How to Turn Leads Into Paying Jobs with Phil Risher

I think in the age of AI and digital, people lose track of that. And there's two ways to actually supercharge this with digital marketing. The first way is when you build these B2B partnerships, you want to make it super easy for them to give you leads.

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Welcome to the Service MVP podcast and my name is Joe Cressera, America's service sales coach. And we have today with us a very special guest, we have Phil Risher, who is with Flash Consulting. Phil, welcome to the Service MVP podcast.

Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to talk with you today.

Well, me too, Phil, you know, because the Service MVP podcast specializes in, number one, differentiating your services and also increasing sales to scale your business and, and grow. Right. And so Phil has a different take on marketing and, you know, using branding and marketing so that it's more relevant to clients to grow and scale. Phil, you know, the first thing I think about when I hear marketing is I start everybody, like everybody else will be grown because the marketing guy says, well, let me work on SEO and Google Ads and see if I can give me four to six months to see if I can start making things work. And meanwhile, we're paying all the money up front to make this thing work. And then in four to six months later they say, well, you know what I meant, I need another four to six months. Next thing you know, you spent a year on this project and you haven't gotten anything. No traction. It makes sense. Phil, why don't you tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to where you're at here helping contractors. Please.

Yeah, for sure. Well, that, that same groaning was the same groaning that I was doing because I was working at a $3 million home service business. I was director of business development. So my job was literally to grow the business and I was dealing with digital marketing companies, a lot of these big pe backed companies that you would know. And it was the same thing. Spend more on Google Ads, let's do more SEO. And when I would ask them, well, who are these customers that you're getting for us? How do we know that this is working? They would say, well it's in your CRM, you need to figure it out. But like here's the, here's your cost per click and just like a bunch of fluff information. And what I realized was that I audited about a thousand different customer journeys inside of our home service business. And there's actually a customer journey that your customers go through. And there's three parts to it. Once we unlock that in this business, they went from 3 million to 4 million in revenue in one year and 300,000 to 900,000 in profit. We've taken that same philosophy and helped a bunch of home service businesses go from 3 million to 8 million sell to private equity, 2 to 4 million sell to private equity. And it's a process that these private equity companies are going to be implementing when they buy these home service businesses. And that's what we can talk about today. Those three pillars. I'll give you a little glimpse of those. So the first one is what people typically think of which is new customers, which is SEO ads, but there's a really big low hanging fruit one which is B2B partnerships. Second part of the funnel is conversions which this was a huge issue at my home service business was that we got a bunch of leads but we didn't have a lead management process to convert them from lead to schedule, job to estimate to sale. And the big part of this was we didn't have return on ad spend tracking so we didn't know what was actually working or not. And then the last pillar is retargeting all these prospects and customers that come to your database. We weren't cross selling them or inviting them to come back into our funnel. And so what we do is implement a custom data driven marketing customer journey in these customers businesses. And that's basically the framework that helps scale these companies.

So let's start with pillar number one there then Phil. I think that's probably a great place to start as far as I'm concerned is to how do we get the, the interest in getting the top of that funnel, Just getting enough trust to call the company after you've seen them on the thing. Because all kind when you search for a contractor at that 1 to 3 million dollar range, there's tons of things that come up. And probably the biggest companies I have the biggest presence have been there the longest. How do you make a dent or impact to get that interest and desire to even give people a look at you?

Yeah, for sure. You know, we could talk about Google local service ads and getting reviews and some technical SEO things. But the number one low hanging, lowest hanging fruit for most home service businesses is B2B partnerships. When I went and worked at that 3 million dollar home service business, he had 36 Google reviews. This was back in 2018. He was $3 million with only 36 Google reviews. And his whole bread and butter was B2B partnerships. He did air duct cleaning. So he partnered with a bunch of H Vac contractors to send him leads. And a really good tip on this is if you're willing to pay Google for leads, you should be paying your B2B partnerships for leads. So what this looks like is you find a complimentary service. Let's say, you know, you do gutter cleaning, you find a lawn care company, you do H Vac, you find electrical or plumbing company and you say, hey, instead of paying Google, I'm going to pay you $50 a lead or $100 a lead. You send me your leads. Now you, this is, you hit on this before. You don't have to pay any money up front. All you're doing is paying when they give you leads. So it's a pay per lead model. So it's free until you get leads or customers coming in. So when we talk about new customers, a lot of times to your point, if you're in a saturated market, there's going to be people that have been doing SEO for 10 years to think that you're going to come in and magically get 3,000 Google reviews and outrank them and all this stuff. It's not realistic. But building B2B partnerships and taking and building a brand of partnerships around you is realistic because a lot of people are not doing it.

