Why Customers Keep Saying “Let Me Think About It” (Mike Andes Q&A)

If a customer responds for estimate by saying that they are thinking about it and let us know what does the follow up process look like? Do you still let the automations run every day risking that it might annoy them? Yeah, so how I'm going to do it is I'm going to have the automations of text and email going out especially in the first few days and again when we follow up we can ask like do you have questions? Did you get it? Or we can be more pointed and this is the part where usually follow up phone calls are going to be stronger and that is offering a specific date saying hey, the route is filling up on that specific day, giving them a specific discount that is kind of a ticking time bomb. It's one day some sort of scarcity. We only have so many spots left. Urgency. No, you know, today we have this one offer and 10% off or your first MO free or whatever. And so yes you can annoy them but what's annoying to them is when they tell you this part right here which is they are thinking about it and they will let us know. I never want to give them the opportunity to give me that information. So if I'm doing a follow up phone call I'm not saying hey, do you have any questions? Because then the response is no I don't. If I do I'll reach out to you. I'm never going to say you know, do you have, you know, did you get it? Because if they see yes, I got it, I'm thinking about it, I'll get back to you. I never want them in the driver's seat of follow up and so I would rather you do some follow up. You will have some, you will have a non zero increase to your close ratio if you just simply call the customer like do you have questions? Did you get it? Like there will be an increase but the far far greater like 2.0 version of follow up is actually calling with scarcity urgency and offer a reason why you're calling. Because if you call them and say hey Mr. Jones, we have a spa available next Monday, I'd really like to get you on the schedule because we'd really like to get that water feature completely free so we can get pictures on our website. We really need that done. If we can go on schedule today, I'll give you 10% off. That looks very different because if they say no, no I think that's fine.

I don't think we want to move forward. That kind of pushes them to basically say no and I'D rather them say no than nothing at all or that they're thinking about and they just ghost me. And so I'm trying to call for a reason. A reason, a date, a time. I'm going to reserve their spot and then call up. So if they actually said this, like, hey, I'm going to think about it. Okay, great, fantastic. I'm gonna go ahead and reserve your spot for next Monday because I know it's important to get this done and we're booked out like six weeks, so I want to make sure that you can get it done. Let's go ahead and put I'll reserve your spot and I'll call you tomorrow and then that way you can think about it, talk to your spouse, you know, compare quotes, whatever they've said, and then I will call you back. I want to be on my time, not their time. I know that seems pushy, but you are going to control the dialogue of the sale. Uh, and the, the objective is that I can. I have the ability to call them back without annoying them because I that I told them that was gonna happen and they asked for, for time to think about it. Great, let's give you time to think about it. I'll call you back on this day and until then, I'll go ahead and reserve the spot for you. Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing on your last mastermind, you mentioned that when instant price accepted, you'll still create the estimate within copilot. Mandy, Mark is accepted and send that accepted estimate over to the customer. We don't send it to the customer, we just mark as accepted. However, this would drastically inflate the close ratio. Can you provide more insight into this? So any, any estimate that is instant pricing is. This is what conference I said track, not track the number of accepted jobs, not the number of, of leads. Because your close ratio on instant pricing is effectively a hundred percent. And yes, it would inflate your, your close ratio in your metrics because you're, you're creating and then accepting them. We don't, just to be clear, we don't send it to the customer. We do mark them as accepted though, so that it triggers automations that are required once a customer has been set up. So, but yes, this is instant pricing will inflate your close ratio 100% because most people will not submit the form if they don't like the price. So there's a whole debate like we've talked about in the past, like do you collect the information and then give the pricing and risk a 30% drop off of them not even seeing the pricing because that happens. Or do I let them see the pricing and then if they don't like it, they don't click submit. So there's that debate. It will continue forever. And if you are doing it where they see the pricing when they click submit, you're essentially going to have 100% close ratio. Yes, it will skew your close ratio higher and that's why I just track number of jobs accepted in terms of comparison. All right, question for Mike. What are your annual revenue expectations for a GM? Ran location, 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year, etc. For example, at the end of their season a GM didn't hit a revenue goal at 500,000 for example, would you fire them? I wouldn't fire them.

