Optimizing Sales and Streamlining CRM for Home Service Success with Jason Kramer

This is Dan— Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm here with Jason Kramer, founder and CEO of Cultivize, a consulting firm specializing in lead nurturing and CRM implementation. With over 20 years of experience, Jason has worked with global and local brands to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales, and he's here to share his insights on optimizing the sales process and how to identify Poor Performing Marketing Campaigns. Jason, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Daniel. Happy to be here.

I'm glad to jump into it. I love the topics for today, talking about sales process, marketing, CRM. Super excited. Can you give me like, what are some just general tips on optimizing a sales process? Like what, what should we be thinking about when we're trying to, to improve our sales process? Because I know a lot of folks, you know, they are a little bit intimidated by the sales process. Some folks are still just sending estimates in via email. They're not presenting on the spot. Maybe they don't have a very good follow-up software that kind of helps them follow up with prospects once they provided that estimate. What are some things should we be thinking about to optimize that sales process?

So we deal with a lot of home service-based businesses. And so one of the things we know is you're always chasing that next lead, right? And, and a lot of times if you are in a sales role, you might be, you know, going from house to house, right? And, and doing those quotes. And so trying to keep track of everything becomes difficult. And even when you get back to the office, you're tired or other things may come up. So one of the things we always look for and we start talking to a potential new client is what are they doing now to follow up with all the leads they have and how would they even classify a lead? You know, there are some companies that I'm sure are listening today that get leads from their website or they get phone calls kind of inbound. Right. And so you might consider that as a lead. But how do you qualify that? Right. Just because they're calling, maybe they don't have the budget to work with you, or maybe they just need one small corner of their kitchen painted. But you're not coming in unless you need to paint like a whole room as your minimum. So, you know, I think part of it is identifying first, how do you qualify leads to make sure that the leads that are going into your sales process are qualified? What we often sometimes see happen, Daniel, is that you can spend weeks or months chasing a potential client that isn't even have the capacity to work with you because you can't help them with the services you provide. They can't afford you, any number of other reasons. Maybe they're even geographically out of your area. You know, a painter's not gonna travel 100 miles to go paint a house for $5,000 probably, right? It's not financially, it doesn't make sense. So when we talk about the sales process, we talk about what are all the steps in order to acquire that lead, right? That, that potential customer and the steps to actually win that business. And so some of the simple things that we often look at is, you get a lead in the world of painting, unless you're maybe more sophisticated, you might need to go and do an in-home visit to actually see what needs to be done to do an estimate. You need to write the estimate. As you mentioned, some people are emailing it, some people might be even doing it by hand, right? On a piece of paper. So what is your process to actually create an estimate? What is the process to follow up with that estimate? And then for the people that don't say yes right away, you need to build a process to nurture and to automate that follow-up, especially if it's a larger job. They might be getting multiple bids and it might be something they want to do, you know, once tax season hits and they get some extra cash in their pocket. So you need a system in place to what we call nurture those people. And it's not hounding them saying, hey Daniel, you're ready to do the job. It's how can we help you? What answers, you know, questions do you have? What answers we can provide just to make them feel comfortable. And so none of those things are difficult, Daniel. It's just about the repetitive process to do those and having a system that's gonna help you keep yourself accountable as the salesperson, but also to keep the whole organization as the company accountable as well.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, especially with, you know, a lot of folks, their average job size is $5,000 to $10,000. And for a a homeowner, that's a big investment. So their buying cycle, you know, might be kind of long. They might sit on it for a while before they actually decide to paint, you know, finally pull the trigger on, on painting their house, the full exterior of their home, or full interior of their home. So you might have to nurture them for a while, which you mentioned. And if you're doing a lot of estimates, you're doing, you know, estimates every day, that can be a lot of people to nurture simultaneously. So having ability to automate that, it can make your life a lot easier.

