183. Make Leads Out of Nothing | Megan Beattie

So, you know, pick your hard, right? Like, it's all hard. It's all difficult. And we have to pick, you know, how hard it's going to be. I mean, we have to decide as business owners, like, are we going to let the fear handicap us or are we going to use it as a driving factor? And the great companies, they use it as a driving factor and they say, well, I don't ever want to be in the position where I don't have leads and I have no way to create them myself.

This is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast brought to you by G4 Marketing. Interviews with today's top home improvement entrepreneurs about marketing, sales, money, mindset, and lifestyle.

Now here's your host, Brian Kaskavalciyan.

All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group. And she's back. Megan knows marketing. Megan Beatty is back again. We could talk— Megan is another one of those guests that we could talk to like every week, every month, and she will deliver good information on what's going on out in the industry and how to overcome the challenges and issues of marketing and sales out there. So Megan, welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me back again.

So it's been about 2 months since Accelerate. For those of you that were there, you know, Megan did not just one presentation, she did two. She actually, she absolutely killed in both presentations. She was our highest rated speaker, which should not come as a surprise. I am getting lower and lower on the list. Megan, it's starting to hurt my ego a little bit. But as long as the audience gets good information, which they did with you. So we talked about— so I want to do a follow-up because it's— we're 4 months— we're the fourth— no, first quarter's over for the year. We're going into Q2.

Where are we?

What's going on out there? What are you hearing from all of your clients?

Well, most of them are still working on getting their processes in place for the call center, but we're also seeing an increase in requests for special event marketing training and coaching as well as canvassing. So face-to-face marketing. And then also we have a few companies that have retail programs. So your Costco, your Sam's Club, your Home Depot programs. I'm coaching in all of those different areas right now, but I will tell you the face-to-face marketing is really making some strides. Minds, you know, people that really never thought of putting one of those type of departments in place are seeing and taking heed to the advice we've been giving, which is learn how to make your own leads, don't become a victim, right? And so we're getting a lot of people that are finding ways to develop those programs at their company. And, and some of them are sort of dipping a toe in with a brand ambassador program. And it's, you know, it's going to be a small thing, but it's going to increase their customer retention, and it's going to increase some leads with referrals and around their job sites. So that's nice. But that's, that's kind of the smallest. It's not going to give us a huge volume of leads, right? Not, not with one brand ambassador. However, some are developing show and event programs that are going to give them, you know, a substantial amount of volume. And then some are going old fashioned and they want to do the door knocking campaigns. And some companies that have never tried that before are requesting help with that. So, you know, we're seeing, you know, consultation requests in many different areas, but mostly in, in marketing where people know that they need to set up an actual program. And train people properly so that they can get the most out of their conversions.

So, so one of the big things that you talked about, one of your presentations was on this idea of make marketing, which is what you were just talking about. So let's remind the listeners two things. One, what is make marketing? And two, why is it so important?

Absolutely. So in make marketing, there's, there's a few names for it. So just so everyone knows we're speaking the same language, make marketing, also known as inorganic marketing, you know, what those type of lead generation programs are, is they are programs where the lead or the inquiry is actually generated by effective marketing, by an effective marketer or effective marketing, and brings people into our company that may not necessarily be making a purchase in the next 30 days, right? These are not the people that are online, you know, searching on Google bath pros near me. These are people that are like, yeah, I've got a future plan of doing a project and, you know, I might check out my options, but they're not super urgent in terms of their, their project. And so what make marketing or inorganic marketing does is with effective scripting, we can take those people who don't want to do the project right away and move their timeline up by creating urgency on the phone or in person at the door or at a show or an event. So the opposite of that is sort of the traditional marketing where people are calling off TV, radio, they're at 100% dissatisfaction with their current project at their home, and they've decided they can wait no more and they must act now. And then, you know, within organic, we're catching people usually about 50 to 70% of the way, you know, up that ladder, and, and we're converting them because we're able to close the gap between them being 70% of the way ready and, and pushing them up to that 100% with effective scripting.

