147. Getting High Quality Leads With Cameron Upton

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Always take the lazy approach. Never just sort of jumping in there and just trying to work harder and harder and harder. But how can you do things smarter instead?

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by Cameron Upton from Contractor Scale. Cameron, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Thanks Will.

Awesome to have you on. Couple of marketers ready to have a chat about marketing, which I'm super excited about. Before you dive in and give us a bit of an intro to yourself, today we're going to be talking about generating high quality leads and it's one of the biggest challenges that builders in our community face. In fact, it was came out in the state of residential construction industry report that 45.9% of building companies are struggling to generate quality leads. So great point of discussion for us and you're an expert in generating quality leads for construction companies. So Cameron, do you want to just jump in and give a bit of a background on your history in the industry?

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So my background's very diverse. Being a millennial of sorts, never sat in one place too long. So actually started off with an apprenticeship in engineering built super yachts. But at the end of the day, during a financial crisis, nobody wants to spend $45 million on a super yacht. So that one sort of came to an end of that piece there. Worked my way through a few other bits and pieces and jumped into marketing and sales, specifically helping my old man who had a manufacturing business and that sort of thing. Sold some e commerce online stuff, but there's nothing fulfilling in doing that kind of stuff. There's only so much home decor you can sell, right? But eventually moved into had an opportunity coaching builders and marketing. So did that for about six years. Biggest thing that came out of that was, man, there's a ton of people that don't know how to advertise for the construction industry very well. Easy to spend a lot of money without getting the right qualified people through. So that's Kind of what I'm here to solve and going forward. And so, yeah, that's how I fell into place.

Yeah. Awesome. Interested to hear actually the engineering brain and how you feel like that's helped you be a better marketer.

Yeah, yeah, it's a. It's a controversial quote, but my tradesman at the time was basically saying something along the lines of always take the lazy approach, never just sort of jumping in there and just trying to work harder and harder and harder. But how can you do things smarter instead? And you'll probably appreciate this, there's a lot of different, you know, marketing systems or automations you can use in certain places. And, you know, it's about finding leverage where you can so you don't have to constantly be busy on the marketing hamster wheel.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, very interesting background there and obviously you've got a wealth experience working with builders, so really excited to unpack how we can help the community generate more quality leads out there. So what do you see as the key components of an effective marketing strategy for residential builders?

Yeah, I guess it all comes down to following a couple of areas and sort of where you start depends on your pipeline, your cash flow and a few other things around that. But all of the stuff works, right. Like if you advertise in the back of a bus. Please don't do that, by the way. It'll work to a certain extent, but I think where a lot of people get caught up is they try and do one strategy or one avenue when it's just not following where they are currently sitting in the business. So, for example, if you've got a pipeline that's coming to the end of running out, got a job finishing up soon, then you might be looking at SEO, but that can take six to nine months to actually come into generating results. Plus you've then got meeting with the clients, preliminaries, plans, all that sort of stuff. It could be a year and a half before you actually sign something from that. So it's a matter of just finding the right strategy aligned with where you are in the business at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, why advertise on a bus when you've got your own vehicle anyway, driving around in your local area.

Oh, exactly, man. Exactly. It's just like a rolling billboard.

Yeah, that's it. So. So you've actually got a system that you call the elite project engine. Do you want to dive into what that looks like a bit more?

Yeah, for sure. So, sort of broken down into three phases. It's a combination of all the marketing elements that we can do. So it's very hard we found working with multiple different contractors and things as far as marketing specific. So if someone's for example, got a website person and they've got an ads person and they've got a social media person, and it's really hard for all of that to tie in together. So it's about doing all of those in one place or through one avenue, but again, doing them in a way that follows your cash flow and follows your pipeline. So the way that that process generally rolls out is getting your foundations right, understanding what's your marketing message, who your target audience is, a lot of the stuff that you guys talk about, but then implementing them in a way that follows that process. And so, for example, social media ads are really good for a short period of time and then everybody in the area sees your message and then it becomes less effective. So it can work ongoing, but it requires a lot of maintenance to do so. So the next thing you could look at is paid ads and SEO and all these other things, but it's just a matter of implementing all of them as a collective but in the right order. So from across all the thousands of leads that we generate, there's still not one specific source which does do better, but not tremendously different in as far as what one area that always works really well. It's always the collective marketing that uplifts everything and brings through the most results.