So not only that, also I think it helps prevent against what we call pipeline leakage, right? So you're putting all this time in, whether you're door knocking, whether you're, you know, doing direct mail, you're doing, you know, Facebook advertising, whatever you're doing, you're spending money and time to generate these leads. And so, you know, for example, we just started working over the summer with a roofing company. As I mentioned, we work with a lot of different home service industries. And so roofing is one, pool construction is another, painting, of course. But so this roofing company does about 1,000 quotes a year is what they told us before they started working with them. They were tracking everything with a Google Sheet, but it was all manual and there was no way to really keep track of everything once it got past, hey, we sent them a proposal. I was just on a phone call with the owner today and they do about $7 million a year in business, this company. And so what we looked at in the pipeline was we built another stage for them, Daniel, for the back burner, the people that didn't say no, they just haven't made a decision yet. I don't know if you want to take a guess, but they got over $1.5 million worth of bids in that back burner pipeline. That 8 months ago before they were working with us, they would've had just forgotten about. They wouldn't have even had any insight to keep track of all that. So not only did they close about $5 million so far this year in business, they got another like $1.5 million that's just sitting there. Even if they closed 10% of it, right? It's still business that they would not have had if they didn't have a way to keep track of all of those things.

Yeah, that's, that's huge. I mean, I think a lot of painting businesses, they, neglect, which you mentioned, the prospects, you know, your list of prospects, people who haven't signed up with you yet. You know, that list of folks that you send them an estimate, but they haven't signed the proposal yet. And you also even have your current customers who have done business with you and maybe will do business with you in the future if you ever reach out to them. I feel like a lot of painting businesses have that huge list of customers, which is probably the most valuable thing in their business. but they never send them any kind of newsletter to, or offer to see if they want to, you know, paint their interior now since they have painted their exterior a couple years ago. That's another huge opportunity. I think that can, yeah, a good system or process could help bring in thousands, if not millions of dollars every year.

And if I can just mention that, I'm glad you brought that up because The world of personalization, which I'm sure you've spoken about with other guests and those listening have heard, you know, kind of the buzzword of personalization when it comes to marketing and sales is so important. And it's really on the rise, especially with AI and all these different, you know, capabilities of CRMs. But let's paint a picture of this quick story, and, and I'll give the visual because your audience is in the visual business, right? They're painting beautiful homes. But let's say you go into a home and you get hired to paint the kitchen or the living room, you're going to probably look around and make observations, right? If you had this thought process in advance, and if you had a CRM where you can check off exterior needs painting, we see notice chipping, or we notice that the ceiling, you know, is textured, offer them to, you know, skim coat and sand off the ceiling to make it look more modern. Well, if you recorded all this information as you're doing your, to your point, to your sales, to your customer, you can then use your CRM to automate that. Right? And you could create that repetitive process where it's not just sending an email like a newsletter, which it could do, but it could say, hey, Jason, thank you so much for letting us come into your home and paint your living room. While we were there, we noticed blank, and the CRM could automatically insert in an issue with your ceiling, an issue with paint peeling and cracking on your foundation. We'd love to provide an estimate if you're interested. Let us know. The other thing too is painting isn't forever, meaning you're going to have to paint again eventually. And so you could also create reminders where, okay, we painted, we did, you know, the highest quality paint we could do. It's going to guarantee you 5 years, 10 years, whatever it is. So in 5 years, an email goes out, hey, we know we did the job for you 5 years ago. If you need any touch-ups or if you'd like a fresh coat put over that, we'd be more than happy to come in. It's the same thing with like our pool construction clients, right? Liners don't last forever. Pool pools have parts that need to be replaced every number of years. Same thing with painting, you know, like you eventually will need to be repainted. So if they were happy with you, why not go back and try to upsell them to do the painting job again?

Yeah, and that's basically recurring revenue, which is huge for the value of your, your business, being able to reactivate those, those customers. And if you can set them up in a CRM and just have them nurture on like a 5 or even maybe a 10-year cycle of just sending, you know, key pieces of communication, you know, along those, those certain, you know, when we expect they should need a power wash or when they, we think that they'll need another coat of paint, that sort of thing. And then sending out offers on those particular points, that could be a, you know, something you could set up once and then that would pay you for for years to come.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And we've mentioned this word a couple times, uh, CRM. Could, could we just break— because I get a lot of questions about CRM. What, what CRM should I do? What should I choose? What should— how should I select it? Which one is the best one? Um, what, what is a CRM, you know, even? Yeah, because it can be confusing because there's other— there's softwares and Some of them do different things than others. And so could you kind of just give us a— what should a CRM be doing for us?

