Keeping the Board Full: Marketing That Works When Demand Slows | Podcast Ep. 106

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan, where you get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today's episode is a little bit different. You guys might not know this, but I work a lot on ServiceTitan's webinars as well outside of this podcast. And these are the online events that we do about once a week that are live, more of a fireside chat style conversation. And I feel like those are perfect to repurpose into a podcast episode to deliver directly to your feed so you don't miss it in case you miss the webinar. And in this webinar, Paul Balesis, he's actually been on the show a few times in the past, so it might be a familiar name. He interviews both Kelsey and Andrea, who are both expert marketers, and they talk about a really timely topic, which is how to adapt your marketing to keep the board full, especially as the summer slows down and the fall approaches. So I hope you enjoy this kind of conversation. By all means, please let me know if you like this kind of content. can always shoot me an email at jolu@servicetitan.com. And with that, we will jump right into the episode.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Josh. Um, we got a jam-packed lineup for you all. I've been chatting with Kelsey and Andrea probably for the past month about this webinar and just, they've been wealths of knowledge that I think you're all gonna get a ton of valuable information from. So We all know that we're starting to exit the summer season where demand is just, the phone's ringing off the hook, you're continuously busy, and we're starting to enter what we like to think of as shoulder season. Andrea, Kelsey, you are— would you say that this shoulder season is worse than the one that's usually in like February and March or like a little bit better?

I would say that fall is typically a little bit harsher shoulder season simply because a lot of those maintenances that you're doing don't take near as long for furnace tune-ups as you would for an AC maintenance, things like that. I do think that schedules get a little bit more packed for our customers, so it might be a little bit harder to get them scheduled as fall's coming around. You know, we've got kids that are back in school and you're just getting new routines. There's definitely some pain points there, but by being proactive and not waiting till there's no calls on the board, you can definitely help limit and mitigate your risk there.

And Kelsey, like, what signals are you looking for? How do you have your ear on the ground in terms of We noticed that demand's starting to drop off. What are you looking for?

Yeah, so I couldn't agree more with what Andrea said about making sure that you are not waiting until the board is empty to start doing the work. We are very in tune with our operations team and the call center, listening to calls as they come in, checking that 3-day call board, and then the weather as it's coming up to sort of predict when the ebbs and flows are going to come and be able to adjust accordingly on our way there.

Makes sense. And I believe that your business is mostly primarily plumbing. Is that correct?

We started off as plumbing, so that is what we are known for. We now also do HVAC and electrical. So a large part of what we do to help deal with capacity is cross-selling and making sure that our customers are aware that we offer these other products. And then instead of trying to create demand, looking at our current database and seeing what else we can offer them.

And Andrea, like how early in advance are you starting to plan for shoulder season? Is it like, oh, here's shoulder season again and it's very reactive? Or are you thinking about this weeks ahead and then it's just, you're implementing the plan that you have in place?

Man, my LemonSeed people will tell you, if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. So there's keys outside of simple operational things that marketers can do. Number one, like what is your GA4 saying? So if you're sitting there and all of a sudden you see this in clicks and impressions and traffic in your GA4, probably means that something is happening on the need or demand side that's slowly coming. And so we look at our GA4 and then we look at our booking rate and lead volume year over year just to make sure that everything is still in sync and what we expect before we even really look at weather. Just because, man, like it's Oklahoma, just like Texas, it can be 60 one day. And then 78, like it's, it's just wild. So, you know, looking at, looking at how people are searching for you, you'll see those drop-offs early.

Yeah. I feel like this is, it's almost like being a quarterback or being a conductor of a symphony where you're just trying to pull on any strings. You're trying to get the pulse of what's coming from the business and you're trying to fill the gaps as they come in. You're really orchestrating quite a bit. And I'm sure a lot of people that are in the marketing roles or are doing some sort of marketing to a certain extent, are definitely feeling that. So what we're going to talk about is 5 proven ways to drive demand. And I know a lot of you have been a marketing pro for a long period of time. You're going to be able to take advantage of these. But just even best practices, even if you're not a marketing pro, you're going to be able to start thinking through some of the campaigns that you can start activating within the market that can help keeping your demand busy. And we're going to dive into each and every one of these. Let's start with the first one. So we're talking about Unsold, like re-engaging unsold estimates and then making sure we're starting with those recurring services, those memberships that are coming around. Kelsey, you guys have a good amount. We were talking a little bit and then there's like, your technicians are going out, they're quoting all these jobs. How much is out there in terms of opportunity for unsold estimates and how are you thinking about tapping into that as you approach shoulder season?

Yeah, so we, there's a ton of opportunity in unsold estimates. It is great if the technician can sell a job in the home, but we want to make sure that we are following up on those estimates. I've loved using Marketing Pro and some of the automations in there to help with our follow-up, not to replace the human aspect of follow-up, but sort of to augment it and make sure our team's time is being used most effectively. So we do unsold estimate follow-ups, and we break them out to really personalize the message based on if it was an opportunity or an aged equipment, and then for service line. And then for sales versus service estimates. And then we use those unsold estimates, those campaigns to send out both via SMS and email to really reach the customer where they are. We found that to be really, really effective. We've had a large reply rate, and then we set up ServiceTitan alerts to see when the customer actually has opened up one of these messages. That way our ISR can call on those leads while it's Ooh, that's interesting.

