Richard's GlobalTmail Blog

New IP Upgrade Today / Money Messaging Close to Completion

We installed the new IP for the GroupCaller^tm server today.  Ahmed should be back on the system by tomorrow morning.  He pulled an all-nighter in Pakistan last night and just logged off at about 5:30 pm our time (4:30 a.m. in Pakistan).  I don’t expect to hear from him again until late morning our time.  Jeff and I tested the GC server and it’s online and working fine.  Jeff also got the bulk email server back online so I’m hoping in the next week or two we’ll be able to start regular email service out to members again after a 6-month dry spell.  We do have internal network connectivity issues, but Ahmed could not address them until today when we got these new IP’s.

Also, the Money Messaging^tm subscription publication is almost ready to go.  I’ve been hacking away at it nonstop since last weekend, determined to get it published by Friday night.  This contains the entire revised webinar presentation, enhanced for presentation in this format, plus the Promoter’s Formula instruction from the class series, complete pricing and policies regarding use of GroupCaller^tm and of course, the entire user manual for GroupCaller^tm. 

Last night I edited and completed the operational manual for GroupCaller^tm but still have to complete the body of this publication which I estimate is about 65% completed now.   We’ll sell this publication as an annual subscription which will be updated continually through the year, and to which all subscribers will have access to the updates. 

More tomorrow. 

New Logo Further Embedded, System Capacity Increased

As you may recall, I just created a new logo for the GroupCallertm so it could be used in the newly released software for our Remote Agents.  This new logo for is now embedded into the software.  Here’s a quick screen shot of the login page you’ll see if you’re one of our Remote Agents, running the GroupCaller^tm from your own home: 

It’s always good to have our brand out there for people to see.  The only hold-up right now is waiting for Comcast to get their act together and deliver our new IP addresses which were ordered last week.  Usually, this is a same-day process for ISP’s.  Not so for Comcast (grrrr).  Anyway, I expect to get them on Wednesday.  After that, we’ll be able to fix the network problem from last week and move forward with more testing and hopefully making our first live calls on Saturday or Monday.  Gee.  This sounds like what I said LAST week. 

But there’s even MORE good news today!  I discovered we’ll get far more bang for the buck out of our current Internet connection than I had previously thought.  According to Ahmed, we’ll be able to run 225 concurrent channels (phone lines) without upgrading our equipment or expanding the existing bandwidth.  This should give us enough dialing power to get 200 to 400 new leads EVERY DAY without any further upgrade! 

You can’t imagine what phenomenal news this is!  With the current configuration, we should be able to meet our goals for the next six months.  This puts us on track to sell the first 400 memberships for the AMG within two or three months of starting the Phase I sales campaign.  If you’ve been wondering whether you should join the AMG, I would suggest to do it sooner rather than later.  If you wait, we’re likely to fill all the best slots before you join!  More is coming tomorrow night.  Please check in again tomorrow.

Screen Shots Added

Over the weekend, I added 14 screen shots of our new GroupCaller^tm for the Remote Agents.  By the end of the day today, the Money Messaging^tm  manual (ebook) will have nearly 100 pages barring any major interruptions to my work flow today.  I hope to complete this necessary book by Wednesday this week. 

Everyone who wants to become a Remote Agent on our GroupCaller^tm system will need this manual and be required to learn its contents to use the system.  The Manager’s manual comes next and will be about 5 times longer, but I still hope to complete it within this month of May.  We have already selected 2 Managers who will help all the early-adopters get started. 

Here’s a sample of one of the screen shots.  This is the main screen you’ll see if you’re a Remote Agent using this software to build your GlobalTmail^tm business:

There are so many unique aspects to what we’re doing to help our Associates build a strong income.  Although we do have a compensation plan with elements of multi-level marketing, we cannot call ourselves a “multi-level company.”  We don’t fit the same culture or mold.   Our policies are far different from network marketing companies.  Naturally, one of the main differences is that fact that Associates are treaded like “real” sales people, and any money they pay to the company has absolutely no impact on their earnings.  In fact, no purchase of any kind is ever a requirement to become an Associate, and that’s simply not the case with the MLM industry.  In fact, the use of our GroupCaller^tm technology is an excellent example of why we can’t classify ourselves as a typical MLM company.

The simple fact that we use our own proprietary marketing software system to promote ourselves, allowing Remote Agent to use this new GroupCaller^tm , sets us apart from network marketing companies.  All Associates are welcome to use the system, but to do so, they must qualify through membership status and performance.  The first qualification is to become an AMG Member.  AMG Members who wish to have a Remote Agent seat are entitled to as many as 300 leads passed through to them to get them started (for fully-paid Platinum Members).  Those who finance their membership are entitled to become Remote Agents, but under the current policy, they must pay for their leads.  The pricing is reasonable, and those with a good enough closing percentage can have the fees taken out of earnings or even qualify for no fee at all with a high enough closing percentage.

Even if your closing percentage is not good enough, or if you’re not willing or able to become a Remote Agent, you can still benefit from the GroupCaller^tm through our commission sharing program (in the Policies and Procedures) under which one of our Account Executives will operate your Agent Seat on your behalf, and keep 80% of the commission (but none of the bonus!).

