Brutally Honest Tips That Skyrocketed My Clients’ Revenue by 20%+

At the time of this recording, my company has generated over $47 million of growth for home service businesses. On average, our clients see an annual growth of 20% year over year. However, there are 10 things holding back their growth that usually stagnates them. And in this video, I'm going to break down all 10, so that way you can get skyrocketing growth in your business as well. Tip number one, if you don't know your return on ad spend, you're flying blind. When I started as director of business development at a $3 million home service business, we were spending $5,000 per month on Google Ads. And, and when I got on the phone with our digital marketing company, I said, okay, great, we're spending money on ads. Who are these leads that you speak of? Who are these conversions? And they said, well, you know, it's in your CRM. You got to figure it out. That was the first red flag that I had with digital marketing companies, was that they didn't know my return on ad spend numbers and I didn't know my return on ad spend numbers. So how could I know what was working and what wasn't working? You see companies that stagnate growth, they don't know where to actually put money to grow their business because they don't know the return on ad spend numbers. So what they should be doing is if you're spending money on Google Ads, Yelp, Angie, Facebook, whatever it is, you want to drive traffic to a landing page. On that landing page, you want to have a custom tracking phone number and a custom tracking form. Those two things are going to be leads directly from that campaign. So what you want to do is anytime a call happens or a form happens, you want it to go into a spreadsheet. And now you can audit that every single month to get your true return on ad spend data. Tracking your return on ad spend is good. However, tip number two is the reason why return on ad spend is low. Tip number two, most companies operate on wishful thinking and just pray that their estimates were closed. We had just started working with this electrical contractor, and they were spending money on ads, and he felt stuck because he didn't know what his return on ad spend information was. So we put all this stuff in place. We started generating his return on ad spend number, and that illuminated the big problem in his business was that he was getting a bunch of opportunities, but he wasn't converting them into actual sales. So he was spending $4,000 a month. He. He generated $50,000 in closed revenue. So over 10x return, which is great, but he generated $127,000 in potential revenue that he wasn't closing. He was closing less than 50% of his revenue that could potentially have generated 20x 30x of what he was actually spending on his ads. So we went in and built an estimate follow up sequence for his company. Anytime an estimate went out, we set up a 21 day nurture sequence that would follow up on his estimates. And this was calls, texts and emails that will go out to the customer to help them close more deals. You see, just because you have your return on ad spend data and it might be low now you need to figure out is it the lead quality or is it that I'm not closing these estimates for some reason. So once you know your closing rate, just like that electrical contractor, now you have to fix it with an estimate nurture sequence. That leads us to tip number three. You're just giving out estimates with no strategy. We were working with this H VAC contractor. They were closing around 46%, which is pretty good. Usually you want to get 40 to 60% and however, we knew that there was area of opportunity for them because they were generating a ton of estimates and they weren't closing them at the level that we knew that they could get to. So what we did was we built a 21 day nurture sequence and anytime an estimate went out, we did text, emails, phone calls, and it ended up over 12 months. They went from 46% close rate to 58% close rate. Inside of that 21 day nurture sequence, we were sharing things like customer testimonials, frequently asked questions, educating the customer on certain things, and then asking the customer, hey, were you able to solve this problem yet in your home? Through that process, they increased their conversion rate by 12% which then grew their business. They actually doubled their revenue in 12 months. You should aim to close 40 to 60% of your estimates. However, most people don't have enough estimates, which is holding them back from growth. Which leads us right to tip number four. Tip number four, you're not doing enough estimates because all you're doing is running service and repair calls. Another H Vac company that we work with had a huge issue with estimate count. They were just paying for leads and going out and doing service calls and repair calls. But they weren't upselling the big ticket items on top of. So what we did was we build out four things. First, we built out a technician incentive program. This enabled their technicians to start sending in leads to their salespeople and it incentivized their technicians that there was a process in place to track those leads and also a way for them to get paid on those leads as well. Second, we clean up their call scripts to encourage their customer service representatives to start creating opportunities for their salespeople on the phones. Third, we send out email newsletters, cross selling different services to educate the customer and have the