Yeah, and we're talking about make marketing because make marketing is one of those ways where you can control your business, you can control your future, your destiny, if you will, using a— yeah, A grand word, right? But it's true. It's like the beauty of this business. One of the things about this business is that if you have no leads today, if you have no zero opportunities, all you have to do is get up out of your chair, go out your front door, get in your car, drive to a neighborhood where you've either done work or you've targeted as a good area where I can put in windows or roofing or whatever you sell, painting, whatever. And I can just go start knocking on doors and somebody at some point within the first few hours is going to say, yeah, I was thinking about doing that. But like you said, it's not a real big issue right now, but we could make them into a lead and an opportunity to make some money.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when it comes to make marketing like that, the idea is, is, you know, we can sit around and theorize and, you know, say, well, this direct mail piece track, will this one not? Do you think this TV commercial is effective? And this message on radio, do you think this will work? You know, we could sit around and debate those things, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do those sources, but at some point someone's got to put boots on the ground and make sure that we're feeding our sales team today. And if we don't have some effort in our business, even if it's just one department or one program, if we don't have something that is out every single day looking to make leads out of nothing, then we're always going to be vulnerable to the next trend in the economy. We're always going to be vulnerable to, well, did this campaign track or did it not? What if I put out a message on direct mail I think is really going to be amazing and then I get zero phone calls? Like, there has to be some ability to go out and create a lead. If there is not, then we really leave ourselves to be victims of, you know, what's going on in the marketplace. And that's just not a good place to be as a business owner, is to be sitting in a victim chair. You know, we have to be able to create something out of nothing. We literally can take a van, a piece of paper, a pen, and a clipboard and a yellow vest, and we can create opportunity where there was none yesterday. And so, you know, it's important that we have some sort of way that is not dependent on, you know, sitting around and hoping the phone rings, that we're able to bring leads into our business. And so for every company, that's different, Brian. It could be canvassing. Some companies, canvassing would be a death sentence. On the other hand, you know, they might have a database full of, you know, 10,000 names that they've paid for that we've just never converted or resurrected. So, you know, There's several ways to do it, but the point is, is that we want to make the most of the slots we have on the calendar. And if they're not filled by traditional marketing, well, we've got to get them filled somehow. So, you know, the make marketing is a great idea for that.

So I know that the idea of make marketing, face-to-face lead generation, it scares people. How do you overcome that as an entrepreneur, I guess, or as a business owner? How do you overcome or how do you help people kind of overcome that fear?

