Mark Taylor is the founder and Managing Director of eSales Hub and he is the 60th guest on The Next 100 Days Podcast. Mark talks to Kevin Appleby and Graham Arrowsmith about getting your business to rank highly in local search on google and then using inbound telephone calls to generate conversions. Listen to the show and find out all about local search, geo-targeting and how you can take action yourself using some of Mark's ideas in the next 100 days.


eSales Hub – the Back Story
Mark Taylor started his marketing career with Hilton Hotels. They were an entrepreneurial international multi-site business. Hilton had a fantastic training scheme. Mark was despatched to the Lausanne Business School for a week to train Mark. Hilton made Mark. Eventually Mark decided to further his career at Swallow Hotels.

He decided to work with a big brand so Mark left Swallow and worked with Virgin Active, another multi-site retailer. Eighteen months later he was approached to work in private equity. Mark realised that private equity really suited his skill set. In private equity, you buy a business, you trade it up as quickly as you can, to get revenues and profitability up and the you sell it.

Mark’s first private equity transaction was Nationwide Auto Centres. Coming in half way through the investment cycle, Mark joined a strong management team. This taught Mark how to run a business. The first thought of eSales Hub started on Mark’s sofa, with his Nationwide Auto Centre’s eBusiness Manager, who Mark had employed, and he said, wouldn’t it be great to solve that problem of Yellow Pages.
Yellow pages stopped working for local business
When Mark was involved with NAC, it was a chain of 217 garages that did MOT, service and mechanical repair. This was 7 years ago. Back then, he had noted that Yellow Pages was not working, despite spending £150,000 per annum on adverts there. They started to spend more and more on Google and they started to get a better return on Google.

With just 14% of Nationwide Auto Centres coming from online, with the rest of their transactions came from offline, they invested in building booking engines for MOT, service and tyre-booking. What they found was that there were a lot of phone calls going into the garages directly – ‘can you repair my engine’, ‘can you repair my clutch’ – stuff that you couldn’t sell online because it wasn’t a commodity.

Back to that sofa. Mark and his colleague Matt Robbins, his eBusiness Manager, discussed wouldn’t it be great to bridge that gap between what is an online sale and an offline sale. He asked himself ‘How much more revenue are we really driving from their ‘little’ website?’ Even though they were raising income from the site at NAC from £6m to £18m in about 12 months, Mark realised the opportunity was much bigger than that and there was a big chunk of it that they weren’t tracking because they were only measuring the online transactions they weren’t measuring the offline transactions.

The NAC business was sold to Halfords and Mark worked there for 6 months. Halfords were quite surprised with NAC’s online capability. Halford were a traditional retailer. Go instore or buy online. A simple transaction.

Mark’s second private equity transaction was with Esporta. They had a chain of 72 health clubs in the UK. In the end, Esporta was sold back to his ex-colleagues at Virgin Active. They had the same business problem. How do they generate leads on a local basis?
Solving the Yellow Pages problem
 When you have got a garage or a health club, back in the day ‘long tail keyword search’ would be thumbing through Yellow Pages. Get to the section you wanted. Look through the ads. Choose the one you wanted. And then you’d call it.

What Mark was finding with online, is although we grew the sales mix from 2% online to 26% online within about 6 months, most their sales leads were being generated offline. They didn’t have the capability to know that online spend was...

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