Because most of the time when they don't hit the hit the target of sales and revenue growth, it's actually, it's a personnel problem. They're usually a good operational gm but they, they stink at sales. And so usually it's actually you made the wrong hire. And so I talked all about this at conference. I have a video on this on the Home Service Millionaire channel. But I would say if someone did not aggressively target 500,000 the first few years that a, you might not have given enough advertising dollars first thing. Secondly, you might have hired the wrong person that has operational skills and would lead a great team at 7, 800,000 annual revenue. But it does not want to do follow up calls, does not want to knock on people's doors, does not want to cold call, then I would, I would say that, you know, it falls on us as owners to hire the right person and make sure they're set up for success, including a solid marketing budget. So in terms of hitting their revenue goals, like I would be much more rather focused on like if their close ratio is 20% then we have a big problem because if, if their close ratio is 70, 80% and I haven't given them the resources for marketing to get enough leads to hit certain revenue targets, then they're kind of at a big disadvantage. And so I'm going to be tracking things much more around their close ratio, their efficiency, like are they complete enough budget hours in the field? If not, do you have enough in person estimates? Because if you have a whole bunch of estimates, they shouldn't be in the field. And if they're not in the field and they have a high close ratio with a lot of estimates, we should be growing very fast and I should be able to pour money on Marketing and growing because I have 70, 80% close ratio and so I would not fire them. I would probably either A need to retrain them or B figure out a way to be able to make sales without them. Assuming they're really good at operational gm, they're really good at team meetings, training. Interviewing that is a very very valuable skill set. So I probably wouldn't throw this person aside unless they also stunk at operations. But what I'd probably have to do is take a little bit more shouldering of the responsibility around sales. Whether it be instant pricing, whether it be over the phone pricing, whether it be more marketing budget. As long as they can have a high enough close ratio then I don't really look to them, you know, as a problem. I just didn't give them the resources or the skills or the training. Kyle from Pristine Lawns and Snow oh to give your I think this is it was asking for numbers. Do I have annual revenue expectations? I have revenue. I don't have expectations as much as incentives. Like when they hit 20,000amonth in revenue they get more 40,000amonth in revenue, 60,000, 80,000 and 100,000 in annual in monthly revenue. If they hit those targets they get more money. If you're in growth mode and you're trying to grow fast and you could do some people do as a commission like a percentage of the sales to incentivize that. So yeah I'm much more, I'm much more thinking like if you're not producing revenue I completely budget hours. You should be doing estimates and if those estimates you have a lot of estimates great, you shouldn't be, you won't have budget hours but then your close ratio better be high and if those things are all true then the business will grow. Like if I have a ton of estimates like 30 plus a week of in person plus everything being done instantly and over the phone I should be growing very quickly if my close ratio is 70, 80% and I'm in growth mode. So if I'm not equipping them correctly though because my prices are way too high, I'm not giving them marketing dollars. I don't haven't given them the training on how to do follow up phone calls or door knocking or door hangers then then I would take responsibility for that. Kyle Pristine lawns lets know how do I know when where to open a second location? Should I be opening one in every city or is it only cities that are a 30 minute drive away? The most conservative route to opening a second location in My opinion is, is you get one location to where there's six to eight employees that a person can manage relatively easily. You don't need multiple overhead people. Usually, again, I give ranges of revenue because it's easier for people to understand. And that's like that 7,800,000 annual revenue marker that's been in profit mode. You raise prices three, four times. That's like the ideal candidate. And I'm having an operational GM that can run that first one. I'm going to start in a second location. Now. The question is, where do I open it? I'm usually going to be looking at the next town over where I get a lot of leads and I'm turning people away. So if you're turning a lot of people away, like maybe 10, 15% of your leads are, you know, out of your service area. I'm looking. Okay, where do those usually come from? That's a good place to start. Also, you could advertise in that area for one season and just see what the response is. Build up your, your. Your customer base of a recurring route to basically fill the general manager