Sure. So in my definition, a CRM is going to have 3 components. It's going to have a place to store all of your contacts. And it's not just leads. It could be even relationships with vendors, with other people. Okay. It's going to have information about them, their, their contact information, a place for you to keep notes. It's going to keep tabs on activity last time you spoke with them, projects you've done together, etc. It's also going to have a sales component. So it's going to have the ability to track your sales pipeline, all of the deals that are coming through, all of the leads, where they sit in the sales process, how much revenue is being generated, you know, from everything that's out there in terms of projecting revenue, right, based on the bids you've done versus what you've won, what you've lost. You talked before about the length of that sales cycle. A good CRM is gonna be able to tell you it takes on average 2 weeks to close, 6 weeks to close, right? So you could actually refine your sales process. And the last piece of a CRM, in my opinion, it should have an email marketing component. It should have the ability to send out whether it be monthly emails, automated, what we call like drip nurture emails to educate and to influence somebody to do business with you. And the reason you want to have the email component in your CRM is that a good CRM will be able to tell the sales team, or even you as the owner, who in your database of hundreds or thousands of people is going to the website frequently, who's going to look at your portfolios, who's clicking on your Google reviews. And if you knew who was raising your hand to express interest in doing business with you before they even called, that's a huge leg up, right? You're more likely to close that business with that person. Other things outside of that, especially in, in painting and other home service categories, Daniel, there's a lot of specific industry-related, what I, what I would call, they would call CRM systems, but I don't necessarily say they're a full CRM because they might be an appointment setter, right, to set up your appointments. They might do your billing for you. That's not really a CRM. It's just like you said, providing one function of your business. So that's how I would define it, you know, and for those that are using, you know, industry-specific things, it might be a good idea just to kind of write down a list of what is this piece of software helping me do to run my business more efficiently? And what is it not doing? Where is it lacking? Because sometimes we could connect in one tool to another tool and build a suite of tools to help, you know, for the greater good of the business.

Do you have any strong feelings about, because there's some CRMs out there who, they do those 3 basic things, but then they also try to do many other things and they're trying to be almost like another acronym, ERP, where they try to do everything. And then there's some that try to be just very good at a particular set of things and then they have a really good integration component. Where they can integrate well with others. So you can kind of patch together what you want to build, like with things like Zapier, which is like basically helping you communicate between apps. Do you have it? Do you have any preference or do you find that one is better than the other? Is it just basically which is best for a particular situation? What do you, do you have any thoughts on, on that?

Yeah. It's a great question. So, I mean, so what we'll do is we'll go through and actually I was gonna mention it later on, but there's a website we created called afterthelead.com. On there, there's a link to do a— we offer a free CRM fit assessment. So rather than saying one platform is good or better than another, it's a little subjective without knowing specific needs and goals and challenges of a team. So for example, something very similar or common with home service, you're gonna have a lot of outside salespeople. That are on the road, they're going in the car jumping from appointment to appointment. They need a CRM they can access from their phone because they're likely not gonna go back to the computer even if they have a computer at work or at home and enter all their activity for the day. Right? So sometimes when you buy software, you don't think about, okay, well, who's gonna be using the software? You know, what business challenges do I have and how is this software gonna actually help with those challenges? And it's also about, you know, the future, right? So you might have immediate needs right now, but then it's like, okay, well, what happens 2 years from now? You might have 3 trucks driving around, the 3 crews painting, but your goal is to have 10 by the end of next year. Well, if you choose a CRM today that can support your team of 3, can it scale to support your team of 10? Because if it can't, then you— we both know, Daniel, moving from one CRM to another could be a pain in the butt. It's doable. We do it a lot, but it's not ideal. So you really want to start working with a product that you could grow into, you know, and that you won't have to get rid of in a few years.