Something you said there I want to dive into a bit further and that's the geographical restriction of advertising. So let's just look at a hypothetical, say a builder's focused on one city or even a portion of a city, and they're advertising on Facebook and Google to try and find potential customers in that city. You mentioned that becoming almost fatiguing over time. What does that look like and how do you combat that to make sure you can continue spending consistently?

Yeah, for sure. So it's really tricky. Depends on the location. So there's not like a. Okay, I can't give you an exact answer on that because for example, a small, small area like Bulimba for example, is just got such a small population size that you could advertise and spend as much money as you want, but it's going to burn out really quickly. Whereas you're looking at a major city, Sydney, Melbourne, etc, you know, Toronto, Calgary, they have such a large population that you can spend more money, you can have one marketing message run for a longer period of time. Now you can still advertise the entire time. But you're going to have to keep refreshing the message so that it's new and different and people don't get kind of blindness to it, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. It does. What kind of like if you're looking to refresh that content regularly, what type of advertising content do you usually recommend or implement for builders?

Yeah, so typically we do the social ads on an on and off basis, sometimes depending on again that population size. But we, we typically do that as a quick roundup or a quick grab as far as let's look at everybody who is bottom of funnel or everybody that's looking to do something hasn't quite made the chance to reach out, scoop all those people up. And then we typically look at more of an ongoing basis of things like Google Ads where there's constantly new people searching for what you do and so it's less of the interruption and throwing a banner in someone's face and more of let's just grab the people now who are actively looking for us and work with those people there. And then the content that refreshes itself on the front end. There's all sorts of other things we could dive way deeper into, which we won't have in this conversation. But retargeting, there's other things there, but you basically just need to have a new front end which once somebody sees it, they can then have the same back end show to them in the advertising world.

So I guess what you're saying is just make sure you're aware of, for the builders out there, make sure they're aware of the fact that advertising can fatigue if you've got a restricted area to target. So just be on top of making those changes if you need to. Or having someone do that for you.

Exactly, yeah. And for most of, the, most of the advertising that happens on a larger scale, it's just more about having more dry powder in the back pocket. So having more ads, whether it's images, whether it's different angles for the text itself, having all of those ready to go so that if the cost per lead starts to go up or it starts to become less effective, you can swap that out and have something ready to go so that it can run for a bit longer and a bit longer.

Cool.

You touched on identifying the ideal customer profile.

Can you talk to me a bit.

More about that process? Like how detailed do you want to go when you're identifying who your ideal customer is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tricky on that one. So you need to obviously have A niche or an area that you want to focus in. So one of our guys, a really good dude in Canada, he focuses on net zero homes. But for where he's currently at, business wise to just target net zero homes, especially in a market where interest rates have gone up and all that kind of thing, still going to target that as the ideal people coming through. But he needs to be open to working with other people to make sure that there's work in the pipeline so he can still have his same focus and his same values and identify the people he wants to work with in the remodeling space to still have that avatar. But I think sometimes people pigeonhole themselves into only working with one very specific type of client and quite often that it gets them in trouble when they don't have enough of those people to work with. So it's about identifying the type of people that you want to work with. On a personality match. On a type of work match. Ultimately following what's profitable is the main thing. But yeah, just sort of balancing out a certain portion of the market without getting too pigeonholed.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think the personality match is probably one I wouldn't budge on if it was me. Just because those problem clients are just going to cause you way more issues than you need.

Everybody's had a problem client.

Absolutely. How do you, how do you avoid them?

Me personally? No. So, so from, from guys having the, the leads coming through, there's only so much you can do on the marketing end and the front end. And so you need to have this whole process of screening people throughout the sales process as well. And so with the marketing coming through, there's certain questions you can ask about this trend. Like what do they call lubricating questions? Easy, yes. No questions to get people sort of filling out details. And then there's what we call a love letter question and that's really open text and that's something like tell us what's important about your build or have you ever worked with a builder before? Or you know, those kind of open ended questions where if somebody has the opportunity to type more into them, you can get a lot more context around what they're looking for and the specifics of that. And sometimes it's really interesting to see what people fill out and you can tell this person's going to be really pedantic and picky and maybe that's okay if I am good at working with those people. Or maybe it's a red flag that when I talk to them on site, we can have an opportunity to say it's not a good fit.

