You can handle your fresh leads and they’ll take your stale ones.
A common complaint about domain name marketplaces is that your parked domain names are generated all of their leads. Why should you pay the marketplace when someone first expresses interest by clicking a link on your parked domain name?
Frank Schilling’s DomainNameSales.com announced a new brokerage service today that is the best of both worlds for those that want first crack at selling their own domains without commission.
Basically, DomainNameSales.com will offer follow up on any of your stale leads (i.e. greater than 30 days).
This is something DNS is good at. I have a number of domain names parked with them and use their brokerage service. They still occasionally reach out to leads that went stale months ago. Although none of these old leads have converted into a sale for me, customers don’t really take a risk by having DNS follow up on them.
On a less exciting note, the company upped its brokerage fee from 10% to 12.5%. That’s still much lower than what competitors charge.
Great. They increase their commission and they increase the spam they will send based on the name you own. And they are the innovating ….. how?
@domaininvestor – responding to an inquiry for a domain isn’t spam.
So they will contact again all your old prospects trying to offer their own domains as alternative choice?!?. Good…. Furthermore they have raised the commission?!? 10% is already too much for valuable domains. Could be a fair commission for domains with value under $10,000, but for high value domains 10% is a theft
The beauty of their platform is you can pay a 0% broker fee, if you work the deal on your own. If you have a domain name that is worth xxx,xxx priced right you don’t need to find a buyer, they should already be knocking daily.
@domainer ….. Then don’t use them lol
*Domainer: DomainNameSales.com has offered this as an optional service for our clients who would like the opportunity for the first chance at selling, but do not have time to continuously follow up for months and or years to come. This new follow up system will resurrect old leads and potentially create missed sales. DomainNameSales considers this an innovation because we have yet to hear of another marketplace that is following up on past buyers 30, 60, 90, 365 days and all the way to the first lead ever received. Good or bad, large or small any and all will be contacted. Furthermore, DomainNameSales is committed to selling the domain that is tied to the opportunity given to us. We are not taking our client’s buyers then pitching our own. All of us are very excited about this. If you want to speak further about it please email us [email protected] or 800.818.1828 x8
Contacted DNS on three different occasions on behalf of three different clients of mine. Have to say the sales process was essentially to state a high price and not move off that price and not appear to be particularly eager to sell the domains.
I gave it a shot and had a budget for these clients (that was reasonable) but moved them to other domains where the seller seemed at least willing to communicate and try to make a deal. They wanted to do business, DNS did not.
As an example let’s say you have a domain and would like $100,000 for that domain. At a certain point $35,000 is offered. Simply writing back “sorry the price is $100,000 and we will hold the price for 7 days” doesn’t allow me to appear to be doing my job for the client. The high price to start is fine (and actually makes me look good if I can get the price down). The inability to move off the high price makes me look bad and doesn’t build my reputation. I’d rather deal with sellers that offer fair pricing and make it look like I am doing my job. DNS doesn’t at least in the few encounters I have had with them. So why not steer my clients to other domains?
You might want to develop a separate channel that people doing acquisitions can contact so at least we can cut out your sales people who (in my opinion from my 14 years in the business) don’t add much value. Anyone can state a price and say “good for 7 days”. You can get a fast food clerk to say that.
Larry,
Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow and we can talk about your experience to see where and if we came up short?
1-800.818.1828 x8 please ask for me.
I urge anyone to call us if they have ever had a poor experience. Your feedback is the most valuable information we can receive to get better.
Jeffrey Gabriel
Do you review the communications of your sales team?
If so you will find that they (at least the one that I dealt with whose name begins with “K”) have no finesse in dealing with inquiries.
What I have found when I sell domains is that I never make assumption about who is inquiring and how serious they are. I assume people are playing games and/or hiding their identity. I don’t care and I never out people I play along as courteous as I can be and I’m always “in the game”.