Yeah, that's, that's a good point. I think a lot of folks see the value in, in getting a particular CRM, at least to solve their problems now, but you really should think Hey, this needs to not only solve my problems for the next 6 to 12 months, but how can it grow with me for the next several years?

Yeah.

So that I'm not having to change CRMs every year because that you probably, you know, have to set up maybe some of those automations in the CRM. Sometimes CRMs have that automation capability like you mentioned with email campaigns, having to set that up. There's a lot of setup costs. Getting all your contacts in there. And then if you're switching again next year to something else, it's like, you got to do that all over again. So like you said, it can be pretty painful. So I like thinking about, like you said, the long term. Will this work for me for the next several years instead of just solving some problems right now?

Yeah, absolutely. There's about like 30 to 40 questions we go through to help, you know, really paint the picture of, okay, what type of CRM or what specific product is going to be a best fit? You know, once we kind of go through those lists of questions, because a lot of them are not even obvious things like even support, right? I mean, generally find when there's like freemium versions or like very low-cost CRMs, the support is usually pretty terrible, you know? So it's like, who's gonna help you, you know, with that? Are they gonna get on a Zoom call with you? Are they gonna get on the phone with you? Is all the support via email, through a live chat? And so you really kind of have to evaluate, you know, who's gonna actually help you with the platform. And that's one of the things that differentiates us at Cultivize, Daniel, is that we do it all for our clients, meaning we come up with the strategy to evaluate their business, make improvements, to find the gaps in their sales process and their marketing, how we could tie all that together. And then we roll up our sleeves, we do all the work, we integrate the website to the CRM, we set up their sales tools, we load all their data in there, we clean their data for them, we teach them how to use it, and then we stay on board as a coach and active participant to their CRM. So every month we're working with our clients that we've had for years and still helping their team. Yeah, even that roofing company I mentioned, they came on board in May. We still have monthly calls with their sales team every month, you know, for like a half hour, an hour, just going over things, seeing how things are working, what needs to be improved. And I think that's the one of the biggest takeaways, if nothing else, Daniel, from this conversation. Any software you have for your business, you can't anticipate and you shouldn't anticipate it just setting it up once and knowing that it's gonna be perfect and you never have to go in and, and tweak it. It just doesn't happen that way. You know, business changes, industry changes, things change, right? So you really should be evaluating the CRM at a minimum on a quarterly basis sometimes even on a monthly basis depending upon what you're using it for to see, okay, is this actually making an impact on my company or not?

Makes sense. So you guys at, at Cultivize not just provide, you don't just do support for CRM, you actually help with building the strategy. Okay, first of all, what do we, what problems are we solving? What, what would make the most sense for implementing software? How do we— and then you actually help integrate that, implement that software for them, and then make sure the team is trained up on that and on the process overall. And you provide that ongoing support and actually help implement changes as you go. Am I getting that right so far?

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you know, if throwing a number out there, let's say it took 30 hours to set up a new CRM, we're doing 29.5 of those, of that work. The only thing we really need from our clients is just to input in information about about the business so we could put that into the process and make sure we're customizing the solution for them.

Got it. So you're almost like a fractional IT, uh, service, like you're— sure, yeah, in a way, almost just helping implement that, uh, the CRM, providing that support, integrations. So do you, do you guys work a lot with, you know, tools like Zapier to kind of connect things if they have several different systems?

Zapier is great. We love Zapier. We use that quite a bit. We also, Mike and our team do a lot of custom API development. So like you mentioned before, ERP or this quoting tools, or they use QuickBooks for, you know, their accounting. So we can build custom integrations as well because the big thing about any business is your data is so vital and important. And if your data isn't clean, if it's not organized, and if you're not leveraging your data, you're really missing out. A lot on the potential of the, not only the growth of your business, but also just the way that your business operates and the, the ease of, of, you know, leveraging that data. And so, yeah, that's a big part of kind of what we do is say, okay, like, what are you doing now? Like, how are you keeping track of everything? What runs your business? And that's where, like, the early part of our evaluation starts is kind of looking into that first.

What are some— when you're doing these initial evaluations with business owner, business, businesses, home service businesses, what are some of the biggest mistakes or common mistakes that you see that something they're not doing or something that they're doing that they shouldn't be doing? Or if you want to take the other side of it, what are the biggest opportunities that they have to, to implement that can get them the biggest results?

I'll, I'll handle, I'll tackle both. I think both are important. So, you know, we mentioned at the beginning of the call, you mentioned, Daniel, is about, you know, missed opportunities with marketing. And so I think that most of these home service businesses, like other companies, but I think more so in home service, they're spending a lot of money on marketing. Some of our clients are spending over $100,000 a year on marketing. And so not everyone does, but some might spend, you know, a lot less than that, but you're spending something. And the problem is, is that they're not tracking where the leads are coming from. So something as simple as the phone rings, ring, ring. Hey Daniel, how are you? Thanks for calling, you know, Jason's Painting. Before I get started, may I ask, how'd you hear about us? And then there should be a dropdown menu in the CRM with all the marketing you do. Oh, Angie's List, Facebook, Google. Right? Wherever it was, this is how they found out about us. And your CRM should be able to report on how many leads you're generating from all of your marketing channels. But not only that, how many turned into opportunities, which would signify what we said before, a qualified lead. So for example, we see a lot of home service businesses doing advertising on platforms that generate a lot of leads, but they're garbage. The phone number's bad, the email address is bad, You call back 5 times, nobody answers the phone. So it shows us that that marketing channel is not the right platform for them. It also tracks to the revenue. So we know, for example, I'll go back, I'll keep using that roofing client as an example. He's got yard signs, he does direct mail, he does all these different things, radio. He's got, you know, you name it, he's trying it, right? He's one of those people that just likes to kind of try different things. And we know his yard signs, I was looking at this morning, generated almost $350,000 in revenue for him. And we know that because either people said, hey, I saw your yard sign, or we put a special QR code on the yard sign. So when you scan it, it goes to a specific landing page. And when you fill out that quote request, we know you only got to that form because you came from the yard sign QR code. And so Doing that, to answer your question, has helped him have the assurance that he's making smart decisions about where he's spending his marketing dollars. The thing we— what happened, Daniel, when we started working with— his name is Tom. Tom's whole thing was, well, Jason, I've been doing radio for so many years, I really don't want to let it go. I've been using TV for so many years, I don't want to let it go because my business is going to tank or it's going to drop off. And I said to him, I said, Tom, if I can prove to you that you're getting either bad leads or good leads from all these different marketing channels and we track every single one of them, would you be willing to, to listen? He's like, sure. And so within a few months, his, I'll give you an example of a story here quickly. So the company he had doing his marketing for his TV commercials said to him, hey Tom, for an extra $1,500 a month, We'll throw up your ad on our, on our website for our like TV's local TV network, you know, so to drive traffic to your website. And he's like, oh, that's great. Okay, sure, let's do it. Well, we gave it a few months. Guess how many trip, how many people came from their website to his website?

Guessing zero.

Zero. Zero.

Yeah.

And, and so I said to him, I said, you're just wasting like $5,000 now, like, you know, because you have this loyalty to them, but they're not providing anything for you. You know, and so, and there's another example with a pool construction company where they were getting a ton of Facebook leads. And, and I said to them, I said, you know, these aren't really converting. Like, you might want to talk to the marketing agency to figure out, like, what's going on. Well, unbeknownst to the marketing agency, for whoever, you know, caused the, the, the mix-up, they were targeting people that were 18 to 23 and 70-plus years old on Facebook. To buy a $50,000 pool, which we both know they're not gonna buy a $50,000 pool. And so, so that was just generating a ton of garbage leads that, you know, and so without having that, they would've just assumed that the marketing team was doing a good job because, hey, we're getting all these leads. And so, so that's one of the biggest things I think that for these home service businesses is to being able to track your marketing and be able to report on that is beyond, you know, beyond a super important thing. But you mentioned the other part of this is like, well, what are the opportunities? And the opportunity really is having a visual pipeline, having a dashboard that says, here's how many in-home appointments we need to schedule today or this week. Here's how many appointments we went on. Here's how many estimates we need to put together. Here's how many were sent out. Here's how many that we are waiting to hear back from the customer on. Here's how many that were into Talks about, right? Here's how many there are on the back burner. And so if you have all those stages, nothing is gonna fall through the cracks if you have everything organized. And I think that is the quickest ROI you can get from implementing a CRM that has that functionality. Because like you say, you're putting all this effort in to generate these leads. And if you're doing a poor job at follow-up, then you're really just leaving money on the table.

Makes sense. Now, I, that makes a lot of sense. So could you, what was the website you mentioned that if you is after the lead to basically get an assessment of the CRM?

Oh, sure. Yeah. You go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Daniel.

I was gonna say, we'll make sure that that link gets in the show notes.

Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate that. Thank you. So your audience can go as a kind of my gift to the audience listening today. You can go to afterthelead.com, just how it sounds. So afterthelead.com. On there you can download our Lead Nurturing Playbook, which is a guide on how to actually nurture your leads, and it lets you apply the principles we're talking about today and all the specific steps needed to virtually any CRM platform. You can also sign up for our newsletter. We publish a newsletter every week, have tons of great resources about email marketing, about CRM. And all things related. And there's also an opportunity, Daniel, for your listeners to talk with me directly. So I'm all about education, all about helping people. So I promise it's not a sales call. I'm not trying to close you on that call. It's really a call to say, hey, Jason, I'm having these problems. These are the struggles I've had. You know, what advice can you provide? So there's a link in there complimentary to your audience. There's no fee for the call. So I want to kind of give those gifts away, you know, to your audience today.

Awesome. Afterthelead.com. Sounds like you got some good stuff there. And I know a lot of folks that are listening have probably thought through like, what sort of CRM should I get? Does this work for my current situation? Is this really solving my issues? I know a lot of folks want that holistic approach, you know. Maybe not just a CRM, but how do I actually get it integrated with all the other things that I have going on with my time tracker, my accounting software, my production management software, because it's different than my CRM and all the other things. So if you're looking for help to, from, for that holistic perspective, definitely reach out to Jason and his team. Um, are, are there any, uh, other last thoughts you want to leave with the audience before I let you go today?

Well, I just want to say that, you know, all these things, I think for some listeners today, Daniel, saying like, oh yeah, like that makes perfect sense. Like I could see how I could apply that. I'm sure maybe for some others it's like, oh my God, sounds so complicated. Like, you know, where do I even start? And so there is something we actually just ready to release, which is a series of Google Sheets we've built that have built-in real-time reporting. So for those that aren't quite ready to step into what I'll define as we define today as a CRM, That's something also that I can share with your audience. It's just going to allow you a place to kind of keep track of all your leads, mark off where did they come from, you know, which marketing effort. It's going to allow you to put all your sales into a pipeline. And so it's just a really simple way to get out of just maybe a very rudimentary Google Sheet, if that's what you're using, that only has like information about like name, phone number, email, which at the end of the day isn't really that useful if you don't have a way to leverage that data. So that's something that I just wanted to kind of announce here. And it's the first time I'm announcing it to any podcast I've been on because we're very close. We're about a week away from launching it. It's going to be something that's going to be basically like, you know, pennies on the dollar. It's like we're not even— it's not a tool where we're looking to generate revenue from in terms of like a SaaS product. It's something we're just giving out there, Daniel, to help people that aren't quite ready to invest in a full-on CRM, but they need something more than pen and paper or a simple spreadsheet. Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. And we're recording this beginning of December, so this should release towards the end of December. So by the time it releases, it sounds like it might be released. So that's, that's exciting.

Yeah, it will be. Yeah. So if you want me to rerecord that part, I can just be like, hey, it's ready and check it out.

Yeah, it's all good. No, I appreciate your, your time, Jason. And with all the listeners, I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next week.

Thanks, Daniel. Appreciate it.

Thank you.