Yeah, I guess that all comes with experience and it's challenging, as you said, especially with the way the market is at the moment with interest rates and just general lead flow. It would be easy to drop your standards, I think.

Yeah. And man, it's crazy. Obviously the industry as a whole, everybody seems to undercut each other. The big thing at the moment is a lot of price shopping. So a lot of people are coming through looking for, hey, can you give me a price on this, here's my plans, etc. But when you actually speak with them and open up what they're trying to do, it's very clear that they're just looking to get a cheaper price from somebody. It's very focused on that. But ultimately you need to know when to say no to those people and when maybe you can work with them if you're a better match for and selling them on what you can do as providing value.

Speaking of price shopping, one question I have for you is what we've seen happen traditionally is, and maybe this is a bit of a bold statement, you may be more likely to get price shoppers from Google Ads than you would with generating interest and trust on something like Facebook for example, because people are at the bottom of the funnel. They're searching, you know, builder in Sydney or builder in Toronto, whatever it is, and they're probably, you know, clicking on the first five results to. To inquire with a bunch of different. Whereas through Facebook you're building trust with content and offers and all sorts of different stuff. Is that what you've seen as well or.

Yeah, so we actually embrace that a lot more because everybody wants to know whether you're buying a pair of shoes or whether you're building a house. Everybody wants to know like what's it going to cost? So we built out a bit of a front end marketing estimate process where people can tap easy sort of questions and get a ballpark price on what it's going to cost to build their home. Now obviously everybody knows that that's not going to be super accurate, but what does do is provide a filtering mechanism to qualify people on whether it's a good fit or not. And so I think people just need education. They have no idea what this stuff costs, especially with the way that materials and labor costs and stuff have gone up over the recent years. And so if we can provide people with a ballpark on what their project is going to cost, line it up with their budget, go is this A match? Is it something that we can work with them on to reduce the scope of work? Then that's great, we can continue the conversation. Or option number two is we can say, hey, this is probably not a good fit, it's probably not possible for your situation, but if they're somewhere in the realm of yes, this is going to work, we can move them into a feasibility study or something else in order to get clearer on that.

Yeah, I think as well, it's probably a false promise to think that, you know, charging the lowest price is actually just going to win you the job anyway. Because I don't know about you, I wouldn't go for the cheapest price when it was coming to building my own home.

No, no, a hundred percent. And I think for the right people that you want to attract into your business, money is one part of it. But for most people it's more about the convenience, the quality of workmanship, the trustworthiness, the ease of communication. All of those things they would actually prefer and they're happy to pay a little bit more for if it's within reason. But I think the other thing, it's more of an educational process, but having the understanding or the education that, you know, there's only a few variables in this ultimately materials, and a few of those things cost what they cost, but you're either going to pay for it upfront and understanding what it's going to cost or someone gives you a low ball offer. Just be understanding that at the end of the project you're going to get stung with variations and change orders. Right, so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you've spoken a little bit about, you know, the different channels that builders can advertise on. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what you found is the most effective way to generate those high quality leads, those ones that are a really good fit for the company, you know, willing to, to invest in their home and all those kind of things.

Yeah, for sure. So kind of what I mentioned earlier, it's, it's not necessarily one specific channel that works really, really well, but they all work in very different ways. So for example, Facebook ads or social ads in general, they do work really well. The problem is that you get 8 out of 10 that are rubbish and it really sucks to talk to those eight because they're like, no, I'm just wasting time. Or it's very demotivating. But on the same token, you can have all those rubbish people come through and then there's one person that comes in wanting a remodel to build a new custom home and to refresh their commercial space at the same time. And so those ones there, it's kind of like panning for gold, but when the gold comes through, it's really worth it. So that's kind of the social ads bucket. The Google Ads work really well for more quality, so we generally find the quality of those leads is much higher and then SEO higher again. And so SEO is where you're sitting on the top of the page for free or organically, but that has an implied trust that if Google thinks that you should be number one, then maybe I should trust that you're number one as well. So they always seem to be the better clients coming through, but that's a longer process to get to that point and everything. So to, to do this effectively, you need to have all of the above. And then you can kind of shift your budgets and things as the timeline moves on. And as you have, you know, you sit differently in the space you spoke.