schedule from day one. So if you get 30, 40 recurring, for example, in that area. Now when I start a, quote, second location, I'm already covering the fixed expenses of like a shop space and the general manager from day one. That's the most conservative way of doing it. Is it the fastest way? No, because you'll burn an extra year sampling the market and then, you know, sending a crew over there into that area, probably driving 30 minutes. Not great. Not good for efficiency. Probably giving them a higher percentage on paper performance just so they can get over there and make money. Um, so not good, not great. It'll take you longer. But it's the more conservative route if you're not. If you don't have plenty of cash. Val Silva from Silva's Landscaping Company. Over the last few years, you've discussed instant pricing on a website in order to expedite the sales process. I've been trying, I've been doing research to see what would like look like so we could have an idea how to implement this strategy. Can you show some examples of what this would look like on an actual website? I've been on Augusta websites and haven't been able to find this. Thanks. Yeah, so we specifically at Augusta do make sure that we. Before we actually show the pricing, you have to fill in some information. We do this specifically just to reduce the amount of people that are just trying to test it out. So once you fill in the information then you'll see the pricing. We don't capture the information until you actually click submit. But just FYI. Secondly I would say watch the workshop. So mikeannies.com workshop I go into depth. You don't need to go all the way to the extent of collecting card information right away. There's three different layers I talk about. The first is just give a range of price on your quote. Like literally just like, okay, if we're doing a mowing job, it's usually going to cost you between 50 to 80 bucks. You could do that. That alone will weed out a lot of tire kickers are expecting $20. That's the range. The next thing would be to be able to give pictures of the size of properties small, medium and large and let them select that. That would be the second option. Now the third option that I'm not a huge fan of is actually like having them where they have to measure their property or it does AI to scan the square footage. I am not against those. There are plenty of other plugins that do this. The plugins sometimes slow down your site. So then now your SEO is getting affected. It takes more time from the customer if they have to actually measure the property and drop pins if their cell service is low. The actual scanning of the property automatically might also take 5 or 10 seconds which leads to a massive drop off in conversion. So there's a lot of pros and cons of doing the third way. And the fourth way really is you. You get the price and their credit card information. They're locked and loaded and good to go. So those are the different levels. I would not try to go for the fourth one right away. I would start with the first one. So again go to the workshop. I walk through the different types. How to set this up. You can absolutely do this inside Jotform and then connect it via Zapier to Copilot if you would like to. That would be my recommendation. And down the road when we do more customizable forms inside of Copilot this is something that we would make sure can be can be done on your site. But there's a lot of because you're actually taking. You know the goal will be able to take card information. There's a lot of PCI compliance and security stuff around that bill from P&J's grounds keeping. Hi Mike. When I give pricing to new residential customers for grass cutting, they say the price is too high. When I raise the prices for my current customers to have, they have no problems paying. I Started with prices above the average market pricing when I first started business. Not sure if I should be lowering the prices for new customers because I have no, I have to lower the pricing for my current customers. Okay, great. So first off, your existing customers are not going to your site looking at your pricing. Once they're locked in, they're happy with your service. No one's doing that. I have yet to actually hear this happening because we use this quite often and everyone thinks that this is like you'll see on social media, people say horrible things about the way we do this at Augusta. The bottom line is this. When you think about from a risk perspective from a customer, they're comparing you against a bunch of other contractors, all of which they have no trust in because everyone to them is the same. They cut grass until that changes with like a more of a national brand and the brand awareness that this is going to be the same. So if you think about it in this perspective, the customer's risk is high for all options. And so the only way to usually stand out or the easiest way I should say to stand out is pricing. Now the way that your workflow in terms of your estimate, the speed at which you get estimate to them, the professionalism you have if you show up to the estimate, your professionalism