Phil Risher (Phlash Consulting) explains how local service businesses can track new customers and evaluate whether marketing is actually bringing in new business versus repeat customers. He presents three practical approaches: (1) monitor month-to-month growth of contacts in your CRM/database (e.g., check count on the first of each month), (2) track lead source per contact via website forms/UTMs or asking customers directly to attribute where leads originate, and (3) use CRM "new customer" reports that show customers created during a time window and associated revenue. He cites CRM examples (ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro) and suggests a simple Excel fallback for businesses without a CRM.
Questions this video answers
Phil Risher (Phlash Consulting).
September 26, 2023.
ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro.
Chapters
In this video, we're going to discuss how to track new customers coming into your business. And more importantly, is your marketing actually working or is it just returning customers that keep coming into your business? The reason this video is created is because we were on a prospecting meeting and the prospect asked us, well, how can we track if new customers are actually coming into our business, or is it just repeat business? And so we're going to look at some of the ideas that we came up with to help with visibility, to hopefully help you grow your business. My name is Phil Risher. On this channel, we talk about growing local service businesses. We have a company, Flash Consulting, where we work with local services to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. On this video, that's what we talk about. All right, so let's get right into this. So we've shared this Flash customer journey. Basically, there's visibility, conversions and retargeting. A lot of people, they just want new customers coming in the door, which is great. So they pay for ads on like Thumbtack, Angie, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, all these different platforms. They get new customers, they get the sale, and they don't do any retargeting. On the flip side, a lot of companies that have a lot of returning customers, which would be like carpet cleaning companies, maid services, even Realtors, a lot of their business is coming in through retargeting. And so they don't really get too much new customers. They don't have visibility into new customers. And so in this video, we're going to talk about how can you track where your new customers are coming from? Hopefully, if you're doing this old school, you can obviously have a pen and paper, an Excel spreadsheet, and keep track on a monthly basis where your jobs are coming from. And that works. But let's look more new school. If you have a CRM or a client relationship manager, or you're utilizing some tools but you don't really know how. In this video, we're going to discuss some different ways and different reports that you can run. So the first one is very simple. If you go into your CRM and you see that currently you have 1,000 people in your database, then you know that if your starting point is 1,000 next month, if you go and get 1,020, if you check it and on the first of next month and you have 1020, then your growth of new customers into your database or new leads or new people in Your database is 20, which is a 2% growth. If you have A thousand people. And so that is a very simple way of how you can see, are you actually growing your database of people, growing your new customer list, and ultimately growing your business. Because the more people that are in your atmosphere, in your database, if you're doing this retargeting stuff, they're gonna keep coming back into your conversion. So maybe they find out about you, they turn into a lead, but they don't ultimately go into a sale. If they go over here and get a month newsletter and some text marketing, then they can come back into this funnel and run through this sequence again and hopefully come out the other side as a sale. And so the more that you're growing your database, the better it is. And that's one very simple way. The first of every month, check to see how many people are in your database. All right. The next thing is in your CRM is to actually track your lead sources. And a lot of businesses, I know when I was a director of business development at a service business, they weren't doing this, but it's a best practice that you should do, which is when you're setting up your job or your task or whatever is happening in your CRM, there's usually a section for lead source, which is, how did you hear about us? Customer? And so there's two ways that you can do this. On your forms, on your website, you can literally say, how did you hear about us? You can also add a UTM tracker on there, which would show, did they come from Facebook? Did they come from Google Organic? Did they come directly to your website? Did they come to your Google business profile? So then you're able to see on the back end where they came from. So then you can add that into lead source. Click. The second thing is just ask the person when you're in front of them or when you're on the phone with them, which is, hey, how exactly did you hear about us? Where did you find us at? Oh, I was just googling around and I found you. Oh, my friend told me about this. Oh, I saw you in a Facebook group, whatever it is, and then put it in there. Why is this important is because if you want to attract your new customers, not just your customer referrals, then this is one way to segment it out and to say, okay, well, how many people came from Google, how many people came from Facebook, how many people came from here? And. And so you're able to truly see your new customers. More importantly, if you're spending money on digital advertising, let's say you're doing Google local service ads, you're doing Yelp ads, you're a home advisor, Angie, all these different ones. This is going to allow you to see what is actually generating revenue and new customers for your business. It's not just, oh, we're growing our database, which is the first one, because who knows where the database is growing from? It could have been 20 more people from Google and you're spending $10,000 on all these ad platforms when they're not working. And so that's going to be a really good way is using your lead source tracking in your cr, the last one. And this gets even a little bit more tighter, which is in a lot of these CRMs, they even have a new customer report which will show you how many new people came into your database, where they came from, and hopefully sales and revenue generated off these customers. And the benefit of this is that truly you're going to be able to see the new customers that have come in and not just from a lead source perspective. You're not going to just see like, let's say that I came into your database from Facebook, but then I used you 10 times and Facebook gets attributed every single time for the lead source. This is truly going to show you your new customers that have come in that are just created by a specific time frame. So let's say that you're looking at September. You're going to look at your new customers created by September, in September, in that time period. This is a truly true snapshot of new customers coming into your database, not just lead sources over a specific amount of time or new customers coming in inside of those lead sources. So that is the three ways to attract new customers and to track your marketing performance to some extent. If you have a CRM, you know, like service Titan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, a lot of them have these resources in here where you can see some type of level of reporting and so you can utilize those. If you don't have those, then you can use like an Excel spreadsheet or something if you're just starting out and just try to track some of this data. Cool. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you have ideas on other content that you'd like to see, drop a comment below. If not, we'll see you in the next video.
