These 2 Numbers Will Grow Your Home Service Business

These two numbers helped me scale my home service business from 3 million to 5 million. When I was working in the trades, I was frustrated because we couldn't grow the business without these two things. And the first. And we're going to walk through what these things are, but the first one is leads. This is pretty normal. We do marketing, we want to get leads. That's the first thing. And we're going to talk about how to get leads, and I'm going to kind of rank them out with the best and quickest way to get leads and the most predictable ways all the way to the things that you should do that are not as predictable. And the second number that you need to know is your booking rate. And the reason that your booking rate is so important is because you could get all the leads in the world. But if you don't book those people into jobs or into estimates, the leads are either trash or your booking rates or your and your booking process is broken. When I was in the trades, it was a combination, and we're going to talk about some of the remedies that I came up with and also some of the ways that you can increase your booking rate. Because if you get 10 leads and you book two, you only did 20%. But if you book four, you literally doubled the number of jobs that you've done, which could then additionally double your revenue as a company. All right, so let's get right into the first one, which is leads. There are many different ways to get leads, but I'm going to kind of rank them on the things from a digital marketing perspective that are more predictable. First one is your cost per lead, which this is very traditional, like Google Ads, Yelp ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads. You spend this much money and you get this many leads. You spend a thousand dollars, you get 10 leads. So that's $100 cost per lead. This is a very predictable way to say I want to get a hundred leads this month. So if I want a hundred leads, how much is a lead costing on these different platforms? And can I go and spend the money there to get the leads that I want? It's a very cut and dry way of looking at leads. This is important for two reasons. One, whatever digital marketing company or whatever you're doing, they need to make sure that they're tracking the leads. A lot of times they don't provide the leads that you're getting. It's just like you're getting leads. So there should be some type of a spreadsheet or something that you can download or see. So that way you can verifiably know that you spent X amount of dollars and you got X amount of leads. Very important. The second part when it comes to leads is having some way to tie it all the way through to your return on ad spend. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, it's great to get leads, but we don't want trash, junk leads, obviously. We want to grow a business which is tying a whole thing together, sales and revenue and that kind of stuff. But just in the presence of leads, cost per lead is very important. All right, next is referral partners. So talked about running ads and getting leads. Referral partners is another predictable way to get leads. What I mean by referral partners is if you have a service that you offer that is complimentary to someone else, like let's say you do H Vac services and they're an electrician, you could go and find an electrician and say, hey, how many people ask you for H Vac service? How many leads could you send me every single week? And I can pay you for those leads. I pay Google $100. I'll pay you $100 for the leads that you send me or whatever that number is. Then you know that this is a predictable way to say they're going to send me five leads, I'm going to send them $500. Then you go out and find more electricians. And now you have a process that is very predictable for lead flow and you can keep track of the leads that are coming from specific referral partners. Number three, this one is another really good way to get leads. And this is more of a hunting strategy, which is you retarget your past prospects and customers in your database with a call, not some automated thing. The reason that it's important for a call is because it gives you the opportunity to hunt that person down, find the person that is the right fit for this service that you are offering right now, this promo, and you're calling them and then you're scheduling the appointment. The way this looks is, hey, we're coming into holiday season. So you need to get X, Y and Z done. And you haven't done X, Y and Z yet because it's not in our database. I'm going to call you and I'm going to book an appointment for you to get this service done. That is what hunting is, and that's a very predictable lead process. You could get 10, 20, 30, 40 leads by just doing that every single week. If you have a decent sized Database. These next three are ways to get leads, but they're not as predictable. The first one is SEO search engine optimization. Not as predictable because it's more of a farming. You're positioning yourself in the best way possible to be shown. When someone's searching for a product or service that you offer through search engine optimization, you're optimizing your presence for the search engine. It's a good way to get leads. It's just hard to say if you do SEO, that you're going to get 10 leads out of it, because it's very hard to predict. Are they going to click on it? Are they going to actually go to your website and convert? Are 10 people searching for this service or a hundred people searching for the service? There's a lot of variables in there, but SEO is