So you're saying that when someone clicks on an email, an alert goes internally and they're able to follow up with that customer almost immediately?

Exactly. So instead of cold calling this huge list of estimates, the ISRs can really focus their time on someone that is actively looking at the estimate and while it's top of mind.

How fast would you say they follow up with the customer? Is it immediately or is it? Take a little while?

We have the alert set up to go immediately, and our goal is under 2 minutes. Obviously, if someone's on the phone with somebody else, it might not be immediate, but we've seen definitely a larger success rate with the quicker that we can follow up.

That's really neat. I have heard of some contractors doing that, so I'm glad that you mentioned it because I think it's one of those things that might get lost and buried that, oh, you send out this email campaign and it just went out. But if you can see what a customer does on those actions and have your team follow up and make sure that it keeps that lead warm. Andrea, anything else you'd want to talk about in terms of unsold estimates? I know you guys are, you guys are doing all 3 trades right now and you got a lot of HVAC work because Texas and it's hot. Are you thinking about any promotions as we enter the season or anything else you'd like to tap in on there?

Yeah, absolutely. So we do things, by the way, Kelsey, what you said, chef's kiss, like yes. 1000% agree. We do things slightly different because we actually have a follow-up coordinator named Amber who's wonderful that does outbound for those unsold estimates. That being said, we understand that everybody prefers different levels of communication and people feel comfortable being transparent very differently. For example, I'm probably not going to tell Kelsey that I don't like her hair, but like if she sent me a text saying, hey, is there something wrong with my hair? I'll probably— I'd probably— find a way to eloquently say it in text versus having that conversation in person. So we actually find that through those automations and those unsold estimates, we can actually get kind of what the root of the problem is, whether it's a pricing issue. That way we're not throwing out discounts right off the bat with unsold estimates like, hey, here's 10%. Maybe pricing's not the issue. Maybe they genuinely needed to wait till their wife got home to, to go through some things. So we want to be just mindful of that. But using the unsold estimates follow-ups, through SMS after— if Amber can't get ahold of them, gives that layer for us to determine what the real problem might be if they're not comfortable talking to Amber. Does that make sense?

That makes sense. I want to dig in there a little bit. So how are you identifying what the customer issue is? And then how are you getting to that level of personalization? Because I agree, I think every customer is different. They might just have had an off month or something. And, you know, maybe it's pricing, maybe it's timing, maybe they're traveling. How are you figuring out that issue and how are you getting to that level of personalization?

Number one, we do daily huddles. So every day, that next morning, we know what opportunities were on the board, where those opportunities landed, whether they converted, whether they didn't. And then from the tech, what that, what that final debriefing looked like, what was their, what was their reasoning why. That sets Amber up for success so she knows how to navigate the conversation. Versus just coming in blind like, hey, I heard you, I heard you needed us. Like, do you want to buy that system? No, she understands. Hey, I know your wife was out of town. Is Maggie back in town today after you said? Did you guys have that opportunity to talk? And really kind of build that brand equity up while still doing that. Now, they might not answer, and that's, that's normal. You know, we see about 25% of people just never reach back out, and that's where those unsold estimate campaigns in SMS and email do play in. After a couple days, I will throw a promo, some sort of discount offer up there, especially if I need to fill that board. There's a couple spots, um, but I'm not defaulting directly to promos just for an unsold estimate. It's price. If price is a problem, I haven't built the value in the home.

And Jessica has a really good question. Um, who are you meeting with for your daily huddles currently? I know when I was doing it, I was meeting with the dispatchers from all 5 of our branches every day just to understand plumbing, HVAC, electrical. Where are there gaps? Where are there gaps 3 days out? Where are there gaps a week out? Where are you seeing 2 weeks out? What do you need? So we can plug and play with those promos, kind of how you were saying. But Andrea, who are you, who are you talking to and what information are you getting?

I actually join in on sales training as often as I can. So I'm hearing it straight from the techs. I also join the daily huddle. So I'm hearing it from the managers. So the managers have a direct line. If they hear that maybe an offer wasn't working, they're going to tell me immediately, or if there's some sort of pain point with that offer. Maybe it's just a, maybe it's just a bad offer, but if the techs don't tell me, I will never know. I'm going straight, straight into the trenches to find out. And it works for, it works for our team that way.

I know we're bouncing around a lot with like offers. We're gonna get there too, but is there a way that you're centralizing that communication or how do you find best to get that communication out with offers to the technicians, to the CSRs? Because there's always a lot of questions. What offers are out there, whether it's financing or certain promos, how long do they last? What's the coupon code? How are you centralizing that information, Kelsey?

We send out a weekly or monthly internal newsletter with all of our offers, the actual creative that we're using. So if a customer shows it to them in their home, they're not surprised. And then we also have a bulletin board in-house that'll house everything for the month as well. But I find that that monthly sort of internal newsletter blasting out the offers and giving all of these stipulations or whatever necessary information as to who we're sending those to has been really effective.

Andrea, are you, how are you getting that information out? Everybody has their own process. What has been working for you?

