Unlock Revenue Opportunities With ServiceTitan Atlas and Marketing Pro | Podcast Ep. 94

we know and Atlas knows. And so when it says that recommendation of, hey, do you want to go after this? It's okay to click yes. That's the cool part about Atlas is what you don't know, you don't know. But now it's surfacing and you can take significant action and just get started.

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan, where you get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today I'm joined by Sarah Girardo. The Director of Marketing Pro here at ServiceTitan. And we are diving into all things Atlas in Marketing Pro. And right before we started recording, Sarah was mentioning stuff is changing so fast, we're innovating so quickly. So we wanted to just cue you in on what the latest is, and I'm sure we'll talk about this topic many more times in the future. But first, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm super excited.

Me too. So for people listening, if they have no idea what Atlas is, How would you describe to them what Atlas does?

Yeah, so Atlas is your AI sidekick inside of ServiceTitan. I wanna be really clear about what that means because AI gets thrown around really loosely right now. Atlas isn't a chatbot that answers the generic questions, right, that you're gonna ask. It's an intelligent layer that sits across the entire ServiceTitan platform. It knows your business. It knows your data and it can actually take action on your behalf. Right now it takes action with your approval, but we're in an agent-to-agent world and that's what we're going to be creating. So I want you to think about it as maybe your entire leadership team and your top performers all kind of rolled into one and a very accessible kind of single interface at this moment. And it provides insights to you and recommendations on what your business opportunities are so that you can take action, um, in a scalable way.

This is really exciting to talk about because there's so much data within ServiceTitan that it can be kind of hard to sift through all of it and to know where to grab everything. So to have that intelligent layer across all of it is a huge topic. So today, maybe we focus just on Marketing Pro and all the new things out there. How does Atlas work with MarketingPro?

That's a really good point, but first I wanted to address the data point because I wanna make that really real for contractors. The data is the moat when it comes to AI. And so what that means is that the platform that's closest to the data, it's going to be able to have that real-time visibility in order to take action. So the more connected systems you have to your data, the more fragmentation tax you're actually going to have inside of your business, which the fragmentation tax hits the bottom line. And something really important to realize, so real-time data utilized with AI, that is going to be able to take action faster than any other platform out there. And so your data is the moat. So no agency, no third-party marketing tool, no standalone AI access will have that to in comparison to what ServiceTitan has to the business. So Atlas is the experience that turns the data advantage into action. When it comes to Marketing Pro, this is where I get super excited because let's be honest, marketing is hard, right? And this is where the data really becomes tangible because we always say in marketing, you want to take action on the data. Otherwise you just have a bunch of data. So inside of Marketing Pro, Atlas gives you two things to work together. First, it recommends. So Atlas looks at your customer data, identifies opportunities in your base, and surfaces campaigns that you should be running that you might be missing out on. It's not going in and guessing who to target. It's looking at your job history, your customer lifecycle, your audience segments, and telling you, here's where the revenue opportunity is. That's so cool. The second thing is, and this came out at Pantheon, Atlas can now draft, edit, and launch those campaigns for you. So you go from, I know I need to do something about my dormant customers. I know I have a giant existing client database, but I can have a campaign built, audience already set, and content drafted without starting from scratch. And that's huge because sometimes campaigns can take us weeks to launch. The other side that's going to be really cool is the ad spend management. There's a lot of wasted spend in PPC, and even with our ads product, we've really realized that. And we went on the road a long time ago, about, about 5 years ago, talking about the wasted spend in ads. To think that Atlas could be brought in and you can you can see the spend and you can see what's going on inside of your ads and optimize those to your capacity, your real-time data. So really driving the conversion, I think that's the coolest thing. It's like you're really looking at the data in a totally different way that's aligned to the entire business instead of just the numbers that Google or Bing or whoever is throwing at you.

Wow. Those are so many— there are so many exciting things you already mentioned. Is that all included in Marketing Pro now with Atlas?

So you need to contact your CSM to make sure that Atlas is on in your, in your settings. But the campaign side is already inside of there, ready for you to go. It's going to launch the autopilot campaigns first because the autopilot campaigns are really the customer journey. So when you think about it, you have the lead that comes in and it can turn into either an existing customer or a customer that's missed. Right? And so there are different campaigns and different types of product that we're making in order to capture this. So right now Atlas is gonna capture the customer that moves on to the booked call and might have a nurture or a rehash opportunity. So think expiring memberships, think unsold estimates, think invoices not paid, all of these things that can be captured really quickly. And money that we just leave on the table. So I think it's a really great start and I can't wait to see where this goes. We're going to do capacity-based campaigns based on weather, based on activity that's happening inside of the environment, just to make sure that your calls are being answered and, and your jobs are being converted. Right. And you're not leaving money on the table.