customer start asking about specific services. And that way they didn't have to go and actually sell anything. On top of it, customers were asking them about these new services. And then the fourth thing was we gave the opens from that email to their salesperson and said, hey, these people are clearly interested in this offer or this specific service. Call these people, don't be creepy, but start a conversation with them and see if you can set up an estimate. This company saw an increase over 12 months of 52% in their estimate count. They literally went from 230 estimates to around 500 estimates just by implementing these four things. So once you know this number, now you need to focus on that first problem, which is you're just getting service and repair calls. You need to get more of them because it can generate more estimates. Which leads us right to tip number five. Tip number five, you're just ghosting your revenue. You see, most companies have a problem contacting their leads. They call them one time and get a voicemail. They might send them an email with no response and then it's gone forever. So we had a business that we work with that was giving estimates over the phone. They got one shot at every single phone call and one shot at every single web form that came in. They would just send them an estimate back. So, so what we did was we said, hold on, we need to evaluate your script. We need to get the customer's email address or phone number and allow us to text them an estimate or an email. Now we were in control. So after we sent the estimate to them via email, we set up a 14 day nurture sequence. The goal was to get more people to convert from a lead to a job on the books. So we set up this 14 day nurture sequence and they ended up closing 21% more of their leads into jobs, which had a 51% increase in revenue just by fixing their lead problem. They didn't even increase the number of leads, they just managed the leads that they had to convert more of the estimates into jobs. The big problem at tip number five is that you don't have a lead problem. You have a lead management problem. You're getting calls, emails, messages from all over the place, but you don't have a process to actually manage all of your leads. And so they just leak out. You're paying money and you're not getting all the juice out of the squeeze. So once you get your lead nurture process dialed in, now you can focus on getting more leads. Which leads us to tip number six. Tip number six. You're chasing new customers while past prospects and customers are sitting in your CRM saying, please contact me, I want to give you money. A big issue is that people are just spinning their wheels, spending more and more and more money, praying to the Google gods for leads when they have a gold mine sitting inside of their CRM. We had a company that does custom closets and fabrication that we started working with. They had never emailed their customers ever, because it's more bigger ticket items. So what we did was we created a content calendar, and the first email that was going out was about custom cabinets inside of an office. So we took all their customers and prospects, we sent them an email. They got an email back on that first email that said, hey, you did not do my custom closet. I actually went with someone else and I wasn't happy with them, but I really liked your presentation and what you all were about. So I want you to do my office for me. Which ended up being a $10,000 estimate just by sending out one email to a past prospect or customer. Email marketing to your past prospects and customers is the lowest cost, quickest, most effective way to start getting leads and estimate opportunities inside of your business. You can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relations. All you need to do is set up an email to go out to your customers every single month and cross sell different services and educate them on what you do. Okay. People say, yeah, okay, Phil, I get it, but I want new customers too. The problem is that you have no idea where to get these new customers from. Which leads us right to tip number seven. Tip number seven. You don't know your customer acquisition cost. An electrical contractor that we work with was slow. They have their shoulder season. They're like, okay, well, I don't know what's working, what's not working. That's the problem. If you don't know what's working, what's not working. You can't figure out where you should deploy your capital to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to your new customers. Which is why you have to figure out your customer acquisition cost. So customer acquisition cost is basically take all the marketing dollars that you spend divided by the number of new customers that are coming in to your company. And now you have your customer acquisition cost to get this even more granular. You could say I spent $2,000 on Google Ads, which generated 10 new customers, which means that my customer acquisition cost is $200. Very simple way to know, okay, if I get a new customer for $200, I'm going to spend more money on Google Ads because it all makes sense for my business. A big part of this is when you're slow or you feel like you don't know what's working. It's a very easy way to zoom out and make a smart decision about, I'm going to spend this money over here because of this. Not just the gut feeling anymore. It's actually using your data to help you grow. Okay, Phil, with $200, that sounds like a lot