Yeah, well, the first thing is there has to be a process in place so that this department or this program that we're developing will run in a predictable fashion to some degree, right? Because the scary part and the fear and fear in general, like we're not even saying just with business, fear in general mostly comes from fear of the unknown or fear of loss. Like those are the two main fears that we're dealing with when we're talking about an entrepreneur or a business owner. And what they're afraid of is a couple of things. Number one, fear of the unknown is, oh my gosh, what will happen? We've never done a canvassing program. We've never done special events. What if it bombs? And then there's, you know, fear of loss. Like, what if I dump all this money into a program, I dump all this money into hiring a consultant, and it flops, and we end up on the other side where we've lost money and we haven't created leads? And I would say both of those things can definitely happen if we don't, you know, find the right help, because these are not programs that can just be generated by, you know, watching a YouTube video and then going out there. There's a lot of planning. There's a lot of strategic things that we have to have in place in order to do this properly. And part of that's the scripting, the words coming out of our mouths. But part of it is the setup at shows and events. Part of it is, you know, does the price that we have to pay to get into a big box store and market, is that worth the, is the juice worth the squeeze in the long run? Because those programs can get expensive. You know, we have to weigh all these options before we decide, you know, what's good for us. But most importantly, like in terms of the fear, the question is, what do you fear more? Do you fear starting a program and it failing, or do you fear going out of business? Because that's a real option for you if you don't have leads. I mean, the reality is, is even if we're doing, you know, take marketing or traditional forms of marketing, we have to have sales coming in today to pay for the marketing that we're going to conduct in the next month, 2 months, 3 months, year. So, you know, someone's got to be doing it. Someone has to be bringing in the leads. Someone has has to be on the front line in the trenches. And so while that can be fearful, people thinking, oh, this new program, how are my sales teams going to react? You know, the reality is, is make marketing, it also shines a spotlight in those other areas in our business that we might be slacking on, right? So if you have a very undisciplined sales team, oh, bring in a canvassing department, that'll really push them right over the edge. I mean, my opinion, because I've coached and managed sales teams, is that, well, they can get their own leads if they'd like. And here's a map of 300 houses, they they can feel free to go out and door knock and get as many as they want. Brian, there's no limit. They can generate as many leads as they'd like to if they don't like mine, right? But the reality is, is that it also shines a spotlight on, is our confirmation team doing their job? Is our call center team doing their job if I start a canvassing division? Because if they're not, we're going to find out pretty quickly. And if the sales team isn't doing theirs either and they don't know how to close a lead that tells them no when they're walking in the front door, well, then we've got a spotlight on another area that needs some work, right? So, you know, I think the fear is that we'll bring in, you know, some sort of new department or new lead generation and it won't work. And then they'll wind up on the other end having made a large investment. But I'll tell you what, how is that different from any other traditional form of marketing? You and I both know when people ask our opinion on, on different campaigns, it's like, well, we try it and we see if it works and then we adjust, right? Like, we can all theorize about it, but the truth of the matter is, is there's one test and that is, well, what happened when you did it? And so, you know, there's a lot of thinking and not as much execution in our industry. You know, there's, there's, there's a lot of thinking about what we're going to do and not near enough doing, which is boots on the ground, right?