Wow, that's a lot within campaigns already. What else is new with Atlas? Any other newer updates or features people may not have heard about?

I think really just getting the word out there to just get started with Atlas. Go to your Marketing Pro. If you don't have Atlas turned on and you don't see it, you'll see it inside of Autopilot. And Autopilot is in both versions of Marketing Pro that are existing today. And you can go ahead and actually speak to it, or you can use Autopilot to just turn those campaigns on. Right away. There are SMS campaigns attributed with email. So you can, you never want to just do one and done when it comes to marketing. You want to layer. And so we're working on those layers for you. And that's why we brought in email first, because always email has been the tried and true. It's your owned customer list. And then we brought in SMS. So with the proper registrations, with the proper opt-ins, you can do both now inside of Autopilot and soon ads. And then one day we'll see where, you know, reputation and direct mail sit in.

Gotcha. So very exciting. And I had to ask if it's available because I know people listening would be so excited. Like, how do I turn this on? So yes, please contact your CSM if you don't see it already, or you can just go check out the autopilot piece within Marketing Pro to take a look if it's available now.

Yeah, most definitely. And schedule some time with your Pro product specialist. I think that's really another big missing point, like part part of the ServiceTitan experience. Sometimes we forget that each product, Pro product, has a specialist dedicated to you. And if you don't know who that is, contact your CSM. If you don't know who your CSM is, reach out to me on Facebook. We have a Facebook group, and I will find it for you, find the person for you to get in touch with. But that Pro product specialist will take you through the new features that are coming out what Atlas can do, look at, you know, growth. We're really expanding quickly in our product line, and we want you to be a part of, of this experience and, and the story that we're creating. Because, you know, our products are built by the trades and for the trades, and so we want you to be involved as much as possible.

I'm so glad you brought up those resources because a lot of people kind of forget we have so many different kinds of resources too here at ServiceTitan, so it can be a bit overwhelming. But yes, your Pro Product Specialist can help you walk through everything new, everything basically Sarah mentioned today to help you get started. If someone's logging into Marketing Pro now and they do see they have Autopilot, do you have any advice on how they get set up there or maybe like the first campaign they should run?

Yeah, it's always unsold estimates. That's your, probably one of the biggest opportunities out there for you. You leave a lot of money on the table. It's not just unsold estimates of like large installs, it's unsold estimates of repairs, it's unsold estimates of memberships, right? Really think about like unsold estimates could mean a lot of different things, but we have campaigns for those, the entire experience. So memberships expiring, membership renewal, membership service due, you know, we have the one-time campaigns where the holidays get mentioned or you just need to reach out for those lapsed customers. It's really thinking about— we sat down and mapped out the customer journey and we were like, okay, what can we make to get revenue fast for our customers? And we mapped out all the data points and we're still continuing to map those out. But the ones in there right now, I would get— say, get started with the unsold estimates, turn on your SMS missed call campaigns. There's also a product called Growth AI. And it's named to be changed. But what it does is it does capture your missed call SMS, but it also follows up with a voice agent. How cool is that? Right?

Wow, that's crazy. That's leveraging the, the AI voice agent, uh, here at Sourceting. Okay, got it. It's all connected.

It's all connected and connected systems connect systems is what I've been saying because I think that's the most important part is we sometimes think of these pro products as individual products, but really what they're created to make your entire experience in ServiceTitan more automated and efficient. And so like, if you think about it, you have Contact Center Pro has voice agents already in there answering calls, making sure that nothing is missed. You have Growth AI that captures the missed call, follows up with voice agents. You have Marketing Pro that follows up with the lead that's already in existence and will work on leads as well. You have DispatchPro that dispatches the technician to the right job at the right time. And then it just keeps going on. You have a price book, you have, you write, like all of these work together to make your business more automated and efficient. And that's called our MAX program is what that's really about. But when you have all of these tools, The hardest thing that I see is our customers are like, well, I'm learning one, I, but then I bought all of them, right? And I know that that's hard to do, but when you leverage all of them and optimize with them and meet with your pro product specialist, it becomes an ecosystem that works so well together that your, it drives your business. Like, The goal is to fully have an Agentic experience from call to the end of the invoice. And, you know, a lot of our customers are working towards that now with our Max program. So I think that's pretty cool.

That's very timely you mentioned that because I think in one week we're going to have a webinar with Ara about the Max program and this entire ecosystem. And the picture you're painting is very much like the 1 1 3 or 5 or 10. Versus— Yeah, it's just greater than like the little pieces put together. They kind of magnify or multiply each other.

It does because we often operate in silos and it's not just in our product, it's in our businesses, right? Marketing's over here, they're not communicating to the CSRs and then they forget about operations. But, you know, with poor operations, marketing can't perform. And so we have to look at the ecosystem and say connected systems connect systems. And how can we connect our systems more to really have excellent operations.

