Leveraging Tech & Tools to Optimize Sales Success

Welcome to Contractor Radio and we're doing a special live version today. We don't usually do it this way. We usually record everything in advance. So anything that is said today, please don't hold it against us. We always love doing these live ones. And today's Contractor Radio is all about helping you optimize your sales out there through technology and products that create better opportunities for you to be successful out in the field and add revenue and profit to your jobs and kind of give you a little bit of a taste of some of the things you might see at one of our events, like Top Rep that we do twice a year to help sales professionals close a higher percentages and higher profits, thus making more commissions. My name is Jim Johnson. I'm the host of Contractor Radio and the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, where we help contractors get control of their business so they can grow their business and find that personal and financial freedom that they've been chasing since they started their business. And I have the largest group of people I've ever had on a podcast before. And these folks are our sponsors at our Top Rep high intensity sales training event that we're going to be doing in Philadelphia on August 23rd and 24th. And the reason that there are sponsors is because they specifically, specifically work with salespeople to optimize what they do out in the field. And so, without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and bring on our panelists today, our guests. We're going to talk to them about some of the things we need to be thinking about whenever we look at tools, look at products, how they apply to us, and how they help us do what we do better. And so first off, we've got Charlie Goldberg from Engage. Charlie, welcome aboard, man. Good to have you.

Hey, Jim, thanks for having me.

We got Doug Schatz from Ever Commerce. Doug, good to have you on board.

Jim, thank you for having me today.

That's awesome. I'm excited to have you on. I don't think a lot of people know, like, whoever Commerce, they know a lot of the products and stuff, but they don't know Ever Commerce. So it'd be cool to get to know them a little bit. Then we've got Kate Radcliffe from leap. Hey, Kate, is there anybody that doesn't know you?

You know, if they don't give me a call.

Oh, there you go. Perfect. I see salesperson right there. Well done. And then we got Michael Connell from Moment Coach.

Thanks for putting me in the game.

Yeah, yeah, no problem. Well said. Well said. Good job. And we also have Andrew Martin from Marlamar. Welcome aboard. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew's a few minutes late. He has no idea what we're doing, but he'll catch up to speed.

I've been watching you on Facebook.

Okay, cool. Good, good. And then we have Steve from Project Map It. Steve, welcome aboard.

Mr. Jim. Thanks for having me.

Hey, man. My pleasure. And thank you guys for hopping on board today. And then last but not least, we've got Ty, Meredith. Make sure I've got everybody on here. Ty, welcome to the show from Ugly Roof. So good to have you on board.

Thank you very much. Appreciate being here.

Yeah, I was sitting here going, gosh, if we just had one more and there is supposed to be one more, we'll see if they log in or not. If we had just one more, we would have a whole Hollywood Squares going on here. For those old people that know what Hollywood Squares is, it would be a lot of fun to have it filled up that way. But the idea today, and our whole show is about helping contractors do what they do better. And we've been doing a series on sales and. And some of the things from a practical application of increasing our closing percentages and opportunities. But I wanted to kind of come at it from a technology and products side of things. So we got a lot of technology folks here. A lot of those technology folks have a product, and then we also have a product in Ugly Roof that helps us add something to what we do in a way that we can add to our bottom line. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to have each one of you kind of go around here and we'll start with Charlie. And Charlie, I think you can see everybody else's names. Just pick somebody when you're done. All right. So that we can stay in some kind of format here. But introduce yourself. Let everybody know what you do and then what your technology tool or product that you have does for sales folks and companies out there in our industry.

Yeah, happy to kick it off. Hi, everybody, I'm Charlie. I'm with Engage. So we're a presentation platform to help you guys build interactive in home sales tools. Really put together a powerful customer experience when you're presenting in the home. And what our technology does is allow you to instantly distribute that content out to everyone who needs it. So we're talking your field reps or we're talking your customers. And more importantly is we also provide valuable analytics to help you guys be more data driven in building consistency and Accountability. So if you're looking for a masterful way to present in the home, take a look at Engage. Looking forward to meeting everybody. And with that I'll pass it to Kate at Leap.

