Only the BIG Companies do this.. but it works!

One of the easiest ways to be able to increase the sales and increase the number of customers you're getting is simply getting to the customer's property as fast as possible so that you can.

Give them a quote.

Now there's a few ways you can do this. Number one, try to avoid going to the property at all. You can do this using OTP or over the phone estimates. And here at command center, this is what we answer phones all day long 24, 7 in order to be able to do the estimates over the phone with the customer. And we don't even have to go to the property. In other words, the time to the property and is essentially zero because we never have to go. And before the customer even gets off the phone, we give them a price, get their credit card information and get them on the schedule. Now if you're not doing that and you actually have to set up in person estimates, try to set up estimator availability that is as wide as possible. Just by increasing the amount of time that an estimator is able to meet with potential customers will get them to the property faster. For example, if you're only available between 3pm and 5pm, that's fine, but. But what if they work till 6 o' clock every evening? It might be a week or two before they can get off work and actually meet with you. Now if you only are doing estimates, say 11am till 3pm, Monday and Thursday, that's fine. But what if someone contacts you on a Friday morning?

It means they're going to be waiting.

A few days before you even get to the property. So simply by increasing your estimator availability and the hours in which they're available to be able to go to the customer's property, that will increase your sales. And I. Another thing that we try to think about is ideally we like to do estimates over the phone as fast as possible. The next best option for us is drive by estimates. The reason we like drive by estimates.

Is because then we can do it.

On our own schedule and we don't have to worry about the availability or the schedule of the customer. And so I can get five, six, seven of those pounded out really quickly. As an estimator in like the evening, I don't have to wait for the customer, I can go to the property really fast and make the quote the the last one. So again, we want OTP is the best, then we go drive by estimates and then at the very worst we meet in person with the customer and have an actual meeting at their property. I usually like to give an hour window at least of time for my, my estimator to be able to have a slot of time that they can show up at some point within that one hour. I've seen some places do two hours or more, so give you more flexibility and allow you to have a bit of a gap. Some estimates will take you five minutes and then another customer will talk your ear off for two hours. So having some sort of a cush there to say, hey, I'm not going to show up at 11 o'. Clock, I'm going to show up at your house between 11am and 12 noon.

Giving you that at least that one.

Hour gives you a little bit of cushion for so many variables that can kind of throw a monkey wrench in your day. Especially if you're doing field work and estimates. You'll want that cushion to make sure you don't disappoint the customer and you're not running around ragged throughout town trying to figure out how to get to the next estimate on time or even having to call customers at all to tell them you're late. Just give them a window of time, show up in person and you'll be inside of the timeframe you've promised.

Already we've talked about how important it is to get a new lead, their estimate and their proposal as fast as possible. And now it's a matter of okay, once we've sent the estimate, now what?

Cause they just kind of are ghosting me.

We've got to follow up with the customer to ensure that they actually accept the estimate and we get the job on the schedule. This is something we're going to drill down very deep at at Blue Collar.

Summit and you can book your tickets today.

It's a three day event but we're going to be looking at what the actual scripts for your emails, your text messages, your follow up phone calls need.

To be to actually close the deal. Go to bluecollarsummit.com book your tickets today.

All right, the next thing that's super important is how fast are you able to send the estimate. You've met the customer, you've left their property many times the person that gets the client the estimate first in their inbox, whether it be text message or email, is going to win the job. So here's a couple things you can do to make this process faster because the faster you the higher close ratio. Number one, have an estimate template. Don't have it where every single time you go to an estimate you got to type up all the notes for that specific job I want to have within Google Docs, whether I have a notes app on my phone or my CRM, all the regular notes that I'm going to have for any specific type of service. This is going to allow me to be able to copy and paste and with a matter of a couple seconds, minutes, send out a lengthy proposal to the customer very quickly. Another thing you want to do if.

You'Re not big, get a virtual assistant.

Or someone that can do these estimates really fast and are on call as many hours of the day if you're larger. This is why you have an office staff. You want these notes being put into a proposal to the customer as fast as possible. And ideally I'm not making the estimator do that task because they're usually the most skilled and the most costly and.

In terms of their wages.

Another thing you can do to get the customer faster is have a Chromebook setup or a laptop setup or Microsoft Surface setup in your actual work truck, the one you're doing estimates with. That's gonna allow you to be able to type these up, format them, attach a video without even leaving the driveway. Cause the whole goal is to get that estimate them as fast as possible.

Follow up phone calls yes, the phone is considered an antiquated form of technology. You can text people, you can email them, you can create automations to do that for you. But I have yet to see any form of follow up like phone calls where you actually call somebody and talk to them on the phone that will convert as many of your estimates into being accepted. And so I highly recommend, especially 24 hours after you've talked to the customer, you've met with them, you've given them a price, you send them the quote, follow up with the phone. Now when you call them, actually know what you're gonna talk about. Have something that you're going to actually go through and instead of like I'm just calling to follow up, that's weak. And the problem is after they say yeah, I'll get back to you, you have no other ammunition.