I get that. I get that. Well, you know what? That's exactly how I grew my business. Because back in the day when we didn't have the Internet back in, I built a business in 1985 and I sold it in 2001. I couldn't afford the money in the Yellow Pages at the time. That was the, the Internet of the time was the yellow Pages. I couldn't afford those big ads. So what I did was I did the same thing. I had created what's called the top 100 list of different, you know, businesses that we used us. And I said, hey, give me a coupon of Yours, and I'll hand it out to our customers. And if we had a bag, we would give people. Here's the local businesses that we support. We just want to give you some special offers from these people. And then I said, by the way, you know, put me in your Rolodex so that I am part of it too. So we would kind of share coupons or whatever for each other to kind of like a p. I had. Wayne's Pizza was a place that we used to buy pizza for all our meetings and stuff like that. And said, hey, here's some of our. Could you staple some of these to our. Because we were buying like, you know, 10, 15 pizzas every week, you know, and like, hey, you know, kind of a heavy user. Would you mind stapling one of my maintenance call tune up cards to your pizza boxes? And he's like, no, fine, I'll do the. So we would do that back and forth. And honestly, that's how I grew into, like, a $12 million business by just exactly that grassroots market. I actually wrote some books called Fire. I should probably give them to you and you can spruce them up. It's called Fire, Fire, Fire. Your yellow page rep. I made a series of books I made. So you're kind of a man after my own heart. I didn't realize how much I would fall in love with your methodology, because that's exactly what I teach.

You know what I. Yeah, so that's so funny because it's so true. And I think in the age of AI and digital, people lose track of that. And. And there's two ways to actually supercharge this with digital marketing. The first way is when you build these B2B partnerships, you want to make it super easy for them to give you leads. So what you need to do, like what you mentioned, Joe, was if you create like a QR code or something like this.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you give it to their technicians and you say, hey, keep this in your truck. Any lead, just scan this QR code and then give me, you know, fill out the form, and then I can track it back. And then the other way to supercharge this is. I'm sure you've experienced this, Joe. You meet a tech or someone out in the field, you get their card, you give them your card, and then you never hear from them. Hopefully they send you leads or something like that. What you want to do is put them into an email newsletter just to all your B2B partners. So every month, you're sending an email to all of your partners specifically, like, hey, you're about to go out and do spring tune ups. So everyone's going to have a dusty home. So be sure to recommend us. And don't forget, you can click here to send your leads. And, and right now it's March Madness, for example. So we have this promo going on where you get double the number, the price of leads. So what you want to do is take all these people that potentially could refer you and stay top of mind with them every single month.

Is that what Flash does? You guys kind of help create that kind of a concept? Because it sounds like it could be a lot of work. Although I love it because it's that grassroots approach which you're, you know, taking care of your partner. They're not just, not just making a list like I used to have to make a list. I didn't have the newsletter back there in the email, so. So I would just get the list and I would just once a month we'd have a group meeting, like a networking group meeting on a conference call, 1-800-TELESEMINAR or whatever we did. And I tried to make sure that hey, we're having this meeting. And some people came, some people didn't. But that, that's a genius idea, Phil. Is that something that you guys facilitate, that kind of a solution?

Yeah. So on the new customer side, we do, you know, SEO ads, all that kind of stuff. And the big part to those ones is, and this is the question I was asking was how do we know our return on ad spend number because I don't care about how much it costs to get a lead and blah, blah, blah, blah, clicks and impressions and whatever. I want to know that I spent $1,000 and I got 10 new customers that made me $10,000. So when we think about digital marketing, it's all return on ad spend heavy, which is why you need a company that knows your CRM data. But then these B2B partnerships, like what you're saying, a lot of times they don't know how to pull list. What should they say in their initial cold outreach. And we have a playbook built for all those things.