So we actually have a portal where we get these offers designed. We have quarterly offers, but we also have some other offers just based on need and our bandwidth. So we will put those in the content portal and I will then do Kahoots quizzes during the sales training. And if they don't know what the offers are, they don't get the opportunities, you know. So they are very invested because how can they sell something? These, these offers help them. It don't— it doesn't help, help me, you know. I don't get the sales, I just get the leads. So they are— they're the ones that really benefit from those offers. So they need to lean on those. It's very important for your techs to know. When I first came in, we had a $49 getup and they did not know. That's a problem. Like, man, that's, that's, that's an issue. Now, now they know. And even plumbers know what HVAC offers are going on. They— everybody knows everything just for cross-selling opportunities in the home.

And that's a really good point. So you're making sure everybody knows. This is more than just an email that goes out or a text message that goes out. It seems like it's an entire team effort. What incentives are you giving the team to make those offers happen and to capture those opportunities? And how are you getting their buy-in?

Opportunities. So, man, like, we have these processes for a reason, and it's because it gives our technicians, our plumbers, a life better than they would get at, you know, another contractor in our market. We do that with intention, but we need to ensure that our processes are working. And so, if a technician doesn't know The process, if they don't know the offer, then we don't know if it's a bad offer. We don't know if it's a bad process. We don't know anything. We're flying blind and then we're basing it on feelings and we're too big of a contractor to go on feelings. So it's, hey, like we make it fun. We'll do envelope games. They'll get incentives here and there. They'll play games. Really, Jason will kill me, but we did a review generation game and I told one of the plumbers if he got 10 reviews in a few days that I would superimpose Jason's face on a twerking music video. That's the buy-in he needed. Oh, sorry, Jason. Uh, he knows, so it's fine. I'll probably get in trouble after that. But I like— everybody is motivated different ways. So it could be money, it could be something like a video just to laugh. Um, it could be just wanting to do a good job. It could be that they just want to get their bonuses and opportunities.

Jason, I will make sure that that is the intro video at the keynote at Pantheon of this year. So don't you worry.

I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you.

You all will get that in an email afterwards. No worries. But yeah, it is about incentives. Technicians, gifts go a long way and sometimes something as easy as that. I think I remember The Office, it was Andy that got a tattoo when the sales team hit a certain goal. So there's a reason that these things work because people get excited about them.

So if we don't hit a revenue goal, like if our plumbing installer does not hit goal, he's getting a pie in the face this month. I'm gonna throw that out there as well, just because I doubt that it will happen because we're doing, we're having a good month. But yeah, we put the fear of Jesus in them a little bit in fun ways, you know.

We have a question from Amber and I'll pose this to you, Andrea. How do you keep track of all the opportunities from the daily huddle when you have so many? huddles and opportunities going on?

So, we have a, just a legit daily huddle sheet. And so, let's say that we have 8 HVAC opportunities. The CSR manager and the HVAC service manager, they have already come in with our sales director and addressed what those opportunities are going to look like. We're going to make sure that the right technician can really cultivate that relationship before they even enter the door. And so we keep track not only through ServiceTitan, but we also have our own lead sheet within Quad. And that, that has worked very well for us. And it kind of can give us that workspace to where we can talk through it in real time as well as in Teams.

Kelsey, I know a lot of these are from your company here and that you showed me some examples. Some of these are emails, some of these are display ads, a whole bunch of different things. When you think through some of these products that are not necessarily and offer. It's more so of a nice-to-have product versus a need-to-have product. How do you determine when to push that and how to push that product?

So I think that these are really helpful during shoulder season when it's— the weather isn't necessarily creating demand, but we have to look for other ways to provide value to our customer base. And I think that a lot of it has to deal with personalization and making sure you're getting the right message to the right audience. So really fine-tuning your audiences within Audience Builder. So one thing we did was a free air purification system with the purchase of a new HVAC system. And within Audience Builder, I was able to pull reports for zip codes that had higher pollen count where people might be more susceptible to allergies, and then layering that on with over 10 HVAC units. So you needed both an HVAC system and you can find an, an indoor air quality system helpful getting that right message to that customer. And then now with back-to-school season coming on, we're really leaning into more of that messaging instead of just saying, you know, prevent your basement from flooding, trying to put some sort of emotion behind it and tie that messaging into the time of year I find is really helpful.

But the pollen is really cool. Where do you get that information from?

I've been using AI to do research. It's been really helpful. I used to, we did a similar campaign for water purification looking at EPA reports. And then sort of thought, okay, this was really successful. How else can we, you know, develop on that same concept, but in other areas?

Yeah. And I think even like electrical outages, you can usually see where those are and you can push some generator campaigns out. Really helpful. Andrea, how are you thinking about offers and like, what's your approach when you're like, I know I want to do an offer during the month of September, it's going to be shoulder season. How do you get to that offer?

I think that we all look at, man, what offer is the highest ticket? You know, what's going to make us the most money? So we certainly want to do that. But I also want to look at like what offers Lennox is running, what offers OG&E are running. So we have good rebates with HVAC. I mean, most people on this webinar probably are reading Home Pros a couple times a week, man. Like financing is a killer to so many people. Like you should be offering financing 100% of the time, whether 40 to 60% of people are going to take it. Like you should be offering. And so we've been pushing really hard on those financing offers right now because we have found that those are in fact the most effective offers to at least get people feeling like they can stomach the, you know, the hit of a new system. Since COVID people are more comfortable now knowing what those prices are. They've heard their parents talk about it or their neighbors or stuff like that. It's not like a couple years ago when all of a sudden it was $20,000 and people were like, You know, it was $8,000 a couple years ago. We don't, you know, people are more educated now, but really think that having good financing offers specifically for this shoulder season is really going to help, especially with the price of everything.