So what I recommend you do is.

Print off on your desk, print off the 12 different things that you can call customers for and actually have a reason for calling them. Just calling to follow up is weak. Have an actual reason. For example, I have a spot on the schedule.

We're offering a promotion.

I wanted to offer you a discount, someone canceled last minute, I wanted to get you slotted in, like have reasons as to why you would do a follow up phone call just calling them doesn't help. After the first call, the first call you can say, hey, I'm following up. Do you have any questions? Did you want to go over it? Just making sure you actually got the estimate. But after that I need reasons to call them again and again. And until they give me an answer, until they say yes or no, I'm going to keep calling them on the phone because if they don't, they're just ghosting me. And it's amazing to me how many times I'll go to the home service businesses and I'll look through their estimates inside of copilot and I'll see how many estimates were sent and then how many were accepted. And that's your close ratio, let's call.

It 40 or 50%.

But then I'll look at and see that 30 or 40% of people, the status of the estimate is just sent. It was never accepted, it was never denied, it was just ghosted. You did all the work to get the quote to the customer, you sped to their house, you got everything sent to them. You spent all that time, energy and money talking to them and wining and dining and then you never even hear back. You're literally getting ghosted and it's costing you thousands of dollars. How do you solve this problem? You follow up relentlessly on the phone until they give you a yes or no. And I don't even care if you say, Mr. Jones, if you don't want any of my services, that's fine. I just want an answer. I want to know why you wouldn't go forward with the proposal. Having the phone is your best weapon. And when you pick up the phone, have why you're calling them and also pull up their estimate on your CRM, actually be able to go through the notes with them. Why? As we'll talk about later, this will be used in price negotiation. Because when I'm calling them, I need to be able to see exactly what the scope of work is and be able to adjust it. And the reason most people don't do follow up phone calls is because they're afraid of that negotiation. So have the scope of work, the estimate proposal pulled up and also know the date of service that you could put the job on the schedule. You'll be able to use that on your follow up phone call as a form of scarcity to be able to tell them like, look, we're booked out four or five weeks, but I do have a spot that came available next Thursday and you're going to know for your budget hour Capacity chart inside a copilot when the next available time slot you can put them in. Use that to create scarcity. Use that as a way to potentially even give them a discount on the phone. If you're planning to discount the estimate on that follow up phone call, great. Just know that going into the call so it doesn't seem like you're kind of waffling with price. That'll come back to bite you and we'll talk more about price negotiation in just a few minutes. At this stage where you've now sent the estimate to the customer, it's really important to handle work change orders when the customer is requesting you to change the scope of work. Now this could be because they have a budget problem and you're trying to adjust the price back to fitting within their budget. It could also be just the fact they saw your estimate notes and they changed their mind or they wanted to add more stuff to the project. When it comes to work change orders.

Here'S a few tips I have.

Number one, make it really easy from your client portal to be able to ask the customer what they want to be have changed inside of copilot in the client portal, the they have three buttons Accept, decline or request changes. If they click the request changes, it opens up text field where they can now type in exactly what they want changed on the estimate proposal. In my opinion, someone that submitted a request change for an estimate is the number one priority. They're basically saying like hey, I want to accept this but I want a few modifications. That person should have much higher priority than a new lead or even a complaint because this customer is about to accept the job. I'm about to add one new customer, so why go running after a potentially cold new customer? Or potentially someone's like making a scene and is super mad online when there's literally a customer to replace the bad customer, or a customer that's actually going to accept and is very, very warm. So focus on these warm leads. If they're asking for a work change order, do it as fast as possible. Now, one way to reduce the amount of work change orders that you have to provide to customers is take a big project and chunk it down on your estimates. So instead of providing a $40,000 install for a new project, break it down into five or six different line items and do it in a way where the customer can pick and choose which ones they want to accept. Maybe they only have a budget for 30,000 so they can accept 2 or 3 of the line items that are most important to them and then down the road complete the rest of the proposal. This will eliminate the need for them asking like hey, I only want like 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 13, 48 and 96 done. And now you're trying to break up an estimate propos and doing the pricing is now much more difficult. Just break up the job in logical processes and steps of a larger project and then allow them to accept or deny each one. Keep in mind if we're going to do this, you need to treat each line item as if it was only going to be accepted by itself. So if you're going to charge rental fees for an excavator and they're like, oh well, I won't charge it again because I'll use it on all the other line items, keep in mind they might not accept that one line item that you put the excavator rental costs and baked it into the pricing. So keep each line item as if it's going to be its own job and if the customer accepted only that.

Job, you'd be okay with it.