of money. Okay, I get it. Here's tip number eight. Don't pay Google, pay B2B partners. If you're willing to pay the Google gods for customers, leads, impressions, clicks, you should be paying referral partners and affiliate partners to send you deals. An Airdale cleaning that we work with scale to $3 million in revenue, all by paying B2B partners to send them leads. Instead of paying Google, they would pay their referral partners and they would pay them 20% of whatever that job is, $500 job, $100 goes to the referral partner, and this scaled them to $3 million. If you're willing to spend money on Google to try to get customers, clicks, impressions, leads, then you should take that same money and be paying referrals. One, you don't pay until you get a lead from them. So you don't actually have to pay money like on Google. And then hopefully you get some leads. You're just paying them and they're sending you leads. Two, they're much warmer leads. It's someone else saying, hey, you should contact this company to do this service for you. Opposed to Google, they're just saying, let me fill out a form and see if they might get back to me and how much it's going to cost. Okay, so now you have leads coming in like crazy. If you execute that plan, you have leads coming in like crazy. But now the real problem illuminates itself, and that is tip number nine. Tip number nine. If you're the only salesperson, your business dies when you go on vacation or you get busy. This is probably the number one thing that holds a lot of these companies back, especially 1 to 3 million is that their business owner is the main salesperson or the number one salesperson for the company. So what happens is you start getting very busy or God forbid, you want to go on vacation and then you can't grow your business because you're stuck. You are the salesperson that keeps the engine going, going, going. So what we see at this point is that you need to hire another salesperson or build some other team members up so that way they can sell instead of you. This will give you the bandwidth to go out and get more leads. People think, oh, I need more leads before I hire someone else. If you do the things that I mentioned before, you're going to get a bunch of leads that are coming in. And on top of that you can even hire someone to go and do this whole B2B game plan that I just told you about. The other thing is when you have another salesperson or someone else in sales, you can hold them accountable to their close rate to their average ticket, to the number of leads that they generate, to the B2B partnerships that they're coming up with. All of these things start to get off of your plate and onto someone else plate and you start actually running a business, not just running a sales team and trying to get things done on a day to day basis. And trust me, I get, I run a business as well. When you're trying to hire people, pay people and run sales and do all this stuff, it can be very scary because you need the leads to come in to make sure that you can feed this person. But there's another flip side to this, which is when you have another person now, you can hold them accountable. And it's who not how is the question that you start asking. All right, so once you solve this problem, you're officially a self growing company. You have leads coming in, you have quotes going out, you have salespeople doing stuff. But there's one big problem that will always exist for however long you grow. Even $200 million home service businesses have this problem. And that's tip number 10. Tip number 10. Most companies don't have a lead problem, they have a lead management problem. Like the home service business company that I mentioned before that fixed their lead problem by 21%. They also ended up growing their business by 51% revenue just by fixing their lead to close process. Most companies think they have a lead problem, but it's actually a lead management problem. And here's two things you can do to fix your lead management problem. First, come up With a workflow. When a lead comes in, what happens? You get an email, you get a call, you get a web form, you get a message on an ad platform, what happens? Who's responsible for it, where does it go and what does the nurture sequence look like after that? How long does it go? When do we step in manually? You need to whiteboard this or figure this out in your business of how this should flow. A very simple one is every single lead goes into a Google sheet. You set up zap here. So every time something goes into that Google sheet, it pulls it over into mailchimp or some other tool and starts an email sequence going on. This is all pretty basic, but it's manual that you can set these things up for your business. The second thing is you need to have a phone script. It's great to get web forms and ad messages, but your phone script is what you're going to live and die by. Your phone script is what's going to actually convert your leads into sales. The phone script is where phone calls are coming in, your CSRs are talking on the phone and you need to actually close deals. If you can get your phone script tight and your lead management tight, all you have to do is just pour on more money and get more leads. It's very simple. If you want to see how we solve these 10 things for a home service business and double their revenue in 12 months, I actually put together this video. You can check it out here. If that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.