Yeah, there's a lot of macro factors that I think a lot of contractors are dealing with and that we've just been hearing across the board. And we have a question here from Roots in Arbor. That a lot of these examples are leaning on financing for seasonal urgency for lower demand periods. Have you seen any success with free add-on offers like an air purification system outperform any straight discounting?

So for us, we do a lot of A/B testing, and we noticed that having the payments as low as in that financing offer rather than just a straight discount has been a lot more effective. But similar to what Andrea said earlier, You don't want to just start with a discount just because you're slow doesn't mean you should be offering discounts right off the bat. That might not be the issue. So we'll start with the value add. And then if you see that that's, that is not getting traction with that audience, then we could add a discount later on. But for us, A/B testing has definitely helped and financing has definitely been really, really successful.

And how are you A/B testing that? Like maybe just explain that process. If someone was like, Completely new to marketing, how are you going about A/B testing and what are you looking for?

Yeah, so it's easier and more cost-effective to do it via email, but we'll do it for display ads as well. And even with headlines in our PPC campaigns and having just 2 separate offers. So $250 off a tankless water heater versus payments as low as $89 a month for a new tankless water heater and seeing which one is more successful. You can go even more granular than that too and see if there are different subject lines or offers that are better for different zip codes. If we have a wealthier zip code, maybe we won't do the financing and we'll do the free add-on or something like that instead. But email subject lines and then the offers to different audiences, but having a similar, try to changing, try to change as little as we can. So the creative will look just about the same, whether it's the display ad for both offers, but just switching that. Post little things out.

To Kelsey's point, it could also be like, who's to say it's not both? Who's to say they can't pick, pick their prize there? You know, 0% financing for X amount of time or an April air filter and Remy Halo. Like, you know, there you could, you could technically have somebody— people love options. I mean, um, you could technically let somebody show you what's important to them, see what's You know, giving more of that call to action there, what people are responding to, and then kind of lean in there. But I don't know, I kind of like getting to choose.

Speaking of getting to choose, I'd love to hear from the audience a little bit. Throw in the chat, what offers are you running right now? Which one has been most successful? Let's— maybe you might help somebody out today with inspiring them with a certain type of offer. We have a bunch here on the screen. Speaking on the screen, these look like they're direct mailers that you both are doing. Kelsey, is direct mail— is that usually a big component of your marketing campaigns?

It is. And we noticed a significant drop-off in marketed leads whenever we tried to toggle back the budget for direct mail. So it is something that we're definitely keeping. But like I said, trying to make sure that the right message is getting to the right audience. And rather than doing one blanket mailer to our entire database, really fine-tuning what offers we're sending to each. So the one that we have right now on the screen for September tied into back to school is smart savings, those smart home upgrades. But I sent those to wealthier zip codes with children in the home and that were more inclined to be using technology.

And when you send out direct mailers, I know there's always this argument back and forth. Do they work? Do they not work? Digital's better because it's cheaper. Why are you wasting money? Because everyone just throws it out. What have you seen? Are you seeing customers actually use this, Kelsey?

I see customers use it a ton and we'll get calls off of the tracking number. If we have a QR code, we'll see it's scanned, you know, 2 months down the line, that customers are keeping them and putting them on the fridge, especially if we have a coupon or a preparation or a plastic mailer that they can keep and hang on to. We find that they really do.

Nice. And then Andrea, you're using QR codes as well. I see that example here on the screen. Where are you directing customers to?

We're directing them to our homepage where we have a get a quote feature and schedule now. So contact us, get a quote, schedule now. And we really like that just because we have so many, so many different things on that particular page. It's a one-stop shop of info. That QR code could be straight to apply for financing. I have done a QR code where it's just, it's a financing offer and it goes straight to Service Finance. So that's also an option. Some people don't even want to pick up the phone. They just want to see what it is, if they could get approved.

As a millennial, I relate with that. I don't like picking up the phone at all. So yes, very cool. All right. And so you have this direct mail piece. Is this just a one-off or are there layers to this campaign that you're building with the customer?

So for example, this one right here is a prospecting direct mailer. So we've never, we've never interacted with these people. So my first thing is I want you to know that we're Pink. So you see all them pretty vans that are driving around and know that it's me. Also, I want you to know what I do. And then I want you to know the offers. I don't know where you're at in this, this customer journey. I don't know if you need HVAC if you're here, if you're all the way up here for plumbing. So I'm just gonna throw it at you and hope to see some results. And so for this particular campaign, that's exactly what we did. Mailchimp did a great job. And so we are doing, we're doing multiple drops. So they get, they get 3 drops for this, this one. Now, this one is a jumbo postcard. The one after this was a magnet mailer. And then the one after that was— Another jumbo postcard. But man, those magnet mailers will stay on a fridge for months. And so, you know, those right there, we did how long food's good for in the fridge. To answer the question that I think we're going to talk about was it'll stay up as long as it has a reason to. And so being creative there is really the key to keeping it in the home. So somebody just keeps walking past it, seeing your brand. So when they need you, They're picking up the phone.

Yeah. And there's no getting away from that bright pink color. Andrea sent me some of their other assets and stuff, and it was like billboards that are bright pink. What would make Jason want to choose the color pink? Do you know the reason behind that?

