Future Now - OnTarget for Lead Generation - GrokdotCom Marketing Optimization Blog. Future Now inc. Running a lead generation scam, website conversion, business consulting scam? Internet

Future Now, Inc. is it another Internet Scam? If you are an online marketer, advertiser, or need help with your website and looking to boost your website conversions, online sales, and lead generation, I advise you not to hire Future Now Inc!

Future Now Inc, bills itself as the best conversion optimization company to help online advertisers with increasing web leads, sales, and other website goals. They appear to be extremely credible with the client list they display on their website and the books that have been published. I have read 3 of their books: Website Conversion Hand Book, Waiting for your Cat to Bark, and Call to action. I was completely convinced these guys were the experts and could help increase my website leads. As it turns out, I was completely wrong and now fear that I may lose my job over hiring Future

Now. I write this review from my first hand experience in hiring and working with Future Now for 3 months; I believe them to be another scam that sales you the world and completely fails to deliver. I highly recommend that if you are considering their approach with persuasion architecture, OnTarget, and their lead generation OnTarget consultancy program, that you run fast before the screw you like they did me.

First, in regards to recommendations to help you boost conversion and increase lead gener, they flat out suck. They bill their recommendations out at an estimate of how many hours they believe it will take you to implement. Not on how many hours it actually took to come up with the idea. At best, the analyst spent 15 minutes coming up with the ideas. One of their recommendations was to change the headline copy of paragraph. So I changed 3 words and they billed me for 4 hours; this recommendation cost $400.00.

So I went along with it hopping their recommendation would boost conversions. It did nothing. No change at all. This becomes the story with all but 2 of their recommendations.

Future Now s billing against recommendations is probably the biggest part of the scam. I never received a recommendation that took longer than 30 minutes to implement. How long does it really take to change 1 sentence, or 1 headline, or rewrite a 2 sentence paragraph? They will bill you for at least 2 hours per recommendation and typically bill 3 or 4 hours. Basically, for each hour they bill, it will cost you $100.

There is nothing about their conversion recommendations that are worth this kind of money. As for the other recommendations to complete the total of 10 that I was supposed to receive for the first month of service, I only received 2 more. So for 10 hours of consulting I get 3 recommendations that took a total time of 1 hour and 15 minutes to implement.

Again, same story month after month. The second recommendation had to do with body copy. Again, I implemented their recommendations and this time my conversion rate crashed! From 15% down to less than 3%. In 1 day alone it cost me more than $50,000 in lost sales.

Now here is the real kicker about the second recommendation I implemented. Future Now did nothing when there was such a drastic decrease from their recommendation. Since they were tracking my campaign and I was paying them to do this, I thought that some sort of alarm would go off in the OnTarget analytics interface they use when there is a decrease. Nope, nothing happened. I had to call them repeatedly to make them aware of the problem and to come up with a fix. Still the conversion analyst and the campaign manager did nothing.

Thankfully I was able to fix the problem before any more damage was done. Still, after 4 days of running a very expensive pay per click campaign and losing the lead and sales I did, the damage was done. I calculate their mistake cost my company about $250,000. That mistake was only 1 of the many that cost my company lost sales, decrease in leads, and wasted ppc dollars.

At this point, I was extremely weary of implementing any more of their recommendations. However, their sales pitch, website, and books had me so convinced that I continued with their service after month 1. This brings me to another point do not sign any type of monthly agreement with them. They will stick you to the contract and demand that you pay even when they are screwing up your online advertising campaigns, not returning phone calls, not answering questions regarding their recommendations, and just flat out not honoring their agreement.

In fact, I had many conversations with Jeff Eisenberg and he personally told me that I was not his only client that was having such problems. What???? If the owner of the company has been aware that he has major problems with his companys performance and knows that many of his clients are not receiving what they are selling then what the hell is going on? My conclusion was this is another business out to scam legitimate companies and I attempted to cancel. They refused to let me cancel and threatened legal means to enforce the 3 month agreement.

Jeff, went on to tell me that I wasnt crazy for addressing these problems and that he guaranteed within 24 hours the Future Now analysts would fix the problems. They didnt. In fact I had to call several more times to get them to work on my account. I can tell you that if you hire future now to help you with conversion optimization and website marketing, you will have to manage them like a baby sitter to make them do their job.

You will have to constantly monitor every recommendation they make to make sure that it doesnt kill your lead generation marketing campaigns.

Another example of how the  sales rep lied to me is regarding a/b multivariate testing. I was very specific to ask the sales rep if that was part of the service and I was told that yes, we will conduct multivariate testing. I later found out that they do not do any type of testing and referred me to Googles Online Conversion tool.

Now let me discuss how awful their customer service is. Part of the Future Now agreement is to receive a monthly conference call with the conversion analyst and the campaign manager. Out of the 3 months where I scheduled a date, and time for the call, they only did it for the first month. The conference call is supposed to be an integral part of the conversion consulting process; yet they dont call you. They fail to answer your emails and the fail to clarify specific questions about their recommendations.

Many of their recommendations have been completely useless to me because I have no idea how to implement. About 1/3 of the recommendations where off target and very obscure. Again, when I called and emailed to get clarification on what they recommended, I got no answer. Out of 3 months worth of recommendations, only 25% were able to be recommended. Of those recommend, only 2 actually worked. The others caused major decreases in my conversion rate.

Yet another example of how they failed at providing the service is not following simple directions. When I first spoke with my campaign manager Natalie, I gave her specific instruction that I only wanted their recommendations to be made to very pages. Month after month they did not follow directions and made recommendations that had nothing to do with my direction. Again, I called to get this resolved and a new set of recommendations were given however these were even more useless.

There is absolutely no quality in the majority of their recommendations.

When I called to complain again to Jeff, he now told me the problems where because of the OnTarget interface his company uses. He told me that all of the problems fall on kinks in the program. Jeff also told me that Future Now does strike out from time to time but expects that to happen only 1/3 of the time. I understand that every idea may not work, but a failure rate of 1/3 of the time?

I do not know anyone that claims to be an expert and also acknowledges that they have such a failure rate. And let me be very specific and tell you why these are failures instead of bad recommendations. A conversion failure occurs when your conversion rate drops more than 1% whereas a bad recommendation will most likely not make any real change in conversion rate.

Personally I do not care about his companies problems; all I wanted was the service they were supposed to provide. I was looking for lead generation help and website conversion optimization, In the end, my company got screwed and I look like an idiot because I recommended the owners to sign up with Future Now.

If you are an online marketer or advertiser, and looking to boost your website conversions / lead generation, I would highly recommend that you do not hire Jeff and his brother Bryan Eisenberg with Future Now, Inc. If you are an employee and report to anyone in your organization, you are taking a huge risk with hiring Future Now to help you with online conversions.