I knew you were gonna do that. See, it's a natural fit. Leap is a point of sale software on its, you know, the lowest end, but on its highest end it's gonna run your sales process from start to finish with all the integrations that we offer. It's a document builder. It integrates with Engage along with many, many others, your CRMs. It's one of those things that I don't have enough time to tell you about it, but definitely looking forward to talking a little bit about just really creating that solution for your team that makes it super easy to quick sell. I'm going to pass it to Doug.

Thank you, Kate. Hey everybody, I'm Doug Schatz from the Socious marketing team. We are a digital marketing agency that's been working with contractors for over 15 years. We take a really data driven approach to everything that we do every day and we really focus on, you know, trying to drive high quality leads for the customers that we work with because these days you can't afford to give up on any leads that are out there, particularly as we enter some uncertain economic times. And so Socius brings a flavor of marketing that really highlights the high quality leads through websites, search engine optimization, Google Ads, things of that nature as well as social media marketing. And it's something we're very proud of and we really have 15 plus years of experience bringing that to the table. Gentlemen, I want to hand it off to somebody here.

Andy will take it.

Please take it away. Take it away.

So I got you off the hook there, Mar Lamar Mobile. We're all about helping home improvement companies connect first with with the consumer to help then tee up that that salesperson when he or she enters that house. It's the most intimidating part of, of the consumer process. There's a stranger coming to the door and, and we want to make sure that they know who you are. It's all about meeting them through their cell phone, communicating to them through via text message to pull them into the conversation, to break the ice, to give them an idea who that salesperson is and improve, as Charlie said, improve that customer experience to give those salespeople a better chance to establish rapport and to present their great products. With that said, Mike, I'm going to hear about financing.

Hey Andy, I'm the guy to talk about it. Everybody mo with moment here Talk a little bit about affordability. And what we've seen today is that your consumers are asking for a price of the goods and services that you provide. And the best way to present a price is to give them options. Now, if we can give your consumers options of how they can afford you in a way that's aligned with you and the way that you go to business and your cash flow, it's the best fit for everyone. So the technology exists today to get your customers approved, to get them to move forward with your business. And let's overcome the cash price and let's talk about the different ways that your consumers are currently buying other goods and services in the industry. I'm sorry, in other industries. And let's align them with how they're buying. Let's add that as a feature into your business. And with that, my old friend Steve is going to talk about this wonderful tool he's got.

My man Mike. Thank you, sir. Steve Spence Managing Director at Project Map IT we're an all in one solution, digital mapping portfolio where you can take all of your past projects that you've done, place them on an interactive map so you're using your past successes to hopefully easily land new successes. So interactive in that, you know, it's what all customers are always looking for when you're at a sales appointment. Locations to show your local reputation, photos of the past, work that you've done, reviews from those customers. It's an interactive map that gets easily embedded onto website. We work with CRMs, very similar to Leap. We have some integrations. My good friend, my good friend Charlie up there, our map easily embeds right into an engage presentation software presentation. So that's what we are. We help with SEO. Jim mentioned that earlier. So it uses all the metadata that's on that map, you know, locations, photo metadata as far as latitude, longitude and stuff like that. So we can help increase your ability to be seen online easier as well. And with that I don't see names. So I'm gonna.

I got, I got you. We got, we got one left. We, we saved the ugliest for like. No, just kidding.

Exactly.

With. With ugly roof. Why don't you give us a little rundown?

That's right on the money, buddy. So we are roof Rejuvenation. So our product is different. There's a lot of tech techie products that we're discussing here. Our product is an actual product for the roofing contractor. It's another tool in their toolbox to help the homeowner in this as the gentleman mentioned before, in this quasi recession that we're going to be going through, it's a pretty much a recession proof product. It's a nice add on for existing roofing contractors to add to their business. It's another tool in their toolbox and it can really help that contractor take their closing percentages through the roof, take their bottom line and profit margins through.

The roof as well.

And it's done that personally for our roofing business, that we have a roofing business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's done that for us and it's doing that now for all the dealers that we have.