on the phone is also value. So let me be very clear, you can absolutely sell a premium product. However, there's a higher likelihood at all times if you are cheaper that you will close more deals. The question is, do I want to have a 30 to 40% close ratio and have a premium premium price or don't have a 70, 80% close? Twice as many deals with a slightly lower price. In my opinion, assuming you have enough cash, getting them in the door at the lower price is fine as long as there is an absolute time when you raise prices on those customers. In my opinion, that's when you hit capacity. Defining what capacity is so you actually do raise prices is important because the vast majority of people go with the strategy of let me go low at the beginning and raise their prices down the road and guess what happens? They, they never raise their prices. And so as long as you have a very clear strategy and I talk about capacity based growth all the time. The reason I do is because I want to get people in the door. I want to prove to them that I'm better than everyone else. I want to prove to them that I answer my phone. I want to prove to them I have a professional service. I want to prove to them if something goes Wrong. I take care of it right away. I want to prove to them I have a professional team, uniforms, trucks, et cetera. They can be proud of our crew when they show up at their property and their neighbors are wowed. Once I've proven that for 3, 612 months I can raise prices. And they are very price insensitive because they don't want to switch and take the risk of going and getting five other contractors of which the four they contacted last time never even got back to them or never showed up or the quote took three weeks to get back to them. So they will usually want to stick around. And if you do a good job and you have a great product and you have a good customer that you're actually marketing to, then the price insensity sensitivity of them goes up as I do a great job and they, they do not want the risk of switching services. And so I'm a big fan of this. However, the reason I don't talk about too much is because most people just continually keep growing their business on these lower profit margins services and customers and never actually raise their prices and therefore go bankrupt. And you can have a growing business that is profitable, go bankrupt. And that happens all the time. And so I'd be very careful with the strategy. But assuming. Watch the workshop again mikeannies.com workshop it's completely free. Watch the workshop. It walks through capacity based growth. But you have to determine, I should say, in my opinion, I believe that you should determine a time at which you're going to raise prices. I do it based upon capacity, how many budget hours I can complete. And I'm not going to keep buying trucks and equipment to extend my capacity. I'm going to set my capacity a certain limit. I hit it and I will raise prices. So I don't believe you'll need to raise your lower. You do not need lower prices to existing customers so you can get new customers. It's not the case. No one checks the pricing once they are a customer and they're happy. And it is very common to have introductory pricing. So don't think that this scammy, it's not fishy. It's the same thing that many other businesses use and that is the reason they use, they employ this especially like I'll just use an example like introductory offers for like cell phone providers. The reason that they do that is because to all of us, the vast majority of us, cell servers, cell services are the same. And so what you do is you get them on a lower price. You prove the Value, you prove that your network works well, that they do great customer service. And guess what? When you raise prices, usually people stick around. And so this is an introductory offer to be able to reduce the risk associated with a commodity. And so unless you are flying drones to someone's house and letting off robots and it's silent and it's done in the middle of the night, we don't have a very differentiated actual end product. What we actually differentiate ourselves in terms of value is the way we deliver the service. So I want to do is I wanted to reduce the risk associated with the cost so that the customer tries my service. I proved them that I'm better than anyone else. And then when I raise price, they're happy to pay it because they don't want to switch to an inferior service. Now, if you don't have a good product, you don't have a good service, you don't take care of customers, don't answer your phone, then you will have a massive problem with this strategy. And this is why I don't talk about it a lot, because most people in this industry do not have a great website. They do not have great service, they do not have great customer service, they don't answer their phone, they take forever to get back to customers. And because of that, when they raise prices, they will lose a lot of people. And so just be careful with that. Caleb Barlett from Spruce Lawn Care. We implemented some pricing at the beginning of March and our close ratio has been 21%. Is this normal? I