22-03-16 Reactivation w UpFrog – ReFrog
Tersh Blissett: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone out there in podcast, world. Hope you’re having a great day. You’re listening to, or watching a service business mastery podcast. I’m your host TELI and sitting next to me, my co who virtually Joshua crouch. And today we’re gonna talk about reengaging our current client list. That’s something that A lot of people I imagine like a bucket and we’re constantly pouring water into it.
And in this metaphor, your clients, your, the water but we don’t paying attention to the fact that we have little holes around the outside of the bucket and the bottom of the bucket. And so as fast as we’re putting it, putting. Bringing in new clients, old clients are seeping out the bottom of the bucket.
So we can never get that bucket as full as we want it to be. Today we’re gonna talk to Noah and Justin with fro, and we’re gonna talk about that. And really these guys here are just a wealth of knowledge. We talked to ’em. Josh talks to him about it on a daily basis. And I talk to him about it every other day basis.
but it’s. Anytime I have a question about something that Josh, heck we, now we have a group chat, so we’re all chatting together constantly, but
Josh Crouch: yeah, no, Facebook messenger never stops dinging me during the day. it’s
Tersh Blissett: it’s a distraction for sure. Before we get started, though, Josh, have you ever thought about the fact that.
That we, that humans are more afraid of spiders, even though they have more teeth, humans have more teeth and spiders are more afraid of humans are getting stepped on by humans, even though they have more legs[00:01:30]
Josh Crouch: no, I didn’t. Th I don’t think about that. I do know that everyone in my house. Screams when they see a spider. So I have to go even the 14 year old boy, he’s like screaming and he is running. He’s I like you just take a napkin, clean it up. no I’m so I have to literally stop what I’m doing, run upstairs or go outside and take care of it.
So apparently that’s the new age that we live in. Yep. Yep.
Tersh Blissett: You’re welcome for that. But,
Josh Crouch: So
Justin Riley: are you looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue, mark, do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let tur BLI and Josh crouch, be your guide in getting you to the top here at service business mastery tune in, as they sit down with world renowned authors in business leadership and personal growth who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human resources, and so much more.
Let their nuggets of wisdom goals guide you in owning a thriving, profitable, and ever growing business. Here are your hosts and Josh.
Josh Crouch: Damn tur. I know what that feels like now just off. [00:03:00] welcome guys. Welcome back.
Justin Riley: Love the intro. Love the intro. And I, yeah, I get jazzed every time I hear the music, it’s it’s go time. That’s right. That’s right. Love the, be a guest on, know, the show with you guys.
Tersh Blissett: Yeah. So for those who haven’t heard the other episodes, the previous episodes share a little bit about real quick.
Josh Crouch: Oh yeah. Go. Not to interject you, but just in case you have not heard that other episode, that episode might be of interest to some people who are thinking about online pricing, but have not really taken the dive into it because it’s, it, it’s just a topic that gets a lot of. It’s like politics, it’s 50 50 where it’s, you’re the right or left and right.
Or, yeah, it’s very polarizing. Yeah. I would definitely check that out if you have not
Tersh Blissett: already. And that’s actually listing your prices online and sharing prices and the amount of revenue that can come from that and stuff. But yeah. Yeah. Guys, if you don’t mind share, share a little bit about yourself and what you got going
Justin Riley: on.
Up frog’s our name, right? We fairly new company in the space, but not new in the industry. So I’ve been 23 years doing this, from, I had a father that was a small business owner, he started in the unions and was a steam fitter and owned businesses through time.
So at high school, it was, a couple choices. It was college, the trades or joined the. I was way too chicken to join the military at the time, because we were going to war. So I carried tools. I was a glorified parts carrier, I wasn’t even an apprentice. I wouldn’t even say so fast forward, and I worked through just about every position that was out there in the company.
Did a retail bid with home Depot for a while. We managed 14 stores in the Mid-Atlantic [00:04:30] region, won some awards, did some cool stuff. And then started to get into technology. And how that can be used to benefit ourselves. Because really honestly, I couldn’t find anybody that I could trust in the space.
I had wasted tons of money on other marketing companies and things like that. And and it was just one of those things I had to learn. Fast forward to now we used a online transparent process in our business and grew it for three years then exited. And now we use that technology.
For small businesses. But it’s not just, we’re not just a one, one trick pony it’s not just online pricing, like the fundamentals of the business don’t change. I’ve also got my business partner on the call as well, Noah and Totally opposite end of the spectrum. So no.
Noah Carter: So I came in, younger and, looking, I guess you could say the next generation looking better. what I like to call myself. I wanted this to be easy to use. Okay. For everyone. All right. On more on the techy side, I wanted this stuff all to be able to relate to not only a contractor who, doesn’t have hardly any time in the day to deal with this tech, that always makes mistakes.
So a lot of what I wanted to do was come in and. Make a purpose here. All right. So the last job I didn’t really have purpose. So I was looking to not only, grow with people, but to have an impact. And the way we do that is through helping small business grow. And I really, took purpose to that.