And Alice, I think, is such a good demonstration of that because of the AI layer that just like sits across all of the data. There's a couple features in here in the notes that you provided me. I wanted to ask a little bit about the Autopilot library and then maybe we can dig into the Atlas recommendations a little bit.

Yeah, so this is really cool. So what we did was we in Marketing Pro make templates for the trades specifically with high-level marketing strategy inside of them. And there's over 1,000 templates inside of Marketing Pro for email and direct mail. We took those templates for the customer journey that, you know, you, you want to get after first, and we put them and assigned them audiences. So we built the audience segment behind it so that it would work within anyone's ecosystem. And those templates are the Autopilot library where you can find the SMS and the email built in. The direct mail isn't built into Autopilot just yet, but you do have access to that through a Canva direct mail gallery. It's also, the link is on our Marketing Pro resource page. It is in our Facebook group. And if you need it, just let us know. We'll drop it here as well. But the cool thing about this again is that It's just 2 clicks to get a campaign started. And if you really need to go further, Atlas is at the very top. So you can ask it if it doesn't bring you the recommendation, which it will first, you can ask it more questions about the data that it's providing you so that you can validate because your data input is going to be what you get back, right? So that's the other part. Is good data in, good data out. So when you look at your data inside of ServiceTitan and you say, cool, it's operating off of this, well, you've been operating off of this. Now is your time to go back and say, oh my gosh, do I have $4 million in unsold estimates just sitting there? Like, did you look at the follow-up tab? Like, is that what it's saying to me? It's going to— Atlas is going to surface surface those recommendations to you. And, you know, it might take a step back to be like, I didn't know what I didn't know, but we know and Atlas knows. And so when it says that recommendation of, hey, do you want to go after this? It's okay to click yes, it's okay to click to take action. And I think that a lot of our contractors at first will are kind of like, oh, well, I just didn't know. That's the cool part about Atlas is what you don't know, you don't know, but now it's surfacing and you can take significant action and just get started.

That's a great segue into Atlas recommendations. If someone's in Marketing Pro, let's say they have Atlas or they talk to a CSM, they turn it on. What does recommendations look like in ServiceNow?

Yeah, so it is going to populate as an alert. There's going to be a lot of different experiences that you're going to go through because we're testing this right now, right? To to see how we respond to alerts and notifications, because that again is human psychology. And so we don't want to overwhelm people, but we actually do want to get these out and make sure that you're taking action on them. So it's going to show you recommendations along, again, unsold estimates, your memberships expiring, your lapsed customers that need service, your basically every, your data points inside of ServiceTitan that need to take action on. And so that's what it's really going to recommend. And then it's going to say, okay, would you like to run this campaign? Or eventually it'll be aligned— pretty soon it'll be aligned to your capacity and it'll say you have this much room left on the table. Like what campaign? Let's get this campaign started for you today. And that's where it'll be really exciting when Ads comes into play because again, Ads has that dynamic audience or that dynamic subset where there's a lot of wasted spend and sometimes when it gets really hot, if I'm an HVAC contractor and I forget to turn that off or pause it, because you never want to turn it all the way off, like Atlas will surface that to you and say, hey, it's really hot and your capacity is full now and you're booking out for an extended period of time, which could have a high cancellation rate. And so like, maybe we need to move some jobs around, maybe we need to rethink the plan and the— and really help you just get there faster with the data that you're seeing and hopefully that you can further understand. You know, there's just so many data points inside of ServiceTitan, so it's good and everyone has a different story with their data.

Yeah, I like how you're— this circles back to your first point about all of the data in ServiceTitan. There's such a tease with the adaptive capacity planning and how that's going to implement in because of the real-time nature of all that and how you can throttle spend accordingly. I'm going to put out the safe harbor statement. You know, these are future forward-looking features. We're not exactly sure on the timing of when these will come out, but I'm really excited you brought it up because I think that'll have our customers leaning in more for anything that relates to Atlas and like the future of Atlas in MarketingPro. Going back to your, your point earlier, the tax, what was it called? Fragmentation taxation.

Yeah, the fragmentation tax. Yes.

Yeah, fragmentation tax. I had never heard that before, uh, that phrase, but it makes so much sense and it reminds me of how we have a lot of customers come on this podcast to talk about Pro and I think the biggest reason they mention is because it's all connected in ServiceTitan and the data is so close versus a third party that has to pull out like maybe a few columns of data, then like map it to their own data and the back and forth. So I don't know if that's a point maybe you can speak to a little bit more to illustrate, but Yeah, it's so true.

