I heard today that Raefield hired a whack of sales staff last year bunch but never gave them the basic tools for success... a basic marketing program or leads to pursue. In fact he cancelled, everything. I was told that the 10k has a bunch of lies.. omg.
For example its marketing strategy includes:
Webinars - Viscount has been concentrating on webinars to educate the industry about Freedom. The response has been excellent with audiences from several hundred up to 800 registered attendees per webinar.
Apparently this was the case for 2013 and that's where they were getting their commercial business. The great administrator cancelled all webinars for 2014. Nothing like cancelling marketing programs that work.
Advertising - Products are advertised on an ongoing basis in various print publications, which the Company will continue to do. We have been testing new publications on a regular basis to evaluate response, sales and readership. All leads are followed up, and magazines are rated based on a dollar sale per advertising dollar spent ratio. While the sales cycle is sometimes fairly long, this approach has given the Company a very accurate measure of the effectiveness of various publications and individual ads.
Number of industry publication ads in 2014. Apparently Zero.
Direct Marketing - The Company continued educating customers about Freedom technology by holding Freedom and Liberty training seminars throughout the U.S. and at our head office via the internet.
Number of US roadshow and training days in the US for 2014. Zero.
Tradeshows - The company did 2 tradeshows but Raefield and crew apparently screwed up their show marketing and booth traffic was down dramatically over previous years.
Distribution Plan - With the addition of our Liberty product line, new security distributors were added who sell the Liberty line in the open security market or to smaller dealers on a non-exclusive basis. These new distribution deals, along with the existing dealer base, gave the Company immediate access to the largest networks of dealers in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Apparently they had the largest distributors in the US signed up and had a big stocking order at the end of 2013. Unfortunately Raefield changed Liberty and the pricing and the deals have mostly fallen apart. The guy who they hired to manage distribution has left the company, partly because Raefield also put no marketing $$ into supporting the programs.
We all know the sales cycle for Freedom can be a year. Q4 dropped 35%. This is a result of the US Gov't not giving Raefield his Hail Mary and doing no real marketing going back to the start of the year. This bodes badly for 2015 and intercoms won't change that.
Raefield is a 1960's guy and maybe back then his methods worked better. Perhaps Encyclopedia Brittanica is looking for someone to drive their door to door sales. I know the perfect candidate. Ooops. I just did a google search and they stopped printing in 2010.