feel like this could be hurting our company. Okay, so first off, I would say you probably jumped all the way to the later stages of incident pricing. Also your close ratio, I'm assuming you're getting, you're collecting the information prior to them seeing the price. Because if you're collect, the reason you're seeing 21% is because you're getting a lead and then they're seeing the price and then they're bailing. The reason I know that is because if you were showing the price beforehand, you'd have A quote unquote 100% close ratio of the instant pricing forms. And so, and then you'd be able to triage the whole. Like, are they actually converting? That'd be a different problem. But the fact that you have a close ratio tells me that you're taking their information. They have to click a button. It goes to a different page to see the pricing. When you do that, you're gonna have a huge drop off right there because people just don't trust. So I would just be careful with this. Again, this is why I recommend slowly going into instant pricing. The way that you roll it out is important. The way that the screens are laid out isn't. But the way the fields are is very important. Because now when you're starting to talk about price, like you're going to have a lot more people are more sensitive to stuff, especially if you start asking for their card information. So be careful with that too. So I don't, I don't, I can't see your site. Let me see if I can just randomly look this up and find it real quick. One second. First off, free estimate. 60 seconds. Like it first, let's first check if you're in our service area. This year. I would take out like this year even.

Fine. Okay. So again, I don't know where you're tracking that percentage. I don't know where you're, where you're tracking that. But see this next button that's required, that's capturing the, the, the contact information, which is fine, but you're going to get a lot of people not even clicking on this. So I don't know where your 21% close ratio is coming from. I'm guessing it's like if I fill in this information. All right, I'm not going to go through this stuff. If I fill in this information. Let me do copy that won't let me. Okay, yeah, okay. So see how they have to give us information just to see the pricing. They know that when they click next, there's gonna be a big drop off here. Now I don't know where you're tracking this in terms of like, I'm guessing it's the people that submit this and then the people that accept on the next page. But generally speaking, if you're advertising get your price in 60 seconds, you want to actually give it to them immediately. People do feel a little bit caught off guard. We've just seen the conversion. Either A, it's the drop off here where they don't submit their information or B, they don't even submit their information simply due to the fact that they.

They'Re like, where's the pricing? Right? So it says click next to access pricing. But again, it feels very like, hey, you said I was gonna get in 60 seconds. Now I gotta give you my information. I'd just be a little bit careful of that. You're gonna drop off of people like me. They're like, I don't want to my information in without knowing the price first. And Whenever they click on something, that's when you're capturing the data. And most people are pretty privy to this. So I'm not opposed to what you're doing now. I would just. Here, give me one second. Let me try to see. I don't even want to fill this out now because I know that I'm going to be in your system and you're going to have all my data. Right. So like, it's just a, it's just a bit of a catch 22 here. Give me one second. Let me figure this out. Let me try to play with this.

Okay. I'm going to just make some stuff up. Give me one second. Sorry. I just want to offer as much value here as possible. One second. How'd you hear about us? Okay, so then I go next. Okay, then I see pictures. Yes. I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah, these pictures are tough. Okay. You got to scroll to see all the images too.

And then. Oh, I see you have a drop down. Yeah. The design of this is where it's struggling. Right? So like, ideally I would just be a click on these pictures in the perfect world.

Also, like, just even the layout of the images is a little bit confusing. It almost looks like the same house with those arches. Sorry, I'm just looking here. So by requiring this drop down, I don't view photos again, is like these, these, these houses kind of look the same, honestly. Mostly because the arch, that arch right there, people are gonna think this is literally the same house just from a different angle. So I would get like either 3D generated or like AI generated ones, for example. That is a little more simple. People look at the house too much, so they would literally think that these three houses are very similar. Also, there's a lot of space. See this like scroll down. This scroll down alone will reduce your close ratio a lot. I want it to be where it's all right here when they get here, it's like 1, 2, 3, small, medium, large. Click on the one that looks like yours. Let's go.