And the way that simplicity could help small businesses grow rapidly through implementation and understanding, the basics of all this online marketing [00:06:00] where, it’s not just yellow pages anymore. I’d like to stick to. New and, not the old way where, people are doing business in what I would like to say, not casual conditions.
Okay. They’re being very pushy about things and not being upfront where we like to be more transparent, more, involved with a customer as well as the contractor in, combining a relationship. And that’s where we’ll go with, this conversation we’re gonna have today. No, I got like a really
Josh Crouch: serious question for you.
Have you ever seen. Yellow pages, phone book. yeah.
Justin Riley: Oh, that’s a great question. Have you
Josh Crouch: Uhhuh,
Noah Carter: it was more of a toy in the kids. Was it in a museum?
Saw it encyclopedia too, but never used one.
Justin Riley: No, it’s wonderful working, as and I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this, right? As you work in an industry for so long, you’ve developed this bias, right? The old saying we’ve always done it. This. And even myself, I’m tainted by the years of, BDR trainings and all these different trainings that are ingrained, that this is the way we do it.
And yeah. And it’s true, right? This is the way we do it, but sometimes right. We’ll be working through things. And Noah’s why don’t we do it this way? Like this just makes a whole lot more sense. And it it just stops me dead in my tracks. And I’m like why Don.
Tersh Blissett: That’s a great point because we I was actually listening to a book.
Oh man. And I thought about it whenever I was trying to think of what it was called and it’ll come to me. But the author said that every [00:07:30] time you start working on a process ask why? Like, why are we doing it this way? Yeah. Is it because we’ve always done it this way or is it, this is the best way to.
Justin Riley: Interesting. And
Tersh Blissett: so every single time you do something, say why, and that I added that into our business. And so I said , don’t get offended whenever I ask you, why are we doing it this way? Yeah. It’s because I literally want to know, are we doing it this way? Because we’ve always done it this way, or are we doing it this way?
Because this is the
Justin Riley: best way to do it. And look, let’s be honest, right? Everybody’s lives are busy. There is no harder job in this country right now than running a small business with a bunch of techs on the road. I promise you, I’ve done quite a few different ones and it is a challenging job.
So it begs the question. Do we do it the same way? We’ve always done it because we just don’t have time. True to change. Okay. Or that it’s the easiest path, right? Like water finds the easiest resistance. So it’s just gonna, go that direction.
Tersh Blissett: Or we may not even know that there is another way to do
Justin Riley: it true, because we don’t have the ability to even open our eyes up above to see what else is out there.
Yeah,
Josh Crouch: right. And I would say that’s where most contractors fit in. They just don’t know what they don’t know. They, they buy personally, they buy with their phones and they do all this isn’t that something, but and they love when businesses reach back out to them. I love it. I see emails and stuff like, oh yeah.
I wanna do that again. I wanna buy that a
Justin Riley: 44 questions survey today from a company I never did business with. I love their product. But I just haven’t purchased it yet, but I did a survey. that took 15 minutes of my time to answer it honestly, [00:09:00] but it feels like they want to know about me and, just staying close in top of mind.
What is top of mind here in 2022 like it used to be, contractors had to spend half million to million dollars to be on TV to be top of mind. So how do we redesign top of mind? Cuz look, we have the luxury. We’re pretty darn good at what we do. And we have a choice to work with a lot of different contractors that are out there.
And I can tell you, our favorite are between a half million and 3 million in revenue. That’s who we like to work with. Why is
Tersh Blissett: that the case?
Justin Riley: Because we can be as, at most assistance. Yeah. And it’s rewarding for us because it’s like if you can have them see the light or put just some simple things in place, that, and become almost like an ally, it’s like a secret weapon behind the scenes to, help them. It is just amazing what can happen, right?
Because any company that’s a half million is just a few quick. A quick changes, not necessarily huge financial changes, but just either whether it be systems, the way you approach things a little bit more organization and boom, you can be a three, four, 5 million company very easily. Okay. In this environment with digital.
Okay. And to tell you the truth, the people, I don’t know, hang up with us and it’s really cool. We just get the opportunity to work with these guys. Imagine that group, text times, 20, 30 people, so now it’s we’ve built this little tribe, if you will.
And I love reactivation, that’s kinda, yeah. So
Tersh Blissett: today, [00:10:30] so let’s talk about that. What is reactivation?
Justin Riley: Look I, I think that there’s a lot of different words out there right now floating around. You hear outbounding, you hear reactivate, you hear rehash, you hear recovery. And like, when you look at it as a whole, all right, there’s all these different branded words out there.
And we gotta break it down to a couple different things, okay. Are we following up on jobs that the tech was at before? Are we trying to generate new business? Okay. Or are we trying to stay top of mind? I think we get mixed in this and we think, oh, we gotta reactivate. We’re all just dialing for dollars.
No. There’s a lot more to. It’s it can be the most effective, low cost top of mind advertising that you can do. And in its infancy, I think email was the first start of it. Yeah. And I know Josh, you guys do a ton of that with clients and really, get a lot of success off of it.