Yes, that sounds like a great idea. Now let's go on to number two again. Let's go back to that one. You don't mind exploring. So that's a great number one. I love. I think, really, I think there's a, there's a ring of truth in what you're saying. I think everybody listening to this will see that ring of Truth that you know, because it's like, you know, like, it's like I should just get out there and meet people. And honestly, that is the answer. People are the answer. Technology is not, I don't think is the answer. The number one answer is people, I believe, and I still believe that, you know, yeah.

So I completely agree. It's all people. Technology is one way that you can get in front of people and connect, but at the end of the day, it's all about relationships. The second piece to the customer journey is conversions. And what happened was we started doing all of these things in the home services and we got flooded with leads. We would get like 50 to 100 leads a day. Calls, emails, all these leads coming in. And we were a duck cleaning company, so a lot of people were calling in saying, well, how much does this cost? And we would give them a price and then they were gone forever. We didn't have any processes to manage leads or they would fill out a form at night, we call them in the morning, they wouldn't answer. So what companies need is a conversion funnel. That is a lead management plan. When a lead comes in and you, you reach out to them and they don't answer or you only get one shot, you need to have something to nurture that lead. So what we recommend is putting them into like a text, email, voicemail drop, some type of an, of an automation to nurture these leads. And we've seen an increase of 10, 20% close rate just by having some type of a lead nurture sequence. There was a study that 63% of home service businesses only reach out one time to their leads. So they get a lead, they call them, they don't answer, and then they never reach out again. So there needs to be a lead management plan. And then the second part to the conversion funnel is an estimate nurture sequence. Because people are just giving out estimates all day long and they're like, oh, they'll work with us, they know how great we are. But you need to have an estimate nurture process. And there's two ways to speed this estimate nurture process up. First, instead of just following up and saying, hey Joe, did you get a chance to look at the estimate yet? You know what's going on? You want to, you want to have a little pain point, which is like, hey Joe, you still having problems with your AC unit? Hey Joe, is your, is your toilet still leaking? Get back to the pain of why they reach out to you. And then the second thing is having an, an expiration date on your estimates. So when you give them an estimate as the estimates going down this 30 day nurture sequence, you're saying, hey, you got 10 days left on this estimate. You know, what's it going to be? Yes or no? And you're trying to get them to a yes or no as fast as possible with this process. Most digital marketing companies are just creating content on the front end, right? Blog content, all that kind of stuff inside of this nurture sequence is really where you should be using your content to help close more deals. And that's really what it comes down to. It's not just marketing, it's performance marketing to close deals.

That's interesting. So you're taking, you're kind of using some of the stuff in the proposal for content marketing there to kind of say, don't forget our, we're going to be able to save utilities or like you're saying a duck cleaning or the duck ceiling or whatever you might be adding to it might be featuring something there, a little more information there to kind of get people there or even a testimonial or so that somebody that could have done something with that too, it sounds like.

Right, exactly. And you mentioned on the top that differentiating your service is a big focus of listeners of this podcast. And there's four ways that you can do that inside of your sales process. The first one is when someone fills out a form on your website, you want to send them an email and a text message with a video from you, the owner that says, hey, this is Joe. Thanks so much for reaching out to us. It's my promise to you that we're going to give you excellent service. And the next step that's going to happen is tomorrow someone's going to be or someone's going to be reaching out to you to set up an estimate. Then when you send them a quote now, you send them a video like five minutes after, hey, Joe just sent you an estimate. Want to make sure you got it. If you have any questions, I'm here for you. When they signed the quote, they just approved it. They're really excited. Now you send them another video. Hey, got your signed quote. Can't wait to get started on your project. Here's what to expect next. And then at the end, the fourth one, this is where most people miss this. They all talk about referrals, but no one ever gets referrals. Because what you want to do is you want to send a video from the business owner that says, hey, Joe, thanks so much for choosing us by the way, if you know any other home, homeowners in your area, friends, family, I'd love to be able to get connected with them to help serve them as well and give them $50 off. You can forward them this email with this coupon and we'll help them just like we helped you. Those four things take like 10 minutes to record a video and connect the dots. But most people don't do it and they're not going to stand out from their competition because they're not using video incorporating content in their conversion process.