Well, number one, I think he wanted to appeal to women. Man, LemonSeed just did such a great job with that brand. He wanted to appeal to women, and I think he just wanted to be a safe, a safe brand. You know, so many people are red and blue and just not disruptive, you know? And so having this bright pink color really does make us stand out. Now you have T-Mobile, we have some tanning salons that are kind of similar, but man, what a great, what a great way to do some co-branding and some marketing that way in the community with, you know, with your partners in pink, you know, so.

Question from Dimitri in the chat here. What's your AAB budget for your, for Above and Beyond? What percent of your budget goes to direct mail these days?

So I'm at around 10%. We were talking before too about how Direct mail, I do think it is effective, but I think that you still need to pair it with other things similar to what we were talking about earlier, not just sending out a text message or an email, but making sure that you're doing on these different channels to reach the customer where they are. So although we have this direct mail piece, we'll then partner that same campaign with a Meta ad and display ads and other channels as well. But right now, 10% of our budget's going to direct mail.

Jessica's asking, how has— I'll start with you, Andrea, on this one. How has social media influenced your marketing strategy? Is it a channel you consider to use or you're currently using or are considering?

I love social media. Number one, it's free. Number two, it's the best way to highlight what makes you different from everybody else. Yes, if you haven't looked at Above and Beyond Service Company's Facebook, please do. There's a lot of cool stuff on there. It allows me to Kind of be fun and funny in a world of it's hot, it's cold, it's clogged, it's not, it's on, it's off. Um, so yes, man, social media is so underutilized. And anybody that wants to have a conversation with that, like, man, y'all, there are, there are people that specialize in social media on here. I used to work for them. Like, man, they, they do, they do a great job. But yes. So, we do a ton of organic social media. I post probably 4 to 5 times a week, and then we also have meta campaigns. And so, I would say that we honestly have better luck with the organic social media than we do with the campaigns, specifically because it's really highlighting the company culture and the hearts of our individuals. And I'm the type of person that'll pay more for a good person. We have the best hearts on our team and that's what makes us different. So yeah, I'm gonna highlight that. Like, I'm proud of that. I love marketing my team because of that.

Love it. So yeah, we're just talking about everything here. We got the direct mail pieces, we got the social media going on, we got billboards, we got somebody that's putting Jason Brady's face on someone doing a TikTok. We got a lot of different channels going on here. And when you think about a lot of these channels, what matters is making sure you're narrowing in on the targeting. So yes, social media is super broad, but then with direct mail pieces, you're trying to get much more targeted. And this is stuff that actually lives within MarketingPro based on your service site data. Are you both with those direct mail pieces? I know there's like a lot of different things you can be using for different functionalities, but are you using some of these data points within MarketingPro to send out some of these campaigns? I'll start with you, Kelsey.

Yeah, I am. And I find that it's extremely successful. Not just in this area too, but looking at, um, in Marketing Pro at the opportunity predictor to use those zip codes too and utilizing this audience data for direct mail, but then also feeding it back into Google and where we're targeting our PPC campaigns as well to really get hyper-targeted with our messaging has been very helpful.

Yeah, we did something similar where we would narrow in on a zip code like this and it would be like above it and this was Um, in Marketing Pro, you'd be able to under— over 150,000, recently replaced a 10-plus-year-old system there. And you'd be able to get super pinpointed in terms of your direct mail. You could pin them with the social media advertising, like a 1-mile radius. Everything was super personalized. And then that layer just kept building, building, building. Andrea, what type of targeting are you using when you're going after new customers during shoulder season?

I'm going to layer that strategically because the first people I want to hit are the customers that have Like a 10+ system. I want to hit them first, and then I'll work on the customers that have 6 to 9 and 0 to 5. So breaking them up that way and really segmenting them just like that so you can really kind of roll into it and work with the ones that have that immediate need or the higher likelihood of breakdown. So we'll do that, and then we'll start segmenting based on the value of the home and areas like that. And so we use Mailchimp will help us define that using their strategy as well.

So yeah, all these are available. There's some— your data is your most powerful tool when it comes to then building out your marketing campaigns. So make sure you have clean data within ServiceTitan when your technicians are out on the job. We're going to talk a little bit about stuff that they can be doing while on the job, but they're collecting the system. If they're there for an HVAC system, they're also getting the age and the equipment type of the water heater that's sitting right next to it or the water softener. So that way all that data is filtering in so you can activate your cross-selling campaigns. You can stay busy during shoulder season. Like I said, like the direct mail features here within MarketingPro are extremely powerful and help you leverage that data even more fully. And same thing with email, you can do the same type of thing. So you're getting more impactful campaigns. And then just real quick, because we had to throw a bonus tip in here before we switch segments a little bit, winning the neighbor. There's really easy things that you can be doing. Andrea, these are your signs, obviously, because they're pink. So we all got that now. What are you doing with your yard signs here?

So those A-frames go behind any plumbing, HVAC, electrical, or fencing truck. So the goal there is to— obviously you're going to see the vans there, but having the ability to do a free inspection right there when they're in the home, that means that women that are walking their dogs, They're going to see that QR code's big, it's bright. You're going to be able to scan that and it's going to get scheduled. It's going to take you right to Schedule Now. And so that allows us to— let me tell you, if our board is full and people are still doing that, I will have Jason Brady go and change a system out. Somebody is going to go get that inspection. So that is a promise that we make. That's a promise that you keep by having those signs out. But so if If you're like super busy, don't, don't put them out. Don't do it. Don't do it to yourself. Um, you can actually do more harm than good. But if you're actually pretty slow, man, those being there will get you for— it'll get you a call an hour in a neighborhood.