About on Facebook, for example, or social advertising in general, like those lower quality leads coming through and wasting a lot of time on qualification calls and things like that. Is there anything you can do in the marketing process to better qualify those leads and improve the ones that you're actually talking to?

Yeah, definitely. So with all of this, the best way that you're going to get a good result is through speed of lead and follow up attempts. And so with leads that come through Facebook, a lot of the time there are good people in there as well, but people are just terrible and scatterbrained and watching too many TikTok videos that they just don't pick up the phone right now. And then people kind of give up on them. And so sort of primarily is getting to them quickly, trying them multiple times. There was a Harvest business study on that, but with the screening process that it kind of comes down to how busy you are and where again your pipeline sits. So if you're just starting out or if you've got a big hole in the schedule that you need to fill, then you should pick up the phone and call every single person and have a conversation with them. Because that's ultimately the way that you're going to get more info from people just by speaking with them or outsource that to someone on the team or an appointment setter or something like that. As far as when you have a bigger pipeline or you're sort of not so worried about that, you can put some other barriers in place. And so there are qualification forms that you can get filled out with the details about their project and where they currently sit and everything. And then there's sort of some questions in between where you can judge. So it's sort of looking on the front end. Are they an ABC or D client? We can kind of categorize them there. Right place, right type of work. Then you can look at budget plans, permits, like where do they sit in the process and then sort of increase that qualification later on.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have a typical ratio that you would work towards? Like for example, x amount of leads usually equals X amount of good calls which equals X amount of, you know, signed building contracts basically.

Yeah, yeah, so good question. So we actually have everyone that we work with has to use the system that we use purely because I don't really care about how many leads you get or what your cost per lead is. Because of the sales process being so long, it's very hard to understand what is quality and what is qualified. So we need a way to track those over the coming months. So having them all in one place we've been able to grab the data from. Typically what we see on a broad spectrum is out of 10, you might get three or so that are complete time wasters that are just, you know, write them off, that's fine. There's always going to be spam fills, there's always going to be people that are looking for work or trying to sell you sub trade services etc. Then the spread is sort of different based off timeline and when they're looking to get started. So you might get one or two that are looking to move forward now or very soon and then the other portion of people are still interested, still qualified, but it's just not a now thing. And so those people, you know, go into a follow up process of nurture emails and all that kind of stuff. But that's, that's the kind of split.

That we've generally seen and that's pretty consistent across the. All the channels that you were talking about?

Yeah, yeah, all the channels and all of the countries as well. So us, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, it's all very similar. The channels do play a bit of like they do fluctuate a little bit in the disqualified people and stuff. So if anyone's done any Facebook marketing before, there's lead forms which are worse quality as far as it's very easy, they click a button, it pre fills their info but instead we kind of ignore that and we run them through to the same marketing funnel because then it Just has that extra piece of work that they have to do to then pre qualify themselves a little bit. So if you're doing the lead forms, the quality is definitely much lower in that respect. But from the same advertising through to your funnel, it's a bit different.

Yeah. I won't go into this too much because it's a bit of a marketing geek conversation, but the. I always had the perception that the lead forms were just way lower quality and didn't. I didn't want to bother focusing on them. And then someone tried to change my opinion the other day where they use the lead forms and then have qualifying questions before they actually submit their details. And they found that that increased the quality and therefore made it a profitable option to look at.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I think we're at the biggest issue is that people signed up to Facebook 10 years ago and so when they click to fill out the form, it pre fills all that info with their name, phone number, email, and that number doesn't exist anymore. Maybe that email is the old one. And so yeah, having those questions, they can at least fill in the right info.

Yeah. You briefly touched on cost per lead. This is an interesting, I guess just question on top of my mind, but I'm sure every builder out there is wondering like what, what should I be paying for a lead?

What is a lead?

Like, is it a qualified lead? Like how much money do I need to spend to get a qualified lead on the phone call which is going to turn into a customer?