Awesome. So I'm going to step in for somebody that was for whatever reason unable to make it today, Sebastian. I don' if everybody's met Sebastian or not, but Sebastian's with a company called Rilla Voice. Everybody calls it Rilla for short. And it's a sales artificial intelligence tool that tracks the audio interaction between a salesperson and a homeowner while they're at the kitchen table or at the front door and then gives them feedback based off of artificial intelligence through the language that they use for what's being successful and, and maybe what's not being successful and thus making your team better and better over time with data. And so guys and gals and products and technology, what are some of the things that you see? I'm going to talk from a technology standpoint first. What are you seeing from a technology standpoint that people are really asking for right now that you may solve for them out there in the field? Anybody want to take that first question? Okay, go ahead, Kate.

So from our end, we are right in that middle of the sales process. We're not at the beginning where you're sourcing out leads like Socius. We're also not at the end where we're resulting or doing financing. We're right in that middle bit. And the big thing that we're seeing is that we want ease of use. And the way that I kind of describe it is when you walk into a room actually like the one behind me, and there's several lights in there, if you flick a light switch, you want all of the lights to come in on that room. You don't want just one light to come on. So with that, it's the same idea with an integration, right? You want to make sure that you have all of your, your tools in place to not only make a sale easier, but also to make training and onboarding easier. With higher attention issues, you've got to be able to Train quickly and on the fly. And when you have a fully integrated system, you're going to be able to do that quicker.

I'll, I'll kind of chime in here. You know, a lot of people I've seen, you know, I've been with Project Map it for four years and I've seen a trend to the presentation models and different presentations that sales reps are using in the home. And I think, you know, a professional presentation is something that they need. Right. Like you have old school contractors, which is totally fine with the flip books and stuff like that, or they just, they have paper invoices and that's all they use. But it really is what's going to let you stand out over the other two free estimates or estimates that are going to come, come to that same house. So, you know, with Engage Leap, those are great presentations. Engage, great presentation, you know, model that just kind of lets you stand out over the competition. With Project Map at, one of the things we solve also allows a contractor to send this digital portfolio to the customer, the homeowner, before, before they even get out to that house for that presentation. So that customer, that homeowner can see, oh, look at all, look at all this work they've done in our area. Check out some pictures. People were visual society. Now we want immediate access to information. So having a thing that you can a, a portfolio like ours where you can send it before you can get it out there or once you're there and it's in your presentation, like an engaged presentation, it just automatically lets you stand out over the competition. It shows a little bit more professionalism and, and drone photos are huge these days, right? Like contractors drone everything these days. And you know, that's another thing I've seen. Drone photos are starting to make you look a little bit more professional than just the typical photo you took with your phone, you know, from the side.

Of the street to piggyback on that Engage conversation. When we set dealers up in the country, they get a customized presentation from our company helping them to sell our product. But we use Engage and they get that along with your dealership. And it's a game changer to have that interactive conversation and sales presentation. Hey, Sebastian.

Hello. Hollywood Squares has now made it to the front page. We got our nine here now maybe Brady Bunch, however you guys want to look at it. Sebastian, I did a quick introduction for you already because I had faith. I had faith. I figured you were probably working with a client, helping them be successful. Yeah. So I gave a brief rundown of rilla. We'll let you get more to that. And note that not only what the product does, but the data it captures here in just a second. But we've been answering a bit of a question of what people are seeing from a technology and product aspect of what, what people are asking for and some of the changes that we've seen over the last few years. But there's an order of process. You know, there's this order of process that happens from lead gen to prospecting and nurturing to presenting to proposal and offers and giving offers that people can actually afford and then finally referrals and reviews and those type of things. And we kind of COVID that gamut here with this group, like working together. If you put them all together, you cover the whole thing pretty well. Those of you that are lead gen, okay, so let's focus on you. So I think that's ever commerce would be in there. Project map, it probably plays a bit of a role in here. What are you seeing successful for contractors when it comes to generating more opportunities, More people raising their hand saying, hey, I want to get more information from you. What are you seeing to be successful with that?

Yeah, it's a really good question, Jim. I think that what we've seen over the past couple of years is that demand is as high as it's ever been before.

Right.

So there are more homeowners out there looking for the services that contractors provide than ever before. And discerning business owners have to be really focused on how they generate those leads and the. And the channels that they bring those leads in from so that they're focused on quality over quantity because quantity hasn't been the issue more recently. And I think using, you know, your marketing dollars to focus on programs like SEO, where you're going to get higher quality leads, it's something that has a bit of lead time associated with it. It takes time to generate those leads is something we recommend because the biggest belief we have at Socious and Evercommerce is when you're busy is when you need to focus on your marketing. When you're slow is when it's too late.