Just reactivating emails. What’s
Josh Crouch: a, it’s just keep it’s keeping your brand in front of people is what its that way they don’t forget you.
Tersh Blissett: How Josh how much is a good amount of open rate for email
Josh Crouch: open? Rate’s a little harder to track these days. But it is, it, and it’s a mix because we wanna try to drive people back to the website.
Usually at least what we’re doing, because we do SEO. We wanna drive people back to the website. Open rate, it depends because if you haven’t talked to that customer in a long time, most likely open, rate’s gonna be. It’s gonna be garbage, but if you just did a job with them, [00:12:00] you’re top of mind, right?
Oh, they just did this thing for me. Now we hit them with maybe a couple emails over the course of the first month. And now we’re like once a month or twice a month, we’re reaching out to them and talking to them, educating them. And all of a sudden they’re used to hearing from us. They’re never gonna forget your name now.
The thing you have to remember, don’t be like walmart.com. Who’s always sending you the 10% coupons or the yeah. People hate that. But they do wanna hear from you. They want to hear that you value their business. And I think that’s what you and Noah and your team have done a really good job of Justin is.
Doing it in a way where you’re not selling, you’re just reaching out and trying to get some feedback. And then the conversation goes
from
Justin Riley: there on the money. We have, I’m a data guy, love data. So when it comes to data and reactivation, it’s like heaven for me.
Yeah. So imagine this space right now, just about every contractor that’s out there has a digital price book gives a digital estimate to some fashion. So then these CRMs, service Titan, Sarah, and all of them, a house called pro and they all have, tags and attributes that we can add to a customer we need to be taking advantage of that as an industry. Okay. And the reason for that is, is data segmentation and reactivation is one of the most important things. Now, when we go in and we talk to a client, the very first thing that we do in reactivation is we’re gonna take the tempera. We’re gonna go out and ask every single customer through email, through text, how we did.
That’s the first thing we’re gonna [00:13:30] do. We’re gonna go and ask the, I’m imagine it’s, Hey, I’m Josh from relentless heating and air. And I’m just trying to, as the owner would like to personally reach out to every single person to see how we did was the experience.
Good. Was it bad? Any feedback is helpful. So what that’s going to do, it’s gonna take your whole customer base and it’s going to segment down the people that are an opportunity, right? So that just gets rid of all the wasted time and things right off the bat. And then when they say they did a great job, you know what we do?
The AI sends ’em a link, right? To send for Google review or a Facebook review. So we’re taking customer bases and we’re getting seven to 10% of the customer base to leave a positive Google review. Sometimes two, three years afterwards. It’s so powerful. We have to drip it out really slow cause we don’t wanna trigger any funny stuff with Google right.
In Locka, but it’s that powerful? Believe it or not like one of our messages is in, I don’t have a problem sharing everything we do with everybody that’s out there. I don’t, there are so many people that are out there that we possibly couldn’t help that I believe that the.
Of just helping is more important than our business. So we send out this text message, and we’re sending it to these customers and it, we’re talking about reviews and we’re talking about how we did, and we let ’em know in the next text message in the second follow up, they don’t respond to that.
Look, we’re a small business. We hate writing big checks to Google and Facebook. We get most of our work [00:15:00] through. Are good reviews online. I can tell you that second one, the first one doesn’t always get ’em. Cause they’re like, ah, blah, I see this all the time. It’s a follow up text. The second one. It’s real personal.
It hits ’em right in the gut. And boom, like the reviews go through the roof. So then after they, we know when they leave a review with our software, right? So after that, about 30 minutes later, we send him. And we let ’em know that we’ve got some special offer or it’s time to schedule your maintenance, or maybe it’s just, Hey, we’ve got these new products out here, come check ’em out.
We haven’t heard from you now we’re getting a schedule rate on those customers. That’s just insane, but it’s how you approach it, right? If you just went out and spammed your list or you just started dialing for dollars, , It works at mass, but it’s not look, I love our customers and I’m sure you do too trash.
I’ve seen your database. I’ve seen people, they it’s why you do what you do. It is that’s how we approach this in 2022. It’s not spa anymore, guys. I love the thought.
Tersh Blissett: I love what you said there, because we’ve always taken this approach where we’re very we have intimate relationships with the clients and.
So we’ve brought on like a sales guy before that had he was used to going on lots of sales calls and catching one here and there. , which is a lot like mass sending out messages to your entire client base. And you’ll get one here and there. [00:16:30] Whereas if you have that personal relationship with every single client.
You’re more likely to convert and build a relationship with that client.
Justin Riley: And that’s the recovery side. Yeah. So like we’re getting into so there’s reactivation, which I claim is okay. We’re taking your customer base. We’re taking the temperature. We’re just getting to talk to you again, generate in a response.
Exactly. Josh. Yeah. We’re try. Just trying to get him to say hello. Are you human? When you talk about recovery trash, that’s a whole different department. In the aspect and you have to really take a step back and I want, I wanna say this statement. I want you to think about all the business owners that are out there.