Yeah. So pointed conversation and I think this is kind of how I got into this space is that everybody typically markets for a lead being a name, email, phone number, can I contact this person, details of the project, like is this someone looking for the right service that we offer and address or suburb right in the right location. So at least then that would be a basic lead qualification. I've had seen people that don't even have that, which is kind of embarrassing. But that's, that's the basic lead or qualification, I guess, that you'd call from it and then from the. The next side of things would be looking at timeline, looking at matching up budgets and stuff. And so that would be more of a qualified lead setup. So based off this sort of the stats and everything that we see on average, most people out there will be paying roughly $250 per lead on average. Okay. So it's going to be much cheaper on your Facebook ads, for example, but you're going to need more of them to get to that same point they're going to be more expensive on Google Ads and that's going to work out to be on average. So that's kind of the ballpark and where a lot of people end up at. I guess by having a bit more of an optimized sort of system, you can get that right down. Now this is ridiculous. It's a bit of an outlier. But we've got one guy that was just checking this week. He's been getting Google Ads leads coming through for $8, which is ridiculous and probably a conversation for another day. But that's over a longer period of time where the campaigns have got a lot more optimized and we've kind of got rid of a lot of the crap that comes through testing and removing that stuff there For a ballpark average on kind of where we sit across stuff that is optimized, quote unquote, be looking between $50 and $75 for a lead coming through.

And then of those leads, how many are converting into the qualified ones that you mentioned?

Yeah, so from those numbers, that's going to be your. You're typically looking at three out of 10 that are going to be moving forward soon of the right type and all that kind of stuff. And then you're going to have the rest of those people that are, you know, probably four or five of them that are. Yes, but later, and I think at the moment anyway, that that has been the biggest gap in this whole process is two years ago you couldn't, you didn't need to market because so many people were coming through. But ultimately with interest rates going up and inflation and all that kind of stuff, people are still interested and they're still inquiring, but the timeline of their commitment level was just further out. So we've seen that sort of bracket open up a much wider.

So I just picked up my phone to do some calculations here on the run. So what you're saying is around the average would be $250 per lead, which would be for 10 lead. That's two and a half thousand dollars of those. You're looking at three of those leads being qualified, which is around $833 per qualified lead. And then maybe what one of those converts into a building contract. So you're kind of spending about two and a half thousand dollars per contract. It seems like a pretty good equation to me. If you're selling, you know, half a million dollar build or even more.

The math works out really, really well. The same system that we use to track everything has the different stages of the pipeline that. Where people get to so that we can track the bottlenecks in it. But if we just look at the front end number of how much did I spend on marketing and what was my cost per sale? We're typically seeing 10% of total lead volume converting into a sale and rough ballpark, kind of because it changes per industry and that kind of thing. But we're looking at around about that 3 to $4,000 per sale. So when I was looking at one of these guys working with in the States, he's spent about three and a half on. On the advertising costs and everything, and he ended up with a $600,000 custom home over there is quite a big deal, you know, 20%, hopefully, then that's a good return for the marketing dollars.

But, yeah, and I think why this is so important, I mean, why I wanted to dive into the details, is because these numbers are so important for builders to know. Number one, if they want to grow their business, number two, if they want to scale, like, over time, because they can factor all of that into the way they price projects, the way they run their business. Right?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And honestly, probably the biggest thing that people struggle with is just spending enough money. They. Yeah, I think people are very, you know, unsure about the process, which is understandable, and they maybe start doing it or start working with somebody, and they just get to a point where they're like, oh, I've spent 500 bucks. I should stop doing this, or why hasn't it worked yet? When in reality, if you get $120,000 in profit back from a project, then you should be willing to spend a good percentage of advertising cost to achieve that, like you said.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, you just need to know those numbers so you can be confident in investing in marketing. I think to your point, it's so easy to not know what you're doing when you just first start doing, like, investing in marketing. And you can waste a ton of money, especially if you're working with agencies that don't have experience in the industry and understand that long sales cycle like you mentioned. So it's really, really important to know those numbers so that you can invest and not, like, panic when you spend a few thousand dollars and don't, you know, sign a contract out of that.

Definitely, yeah.

I mean, on average, what do you see? I guess it depends on the size of the building company, but what's like a good amount to spend, let's say on Facebook and Instagram and Google each month to start to see like some good lead flow and build it up from there.

Yeah. So on average, across the board, round number for marketing costs is going to be roughly $1,000 a month. Okay. If you've got things sort of dialed in, in that most people, if they're looking to grow a bit more, will be a bit higher than that, et cetera. Thousand dollars a month would be roughly where I would start things, because otherwise you don't have enough volume coming in to then have those conversations to get any momentum or any confidence in your process. Because it's also very hard going into things in the sales process with a bad mindset as well that, oh, I need to sign this person up because I've only had two or three leads come through this month, so about a thousand a month, roughly. Most of the kind of average demographic would be probably sitting in a little bit higher than that, maybe 1500 to 2K. But yeah, that's sort of spread across a few platforms and things.