Wow. It takes all those things about, you know, the, the short video content that we see on so popularized on TikTok and Reels and, and it brings it to life and makes it more personal, it sounds like to me, and that's.

What I'm saying is the content on the new customer side, to get new customers, social media all up, you need to use that inside of your sales funnel. About like, hey, here's what happens when you fill out a form with us. Here's the next steps, here's what a quote looks like with us.

That is sounds brilliant. Let's go on to phase three, which is that remarketing and that part of it there. And that is the element where I think a lot of people do fall short. It was a big movement of this back in the, you know, the mid 2000s and late 2000s and now it seems like it's coming full circle and coming back to it. It's always been there, but I think a lot of people forgot it, kind of dropped it and forgot about it, you know.

Yeah, that's right. I would say for most home service businesses, we talked about that four to six month, you know, it takes four or six months to get SEO and get this and that. The number one thing you can do literally this week as a digital marketing company is send an email, effective email out to your database, cross selling services or educating them with a call to action and you can generate real revenue and jobs on the books. The reason that we came up with this in our customer journey was because we were running about 15 to 16 routes every single day and we had days where we didn't have full routes. So what are we going to do to fill the routes? We have to go back to our customer database of past prospects and customers and retarget them, cross sell them other services and invite them to come back into our database. So some of the ways we did this was we literally just looked at people that we service last year at this time and we sent them an email that it's been a year since we've done service, so now it's time to get back on the books. There's a huge opportunity that people are not sending emails or text messages to their past prospects and customers and they're missing out. We had a company that we. They. It was A6. They had 6,000 people in their database and H vac contractor, they never emailed them once. We sent out one email every single month for 12 months and they generated $250,000 in revenue just from sending out 12 emails. So it definitely works. It's just about having a consistent message and cross selling and asking people to come back into your funnel.

Well, Phil, I mean, I think everybody would agree on this. Now can you give me some of the pitfalls or you know, when you obviously you probably have an avatar of a client that works well with you and, and believes in this kind of a thing. What are some of the clients that don't work well with this? Like you kind of see, well, if you're not going to do this, this methodology won't work. What are some of the pitfalls or things that get in the way or barriers that you run into that you see that mistakes people make when they hear about this and maybe they even take your services on, but then it doesn't succeed because of something that the client's doing or something that they're not doing. What would you say is some of the pitfalls are on the. Or barriers on that road to get there?

Yeah. So we specifically work with 1 to 10 million revenue companies and usually like 1 to 3 million. The owner is still the number one salesperson. And even worse, sometimes they're the customer service rep, the csr. And the problem is, is that they're getting pulled in a million directions. Like a perfect example of this is we send out an email, we can see who opened that email. Let's say we send a $500 off a ductless system. We can see who opened that email. And then the salesperson should be calling all these people to say, hey, we have this promo going on for $500 off. Are you interested? But when it's the business owner is the salesperson and the csr, there's no way they're making any calls or actually like selling. They're just trying to see whatever comes in. So that's the first thing. The second thing is if they don't have a CRM, if they're still running their business out of Quickbooks or something else, and trying to, like Gary rigged something together that's a huge downfall because they don't have their data reporting clean. And then it's hard to track return on ad spend or keep track of anything when you don't have a CRM in place. So I would say those are the two big ones.

So if you're not willing to respond when you do have something, you kind of let it go, let it. Let it rot in your inbox or your no action is being taken on it, then you're not. You're not. You're not really professionally doing the thing that's got to hurt. Right. Where you generate this kind of thing and you get somebody waiting and then nobody ever did anything with it. It's like, I didn't know I'd have to do something with these. These leads or whatever kind of thing.

It's got to hurt.

Yes. When you happen.

So, yeah. So we had an electrical contractor that we work with, and we sent out a promo for $500 off a new generator, which a generator can be 10, $20,000. 500 off. Reply yes to this email and we'll send you an estimate. He had three yes responses that came through. So basically, you know, 30, $60,000 right there. We got on a call with him and said, hey, did anyone respond? He's like, no. Oh, man. I didn't respond yet because he is the salesperson and he's the one, and he's busy all over the place. And that's literally 30, $60,000 sitting right there. And then he complained that he didn't get any leads or enough leads. And it's like, you don't have the infrastructure and you're not taking the action to actually grow your business. You just want people to be calling you all the time. And that's the most expensive way to get customers.

