P B
1/5
A bad experience.
We retained Theresa Pantanella's services on February 9th.
Our initial interactions were pleasant and I even imagined involving her in other projects we are working on.
However, at a monthly fee of 1500USD$ per month it took her until early May to initiate lead generation. So "Right Away Leads"? Not so much.
For an additional fee she apparently outsourced copywriting to some mysterious copywriter who oddly had zero online presence and whose work was dire. As we were paying Right Away Leads for the copywriting you'd think she would have reviewed the work before we saw it. Frankly GPT4.O would have done a better job.
The creative executions were not on brand. For a ultra-luxury brand they provided cheesy ai-generated images. I suppose that's not surprising because, despite their laborious onboarding questionnaire, they never asked for our brand guidelines. Their work was amateurish. When we asked them to send us a copy of our onboarding submissions that also too an unreasonably long time to receive.
We offered them a number of initial lead magnets and one was adopted - although we only learnt weeks later that they didn't think it would be very effective. Which makes you wonder why they adopted it at all?
We were recommended to Theresa Pantanella's business for lead generation by someone whose sole focus is product launches. In addition we referred to the fact we were doing a product launch in the onboarding documents, and in our creative brief. And yet - despite all this, early in the lead gen process it came as a surprise to Theresa that we were doing a product launch.
Lastly, despite prompt invoice payments, on one occasion Theresa had a puzzling meltdown threatening to "cease all services" because she had not received payment within a couple of days of sending her invoice. Beyond everything else, treating a client that way showed a poor understanding of the lifetime value of a customer.
My learning from this experience is that it's not because someone is a member of a direct marketing mastermind group that they are necessarily a mastermind themselves.
We are now working with a grown-up, who's teaching us a great deal, getting us great results and high-quality leads at a fraction of the cost of what we were paying via Right Away Leads.
Of course, most of these were points were made to Theresa by email when we stopped working with her, but have we heard anything from her since? Nada. Zip. Nothing.
What is even more curious is that even though we emailed to let them know that we were ending our contract on the 29th May, on the 18th June they debited £1,219.67 from our AmEx card. Obviously we'll be pursuing this via AmEx.
Bizarre.