So I guess that's. You're looking at like a small residential builder in that case, when you're recommending that. And that's a starting point. Right. Because based on the $250 per lead, if you're only spending a thousand, I guess that's only four leads a month.

Yes.

Convert any of them into a contract. Right.

No. Yeah. So you're looking at sub 2 million in revenue as a ballpark kind of builder. That's roughly what you'd start at or where you'd get into the marketing world with. When you kind of go from 2 to 5 thereabouts, then obviously you're in a bit of a growth phase and so you'd be spending more than that to get the volume coming through to have that confidence, et cetera. And that's where your budgets would start to go a bit higher. Got a whole calculator to sheet that can kind of work out those exact numbers based off revenue targets and things, which obviously. Yeah, very wildly depending on whether you're doing Renault's or new builds. But yeah, good, good starting point anyway. Yeah.

Because funnily enough, there's probably a lot of builders out there that might have 5, 10, $20 million businesses. They might not have ever done advertising or digital advertising before. So there's a huge untapped opportunity for them. But obviously they'd be dealing with different budgets and need to have a much more numbers focused approach initially.

Oh, 100%. And I think as a whole, I think it was even in the report that you mentioned earlier, people just in the industry are very slow to adapt to the change in technology and everything. And I think that presents a few barriers, but probably also a few limiting beliefs and that this stuff works really well. When you know the numbers and how it all pans out and can see things on a longer time horizon, then obviously that confidence comes through and you can go down that route.

Yeah. Okay, so for builders who are just.

Looking to improve their quality of leads that they're generating, what's the best next steps you'd recommend they take?

If I was to be brutally honest, it's pick up the phone and speak with more people. And so that doesn't matter whether you're doing digital marketing or whatever else. Like you can, you know, you can doorknock, you can call people and that kind of thing. The more conversations that you have, the more you get an understanding for the qualification and where people sit and all that kind of thing. On the same token, the more leads that come through, if you speak with more people, you can get more people through the process. The that's as sort of judging on people that are needing the work and stuff. Most people in a perfect situation have a few barriers in the way that people need to jump through or a few hoops. And so the best way to do that is typically through some form of qualification in that initial process. So one guy, just as an example, had a lot of qualification questions, but he had them on his web form on his website. And so when I was running through, looking at that website, I was like, oh, you're a mortgage broker. And he laughed. He said, why do you say that is? Because there was about 30 questions that a lead had to fill out in order to get in touch with him, which he's wondering why he was getting no leads. So it's kind of staging where that sits. So easiest way to do it is to have leads come through wherever and however, send them something simple like a Google Doc, sorry, a Google form or a Jotform or however you want to have it, which covers things like when are you looking to get started, what's your budget? And give them a range instead of a free text so they don't lie to you. Do you have plans? Do you have permits, have you selected a designer, architect, Those kind of things where you can shape where people currently sit in the process. That's going to be the easiest thing to get into action really quickly.

Yeah, I guess that's a great point as well. Just in terms of not scaring people off before they know who you are or anything like that. If you catch their information up front, then you can start to progress them through that qualification process.

Yeah, there's just one other thing on that as well is if you can make it really simple for people to give you that information, then it's going to work really, really well. So that guy that had 30 questions on his form, you look at it and instantly you're turned off. On the flip side, there's a company called Typeform and all they do is create web forms online and they're a multi hundred million dollar company just because they have these multi step forms. Now everybody does them, so don't get caught up on the platform. But the magic in it is if you have one question at a time, which is multi choice or yes, no, yes, no. That's actually something that we do in the process. So when we get a lead we don't just get the name, email and all that kind of stuff. We get 15 points of qualification. Because as they get started with the easy questions, it's much easier for them to stay in momentum and fill out the qualifying stuff as well. So one at a time works really, really well. Make it easy for people to give you that info and don't put any roadblocks in there. And it helps a ton.