Yeah, I think that's a problem with a lot of businesses. Even here at Service mvp, we have. We wrote a book and it's got a bestseller. 54, 000. We're like, hey, let's. A lot of people are responding, but it's like, hey, we got to get the. So then we had to hire lead setters, and we had to make sure that we had an infrastructure, had to build the infrastructure. And when we realized we weren't able to keep up with how many people had the little micro demands on that kind of stuff, which do turn into opportunities. And have you ever seen it before where people see the. See the thing, but then the contractor kind of like, oh, I Thought they were just. They were just tire kickers or whatever kind of a thing. They didn't really nurture that opportunity. Tell us a little bit more about that nurturing element of it to kind of get them to the point where they would be interested in setting an appointment.

Yeah. Well, nowadays there's three ways that people interact. There's phone calls, there's text, and there's email. And you don't know, as a business owner how people want to communicate. They're a texter, they're emailer, or they're a phone person. Most home service businesses default to pick up the phone, talk with them, and try to close the deal. But that's not the only way, which is why you need to open up these channels. So, like companies that work with us, the first thing we do when a form gets filled out on the website, we automatically send them a text message to ask for pictures and an email to ask for more information and pictures. Then the customer can choose how they want to respond, whether it's text or email, and then the CSR is calling them as well. So the number one thing you can do is open up all the available channels that your customer wants to communicate through. Especially, you know, they're working, they're doing different things. On top of that, when we talk about this nurture sequence, you need to be following up on those three nurture sequences as well. Text, email, and phone calls. Because people communicate in different ways. And what we found is there's two schools to this. First, if it's like an H vac contractor and they have no heat, obviously, you know, 14 days is too long to be, like, trying to nurture this thing. You got to hit them like, three times a day for the first two days.

Yeah.

Something bigger, you know, like window installation, painting. Something where people are getting educated. It's not like, as time sensitive. 14 to 21 days is a good time frame to be nurturing these people through a process.

I get it. I get it. Well, Phil, I think we definitely have learned a lot here from you. So tell us exactly the kind of service that Flash offers to help service businesses with this concept. These. There's a three great concepts, and I believe in all three of them, honestly. But how does slash help in this regard?

So if you're a home service business owner and you feel like you're the point person when it comes to marketing, cookie cutter marketing, and you're spending, you know, $2,000 trying to put all the stuff together, and you're still running around trying to do your emails and do all this stuff. Where we fit in is we have a consultant that gets put in your business almost like a fractional marketing team that gets bolted into your business that does all of these things. On top of that, we use your CRM jobber house call pro service titan work is and we're using the reporting and automations to build out all this infrastructure. So it's basically like hiring a marketing team to be plugged into your business. This was the need that I had that I built to help solve this. And we've helped companies. Usually Companies are growing 20% when they work with us. We have one guy right now. He's worked with us for he's just hitting a year. He's up 3x in revenue. He was at 80 and now he's at 240. So we know that this works really good. People that want to grow, that have the infrastructure and the CRM in place to grow, that's a perfect fit for us.

Well, Bill, you want to go ahead and give how do people get in touch with you to be able to explore this solution more and start scaling their business right now?

Yeah. So we do discovery calls as marketing audits. So you can go to flash consulting.com ph l a s h consulting.com we do marketing audits where we get on a call, look at all your stuff, and then basically give you the playbook of if we were to work together, this is how we would help you grow your business. Whether we work together or not, it's yours to take away. But it's our first step in working together.

Bill, any final thoughts? But we wrap this up, biggest thing.

I would say is if you don't have a marketing budget in place for your business, a lot of times people ask us, how much should I be spending on marketing? How much should I spend on Google Ads? The threshold is 3 to 10% of your revenue. So if you're making $1 million, you spend 30 to 100,000. That's how you can figure out, okay, I need to spend this much money on marketing. And then all you have to do is just deploy your capital to figure out how you're going to get the best bang for your buck.

Well, thank you, Phil. It's a pleasure seeing you and everybody here. Give them a call and do that audit and see what they can do to get you that next level. Phil, thanks a lot for joining us. I really appreciate you.

Yeah, thanks, Joe. Great conversation.

I appreciate you, buddy. Thank you.