So it's all optimization of your design. Again, like, um, I'm just, I'm biased this because I, I see the numbers in the back and like changing the size of these pictures and putting it small, medium, large, left to right will dramatically change compared to where I have to scroll down to the next page. And these are all large images. So if, if, if you're really concerned about a low close ratio, I would back up your design a little bit instead of trying to go for this exact pricing. Like you Are and slowly start adding things and testing it. Um, so, yeah, again, this is why when I talk about the workshop, I say start with the ranges and move forward slowly because you don't want it to go to this. And now if you've had a big drop in close ratio, that's. That's not good. So, yeah, also you're gonna get a lot of tire kickers when you say instant pricing. So you're getting a lot more people. I would assume you're getting a lot more leads. The way you have this set up because you're getting all the people sending submitting contact information to see the pricing and then they're dropping off. But you'll get a lot more tire because simply by saying you get instant pricing. So I like to say you get instant pricing, but then let them see the prices before I click the information. I'll have more people see the prices. There will be some people that are shocked because it's so high. There'll be other people that are shocked it's so low and they'll accept. So anyways, that's just based upon, like, a lot of testing on the design of these forms, design of the pictures, et cetera. I think you might have gone a little bit too quickly, Caleb. If I was you, I would go back to just like, hey, on your. On your asset request form, here's approximately a cost for mowing. That way you get rid of the people that are super cheap and the people that are, you know, thinking that this is great pricing, they. You have a higher close ratio then. So also just the way you have this form set up where you're collecting information prior to them seeing the pricing, you're gonna have a lower close ratio, but a way more number of leads. So there's pros and cons to both. Okay, let's see here what else we got? Okay, we answered that question. All right, couple more. Number 11, Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and Snowplowing. What should be some main focuses of an owner to get the most out of the spring rush, really understanding what your capacity is and then being able to know that when you hit capacity, either raising prices or buying another truck or a piece of equipment or hiring someone. And those are not they should be guesses. It's like, well, we're kind of feeling busy, so I'm going to hire someone. No, it's like, how many budget hours do I have in the schedule? Like, if you're not using the calendar view of copilot that shows the budget hours for recurring jobs the budget hours for one time projects and your total number of budget hours. And you're not using your budget hour capacity chart to be able to know, okay, am I above capacity? Am I below capacity? Well, if I hire one more person, I increase my capacity by 30 budget hours a week. Now all of a sudden, the calendar will adjust. So if you're not using that, highly recommend. The vast majority of people oscillate in the spring rush from not having enough work to being booked out six weeks and an employee leaving all of a sudden because they're not tracking their capacity. Like, how many employees do I actually need to complete the work that's on the schedule? And if I was to grow by X amount of customers and it was to increase the number of budget hours, when would I need trucks and when would I need equipment? These are things that can be simply done by math. And so I would highly recommend use the budget hour, little toggle on the calendar, See your budget hours for recurring visits, see your budget hours for one time jobs, be able to note your total budget hours, which now includes in person estimates and meetings, et cetera, to dos that have an associated budget hour time. You can be very specific in terms like are we overbooked? And if you saw last week you had 120 budget hours, this week you had 130 budget hours. Now next week is 140 budget hours, there's a very good chance you're going to need to hire someone pretty soon. So, you know, can you help you avoid getting overbooked? Last question from Steve from pro Lawn in St. Louis. Just signed up for COPA. I have no customers. One of my best next steps for getting the most customers this year. Honestly, I would recommend watching the free content on my website and it talks all about marketing. So mikeannies.com, there's landscape business course on there, there's MBA for entrepreneurs on there. There's been this turnaround on there. There is the workshop on there. There's just a ton of resources. It's all free. Go check that out. You'll have plenty, plenty of ideas on how to grow the business from scratch. All right, everyone, I hope you all have a fantastic day again. Thank you very much for all the feedback and the surveys. Hope you have a fantastic day. We'll stay in touch. Take care.