Why do we have to recover what’s out there? What does that tell us about our processes that we use right now?
Tersh Blissett: For me, it’s almost that you’re not memorable throughout the process. If it’s if you. And it’s very easy for that to be the case, because I had our septic tank pumped and the guy, I had a great conversation with the gentleman that were here and they were good people.
And if I have to have it done again, I’m definitely gonna use them. The problem is, if you ask me the name of the company, right at this moment, I have no idea what the name of the company. Now Julie has Julie knows and we have the magnet on our refrigerator. So if I needed it, I can get to it. I know where it’s at.
But with that being said I don’t recall the name of the company. And I know that we’re guilty of that. I hope that people would remember our brand because we it’s loud and proud everywhere we go. But at the same time to [00:18:00] think. The exact name of our company, it’s it may not be as memorable as, oh yeah.
The guys with the lion on the side of their
Justin Riley: vans, so no, what’s the last big purchase you made just to pick his brain, cuz he’s gonna have a totally different perspective. Yeah. And so Noah what’s the last big purchase that you made? You could say a computer. All right. With that, what did the process look like? What did you start doing when you were looking for a computer? Where did that start? Did it, what was the first you did when you thought about buy a computer? All
Noah Carter: And this is why our company’s built like this. So YouTube.
Obviously you run to YouTube and you start looking up best computer 20, 22. All right. Something like that. All right after you, you’re gonna settle on one. You might even click the link to it, little Amazon link in the bottom to see what it costs. So I’m realizing. Nowadays, those are cookies.
We’re leaving around on social, now for me, I’m an apple guy. So in this case, I didn’t quite wanna use it, but God honest, that was my last purchase. So just wanted to talk about how it went. You shop around, you start looking for the price. All right. So where can I get the best price?
And obviously what everyone’s doing nowadays inflation, trying to spend the least where we can. Started looking around. I even, might have looked for a coupon a few times and I can’t really find a coupon on, some stuff. Yeah. So you move on and you start looking for who has the fastest shipping.
All right. So that was the next thing I wanted to get it by Thursday. All right. We got somebody starting here, so I needed it. And that was the path before the purchase. All right. Now, obviously things change where you add it to a cart and. It comes through the door compared to [00:19:30] service, but not in some sense, because if I would’ve just booked an appointment and paid for what I was expecting to pay for and had someone on my way, it wouldn’t be any different.
And I think that’s where the new generation I wanted to retouch on one thing before. So text. Okay. I’m not gonna try to blanket people, but in younger generations they don’t work very well. We can see through automations. We know what automations are. As people get older sometimes. Okay. That’s easier for them to think that it’s relatable.
so that used to work you’re
Josh Crouch: is that what you’re saying? You keep dropping this old person thing. I don’t know who you’re talking to, man. He’s talking to me.
Noah Carter: Let kick this young boy outta here. No, the guy like great beard with a different aspect. Okay. Times change. You have to, we like to be where the wind’s blowing towards.
So if it’s blowing from saying stop, whenever they see automations, we want it to sound more personable from the beginning. So we don’t ever send thanks for joining this chat. Like most things do Chipotle you sign up for the rewards. You’re gonna get a thanks for joining Chipotle rewards that will not work in service.
All right. So what I wanted to go away from was sounding more. Human work on every single person. They think they’re actually talking to someone. That was my point by saying like the older generation sometimes was able to fall for it easier. And it would work sometimes in text and you’d still have people that would say stop instantly.
So our idea is to get a better. We’ll call it reactivation. And the way to do that is to sound more human. Human will work on anyone. Okay. It could work on, there’s [00:21:00] no blanket clause, right? As people get more in tune with automations and texts and stuff like that, it’s not gonna feel as personable.
If you’re trying to grow your brand and really build a relationship, you have to really think about the way that you talk to someone, how you follow up with them. It’s multidimensional. Once you, you start a conversation, right? Every there’s no response. I
Tersh Blissett: gotta put my hand up here. Let me ask you a real question right here.
Used to, we would think about very carefully think about the message that we’re sending out to clients. , whether it’s through text message or email, and you wanna be very careful that you didn’t have grammatical errors, but then you almost became, you almost got to where you sounded like a robot now, is it better to start putting some errors in?
Justin Riley: We do that actually. Okay. We put a typo, we put a little grammar here and there because. Look the further we get in this technological space. Yep. Humans are herd animals. They long for a human communication. Yep. Yeah. And the more we get out and it’s gonna continue to be that way for some time.
So we want to be talked to a human, like we wanna be, just think about last two years, people have been more separated than they ever been in their. Technology has been shoved down their throat. I Think about how many remote employees are out there. We just want someone to say, Hey, it’s Joe.
And I’m just following up, and I’ll
Tersh Blissett: be, I’ll be honest with you as an introvert speaking for the, I could be the national spokesperson for all the introverts ,
Justin Riley: [00:22:30] I,
Tersh Blissett: I think, I don’t know that I really. Had a problem with the remote work and not interacting with people.