One specific example you lost was where you quoted $55,000 for a truly crappy domain. Was worth no where near that price not even close. But yet I had a buyer that had allocated me $35,000 to buy. If you hadn’t pissed me off I would have made a deal. But instead I found a name that buydomains had and bought that for $15,000 and was a hero to my client. Buydomains will always work with me and not only that they give me 25% off whatever their listed prices are. So right off the bat I have a reason to try and push their domains. And I have bought several and have a rep that I deal with.
I’m not in the business of helping other people make money (unless they pay me to do so). That said if the situation occurs again I will try and contact you. At one point iirc I did write to you and you never replied to my email (realizing that could be for any number of reasons of course).
Larry,
Thanks for the message. We do not have a broker that has a name that starts with a K. We never have either. I have also spent time looking for an email from a “Larry”, that would have something to do with this and could not find it either. Perhaps you were in contact with one of our clients who could appear to be a broker who works for us?
Either way, the invitation still stands please give me a call. I would like to research your inquiry and learn from it.
Thank you,
Jeffrey Gabriel
Email corresponded with was Abstract Holdings International via DomainNameSales.com and person’s name definitely began with a “K”.
I’ll think about whether I want to give you a call.
Separately the whole idea of trying to get people to identify themselves (with the web page) before making an offer I personally don’t agree with. The idea is to allow people to hide their identity if they choose and then figure out who they are so you can maximize the profit on any names. If you get someone to tell you they are General Motors and they want your domain they will think you are jacking up the price because they are a big company. While this is clearly much more work, to me at least (as someone who has sold domains) this is much more effective way of maximizing returns. As a strategy I’d rather play dumb.
Following up on old leads is a great idea but it’s no innovation
Following up on old leads is explained here as if its for the domainer when it is simply a source of revenue for DNS. Shouldn’t our brokers who get 12.5% be working at our leads? Even more aggressively than we ourselves would?!
@Larry you are absolutely correct sir in that DNS is not interested in negotiating at all. Which is why a professional person would use a broker in the first place. I had the same experience selling with a broker whose name starts with E…ddie. I received this reply to one of my counter offers – “This guy is not going to go above $2k for this domain.” and has not replied to 2 emails since… My previous counter offers remain a mystery. No replies.
@Jeffrey Gabriel no one should have to call to explain these things. It is clear to me after reading, matched with my experiences, that this behavior is exactly how the culture at DNS operates. If its not commissionable it is a waste of time to your brokers.
Here’s an idea Jeffrey, make several inquiries per month and see exactly how your brokers handle every situation. But for now the 12.5% commission matched with the quality of service tells me that Domain Name Sales has no value for professional domainers.
Ben,
Thank you for your feedback. Greatly appreciated. Larry’s comments about his experience was provided to him by one of our customers who handled the negotiations…A very professional Domainer who has a very large and valuable portfolio. It was not one of our Brokers because we have never had anyone work for us that has a name that starts with a K.
Here is our team: https://domainnamesales.com/about-us#section=people
As for Eddie and his work I would appreciate it if you could provide me with the domain so I can look at exactly how he might have gone wrong, and how we can improve. My email is [email protected] and my phone number is 1-800-818-1828 x8
If you quoted a price, and the broker spoke to the buyer providing education, discussion and debate sometimes the greatest salesperson on the planet is not going to overcome a person’s bank account that has 2,000 dollars in it. Eddie provided you feedback when he knew he was not going to be paid a commission that was the highest the buyer would go.
In a perfect world what else is he supposed to do?
I know we will follow up with the buyer at a later date, but really how can we do better?
**As a side note: I was at Namescon, I will be at the next show. Come find me. Tell me if your unhappy and lets talk about how we can improve. My phone number and email is included in this thread, and you can find me on the DNS site. Going on a blog, and me finding a customer there who is unhappy without hearing or having the opportunity to see exactly where we went wrong is hard for us to improve, and provide a better experience for everyone. This could have happened six months ago, or yesterday. I do not know. I do know we want to get better.**