By allowing Remote Agents to build a downline of other Remote Agents, it’s like building your own call center business on which you’ll earn residual profits!  There are no other work-at-home opportunities like this in Ameica, under which you can learn how to operate this unique call center software, and at the same time build your own team of Remote Agents doing the same thing!  The earnings potential is truly astounding.  I expect we’ll see some spectacular success stories before the end of 2011.

This week might just be the most intense development week since we started the software development project about 5 years ago.  We’ll roll out this first working edition of software designed specifically to mass market our system and create sales volume sufficient so that those who wish to work the system full time can do so, and earn adequate incomes from the time they start.  I believe I’ll have updates to the blog every day this week before noon, so please keep checking back here late morning each day for a report of the previous day’s accomplishments.

Whew! What a Week . . . And We’re Still Going

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get more articles posted this week.  It seems the closer we get to the roll-out of GroupCaller^tm  the busier and more intense the work becomes.  I’ll give you a quick update here b/c it’s getting late and I have to start early on Saturday (again).  Basically, everyday this week, Jeff, my self and Ahmed (from Pakistan) have been conferencing together using a variety of online tools to resolve a number of technical issues such as internal network connections, campaign program-script writing (as opposed to sales-script writing) and Ahmed training Jeff and I regarding the inner workings of the software and how to administer it for managers and remote agents.  Let’s skip the technical jargon and say …. “it’s intense.  I haven’t really come up for air this week, but tonight I feel a real need to get an update especially seeing that I got several messages wondering what happened to these  updates. 

GroupCaller^tm

The entire system is installed and it works.  BUT, that doesn’t mean we can use it yet.  As I mentioned, we’re having to deal with many network issues that must be resolved to ensure that we’ll be able to expand the system as the demand warrants it; we’re expecting a rapid growth phase to follow the first four to six weeks of operation.  We do NOT expect much growth nor many sales during the first 6 weeks because it’s going to take that long just to truly learn how to use, manage and administer the equivalent of a several-thousand seat call center with work-at-home agents all over the country, and some in foreign countries.  The scheduling alone is a nightmare, not to mention CRM (customer relationship management software that allows the work of many agents to be managed by a few supervisors and managers), extensive training for an ongoing stream of NEW workers, and conducting an ever-increasing number of webinars.  It’s a tall order to say  the least, and in the past 2 months of finishing off the voice broadcast system, we discovered just how ill-prepared we are to deal with a fast-growing enterprise.  Those issues are being dealt with each day which is one reason I have not taken the time to write very much this week. I hope to do better next week with several short articles. 

The bottom line for this week is that we discovered we need a few more static IP’s.  For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically it just means we have to pay a little more, they were ordered today, and we have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for delivery; and only THEN will we fix the network issues we uncovered this week.  And to continue…only AFTER we install the new static IP’s will we be able to continue and fix the problems.  I’ll keep you posted.  But don’t feel badly…these are permanent solutions and will take us from nearly ‘no revenue’ to doing a substantial monthly cash flow in the matter of only a few months.

New Logo

Since this software is our own system, and it will be installed in the homes of many people, branding was needed.  We’ll begin using the term GroupCaller^tm for both the mass voice broadcast system and remote agent opportunity, as well as a term to replace GroupCast.  We cannot use GroupCast because it’s owned by another company.  You’ll see our new logo frequently in the future:

 

 

New Operations Manual and eBook

To become an Agent on GroupCaller^tm does take some time and effort.  I have completed about 50 pages of an operations manual this week and I expect it will be more than 100 pages and published as an ebook within the next several days.  This is one of the projects that I absolutely must complete BEFORE we’re able to start selling through this new system.  The reason for this is the simple fact that, as soon as we make that FIRST sale, the new customer needs a complete instruction manual showing them what to do.  They’ll also need webinar-style training as well as one-on-one coaching.  If we expect to make many sales at all, we have to make sure we have to tools to help these people succeed BEFORE we start selling, or they’re all going to fail.  We can’t allow that to happen. 

Just to whet your appetite a little, here’s the cover of this new ebook/software system. It’s actually a multi-media ebook and includeds embedded videos and links showing what to do, plus the complete agent operating manual that guides a person through the setup and use of their very own call center seat right in their own home.  

I created what I believe is a professional looking cover for this publication and titled it “Money Messaging” to use it as a combined training and marketing tool for the company.  We’ll use this ebook to attract even more new sign-ups.  It will sell for $39.95 as an annual subscription through Clickbank, Plimus and other online affiliate marketing companies.  It’s sold as a subscription because I expect many updates which users will need.  I’ll be posting it to those firms and recruit their Affiliates to do some online marketing once it’s ready to go.  I expect this book to be ready for publication within a week, maybe less. 

Also, I’m posting it next week in our company store so anyone who wants one can go online and buy it for instant download.  All fully-paid AMG members are entitled to a free copy, just let me know you want one and I’ll send the download link privately to your email.  If you’re not a paid-in-full AMG member, you can subscribe to it online.