Justin Riley: Okay.
Tersh Blissett: I’m just kidding. But seriously, it’s definitely been one of those things where it’s like, all right, alright. This world is this it’s the world of introvert,
Justin Riley: instead of I’m. One more big one out there. Noah, would you rather communicate through messenger, text or email or the phone? Not the phone.
Never not the phone. there you go.
Noah Carter: Cause I can’t communicate with you right now. Like seriously, and this is another thing about social is okay, you can’t tell I’m on my iPhone right now. All right. I could literally be like involving with something. All right. I could be re responding to a customer, that type of thing.
Or I could be booking an appointment later today for a. You guys would never know. I can’t have a conversation right here. Okay. It’s just not gonna work. So in the modern times of working for home, like you just said, if you’re more, Click this link to book it Calendarly. We all have it. Now. We all hated it.
At first we’re like, oh, I don’t wanna be the person with a Calendarly, 2018. You’re like, man just call me when you wanna book. All right. It’s just ridiculous. Let’s go to this website and get it right. So that’s where people have went. All right. Follow that path into the consumer. The consumer now wants to respond.
It might be human, but they don’t even wanna call the human. They just want to use that link to book. So if, when we contact someone. , it’s a paragraph, and that’s only one, it’s a, Hey, thank you for all. Like what you need. Thank you for what you did. If you need [00:24:00] anything, contact.
And then legal stuff, when you normally get a text it’s just legal. And you’re like, wow, like it’s really just a pro cut and dry process. As soon as you put a price in you get this text God, I don’t want that. We wanted to stop that. All right. That’s what, cuz I’m the person that says instantly, you’re not talking to me anymore.
All right. Like I’m a busy guy. I don’t want you in here calling me about this car six times. So I’m, as soon as you send that text stop, if you said, Hey, it’s Joe from, the Lexus lot. Then I’m automatically gonna be like, sorry, Joe, I can’t get back to you right now. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
All right. That’s all you need. Now, you now, instead of losing a customer in a whole avenue of contact, we have gained them while I was busy and I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience. So that’s a difference in a social, or a reactivation with a different message than it would be for someone calling cold calling.
So the cold calling would I’d get annoyed and just not I’d purposely do business with your. Okay. This is a new generation that has spite and hates tech and being bothered. It’s just what happens. Like I know people just like me, that act the same way, so I want to be able for them to do it as well as the people that, don’t care and, will talk to someone.
So we never said don’t call, but we just wanna make the first avenue of convers. Easily available for everyone. All right. That was context
Justin Riley: tr to get back on your open rate, 76.6% open rate on our emails.
Tersh Blissett: I thought that I thought 20% was good.
Josh Crouch: I’m blown away by it’s like the average it’s like the average for it’s all [00:25:30] industries type of thing.
But if you’re send an email that
Justin Riley: people want, they open. But I, and I’m guilty of this as we grow a business, I communicate with our team through text more than email and it sucks, you know why? Cause I’d rather do it that way, but documenting everything is difficult. I like the text channel.
Tersh Blissett: That’s a great point because things get lost. That’s what I love about slack and teams. Yeah. Because then you can go back and search the conversation. And even with the iPhone now Josh doesn’t really know anything about this, cuz he’s old Android guy, but an Android guy, but iPhones, right?
You can search that. But even the search feature with the iPhone is not amazing. Especially if you have right, Android’s
Josh Crouch: probably better.
Tersh Blissett: I highly doubt that
Justin Riley: I think the point I’m saying is we have people open emails, like crazy. When people want to do business with us, they don’t respond by email.
Sorry, guys. It’s text. That is 100% the preferred channel that we drive 95% of the business that we do. And now it doesn’t mean they’re not reading. Okay. The text messages or the emails and all that stuff. Like it, it has its place. But Good one, Casey man. Good. I love it.
Josh Crouch: It’s Cassy, man, what’s up with you guys.
It’s Cassie. This is, I know
Tersh Blissett: I
Josh Crouch: yelled at church the other week about that.
Tersh Blissett: I
Justin Riley: said, Casey, the whole, right? If you text me and if I text you and then you call me back, [00:27:00] oh my God I’m gonna send like a war crime over to you or something. You just don’t do that. That’s yeah, she’s, that’s totally right.
Josh Crouch: That literally is the worst one. You just want like an answer to one question. So you send a text and someone’s like calling. You’re like, oh my God, dang it, man. Like just text
Tersh Blissett: me back. You literally did that to me
yesterday.
Josh Crouch: I do it to you. Sometimes I do. if it’s a, if I need to explain something. Yeah.
It’s a little different. You’re
Noah Carter: like,
Tersh Blissett: this is gonna be easier to explain over the phone.
Justin Riley: I wanna touch base you’re one on where this goes. Cause we’re always playing in the future. Like I love taking it to like the NS integrate, right? That’s. How do we take this from a simple, where it used to be?