So, you know, even me as a marketer, when I was in the trades, I was working to figure out all of these reports and working to figure out what these metrics really meant. And then I had, you know, at that point, because I'm way old school ServiceTitan, it was just email, right? And so an email was the hardest thing to attribute to because if you use a different system, you had to at that time pull out your list. Scrub your list, make sure it was clean, and then design a template in this other system. But then there was really no connection back. So then I had to like manually attribute these things and I was like, this doesn't, doesn't make sense. It would take me literally like a good 2 weeks just to do that. With AI now it's a little bit easier and there are API connections. Um, but there's still that, that disconnect. And the disconnect is one data source could be telling you this and the other data source could be telling you this. And so you're like, well, what data source do I believe? What's the source of truth? Well, the source of truth is always going to have a deviation, but it's always going to be where your job— where your records are held. And you can't get closer than that, than your— the moat, which is Surface Titan, because there's always going to be either a lag in data due to connections and API because that's just how they work in every instance, not in every business. And there's always going to be the opportunity to clean our data. But the fragmentation task is, or tax for marketers is that we have like 50 tabs open because we're doing like all of these things in different ways. But in the end, that hits our bottom line in time. And time is money. And so when we think about what we're going— the world that we're going into, which is what we're already into, is AI. It's going to become this agent-to-agent experience eventually. That's what we're— that's what's happening right that we speak. And these agents will be talking to each other and the marketer's role has changed to an orchestrator. And we're looking at the data, we're saying, hey, this agent looks great. Like, Let's build our own agent. Let's do that. But you can only do that with, you can do that inside of, you know, your, your moat. And I think like that's the part where we have to think of, we're not just here today. What could the vision be for tomorrow? And then tomorrow will definitely be something totally different the next day.

I like that picture you painted though of the orchestrator because we're already starting to see it a little bit with Atlas. Atlas is like this thing giving you recommendations, this thing that can execute a bunch of campaigns and you're already starting to manage those things. And later, as you, as you mentioned, it being connected to more and more within ServiceTitan.

And then you, you measure the command center, right? You look at that and you're like, well, does this work? Can I iterate? Can I make a different— does it need more? I think that's the coolest part is that, you know, everyone is hesitant on using AI in some instances, but really when you lean into it and you test it and you play with things first and you're innovative, which a lot of our customers are right now. I've seen just so many. I think that they're the ones that are going to be ahead of the curve and the ones that are not using AI or tools at their advantage, they feel not left behind, but they feel more confused. And I don't want that for anyone. So yeah, however we can help, let us know. And, you know, we're always looking for great customers to partner with and test out these products. So Feel free to reach out. We drop those links on Facebook as well in our group.

Amazing. So yeah, I think most ServiceTitan customers, or maybe a vast majority, are on Marketing Pro already. So all this you heard today should be great news. Go in, check if you have Atlas already right now. If not, reach out to your CSM, your pro product specialist will get you set up. And if you're not on Marketing Pro, this is just like another big reason why you should be on it because it is innovating so quickly.

Yeah, and we're excited. We're excited to build with you. And, you know, we're excited just to really create an experience that will change the trades. And we're, we've already done it and we'll just keep going.

Amazing. So Sarah, for people listening who, I feel like everyone listening probably knows who you are already. They've either heard you speak on stage or somewhere else, but if they want more Sarah Girardot, where should they go for your podcast?

Yeah, most definitely. So I do have a podcast. It's called the Trademark Podcast. I know, very original. It has an E. At the end, so Trademark. And we talk about AI and marketing in the trades, and I really bring a different kind of viewpoint. If you look at the guests on there, they are not only our customers, people I know in the trades, but also from different industries, because I learn quickly about like customer experiences from— like the last one I was, he did dental marketing, and I was so interested in dental marketing because You know, they never let you leave without booking an appointment.

That's so true. That is so true. You try to walk outta that office and they're like, we're gonna get you on the calendar for your next cleaning.

That's so— Exactly. Exactly. So, um, very interested. I did, there's new construction, there's everything, um, that we really are talking about, the AI infrastructure, looking about how the trades can help. It's an exciting podcast. I would love if you listen to that and I really appreciate you allowing me to even pitch it.

So, of course. Yeah. From one podcaster to another. And, um, people already love this audio format if they're listening. So I, I'm sure they'll love yours as well. So we'll include a link in to that in the description as well.

Yeah. And if you need to find me, I'm always on the, uh, Facebook group for Service Titan Marketing Pro. I'm in there answering as many questions as I can. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn or wherever. Just reach out. I'm here to help. And our team is always on the road doing Toolbox live events. Or right now we're gonna partner with Titan Tailgate and go out to Chicago next month to visit some more customers. We've been doing a road show. So yeah, we are just out there wanting to help as much as possible. So please reach out.

I have no idea how you do all that you do because for people who are just listening, I wanna point out Sarah's background. She has the badges from all these events where she's speaking, and I'm sure you're like constantly in jet lag from all your travel. But thank you for coming on today and, uh, sharing all your knowledge and, and wisdom with our audience.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate you.