract to people binding us to pay them and laying out the terms, I don’t think there are many companies out there that would do this if they were going to avoid paying up. You could say the reason there are so many sales positions available is because the normal advertising is not working. We as in internet based companies offer an alternative advertising medium which is more powerful than paper communication, if this is not the case why does every publication also have a website?
One bit of feedback I would offer is that the lack of categorisation makes the directory hard to use as a consumer. For example, I put the word ‘vegetarian’ into the query box, and one listing came up that was fairly near me, so I clicked through to it. The name of the business did not give the game away, and I have no clue from the listing whether I was looking at a shop, restaurant, wholesaler, community organisation, etc.
This wouldnt reassure me as to the usefulness of creating even a free listing, never mind paying for one.
Also the events interface seems pretty unusable as well, as you have to select a date first… I am sure people don’t approach event queries thinking ‘I want to do something, anywhere in Spain, on Thursday 29th’ for example.
I hope you don’t mind this feedback, I think it would be a lot easier for your sales people if they were offering space on a site which offered a better experience for the user…
I guess it depends on the basic wage, in Spain many jobs work on commission to boost a rubbish basic wage.
When I transferred to Spain from the UK my wage was drastically reduced, in the UK the wage was some 5% bonus on top a great wage, in Spain it was 50-50, the issue being I’m an engineer with no control over performance, my job was simple if its broke fix it, the issue of being able to fix was dependant on the rest of the company have the components available for me to fit.
Which is probably why they employed a Guiri as most Spaniards in the area knew the issue and would not touch them.
I would suggest if you cannot get staff, look at what your offering, in the same way the people you market yourself too, after all people want the same as if they where buy a product, the best possible for the price, if youe not getting staff maybe its more to do with the package on offer than the people being lazy.
this off tell staff you get Com% on sales dose work any more , people want a wage per week , as sayed “If you pay peanuts you?ll get monkeys.” <- Santi
again people are not willing to part with money as easy as that did few years ago , and some price out there still outrages , radio and tv maket have drop there price , in return that droped the wages ,( and you got problem there , will there no work on monday ) god you could like the Mp in ireland having all there ministerial pensions to give and been still pay two work as MPs , god we live great world off over spending and us the punter having to pay for it , what mps doing in spain ? fat cats !
If spain drop its price then the tourist may come back over prised
Hi again Mark,
By East Coast I meant Costa Blanca. (I only came to this conclusion as I saw the name Orihuela a few times over, but maybe you are Spain wide and it was the middle of the night and I did not see this!)... please correct me.
I agree in principle that Spain is becoming more technology aware (our local town hall publishes a weekly programme of ‘whats on’ and other things of local interest on their dedicated website), but I think partly due to the lack of good internet connections/packages out there and the Spanish mentality of preferring to do business face to face, internet commerce in here is a long way behind! (Ask lujos - luxury soap co in Guaro)
The Sur in English, and several other Eng lang papers are still free, and it is the adertisers who support the bulk of the running costs. (I think I am right that The Sur - sp ed pays for an deficit there might be on the Eng version).
I wish you luck as you are obviously dedicated to what you do.
kind regards,
sj
Back sooner than I thought. We are implementing some of your feedback as I type this… With regards to the search, we purposely did this because we are going to be implementing a tag cloud which will make it simpler for the user. If we didn’t do this we would have ended up with 1500+ categories which is not the way to go.
BTW we have just started a new poll on http://www.costaeye.com which should be interesting if we get enough people to vote… Lets see who win this election..
Thanks for your continued feedback, it all gets taken onboard