We were in the home Depot program, right? So we had mountains of leads that came through. A lot of ’em were useless and a lot of customers, we had to chase down and we had sheets with phone numbers that we printed out and we gave to the DSRs, right? Like it started there right in 20 12, 20 13.
And we had an office and then we were doing outbounding and all that stuff, but, okay. So let’s look at where the biggest gold is in the business and. So we do all this tech training. We do all this sales training, and we stayed primarily focused on, we gotta get ’em to sell in the house. We gotta get ’em to sell in the house.
And the thing of it is, okay, maybe it’s not the tech or the salesman’s fault. Let me say that again. Maybe it’s not the salesman or the Tech’s fault. Why you have so many unsold estimates in your company. Maybe the consumer has changed. Maybe just maybe write the behavior because now these consumers can go on and they can research [00:28:30] apart.
And yet we’re so easy as business owners say, oh, they’re just a part shopper. They’re not buying well. Maybe they just don’t trust anybody. Don’t take it so personally so how do we implement that and, or a business now, remember I said about tags and data and estimates, right? So what if you had a.
That was your recovery. Cause I’m talking recovery, not rehash right now. And that system, and there are some softwares that have attempted to do this, but where they limit their self. And this is how transparency and online pricing is gonna come into the world, because I can tell you that the data that we get when a user okay, comes back and maybe shops that product.
Maybe the old invoice that we’re sending by email is just not enough. Maybe it needs to be like a landing page or an explanation because the wife was home and the husband comes home later and she wasn’t gonna buy the big repair and they have to talk about it. Do you think that little invoice that you’re sending behind that your name logo, and it looks like a damn warehouse.
And you’re expecting customers to buy from that in 2022, when
Tersh Blissett: very minimum it is such. And this is something that the listeners need to pay close attention to and use it. Whenever I talk to my technicians, my guys in the field, whenever we’re talking about the summary, the invoice summary.
I always tell them, write that summary as if I’m your lawyer and I’m representing you in court. and this is the only piece of documentation that I can use. Yeah. I cannot use anything else. [00:30:00] No hearsay. No, he said, she said, I told the person this they said yes or no. I can only use this to represent you.
Is that enough information for me to represent you in the court of. Yeah. And they’re like, oh no, like I, no, absolutely not. Yeah. I put it internal notes where I wrote it on this form or that and so I’m like, Always write out all this information and it takes a little bit longer. There’s some things that they learn how to copy and paste into notepad and or notes and stuff like that.
But at the same time, if you had something like what you’re describing to give more detail, more context, how
Justin Riley: about this? Because yeah. How about this, everybody? And here’s a great nugget for anybody. That’s gonna be out there. Hopefully some people are using. why aren’t we sending a cover letter with each of our estimates?
Why aren’t we telling the story of our brand in there with it? Look, homeowners get, sometimes we’re talking digital, like what estimate every single time, like we send these PDFs and we expect oh, it’s so cool. It’s digital. It’s not handwritten. How about we go a little bit further? How about we tell the story of our company and a little letter signed by our owner of why we’re in.
How about we, we have another page of it that talks about our, why we stand behind our work, and then at the very bottom, the last page, we start getting into what the work needs to be done to their home, and then even better give time estimates for [00:31:30] how long that work’s going to take. Okay, because in a consumer’s mind, right?
They’ve got all these estimates. That’s a great point, right? That’s something that never gets touch. Dude. We need to talk about foreshadowing. What the events are going to happen in their house when they press go. Yep. What is it gonna look like? How long is it gonna take paint? A picture, the experience we think a consumer’s gonna remember what your tech says.
Every time they’re in the home, you are sadly mistaken because you just came into their house sometimes on the worst day of their. Yep. It is, we deal with consumers when they are, oftentimes they may not show it, but they’re frantic, especially in these times, money is tight, everyone, right?
Gas prices are through the roof. And they’ve got, summertime and they don’t know whether they’re gonna go on their vacation this year, because now the money’s tight and now the air conditioner just broke and all we’re gonna do is leave some prices and some legal shit behind us on the. In a little thing, and then we’re gonna follow up.
Hey, did you buy from us yet? Did you buy from us? How about let’s be humans. Let’s do business with human, to human, not customers. Yeah. We
Tersh Blissett: all say that. We want to build the relationships we want to humanize the,
Justin Riley: the energy, but truth. Forget that we gotta follow through with the ball, it’s not just okay. To just show up and diagnose a repair nowadays. Yeah, it’s not. So is awesome. That’s where our minds are going. Now you take that even further is personalizing each of those that go out in the recovery process based upon what was unsold. The data’s there, the connections [00:33:00] are there.
It can be dynamic it’s you know, so that’s where our vision goes is, so we’ve got reactivate, which is getting your existing customers that maybe you haven’t been to in a little while. We’ve got rehash, which is your sales process. We’ve got outbounding, which are, we’re trying to generate, maybe you bought a business or acquired a business, and you’re trying to transition those people where sometimes it does take a phone call, to introduce ’em to you. And then you’ve got recovery. Which is all of your service sales and things like that. Wrapped up into a package that limits the amount of labor burden in the office, but also paints a beautiful picture. And when they sit down on a Saturday to go over the estimates that they got during the week, yours is six pages long has a nice cover letter.