Fully paid AMG members are entitled to a free subscription.  This operations manual is designed as a subscription, more than just an ebook.  That’s because we’ll make frequent updates as the software matures, and as our marketing systems develops.  This first edition is (of course) Version 1.0.  Those who purchase the subscription are entitled to free updates as long as their annual subscription is current.  I expect many, many updates during the first year.

Those of you on our Spearhead team know who you are.  We won’t be starting till late next week due to the networking problems I mentioned earlier.  But you can expect to hear from me by mid-week concerning your role, and helping us with final testing before we start the real mass-dialing campaign.  Progress has been great!  And exhausting … see ya back here very soon!

Delay From Pakistan - Internet Outage Restored

Well, this is one of the "down sides" of working with programmers in non-USA countries.  Major ISP's in the USA almost never have a problem like this, but it's common in many other countries.  It's the "wee hours" now and I just heard from our buddy Ahmed.  They had a lengthy outage in their fiber Internet connection right at the time he and I and Jeff had a conference call scheduled to finalize set up of our first 2 campaign types (see previous blog article for details on Campaign Type A and B). Needless to say the meeting never happened and now I know why.

We re-scheduled the meeting for this afternoon, so I'll be tied up all morning in preparation (need to do a lot of database work).  Our updated business contact database arrived last week and we need to scrub out the Do Not Call numbers from our in-house as well as the national DNC list.  Another part of the scrubbing process is removing all kinds of other phone numbers that are either illegal to call or just don't make any sense at all, such as police, fire, emergency, hospitals, rest homes, hotels, large companies (over 50 employees) and the list goes on and on.  At any rate, Jeff and I collaborate on that effort but it still takes hours to accomplish.   The updated list has more than 18 million records, so it will also take several hours of processing time to roll through it and create our new "clean list".  

There's more great news! We just picked up a political client in Utah.  He is running for office to replace a deceased congressman here and he's one of our AMG Platinum Associates, Keith Harrison! We wish him well.  He's going to use our system in his campaign, so I'll need to make some arrangements to do a simple announcement-style calling campaign for his robocall efforts.  I'll post some updates on this effort here in the blog as we complete some dialing campaigns for him.  That's our SECOND political client in 2 months, and we haven't even fired up the system yet.  Can you imagine the business we'll have once we announce we can make 12,000 simultaneous calls and millions of calls a day?

At any rate, we know there's a lot of business to be had out there, and it's frustrating to go through delay after delay.  But that's what it take to get our services off the ground, so we're plodding through it.  

As I type this, I'm also online with a programmer in Beijing we work with (American name = "Jacky" as in Jacky Chan...they don't spell the same as we do).  He's working on our bulk email server and I'm monitoring the process.  When we got the voice broadcast server going, we broke the email server connection.  So he's fixing it.  So far, we've been online a couple of hours.  I don't expect to hit the sack until 3 am or so at this rate.  But once again, this is what it takes to start a company destined to become a billion dollar enterprise (nobody ever accused me of thinking SMALL!).

It looks like my blog update schedule is way off this week.  I have been updating it mid morning every day.  But with so many irons in the fire, it looks like this week i'll be writing my articles late at night.  That's all for today.  I'll report on our afternoon meeting in my next update. 

Admin Training

Today was administrator training day for the GroupCaller^TM Voice Broadcast System.   Jeff, myself and Ahmed from Pakistan had a conference call this afternoon, during which time he taught us some of the concepts that make this software operate.  It’s fairly complex.  Jeff had already studied the notes and a manual on the open-source software on which GroupCaller^TM is built, so he was more familiar with than I was.  The thing I want you to get from this is simply that the system we’ve developed here is far more robust and versatile than I had hoped for our first time running it!

Having said that, I want to caution all my readers not to expect too much during this first month of May when we begin our nationwide sales campaign.  I’m pretty sure it’s going to take Jeff and I the entire month just to learn how to administer the program so it can be used by Trainers, Managers and Agents (Associates). 

Another word of caution.  From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it’s going to take a lot more bandwidth and the addition of at least 6 more servers (maybe more) for us to do the kind of calling volume required to keep tens of Associates busy answering calls; and by later in the summer or sometime in the fall I expect we may need a capacity of having more than 100 Agents logged into the system at one time.  To do that will take a monster increase in capacity, to where we can call out on 2,000 lines at one time. To have 100 Agents on the phone at one time, we’ll likely need a minimum of 500 to 800 Agents trained and available to follow up on the leads we’re generating.  To get through the entire database of about 80 million opt-in records within a year or less, we’re going to need that kind of capacity.

One of the biggest questions we’ll be answering during our first month of calling is how many concurrent calls must be made to keep a single Agent busy talking during their shift.  In my opinion, it’s going to take about 15 to 20 lines per Agent.  Ahmed thinks it will b 6 or 8.  We’ll see who is right in a month or two.  In the meantime, there’s a lot I must do to prepare for live calling on Wednesday (our new target date for calling). 

Tomorrow, Jeff and I have another appointment with Ahmed.  He said that our campaign would be set up and ready to begin dialing by mid-afternoon tomorrow.  I’m not quite convinced yet, but he seems certain.  Could it be that he just wants to get paid?  (I think so ….)