So, so it's interesting. So you said, you just said a lot. I might, as, as you, when you started this, I was thinking, well, I was good. The next question I was going to ask you is, what do people get wrong? And you listed off some of the things that they get wrong. There's no system, there's no scripting, there's, you know, how do we set the thing up the right way and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so you listed out some of those things, and maybe we could talk about a few of those things. But here's the thing that got me. You said it shines a spotlight on other aspects of the business. And I can't help but wonder, because I think I have to be careful how I say this, but hey, this is all about, you know, this, this is all about tough love. Okay, so I think that You know, we're here because we want to help you get better. So don't take the things that we might say the wrong way. We're just here trying to help you get better. That's my disclaimer now to the listener. But when you say shine a spotlight, what you're really saying is here's the other parts of your business that are messed up. And as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as someone that works as hard as we know you do, The last thing you want is shining a spotlight on the stuff that's not working. And then what's even worse is that now you've got 4 or 5 spotlights. So your scripting is good, your inbound, your intake isn't good, your confirmation's not good, your sales team is pissed off. So it has a ripple effect of all of these other things. And so then the question is, is that, well, Well, do I really want to put myself through that? Do I really want to shine the light on all the stuff that's not working and just kind of keep going the way that I'm going? And it's an option. It's definitely an option for people. You don't have to do anything. You could just keep doing this. But if you want a business that serves you, serves your family, serves your team, serves your community, if that's important to you too, which I know it is for a lot of people, you can't be afraid of what might come up as not working. And so one of the big things you also talked about at Accelerate, your second presentation was about lead efficiency. Leads are not— I, I don't know what, you know, what I'm hearing from my clients is leads are definitely getting more expensive. Cost per leads is going up, and we know it's never cheaper, it's always more. Have you heard much about leads, like, pulling back, like, not as many as there were last year?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's happening, and that's forcing us to invest more in other areas, right? So, like, the natural flow of the lead, the, the inbound lead, the coveted, you know, inbound lead, you know, it's becoming more expensive to get. And again, law of supply and demand, you know, we're getting less of them, so we're having to pay more to get them in general, right? And So it's forcing a lot of companies to look at other things. Some are pushing, some are looking, the ones that don't want to put a ton of work into these programs, Brian, the make marketing, they just spend more on lead aggregator, which can be, you know, a viable option. The problem is it should always be supplemental and it ends up becoming their main lead source. And then, you know, when those companies, those lead aggregators, they slow down just like anyone else because they're operating off of online inquiries where people say, I need windows, I need bathrooms for my home. So when the rest of SEO and pay-per-click slows down, so do lead aggregators. The difference is lead ag is still going to charge you. You're still going to pay for just as many leads. It's just that the quality is going to be lower. And instead of getting bathroom leads, you're going to get faucet fixes. Instead of window leads, you're going to get windshield repairs. So, you know, pick your hard, right? Like, it's all hard. It's all difficult. And we have to pick, you know, how hard it's going to be. I mean, we have to decide as business owners, like, you know, are we going to let the fear handicap us or are we going to use it as a driving factor? And, you know, the, the great companies, they use it as a driving factor and they say, well, I don't ever want to be in the position where I don't have leads and I have no way to create them myself. You know, on the other hand, is it hard to put leadership in place? Yes. You have to train them and coach them. Yes. Do you have to manage them? Yes. Do you have to inspect what you expect, check on them in the field time to time? You do. These are all things that have to be done. But when, when you're left to your own devices and those, those programs aren't managed or aren't set up properly from the beginning, that's when you end up spending a bunch of money and getting no return. You know, it's just like a customer in our industry. It's very rare that we get a customer that comes back and says, wow, I spent way too much money on this home improvement project and I'm not happy. It's I didn't spend enough and I'm not happy, right? Well, the same thing happens with our industry. I didn't spend enough with a consultant, or I just tried to, you know, find someone to tell me what they did at their company and I tried to model mine after it. Well, that's fine, but that company's belief systems, values, the way that they do things might not be the same as yours. So you might need a different approach or program setup, you know. So it's all individualized to each person's company. But too often it's, it's just like Brian, again, with a customer. I equate everything to being like a customer. You know, when we leave a house, when we're at the end of a sales presentation or even during the demo, we always tell the customer, you know, you have a choice to do nothing. If you leave these windows in your house just the way that they are, you can always choose to do nothing, but there is a cost to doing nothing. And that cost of doing nothing is, do you think the problem is going to get better or worse? And the customer always says, well, it's probably going to get worse. Absolutely. Same thing in our business.

Yeah.

The problem is only, you know, if I find out I have a leadership and a confirmation problem, I can avoid it. I can keep going the way that I am, but eventually it's going to rear its ugly head again. And so I would rather know about the problem and at least have a plan to fix it in the future at some point than to just walk around blindly and hope I get enough leads and one one day sales team can't figure out why they only have one appointment a day instead of two. And pretty soon we're scrounging around to get them 5 a week. And then all of a sudden we don't know what happened and we're going, ah, this industry is really hard. Well, I mean, there might have been other opportunities for us to make it not so hard on ourselves, but it's work.