Maybe has a picture of the owner’s family on it. Why they’re in business, tell ’em the why, right? Be human. And I think that if businesses can do that and do that at scale and stand out. I think that they will just leap frog because it’s not okay anymore. Just to have a PDF email of your estimates.
It’s not.
Tersh Blissett: So tell me this. How do we do that at scale? You said if a business could do that at scale, I’m thinking to myself currently in our process, best case scenario, we have a terms and conditions that goes out,
Justin Riley: no certifi and can do it, but they used to when we did it. So we were like number 40 on service Titan back in the beginning.
So we had a much different experience than a lot of people have. It was very intimate. It was with the dev team and working on things. And we had actual estimates that we could send that were [00:34:30] dynamic. If you will, we would create a PDF. We would create these values that we would put in there. We’d put a cover letter, we’d put all this together and I’m sure the technology’s still there cuz it was created a while ago.
You’re able to okay. Send a cover letter and why not just put that. As a sheet in the PDF, a separate one to send with it. Why not pre it up a little bit? Purdy that thing up there, Joe dirt. That’s right. That’s right. We,
Josh Crouch: so what do you, so in, in the same token we’re talking technology today.
What do you think about having a, obviously it wouldn’t be personal. Video, but a video that talks about it has to be short. Love it. But a video that’s similar to what you’re talking about. That don’t wanna, yeah. They don’t wanna read, they wanna watch something and you can a short brand story video of who you are, why they sh essentially why you back, all your stuff.
You, this is our family. How about
Justin Riley: maybe sending some of that stuff out to position the customer before you get there? Oh, Absolut. If you send just the regular generic template, your tech will be arriving at X time in this, you are missing huge opportunities to like position. You gotta help your techs.
It’s not your techs and sales fault. We gotta look at ourselves as owners and say, what can we do better to empower our employees to be more successful. We have to be doing this stuff. That’s our
Josh Crouch: job. So Chris hunter he used to have a business hunter, super techs. He works at go time [00:36:00] success group. Now he is a huge fan of this, especially like the tech bios.
Yeah. Have a 32nd video. Absolutely. Instead of just, Hey, Noah’s on the way here’s Noah, this is what Noah cares about. Here’s, you get to know the personality and the person that’s coming to your house. You feel more comfortable and at ease because oh, Great. He’s, he looks like a nice guy or nice gal has a family, whatever the video says, but it doesn’t have to be rocket science take, you can do it with your phone today.
, especially with the cameras inside these things, the more authentic is
Justin Riley: the more it works.
Tersh Blissett: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, if you have an iPhone, it’s gonna be a lot better quality camera. Yeah.
Justin Riley: But it, but if you’re like polished in like the Oland mills screen and you’re like, portrait and all that stuff, like that’s over the, that’s not what you want.
You want maybe a guy that’s, okay. All right. All alright,
Tersh Blissett: so here, let me interrupt you with this one. make sure he’s not standing in front of an air conditioning unit. That’s running.
Justin Riley: I had all my guys,
Tersh Blissett: they sent me videos of themselves. Like this has been two years ago. I was like, I’m gonna do this exact thing.
And I was like, all right, everybody stop what you’re doing right now, take a selfie of yourself video and send it to me. And this guy’s like working on an AC unit and he happened to be at my grandma’s house, working on her AC unit turns around. It’s a nice, wonderful train unit we had recently installed, but all you could hear.
Justin Riley: I’m like,
Tersh Blissett: you’re gonna have to redo that one. Take a few steps forward. Yeah. Unit off [00:37:30]
Justin Riley: it was horrible. Yeah. But I think that as a business owner and I’ve been guilty of this before was. You see your schedule full for the day with all estimates and service calls. And then at the end of the day, they didn’t sell and you call your tech.
You say why didn’t you sell it? Stop. Yeah. What can we do? We’re supposed to be this team, this unit, this movement. And you see this with companies that rocket, right? You see this where everybody’s working together, right? The owner’s making that the investments into the company to give.
The tech and the server and the sales guy, the best opportunity, then they have a follow up process. They really care. They look at it end to end, and it’s not just the time in the home. That is where, we can go next level. And it doesn’t it’s not like you have to make huge investments.
This is small stuff, guys. This is more time.
Josh Crouch: So I wanna bring this together for everybody, cuz we’ve talked about a bunch of different things. Yeah. Because a lot of times people. Phone dead. What am I gonna do? Yeah. And they don’t realize that there’s
Tersh Blissett: why we’re gonna raise hill with our marketing agency.
Huh? Yeah, that’s
Josh Crouch: us. That’s usually the phone call, right? It’s oh, it’s 70 degrees out. Phone’s not gonna ring and it’s not going to ring on Google. It’s just, it’s the way it is people. They don’t necessarily want to see you when it’s nice out. But there’s so much you can do.