I've never seen the leave behind the truck thing. That's cool. I've seen like yard signs. I've seen all that. But the leave behind the truck is actually a pretty neat one. And then always slap one of those stickers on the units. Yeah.

I think I stole it from Tommy Mello. I'm not gonna take claim of it. I think I saw Tommy Mello, like A1 from day 1, free inspection. And I think I told Crystal like, one day I'm gonna do that. That's so cool. So yeah, I'm not gonna steal somebody else's idea, but it was a great one and it works. So one of those is $180.

And if you're in a neighborhood replacing that system that's 10 years old, that $180 could get you a $10,000, $20,000 replacement very easily. So cool little tips and tricks. We talked about a ton of stuff to drive demand, wealth of knowledge over here, Kelsey and Andrea. If you're looking to do any of these, I know a lot of you already have Marketing Pro and we appreciate that. And I hope you got to take some away and maybe there's just, you know, one or two things that you can implement today. If you don't have Marketing Pro and you're interested in checking out how you can do some of these targeting automated campaigns that Kelsey and Andrea were talking about, we have a limited time offer actually that just came out. Past couple days, a $100 gift card if you demo any pro product. And the other thing I saw that we had some questions about digital ad spend. What I've seen historically work, and then I'll let Kelsey and Andrea chime in, is as you're going throughout summer, you're kind of depends on like your actual busyness, you're throttling that search spend. We usually didn't have very much going on in terms of display. As you start to see everything taper off, we started increasing our display advertisements with offers on them to start Kind of using it as a digital billboard, whether it's through display through Google or social media. We even did some Spotify advertisement, indoor advertisement, which are pretty cool. So we started really increasing those awareness type digital channels while also maintaining or increasing our search level channels for whether it's repair or maintenance level keywords. But I'll let Kelsey, you chime in a little bit. You guys are a little bit unique because you are a little bit plumbing focused, but you do still have the HVAC and electrical. centers, but kind of curious of like, how do you throttle that digital spend?

Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you said. We kind of use it as a toggle. And so in peak season, trying to capture the demand that's coming in with search campaigns and then leaning heavily into display, Facebook, Meta ads, trying to create the demand and then increase top-of-mind awareness during the shoulder season. What we found really helpful though is using the Ads Optimizer within Marketing Pro as a second layer. So not just trying to shift your budget for based on capacity and seasonality, but really using like the job value predictor tool and tracking your conversions more effectively towards those booked jobs to get service time to optimize those campaigns, especially when you really need the calls.

Andrea, you're in Texas, so things are a little bit different. How is that going for you and what are you doing in terms of digital spend?

We're doing Atlas, so we're, we have Different avenues of digital spend. So we have PPC, we have LSA, OTT, digital display ads, things like that. I would say that 50% of, and this is, this is a LemonC rule of thumb that I've just carried on, 50% of our spend goes to like new customer acquisition specifically in digital. So half my budget typically goes to digital. Now, I haven't needed to use That digital spend recently because we've made such great efforts with branding. We're trying to ramp up after having a website that I was telling you launched pretty late. So we've actually saved quite a bit of money, but we've spent more in branding during the summer than we probably needed to for that, you know, for that reason. So really just being mindful of that digital spend, using your, you know, your adjusted capacity and things like that is how we're going to do it moving forward now that all of our things are truly set with paid I know we had the question about Marketing Pro Ads.

There's a lot of contractors that are currently using Marketing Pro Ads, and the real value there is that it's Google's— some customer is clicking Google Ads and we're able to predict the value of the job of that customer clicking that ad and send that trigger right back to Google. So instead of having a month-long attribution window, your attribution window is shrinking down into seconds, minutes, and Google is able to learn a lot faster, optimize your ads a lot faster, and the ROI customers have seen has been Significant. So if you're interested in checking that out, hey, it's worth $100. Why not?

We are using Ads Optimizer and we really started ramping it up in January and I've seen a huge difference in our ROAS. Even something so simple as not having to manually upload your customer list for lookalike audiences, having all of those signals sent directly to Google from ServiceTitan is a huge time saver. And then like you said, having the actual job value rather than Focusing just on cost per lead has been really increasing the success of our campaigns.

What you just said is exactly what I've heard from countless other contractors around the country and their success there. Very cool. Also, I saw, who was it? David, you're going on with the AI voice agents. The amount of contractors that are onboarding with AI voice agents and the market adoption that not just our contractors are seeing, but the success we've seen with our customers through the roof. You are not alone, David. You are on the forefront and you are joining the club here of people that are going to have Great shoulder seasons, peak seasons, and all in between with AI voice agents. Love it. And let us know how your success goes. And speaking of that, actually, it's a really good segue into that. Yes, this is only driving half of the equation here. So you're creating all this demand and a lot of times, honestly, it can just fall through the cracks. I remember listening to phone call after phone call of 7-minute-long hold times and customers just dropping off and calling a competitor. Or you see that good old form fill on the website that goes to the dark abyss of nowhere and that customer just dropped through the bucket. Andrea, I know you are passionate about this one. Tell me a little bit about your experience. You obviously worked at LemonSeed, so you were responsible for driving all the leads for a lot of contractors, and I'm sure it broke your heart seeing all those leads just fall through. Well, a portion of those leads fall through.

Oh yeah, 1,000%. 1,000%. So LemonSeed, LemonSeed can, we can drive as many leads. Using like branding and strategy as, as you'd want. But man, like I couldn't tell you how many times we saw people that just let them, just didn't pick up the phone. Like, oh yeah, we're, we take 2-hour lunches. I'm like, every day you do that every day, huh? Anyways, yes. So I was really kind of nervous about this kind of SMS AI agent, if you will, specifically because I thought we would lose brand equity by not having a good personality and tone. So when I learned that you can absolutely adjust the tonality and adjust the verbiage within those campaigns, I really got on board with it. And so I started doing different types of messaging and different cadences that is completely dependent by how hard it is to convert that lead, if you will. So for example, if you're on Angie, if you're on Thumbtack, if you're on eLocal, I apologize for you, but like You know that that is not going to convert like somebody that's just going on your website. So you're going to massage and cultivate that relationship very differently. Like they put their email with their phone number or whatever into a web form. They're wanting quotes. I'm going to blow you up a lot. Like I, I'm going to get ahold of you. Somebody that's come onto my website, man, I want to give you that Disneyland experience. I want you to feel like this isn't, you know, a salesy thing. But on that first one, it's truly speed to lead. It's the first person that they can really get ahold of is usually going to be the one that, you know, at least gets the opportunity to quote it. So we have our speed to lead set with very different messages and very different amounts of messages depending on how hard it is to turn them, as well as what we're even talking about. Are they on a campaign That's only generators? If so, I'm going to talk about losing power. I'm going to ask them very generator-specific questions. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be very brand forward versus me just talking about service that they need. Because I, even though it's AI, I still want them to feel like it is a piece of our personality. They should at least get a feel for who Above and Beyond is. Even before we walk through the door, even with an AI agent. And so if you're just using the basic messaging and using the basic drips of sequences for all campaigns, you cannot expect that to be effective. Like, I can't throw out 100 different one-liners to 100 different women and expect them all to work, right? Like, you, you change it up based on what you think they're going to react to and what you think they need. So That's what we do. And it's been highly effective. At first we were seeing a 28% conversion rate, which we thought was just low. And then when we started really tailoring those messages, we were up to the 70s at that point, at least to convert, to get one of our girls to get on the phone and talk through it.

I think that's a good point. Like AI is following up immediately. And then you're also able to shift that into a live voice conversation, depending on the workflows that you have set up for your AI agents. And that's all within ServiceTitan. It takes minutes to set up and then you fine-tune it as you want to. You can like adjust the voice, you can adjust the workflow. Yes. Was it— can you explain that process a little bit? Because I know these can all seem intimidating. There's so many options that you can choose from. How does it go about setting it up?

I seriously got, got told by Chelsea to hop on a quick call, but as soon as that Speed to Lead was in there, it was, it was simple as just adding, adding those campaigns. It looks like there's just one full one there. And then you can start segmenting it out. But I didn't need to ask anybody's assistance, which anybody that works with me will tell you, like, I'm always asking for help for something, but I didn't need to ask anybody for anything. And then when I got back on a call with ServiceTitan, they're like, I'm surprised that you changed the messaging among those campaigns. And so I was like, oh, so other people aren't doing that. And even that was super easy. So just going in there and playing with it after you get a couple weeks of data. Then refine your messaging. Did you, did you convert well? Did you not convert well? It's not that it doesn't work. It's that maybe you bothered them too much. Maybe you didn't, you know, finesse it enough. Maybe you weren't brand forward enough. Maybe it was bad timing or a bad day. But, um, but yeah, not giving up on it. It did take us about 4 weeks before we really felt like we were honing in on our messaging.

Really cool. Yeah. And you only pay per call, which is very convenient. And some of the new features, like you were saying, Speed to Lead. Oh, go ahead.

That's what I was going to mention about Thumbtack. I remember us talking about it. So the one thing, when you start hooking up these kind of lead aggregates that is pay per lead, if a lead opportunity comes in and it's a direct lead and you only pay when you reach out, Speed to Lead is going to reach out to that person, just so y'all know. So make sure that you're, if you do use things with paper lead and, you know, your capacity's there, you might want to turn that off because you'll have the same, same issue. Just you're going to want to turn that lever off. It's a good problem to have, right? Turning levers off. Yeah.

Again, it's like being a maestro. It's very intense. You're conducting everything. And yes, speech lead, very new feature. Actually, it's been out for a little bit now, but it's new to the virtual agent entire ecosystem. And also we have the SMS feature now, which I think is cool. Especially as someone that likes, would prefer to text versus call. And you can just interact. So let's say you set up one of the campaigns that Kelsey or Andrea were talking about for marketing, whether it's maintenance or a special offer of some sort, the customer can just text back. AI agent knows the exact same way as it would be through voice, that'll be through SMS. And it'll just say, hey, we have these availabilities open. The customer can choose that or say, hey, maybe next week works better. AI knows what to say. And it goes back and says, we have this date available. It knows your level of prioritization. If it's an older system that might need a replacement, it'll know that versus a 1-year-old maintenance. So it's very cool how smart AI and the leaps and bounds that it's making very quickly. And then on the online scheduling, I mean, this is how you're capturing that data and that information. It's the same exact thing. And Kelsey, you guys are— I was on your schedule the other day when I got this screenshot and I just saw how in-depth it is and the information that you're getting. It had 1 to 5-year-old systems, 6 to 10, 10 15, 15 plus. And you just, a lot of this was very good information. Um, how is online scheduling going for you?