Wow. So to the listener, go back like 2 minutes or 3 minutes and listen to everything she just said again, because because that's the business, and that's any business. You know, this one has, this one has its moving parts. We got to put that, that lead through a phone scripting process system so that we can make appointments. The appointment has to be issued to a salesperson, and hopefully, ideally, that salesperson is trained on a step selling system and understands inside out, backwards and forwards. This is the process that we follow and on and all throughout. And it's any one thing that's broken in that chain will have an impact on your results, on your profitability in your business. So, yeah, so it's, it's like you got to look at your business and say, okay, do I really, do I want to do this thing the right way? Do I want it? I guess it's, you know, it's funny you said earlier about with clients and, you know, they have, they come to you for this problem, but they really end up having this problem and that. When people, when people come to see me, they'll come to me and they'll say, well, we're not getting enough leads or we're not just all the same typical, you know, what we almost invariably almost always go back to. What do you want? What do you want your life to look like? How much money is it going to take for you to live the life that you want? How much time do you want to spend on whatever it is you want to spend it on? Do you want to take weekends off? Do you want to take weekends plus a week, a month, 3 months? What is it that you want? And then we can start to build a business around it. And the only way to do that is through a lot of what you're talking about. You've got to be able to, to shine a light on what's not working and say and admit this is not working as good as it should. I need to tighten this up. I need a process around it. I need the right leadership in place behind it. I need a good accountability system, and I need to make sure I have a way of tracking and monitoring this and making sure that it's being done the right way. It's not easy, but once it's done, it makes it work. So one thing I failed to mention is that Megan will be back speaking at LeadCon. I completely forgot at the beginning to even mention LeadCon. So I am really excited. Tony Hody, who Megan works with, and I have been talking for a couple of years about getting together and putting together a killer marketing event. And so we're gonna do that June 6th and 7th. It's gonna be in Atlanta, Georgia. Information, go to leadconevent.com. leadconevent.com. Megan will be there. Megan will have plenty of time to— you, uh, I had to give you 2 spots at Accelerate and that still wasn't enough time. So Megan will be presenting again, and if you've never seen Megan speak, she is incredible and the information that she provides is amazing. Amazing and useful. And what's the thing you like? Implementable. You could take what she tells you and actually like take notes and go home and implement what she tells you. So that's going to be LeadCon, June 6th and 7th. Megan will be there. Okay, so that's my big plug for that. And I'm looking at the clock because I know we both have a hard stop in about 6 minutes. So Let's say where, where are we right now? We're going into Q2, busy time. They're starting. This is the busiest time. Next two quarters are the busiest time for home improvements. What's— I'm putting you on the spot. What's your best advice going into Q2 and Q3 2023?

Have a way to make leads and whatever fashion that might be in. Let's maximize that to its greatest potential because even if you don't need the leads right now, number one, you might in the future. And number two, they are also going to drive down the cost on expensive make marketing that you're probably already doing. What we just talked about, Brian, was that leads are getting more expensive to purchase, right? Guess what is not getting any more expensive is the ones that you've already purchased in your database. Those are the same price you paid for them originally, and they're just sitting there like a lump of gold that we most of the time are not even paying attention to. So I would say whatever you need to do for your company, it might be individual to you, but you need to have some sort of, of marketing where you can create leads out of nothing. That way, the day before, when you're looking at your schedule tonight and you don't have enough leads for tomorrow— and I know as an owner or manager, you know this feeling— you actually have a solution for that versus just sitting there and saying, oh, I guess we don't have enough leads. So we live and die by the calendar fill.

Yeah. And, you know, one of the things I hear a lot is when we talk about about sales team readiness, sales team capacity. A lot of people, what they'll say is, well, because we tell them that, yeah, I have 2 salespeople. Well, you really need like 4. You really want to grow your business, you need 4, you need 5. And they almost always say, yeah, but I don't have enough leads for those salespeople. If I was to bring more in, the guys that I have now are gonna go nuts, and then I don't have enough leads. Leads. And how do you answer that question? What do you tell people about that?