Instead of sitting there on your hands being like, oh, I gotta spend more money. I gotta run more ads. I gotta do this thing. I gotta get mailers. Go into your list. Yes. Like seriously dive deep into that sucker. Cuz [00:39:00] there is so much value and dollars and feedback and reviews, which gets more custom.
There’s so much stuff in that customer
Justin Riley: list, and we’re on the heels of something that we’ve been working on for about six months now. That’s about to come out and it’s gonna be a free platform for people to use that within 10 minutes of starting. Can have you interacting with customer.
And that’s the goal, right? We know that and I’m guilty of this myself. So when I speak as small business owners, I speak that myself. We wait till the last minute to do a lot of things. Like we have some bad habits when it comes to things and oftentimes we wait too long to reach out for help, or we wait too long before it’s a big problem.
And then it’s oh my God, I need it now. So that’s when the marketing companies get the calls, I need my phone to ring and they expect like you just to have this magical thing. Now marketers, do you know, we do within 10 minutes, we can get you on the phone with customers right now. And we know that if we connect.
A past customer with a business owner or somebody in their staff that they are gonna make the magic happen.
Josh Crouch: I will add. And because we talked about this offline and again there’s so many things and this is the problem. So many, they would look for the next golden ticket. Yeah. Like this big hair audacious thing. That’s gonna save their company. Yeah. And as a marketing company, and Justin know, you can probably attest this, even when you do these reactivation campaigns, the worst thing that can happen.
Is either a, if you get a phone call, you don’t answer the phone or B you [00:40:30] do a reactivation or a recovery type campaign, and you don’t answer the text messages when they come in. And that’s
Justin Riley: why, and you don’t freaking answer NLP in AI to assist. We have to, and we have very dedicated hours. We are very honest look, these are gonna be your most successful hours.
Can you just dedicate two hours a day to this? That’s it right. We know that’s the magic hour, right? Those are the two times when people are really gonna be active. So we schedule them appropriately. We use AI, it does not catch everything. They will automatically schedule the customers.
They will automatically get your reviews. They will do all this stuff, but it’s not a fail safe. It’s not right. It can’t, it at least ours can’t interpret everything that’s out there and it gets smarter and smarter as time goes on. And I think that’s the direction of where things are going, but there’s a balance between using AI and keeping it human and putting your human touch on it.
Yeah, we have been testing and testing and testing and we believe we have a solution that is that within 10 minutes can start booking calendar. And I
Noah Carter: saw a question come through earlier. How do you track your conversations and keep up with everything? Keep it all organized. Great question.
That was one of the first questions that came through. So with that free platform, whenever a, customer will reply, you will be able to obviously record all of the conversations. You’ll be able to classify, add task later, make notes about the conversation. If he mentioned he wanted to talk about it later with his family.
Whenever schedule a FaceTime maybe to, show his wife what the [00:42:00] options, what could happen here, what’s wrong. There’s all kinds of different ways that it can go from there. And that’ll all be part of that platform. That’s, totally for everyone that owns a small business, that’s for sure.
Tersh Blissett: Cool guys. Yeah. We really appreciate it. It’s time for us to wrap up. We appreciate your time here. Is there, what’s the best way for everybody to reach out to you learn more about you two guys and up frog
Justin Riley: in general? Don’t call me cause I’m not gonna answer. So I’m just gonna tell you that right now.
So no, send me a message.
Josh Crouch: I give his phone number. Here’s Jesse phone number.
Justin Riley: You can go to up frog. I. And you find our website there, there’s gonna be a lot of changes coming out here shortly, but, shoot me a message on messenger, friend, me on Facebook, I talk to way more people that I do business with.
Let’s put it that way. I am all about giving out info because what I’ve found is that, If I do good things come back to me. And that’s just a core principle that I live by. So I give out way more than I take. And if anybody just wants to bounce ideas I’m happy to do that.
So find Noah and I, you can also find us in H V a C owners, digital ally Facebook group. We’ve started a little organization there where. We’re trying to keep it as clean as possible. If you know what I know and that’s not like Savage is in their direct messaging all the time.
When you make a comment post, like we’re trying to create a safe environment and man, it’s tough, it’s a mean community. Yeah.
Noah Carter: A community there’s
Josh Crouch: Savage take profiles to get in
Justin Riley: and do all this screen. Yeah. That’s gonna be coming more active, and. So just reach out messenger, Facebook the Facebook group, all those things, [00:43:30] and happy to have a chat.
You.
Tersh Blissett: Cool guys. We appreciate it. We appreciate everything that y’all do for us. Thanks guys.
Justin Riley: It’ll
thank you for listening to this episode of service business mastery. Now that you are equipped with essential business advice from this impactful conversation, you are one step closer to becoming the successful owner of your dreams. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don’t forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating and share it with other owners as well.
Visit www.servicebusinessmastery.com to learn more.
