Ad Agency

Greg O, Advertising Agency We couldn’t live without our telephone conferences. There are only two of us here, but we work with folks all over the map, and it seems there’s a conference call every day. If I had to rely on one of those “big boys” for that, out budget would be shot in a week, not to mention my nerves. Mark and I just use our Universal Offices for that. And we only give out the toll-free number, even though we have a local number. All the calls come in through that one number, and we get a complete report every month – or whenever we was for one – telling us the time, date and number of every incoming call. Even if the caller doesn’t leave a message! I closed two deals last month just from folks who called without leaving a message. They couldn’t believe I was able to get back to them anyway, so they decided to see what else we could do that was magic.

Using it – In Depth:

Excellent Images, Inc. is a new, aggressive marketing company, specializing in creating marketing plans for start-up companies. The founders, Joe Smith and Jane Jones, are based in Denver.

Says Jane, We have a small office in Denver, but we work with people all over the place – in and out of our office. Bruce, our photographer actually works out of his own studio across town. We also use three business specialists a lot – one here in Denver, one in Atlanta, and one in Los Angeles. We work mostly with high-tech and media buyers, so we’re always dealing with outside companies in Silicon Valley, Chicago and New York.

Joe handles the day-to-day office affairs, so he handles the set up of their Virtual Business Office

We have one toll-free number, and a local number here in Denver. Then, because of all the business we do there, I added local numbers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York. The great thing is that ALL those numbers come to the same switchboard, so we know that all the calls are handled the same way.

All six of us have our own Universal Offices – me, Jane, Bruce our photographer, and Bill, Amanda and Wyatt, our contract specialists. It’s just great that the calls all come in through one switchboard, and then we can each decide how our calls are handled! My calls go to my desk and then my cell phone; Jane’s go to her desk in the daytime and her home phone at night, and the others go to their offices or cell phones or whatever they want. I don’t have to worry about it.

Local numbers for individual offices are great too. We gave Bruce a local number on his Universal Office and he uses that for all his own business too. The same with Amanda in LA. The extra lines only cost us FIVE BUCKS a month each, but more than doubled the business we can do with those folks. I almost passed out when the local phone company told me what THEY wanted to charge for that!

Joe was really excited about the Info Line announcements and Fax-On-Demand too. Oh, those are great timesavers and really good marketing tools for us. We have two Info Line announcements. One is this really nice general description of what Excellent Images can do for our customers, and the other is an “Upcoming Project” announcement, which we change every week.