Right.

And so I think that a lot of folks we work with need to be preparing for yes this fall, but also early next year and using smart strategies to maximize every single lead that comes in and being really focused on the cost per lead, that's the metric that we're focused on when we work with our customers.

So just to have a bit of input there, that's one of those Metrics. I've always tracked cost per lead and then cost per acquisition, too. Like, those are two really big ones. But there's this cost per opportunity. Like, there's one kind of in between that identifies as more of a quality opportunity than necessarily just elite. Like you said, you can generate a bunch of leads, but if they're not very good leads or you're competing against a whole bunch of other people for that opportunity with those leads, is it really a good lead to generate a whole bunch? I'd rather have. I'd rather have higher quality and less leads than just a whole bunch of leads that I'm paying for that I don't have opportunity with. Do you guys track any of that? Is there anything that you do metric wise or that you've done to help contractors understand that a little bit better?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Part of that is operational, right. So my number one rule is everybody's got to pick up the phone. We can get the phone to ring, and I know there's other folks on this call who can do that too, but they got to pick up the phone.

When that rings, how fast should they pick up the phone?

Oh, I'm, I'm a big believer in five. You know, if you get a form submission on your website, you got to get back to that person in five minutes or, or less. The impact that that has. Oh, Sebastian, think Is three.

Okay.

Three minutes or less. The impact that that has is, is astronomical on that customer and the experience that they have with you. Right. So, you know, from an opportunity standpoint, I really like to say, you know, cost per lead depends on the services you're providing and the way that you're spending your marketing dollars. But we're big believers that when we deliver reports to our clients on a monthly basis and we have conversations with them every single month, we're looking at that cost per lead to make sure that it's tracking year over year and month over month to provide as much value as possible.

Awesome. So we actually, like, we have a lot of people watching. I don't know if you guys can see the comments coming through on your. So I can see them on mine. I'll be the facilitator here. Lots of people, just a lot of kudos to you guys from Tim Brown and Reggie Brock and some of the Jonathan brochures out there watching as well. But there was a question from Dima. Aren't images taken on a smartphone and directly uploaded through the GMB app already geotagged? And so I think that would be directed at Project Map. It is, that is, that is correct. So what value does Project Map it brings? And maybe I could just do that on my own.

So we have, we have a. So with our SEO component which to be very fully transparent, we just deployed like two weeks ago. So we're going to be getting analytics on that over the next three months and stuff so that we do have that proof of concept. But we, with Project Mapping, I'm not going to take up a lot of time, but we have, we've built out like a public profile page that gets indexed through Google, that's on our server and backlink to your website. So everybody kind of gets that SEO juice. So those pictures, that metadata on the pins and all that kind of stuff, specifically the written testimonials, whether it's through Google, Facebook, we sync with those two review platforms and we are actually our own review platform. So you know, to, to leave a Google review, it's hard if you don't have a Gmail account to log into. Same thing with Facebook. With, with Project Map. It we don't have, we don't have a login necessary to leave review. So all that written content helps with that SEO.