Well, I mean, it's the age-old chicken and the egg, right? And the question is, you know, which comes before the other. I would rather have too many salespeople and not enough leads, right, than too many leads and not enough salespeople. Because if I had to pick which, you know, which is the lesser of two evils, I have options. If I have enough salespeople, I can teach them how to generate a couple leads a week if I need to. What I can't do is take salespeople that could be underperforming. And if I only have 2, I'm already at a detriment because if one leaves me, I'm stuck. And that is a problem, right? Because then I'm in lack mentality. I'm in a tough position if I only have 2 sales reps regardless. I need to have more than that because when one underperforms, he has to feel the heat that the other one might take the leads. And if he does not, he will continue to underperform as long as I tolerate it because it's not what we preach, it's what we tolerate. And so So for me, with the sales team, it's never been more true than this specific scenario. I hear this all the time. I would rather have sales reps getting 1 lead a day than have sales reps getting 4 leads a day. And that's just the, the sheer number of things and everything I've learned in our industry screams that that is the right answer. And too, too often we get it backwards and that's when we shine that spotlight, Brian. Well, if you have sales reps holding you hostage over leads, you have a recruiting problem and you have a leadership problem. And so that, that answer from a customer or from a client that says, well, my other sales reps are going to get pissed and they don't even have enough leads. Do they really not have enough leads or are they just not allowed to cherry-pick the way that they want to with this amount of leads? Because that's usually the truth of the matter. And so that's the truth.

Yeah. And we know that over the last 2.5, 3 years, there's been a lot of that going on. And if you think that that's how it's going to be always, you're potentially in a lot of trouble. And Megan's talking about the making leads and efficiency with leads and training and leadership and all of that. It's a new day. And if you're, if you're not there yet, you better get there. Otherwise it could end bad for you. So with that, Megan, thank you so much. How do people, how do people find you? Sorry. How do people find you?

Yeah, no, that's okay. No, I'm, I'm all over social media. You can find me on Facebook, Megan Knows Marketing. You can You can find me on Instagram, Megan Nose Marketing, TikTok. I've got a lot of great content on there. Even if you just follow me to get the content, you know, there's a lot of tips and videos I make and stuff I share day in and day out. Might be some stuff you want to share with your team, right? You can find me on LinkedIn as well, Megan Beattie. And then if you want to email me directly, megan@tonyhody.com. I do have an assistant that is working full-time to set up discovery calls. So don't be afraid to reach out and we'll get you in touch and, and we'll get something scheduled to see how I can I can help. The very least, the half hour we spend on the phone during the discovery call, I'm sure you'll take some things you can apply whether we work together or not. So feel free to reach out and see what I can help you with.

Awesome.

Cool.

So look, I trust very, very— I've said it before here and I'll say it always— very, very few people I trust in this business. She is one of the few people on that list that I trust. So if you need help with any of this stuff, she is your girl. Come and see us at LeadCon. This is gonna be— I think this is part of the— I'm glad that Tony and I are able to do this in this year in particular because, you know, things are not going to get easier. And if there's a lot of big companies out there that are backed by a lot of money with a lot of marketing power, a lot of firepower, and, you know, as a smaller company, you can compete against them very effectively and make a ton of money, but you can't be afraid to shine the spotlight. And so, you know, do what you can. Get to, get to LeadCon. So it's leadconevent.com. And Megan, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I'm excited. We'll be 2 months from now, from today, we will be at LeadCon. And I hope I've said LeadCon enough. Have I said LeadCon enough in this episode? Yeah, I don't, I don't usually plug things this hard, but it's an important event and anybody involved in marketing should really be there. Okay, Megan, give Dan my best. Thank you so much for being here. I'll talk to you soon. Everybody that's listening, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Let me you. Did it help you look at your business in a different way? Did it spark an idea or ideas that you hadn't thought of before? Do you have a list of action items that you can take and implement into your business or your life today? I really hope so. If it did, I'd like to ask you a favor. Would you leave a 5-star review of the podcast? By doing so, you'll help other contractors find the podcast more easily so that we can help them achieve more success, wealth, and freedom. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast so you get access to the latest episodes as soon as they're available. We're always striving to provide you with great content, so you don't want to miss what's coming up. In fact, if you haven't already, make sure you go to thewealthycontractor.com and get your free copy of my latest book, The 7 Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. Just pay shipping and handling, and I'll take care of the cost of book. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan.