How to convert 4x more leads into customers

All right. If you're having an issue with getting your leads to turn into customers, this video is going to walk you through different strategies that you can implement in your business to help you navigate leads to customers. This is a common issue that we see with business that we work with. Obviously, we can do all the marketing stuff to help them get leads, but at the end of the day, they have to convert those leads into actual sales. So this is our customer funnel that we work off of, and we're going to go through this conversion section here. But essentially, you're going to be creating visibility for your business, and you're going to be getting leads coming into your business. However, what we found is that getting them from lead into a sale is one of the biggest hurdles that most businesses have. A lot of times the people up top, whether it's a customer service representative or even a salesperson, they sometimes just turn into order takers, and so they're not able to get them through this funnel. When I used to be the director of business development at an air duct cleaning company, what ended up happening was a form would come in from the website. The customer service representative would call them. They wouldn't answer. They would leave a message, and they'd just stick them over into a pile, and they would have stacks of piles on their desk, and they would never follow up with them. Then slowly, what they did was instead of printing them out and calling them and sticking them here, they would call them and put them into an email folder that, again, no one would go in and follow up with. So I'm going to walk you through some of these strategies that you can implement in your business and to go from a lead to a sale. The goal of this, especially for cold outreach, is to convert these people at about 40, 50%. And so with these strategies, you're going to be able to do that. And so let's go into our conversion funnel right here. All right. So conversions come in, they turn into a lead, and they never schedule an appointment or get an estimate or a sale. They're just sitting there as leads. So, as I mentioned before, obviously you could call the lead and leave a voicemail. Everyone should be doing that. I'm sure everyone is doing that. If they are getting people on the phone and they're not converting. What we found is that there is a difference between taking an order and having some salesmanship. And so some of the questions that you can coach your customer service representatives to ask is, why do you want to get this service done now? What else have you tried to get to resolve this issue. And why did you select us to call? What this will allow you to do is uncover certain things. For example, let's say it's carpet cleaning. Why are you calling us now? Oh, my dog peed on my carpet. Did you try anything before? Yeah, I sprayed some stuff on it. Didn't work. Okay, why did you find us? Oh, I read your reviews and they're great. Perfect. Then you can start going into why they should choose us. Right. And maybe they still give you some pushback, but we're going to walk through some ways that you can take that conversation. And maybe they do say, hey, I need to talk to my husband. Or maybe they do get off the phone and say, oh, that price is too much, or whatever the objection is. But there's still ways to pull them through your funnel. So the first one is if you use a text message platform, whether that's podium or whatever else that's out there, there's a bunch of different ones. You made content about that before you can send a text message, follow up. Just simply saying, hey Phil, it was really nice to talk with you. Just wanted to follow up and see if you had any other questions. I'm here to answer them for you. Perfect. Follow up. I'm with, you know, such and such company so that they know who you're with. Sending an email, follow up. So let's say you do give them a price quote. You can ask them for their email address and send them an email and say, hey, just wanted to get this in writing for you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now what you have is yes, you have a lead that has come in, but you also have a text message campaign of some sort and an email follow up chain of some sort that you can reply to either an email or a text. So you could do this manually. By all means, tomorrow you could send another text message here. Hey, just checking in. I know you needed to speak with your wife. Did any other questions come up about the carpet cleaning? An email follow up, Hey, I know you need to speak with your wife. Did anything else come up? And it's responding to that initial thread. So this is a manual way that you can do this, but it will help get leads through the funnel faster. The longer that a lead sits, the more likely that they are to not get to this. So even if it's, let's schedule an appointment for two weeks out, three weeks out, at least you can move them to the next step of this funnel. All right, next, there's A little bit more technology that's needed. We work with our clients to help them implement this. But you might have a sequence that you already have. But what this allows you to do is to put these people inside in some type of a nurture follow up campaign. So what this might look like is this lead comes up, comes in, they don't book an appointment. Maybe you do leave it a voicemail, maybe you did talk to them, but you need to follow up with them. What this looks like is you put them in some type of a sequence. Now this is a sequence that we found that works really, really good. And essentially what this does is you call the customer. If they answer, you qualify them. Let's say it's a form that comes in, you qualify them as in your service area, that kind of stuff. And then let's say they don't book an appointment, you put them into some type of SMS follow up of some sort, which is a sequence that will add value. So let's say you have educational content about carpet cleaning. You could send them videos over the next, you know, seven to 14 days, every couple days. Like, hey, if you're hiring a carpet cleaning company, here's five things that you should look for. If you're trying to get this spot out of your carpet, here's three things that you should try, right? Things that just keep adding value. Adding value. It doesn't have to be a text sequence, it could be an email text sequence of some sort. But that's going to be a really good way to get these leads through your funnel. You can also add them into a CRM. A lot of times people use like Service Titan or Service Monster or Jobber, Go House Call Pro. And they don't want to junk up their database with these people and so they never add them into their CRM. But then what happens is when you send out a monthly newsletter or you send out specials to your customers, they're not in that sequence. So whether you have an external CRM that you keep all of your leads in, like a HubSpot or even an Excel spreadsheet or something, it's really important to capture these because at the end of the day, you did pay for this lead somehow, whether even if it was through just organic Google, these people saw your business and they did turn into a lead. So you might as well put them into some type of databases so that eventually maybe you could get some money out of that, return out of that investment. So adding them to some type of CRM is very and very important. And we see this all the time with companies that they just sit in their Outlook inbox and there's nothing that ever happens with these people. And so there's never any retargeting, right? There's never any like monthly newsletter, text marketing, anything to get people back into the funnel that may have not converted initially. So that's a big, big area of opportunity. Dropping a voicemail inside of some of these follow up sequences. You can drop voicemails that just say, hey, I'm just following up on the lead that I. Or the estimate that I gave you a couple days ago. Just want to see if you had any follow up questions and you can have this drop inside of some follow up sequences. Sending educational content, we talked about that. Adding them to a monthly newsletter. Talked about that. And then sending them specials. Let's say that they did it, that they filled out a lead request in August and they were kicking the can down the road. And then now it's November and they're saying, oh my gosh, you know, Thanksgiving's coming up and my family's coming over. I have this huge stain in my living room. Maybe you have a special for Thanksgiving, a $35 off special for cleaning to get ready for the holidays. And you send that out to them and then they come back into your funnel and they are ready to schedule, ready to roll and get through this process. So if you're having issues with converting these leads into sales, these are some ways that you can push people through your funnel or more effectively, rather than just getting a lead leaving a voicemail, they're never going to answer, they're never going to call you back and they're just stale. And this is also going to improve your marketing return on investment because you're going to be getting all these leads in that you can actually now start to convert. So if you need help implementing these strategies in your business, this is what we do at Flash Consulting. We help local service businesses increase their sales and keep their technician schedules full. And, and I'll put some links down below, but we post content about growing local service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.