I really like how like in the Engage app, when I'm presenting I can actually show like where all of my projects are. I can, I can do it right from within. When I'm presenting with, instead of going outside somewhere else and trying to get to my Google, my business page or wherever else and then teaching this whole like, hey, you got to do this and this and this when it's embedded in something makes it easy, almost idiot proof to show that. I think that's highly valuable. So that's kind of lead gen. And the part they play is their, their job is, hey, somebody raised their hand and just say, I'm interested. When they do rate, I would argue you got like five seconds. And the reason I would say that the speed delete, like speed delete is absolutely important. And it really doesn't matter what kind of opportunity you have. That person could have organically searched you. They could have been SEO to you. They could have been something from a Facebook ad. Maybe it's from one of these lead aggregators. It doesn't matter. Once that lead comes to you, when they make that suggestion, they raise their hand. If they don't get somebody to like, it's a teacher in classroom, like, you raise your hand, she ignores you and asks somebody else, right? Well, you're probably not going to ask anymore. The Same type of thing with this is I've got my hand up, nobody's paying attention to me, nobody's paying it, okay, I'm gonna go put my hand up somewhere else. And I always relate it to like if you were gonna call and get your, you know, schedule a barber, you know, your stylist or I don't know who you have like barber back in the. I don't have any of them anymore. Like, but if you have hair and you were gonna get a haircut and you call your haircutting place and say, hey, I'd like to get an appointment and the person on the other end of the line said, no problem, I will have one of the stylists call you back to schedule that. And they go, they'll call you within the next few minutes. Great. Click. I pick up the phone again, I call the next one. Because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to solve my problem right now. I'm not, I don't have time to solve my problem later. So I would strongly encourage like, the faster you think about speed to lead. The faster you serve somebody, the more likely the first person that interacts with them is the most likely person to get that business. Now I get this lead and it comes in, there's some prospecting and nurturing capabilities that are out there. And I'm speaking specifically to Andrew, who's not here right now. He's losing Internet. But this idea of being able to automate some of that nurturing right away so they feel the contact, hey, this thing happens. That's what Marlimar does is not only that first interaction, but nurturing them along the way all the way through. If the case. Maybe we don't actually sell them on the first call. It continues to interact with them and you can, hey, there is, I think it was his time. We'll see if his Internet's working. Hey, we got you back, Andrew. We're talking about right now going from Legion, they come in to a website and prospecting and nurturing.

So here's, here's my question to all of the sales people and owners of the groups that are attending with us today. When someone calls you on your cell phone and you don't recognize that number, what are you going to do? You're going to swipe it away and give it the right handed swipe. And so what you need to do is you need to send a preemptive text with your logo from the same number that your call center is going to call from and that will give you 15 to 20% lift on that lead right there. And then after, after the fact, you and you and you get them to get you to call you back, they will call you 50% of the time in that situation, if they've created the lead and you have connected back to them and said, hey, you entered a form on our wonderful socialist.

On.

On this wonderful socialist website, we will read that information, that integration that Kate was talking about. We'll read that information from socious and send a preemptive text that says, we care about you and we're ready to serve you. And somebody from our call center will be calling you or if you want to respond right now and we can set up that call.

Yeah, see, that's fantastic. And automation, that's a big part of it. How do we make this easier and faster? That whole speed to lead, speed to prospect, speed to close, and how do we take the hurdles out of the way for the client? And so then we get down to like, now we've got some interaction happening. We've created an appointment. Possibly a lot of that can be done through MyLMO. Am I correct, Andrew?

Yes. Once a, once a it is created in your CRM, we're gonna pull that CRM information and send a text message that says, hey, you're set for your appointment. And then obviously can go down the chain of that customer experience.

And so that's what I really like about what you guys do, is you can pick the touch points as things are happening outside of a CRM, in a CRM through a website that you identify the right time and the right message to give them for where they're at in the process. So now we're on an appointment. Like, we show up, hey, we're here. And we're going to use some tools while we're here. What would some of that possibly look like? I think this is where a engage may come into play. So I show up, I'm like, hey, my name is Jim Johnson. Nice to meet you. I'm from ABC Roofing and I'm here today for our appointment. I'd like to tell you a little bit about my company before I get started. Do you mind if I show you a little bit about who we are before I hop up on your roof? And you know exactly who we are? No, not at all. And boom, I pull out my engage presentation and I just go through the first little part where I'm showing people exactly who we are, who I am, what we've done for their neighbors. Not how many roofs have we built, but how many neighbors have we served? I may pull up project, map it and say, hey, here's a lot of the people around you that we've actually done work with. So right in my Engage app, creating this experience that they're not getting from anybody else. Would you agree with that, Charlie?

Yeah, absolutely. So a little secret here. If you don't know and you know, it's all the most successful scaled massive companies in the home improvement space. They all do an in home sales presentation. They sit down where the customer is comfortable, they educate that customer effectively, and they have a process that their sales team can follow through every time, building some consistency and accountability on their team. And what you have to remember is the presentation, as great as a presentation can be, it helps get your sales reps trained quicker. It's really intended for the person sitting across that kitchen table. And most people are visual learners. People love to watch video. They want to know that you guys are going to be the best fit to service their needs for their home. And the best way to do that is to walk them through something visual.