It's gone great. Um, we love it. And they do limit the amount of questions that you're able to ask. We prioritized what we wanted, like the system age. And it can be overwhelming to some people. So there could be some drop-off, but Marketing Pro and, um, links with Scheduling Pro to send an automatic follow-up if someone started their booking and then didn't complete it. So we can still capture them that way as well. Same with, you know, we were victims of long hold times and seeing some calls drop off. We were able to use MarketingPro to trigger an abandoned call, missed call campaign and putting that SchedulingPro link right in our message. Like, hey, sorry, we, our system noted we might've missed a call from you. Visit online here to schedule your appointment today. And that's been really successful for us.

Yeah, we've heard that works a lot for, well, for a lot of people because that text goes out and everything and Scheduling Pro is so much more than an online scheduler. I've been telling people a lot about this recently. It has dynamic dispatch fees, which is arguably one of my favorite features. So think about like an Uber. When you go use an Uber to go to a sporting event and it's peak time, that price goes up. But when you're trying to just get from point A to point B on a very average Monday, that price is consistent. So you're able to do the same thing using adaptive capacity. Let's say you have a 10-plus-year-old system that needs repair and it's a hot day, drop the dispatch fee down, capture the job. Or if you have a maintenance that doesn't really matter that much and that you can push out a couple days, increase the dispatch fee or increase the job fee, whatever it may be, and empower the customer to book when it works for you as well as what works for them. So it's a very great way to be able to do that. So you always meeting customers where they are and just a couple things real quick to maximize every job. And Kelsey and Andrea are doing all these and I know we're running close on time, so I'll just cover them. If you have any insights, just feel free to chime in. Right tech, right job. This is Jason Brady's bread and butter. If you ever talk to him, when you see him at Pantheon, he believes in products like Dispatch Pro. But really all Dispatch Pro is, is AI within your dispatch system. And you're able to take all the different data points that we're talking, technician performance, their skills, how they're doing on each different job, how far away are they, and be able to assign the right technician. And we've seen contractors at 10, 15, 20, I've heard even higher percent increases in their Average ticket size is just based on this. So if you're looking to protect your margins, increase your profits during shoulder season, so without having to do as much with leads, great idea, great opportunity. Spot the opportunities. I know Kelsey and Andrea were talking that they had all these different campaigns go out, whether it's the leak detector or the indoor air quality, you're nurturing those customers. So spot the opportunities for those customers and equip your technicians with the information they need to expand the job within the home. With any of those add-ons. And products like FieldPro do a great job of being able to listen into those calls and understand where you can do some training, which, speaking of training, off-season is a great time to get your technicians trained, prep for the winter season, fine-tune some of those things that need to be fine-tuned. Again, if you're listening to calls, doing ride-alongs, using products like FieldPro that listen to each and every job, you're able to understand a little bit more what's going on in the field as a manager and figure out what needs to be trained on a weekend, weekend week out basis. Continue to build your membership program because your members are going to be your repeat customers. And then think about booking what's next. If you schedule that job here in the fall for that maintenance, think about scheduling that one also in the spring. It's going to save you time. It's going to save you effort. It's going to save your CSR the call. It's going to save your AI agent a call, even though it's always going to be on. So just think about that. Work smarter, not harder. Like I said earlier, we do have a $100 gift card if you're interested in any of the products we talked about today. We really hope that you walked away with some actionable strategies that you're going to be able to implement at least 1, 2, hopefully all 5 when you get the recording later on, and that you're going to be able to stay busy all year round. All these products, they're products, yes, but they're AI solutions meant to help your business and help make your life easier, automate tasks that you do on repeat. Trust me, I was in the trades. I know you're just constantly reacting to things. And when you have automated tools like Kelsey and Andrea are using, They are working smarter, not harder, and that gives them the mental bandwidth to be able to come up with attractive offers or A/B test some different things. Or if you're interested in the Max package, it's completely new. It's connecting all the tools together from, from first call all the way to final invoice. And it just has superior customer service support all the way around. I know a lot of our contractors are implementing it because it's new and they're seeing significant results so far. So if you're interested in that, feel free to hit that poll button upper right-hand corner and someone will get in contact with you just to give maybe it's a good solution or not. And then speaking of good solutions, actually good event, Pantheon. I'll be there as well. Obviously Kelsey, Andrea, we're going to be there. Andrea, any closing thoughts?

Train your guys. It's about to, it's about to get cool. And man, it's a lot easier to sell systems when it's 105 out than when it's 68. So get ready. My guys are coming for y'all.

Amazing. Kelsey, anything to close with?

You know, I echo what you said that I'm sorry that we weren't able to get to all of the questions, but if anyone wants to find me on LinkedIn or come see me at Pandion, be happy to continue to talk.

It's been a pleasure getting to work on this webinar with you. And thank you all for coming. Thank you for taking time out of your busy days. Appreciate it. I'm wishing you all the best into shoulder season. Thank you.