Yeah, we've had a similar experience. Like it's just, it's funny how many people just when it's one question at a time and you're capturing each of those in your CRM through that process, it's amazing how many they just keep rolling through, whereas if you put them all in one form they're just like, well, that's too much.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So what do you see happen in the future in this space in terms of like generating quality leads for builders? What's happening next?

Yeah, so there's obviously a ton of talk at the moment with AI and how all that is coming into things. You know, there's really, really cool but scary systems out there that will automatically call people and an AI voice will talk to them and that sort of stuff, which I think it's kind of good and bad and there's places for the technology and there's other places where you shouldn't put it. But I think some of the opportunities for the technology or for the future, getting qualified leads is to leverage the technology and the systems and that too helps assist the process, whether it's creating content for your social media. Like, you know, you can do that in 60 seconds pretty quickly using some of These tools, you can help it write emails or reply to clients and stuff like that, use it to scope projects, but just also some of the opportunities are on the flip side and that if you go more personal, go deeper in that connection, you know, really get people to know like and trust you through video content, through, you know, educational content. Hell, just like you could write a book if you really wanted to using AI tools. But because you've gone to that extra level of effort, it's got authority with it and things I think going, leaning into the assistant side of things and just having that take workload off you, but then on the personal side of things, just keeping those personal connections. I think you can't really take any of that stuff away with AI and all the future tech. Yeah.

And I think coming back to your point, your previous point around getting on the phone call and just talking to people, listening to what they're saying and understanding that journey a lot more, it comes back to the fundamentals of marketing, which I don't think will necessarily any change. The technology and the way that you implement will change. But at the end of the day, marketing is a numbers game. You get more data and more information about the type of people you're trying to connect with, the better you understand what's working, how you engage with them and how you can turn them into customers. Right?

Yeah, definitely. And just one example on that is if you don't listen to those conversations or have those conversations, you have no idea what the market shift is doing as well. So obvious at the moment, there's a lot of leads coming through, there's a lot of people having site meetings, but then there's also a lot of people that are not progressing from there and going, why am I getting no go aheads on projects and things? And so we listened to a few call recordings that we had through the system and ultimately this same trend was coming up of people going, hey, here's my budget, here's roughly what I'm looking to do, but I'm unsure whether I can even achieve this right now. And then the next step in the sales process for them was doing a preliminary concept drawings and all that sort of stuff, which is around the 15 to 20k mark. So they're trying to go from just meeting this person to 20k is a very big step. So based off that feedback, what we did is we chunked out or we removed a bunch of the stuff from that concepts, put together the more of the feasibility study package, which is between 2 and 5K, something that's sort of a no brainer for people cost wise to do and they've subsequently gone one from three that they presented last week. So without having that feedback or having those conversations that kind of never would have eventuated and sort of assisted the process. So yeah, then people get too detached from running their own business sometimes and getting in the weeds that they miss those opportunities.

Yeah, that's a great tip. Just, just kind of layering the, the journey for them. Like if, if you've got to go for a phone call to a million dollar investment, it's a big jump.

Yeah, for sure.

Cool. Well, Cameron, thank you so much for.

Coming on Professional Builders Secrets today. I've had fun chatting to you and, and I'm sure we could chat for many more hours about marketing.

But for now, where's the best place.

For people to find out more about contractor scale?

Yeah, for sure. So add me on Facebook, send me some smoke signals, whatever works ultimately at the end of the day. But on the website contractorscale.com there's a couple of resources. One of them is a flowchart of the whole system and how it all works. You know, you can steal that, you can do whatever you like. Funny thing is, we get a lot of marketing agencies that download that as well, so it's clearly very helpful. And then there's one that explains the whole thing broken down in detail, which is called the Elite project engine, so you'll find that there as well. Or lastly, just feel free to book a call. We can run through marketing Audit, where you're currently sitting and get a plan together based off your situation. So yeah, any of those options works really well.

Yeah, perfect. Well, we'll make sure we share those resources.

Also, for any APB members out there, contractorscale is a rewards partner, so you can get a cash rebate if you inquire through our directory, which is probably the best place to go there first.

Definitely.

Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks again for coming on. It's been fun.

Yeah man, let's do it again. I really enjoyed talking and hopefully that helped a ton of people on the call today and do it again.

Definitely did.

Also a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope, end to end. QuickBooks, Precision Construction Accounting and CFO Services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus Root will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.