important. It's just hard to predict leads. Lead flow, social media is another thing you could post on social media. It's hard to say, I'm going to post this post and get 10 leads from it. Right. It's very unpredictable, but it's something that you should be doing from a branding perspective. And then the last one is literally branding billboards, yard signs, that kind of stuff. You can't say, I'm going to stick a yard sign here, I'm going to put a door hanger here, and I'm going to get leads from it, or a predictable amount of leads. But it's something that you should do that's going to generate leads. When we talk about leads from a digital marketing perspective, those are the core ways that we see getting leads. So as a company, you could set a goal of getting 100 leads and then you could say, okay, we're going to try this channel, this channel, this channel, and then we're going to track the number of leads that we get, and hopefully we get a hundred leads to help us grow. The last piece to this is your booking rate. That's the second thing. Booking rate is so, so important that most people miss this thing. When I was director of business development at the duck cleaning company, we were $3 million. And I'm like, you know, we have four or five CSRs, like, okay, we need to track our booking rate. We get, we're getting leads, but we're not booking them. So how do we do this? That's the first thing I want to share is a very simple way to track your booking rate. What you should do is have a piece of paper that your CSRs have. Literally, I used to do this. I used to run enterprise branches Right out of college, I went to their management training program. This is what we did. If they booked it, they would mark it as an X, so then they know that they booked that one. The next call, let's say it was just a slash, slash, slash. And then you could easily look at this at the end of the day and say, I did 10 calls and I got four bookings. And they can send that to their manager at the end of the day and say, this is my booking rate for the day. A very simple way to keep track of your bookings. This is literally your call booking rate. There's another part to this as well, which is, holistically, if you look at the number of leads that you got today, right? Web forms, emails, chat widgets, Yelp messages, Angie calls, fill in the blank. You know, you want to keep track of your leads, so that way you know how many leads that you got, and then on top of that, you want to know your booking rate. How many jobs did we book today? So I got 50 leads today and I booked 20 jobs. That gives you an overarching booking rate for your company, not just your call booking rate. So that's how. How I would recommend tracking it. There are softwares out there, like Service Titan, that can track this somewhat for you, your call booking rate. But holistically, you should have some type of a way to track your booking rate in totality. How can you increase your booking rate? So I did a video with Power Selling Pros. It's on this channel, and we talked all about bookings, how to increase your booking rate, how to set up your technicians to sell more out in the field through your booking process. And he distills that process down to three things. You want to listen. So if when someone calls, you want to listen to their problem and you want to ask them questions to uncover their problem. Why are you calling me now for this service? What's going on? Is there an issue with this? What's. What's that? The second thing you want to do is you want to show that you care. So you want to empathize with them and say, oh, I can really see how that's happening. You know, what else have you tried? Like, start building the dialogue, communicate, have good questions. And then the last one is reassure them. Hey, it really sounds like you've been through the ringer on this one. I just want you to be assured, like, you called the right place. We're going to get this taken care of for you and get this solved. Let's get you on the schedule. When you do those three things, listen, care, and reassure. He explains it in more detail in the podcast. But those three things, when I was in the trades and I was working with csrs, it was literally like, just talk to these people as if they're real people and then reassure them that we're going to solve their problem for them and try to get to the reason why they're calling. So in the duct cleaning space, which was what I was in, he would say, hey, how much does it cost to get your ducks cleaned? That was a common question. It was like, well, what's going on with your ducks? And it's like, oh, you know, I have a lot of dust all over my house. Okay, well, when's the last time you had your ducks? And oh, I haven't had it. That's why I'm trying to get a price going for this. Okay, well, you called the right place. Duct cleaning does solve this. Let me tell you about our process. So you got to work them through that process, and a lot of times people miss that. Tracking your booking rate. When we talk about tracking your booking rate in some process now, you can start to see if I get more leads or the same amount of leads and I increase my booking rate double, I'm going to book double them on our jobs, which then should increase my business. And then if you can increase your lead flow by some of those strategies and your booking rate, that's how you would grow a business from a marketing perspective. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content to help you grow your business from a digital marketing perspective. And we have a ton of great videos on our channel, so be sure to check it out.