Yelp Acquires Hatch | Outcomes vs. Outputs | New Way to Marketing in 2026 | Q&A

Just make sure we're all good here. If you're joining us, drop a comment where you're calling in from. If you got a question, I'm live here and I will answer your question in the chat. Got an agenda for us? We're going to be going through a couple updates that happened over the past couple weeks in home service businesses and then got some good Q A. So if you got a Q A, make sure that you drop it in the chat. Let me open up my chat here. All right, cool. So first thing, top of order. So a lot of people think Yelp is a scam. They frustrated Yelp, hides their reviews, all that kind of stuff. We have clients that literally 10x their return on Yelp. And Yelp just announced that they acquired Hatch, which is an AI automation communication platform, which is very similar to Chirp, if you ever heard of that, or Podium, these platforms that will automate communication. That happens. And so Yelp acquired Hatch because the biggest issue with Yelp was when you run ads, about 60, 70% of the leads that you get are on message. And most people go in and message them and then they never hear back. And I believe that Yelp is going to build an automation tool inside of Yelp that allows people to set up automations to communicate with their customers, to message back and forth. And I think that it's a big game changer. They spent $300 million on this acquisition, so it's not chump change, right? They are investing heavily into home. It's a home service automation tool and they're investing in it. So I think that Yelp is really making a big push based off this investment, you know, quarter of a billion dollars on becoming that powerhouse for marketing for home service businesses, specifically when it comes to lead gen. And I think there's a big opportunity here that's subtle that a lot of people are going to miss and that is that leads right now are coming from all over the place and everyone's focused just on Google, Google, Google. But in the next two to three years, the landscape is going to significantly change. And a lot of these platforms, Yelp in particular is positioning itself to be showing on AI search to create automation via their biggest leak point, which is in messages. So that way people feel that this is actually working and generating revenue for them. So like in your business, if you're just focused solely on Google, Google, Google, it's not bad right now. But in the next two to three years, you have to future proof your business for AI search and for these other Platforms that are going to help you get leads because people are not just going to go to Google, they're going to go to social media platforms. We already know that 26% of Gen Z uses social media to find local businesses. So all that to say that Yelp bought Hatch, which is pretty cool. And I think that there's a big opportunity for a lot of home service businesses to consider using Yelp in the future because they are optimizing their platform to help you get more leads and business coming in. And we have opportunity for 10x return with a lot of our clients. All right, next thing we got is I did this post on, on LinkedIn and it's, it had a lot of traction so I just wanted to go through it and talk about it, dissect it. So we had a client that had this exact workflow in their business from a customer. Someone, well, it was a prospect, found them on ChatGPT. And basically I want to break it down which, what, what does marketing actually look like in 2026 and what should you be doing? Because the way that your customer journey was last year or the past 10 years is different now and going forward it's going to be even more different. I'm going to walk you through these different faces. So first someone goes to ChatGPT or AI search to find you. What can you do to position your business for this one is you can create they ask you answer style questions. So take your actual call transcripts and turn those call transcripts into blog posts. Because when people ask Google a question now they have a Google AI overview section. And those AI overview sections are pulling directly from content from people's websites, answering their questions. And you want to show up there and have it link to your website to answer the question. The other thing you can do, make sure that you get Google reviews, have a pricing page. We made a whole video on how to, we did a whole webinar even on how to prepare your business for AI search. If you go to our channel, you can find that how to prepare your business, your home services for AI search. But essentially people are interacting different with Google than they were before. They're not just typing in four words, H vac repair near me, they're typing in 347 words on average and asking a lot more questions to figure out who they want to work with. So they go there, they search for local businesses, hopefully they find you. If you did some of those things or you're preparing yourself for AI search, then they go to your website. Okay, They've already done their research offline. 87% of people do their research offline. Then they go to your website and they are trying to see, do you have real pictures, not stock photos, like real logoed up stuff. Do you have actual estimate calculators, pricing guides, educational things that builds more trust with them, that verifies like, yep, this is a legit company. So in this case, a customer went to their website and they filled out an estimate calculator. So they put in some information, filled out an estimate calculator, and then they turn into a lead for the business. Now a lot of times businesses that I talk to, they're just focused on, I don't want to give an estimate calculator because then I got to call this person and go through this whole sales process. I just want them, if they want, if they want their stuff done, just book a meeting here, book a meeting on my calendar and then I'll do your stuff. This is, if you think about your funnel like this, this is like these people all the way at the bottom. But as you work up the funnel, maybe this person is 80% of the way there. 70, 60, 50, 40. And you need to nurture these leads through your sales process. And that's actually how you grow your business. So this person, estimate calculator becomes a lead. So they get an immediate text asking for more information. So the text message goes out, hey, here's your estimate, by the way. If you could send over a picture, we can get a little bit more focused estimate for you. They send in pictures, then your CSR texts them back, or you pick up the phone. Or the automation says, hey, sounds good. You know, you want to schedule an estimate for someone to come out there on site. They say yes. Then you go out there on site, you send them an estimate. Now once you send them an estimate, manual follow up happens. So your CSR or someone needs to be calling them following up on the estimate or you following up on the estimate. But then automation happens texts and emails over 14 days. So this is, this is what it looks like in 2026 to actually get people from AI search into your funnel to an estimate and then nurture that estimate. Now in this situation, they followed up for 14 days. And the whole goal is to get to a yes or no. You do not want people to just ghost you. You know, they could be a Casper or friendly ghost, but you don't want them to ghost you. You need to get to a yes or no. In this example, the person said no. So they close Lost it. Now a month later, they get their email newsletter that goes out, which is, hey, this is going on right now. Here's a little promo to work with us. This time they decide that they want to book the call. All of those things is much different than just go to Google, click on our ad, schedule an appointment, have someone go out and close them on site. This is 10 years ago, five years ago of what was happening 20 years ago was go to the Yellow Pages, call these people, have them come out. Right? This workflow that I just explained to you is building trust without you even talking to these people. You have to be doing these things offline to build trust. Obviously, once you get them into your mix and they work with you and they trust you, that's a part of it. But now trust is built outside of ever interacting with your business. It's a whole shift of what it meant before. To be a home service business, you have to be doing things offline. So this is the new flow for your customers in 2026. The last piece of this is that you need. A lot of times people say, well, you know, oh, we're showing up on AI search, everyone's calling us from ChatGPT. But it's just gut feeling. You need the data, like what I just explained to you to be able to walk people through your actual customer journey, to say, wow, okay, this is the customer journey that's working and it's all tracked inside of your CRM in one place. This is the beauty of having all your data synced up. Sales, marketing, everything, working together with your CRM and to actually grow your business. All right, next thing. So I was on a webinar earlier this week and it was about an hour long. I was the speaker. And one thing came up that really hit me. And on that call, there was home service businesses, there were some other businesses, but the conversation came up, which was me as a marketing consultant. In our company, we use our clients CRM data and we go into their thing. We're pretty immersed in their business. And there was a guy on there who has a small marketing company and he was like, hey, one of our clients uses Salesforce. And you know, they didn't hire us to like go into their Salesforce. They just hired us to do marketing stuff. And I said, hey, no, man, they didn't hire you to do marketing deliverables. They don't care if you do two blog posts or three blog posts. They hired you because they want to grow your business. They want to grow their business and they Want you to help them grow. So if you know that somebody's going to help them grow their business, then go do that. And it was a great example of outcomes versus outputs. And a lot of times, me included as a business owner, we go and we try to hire people because we think that, oh, I need that for my business. When really we're thinking about the outcome that we want in our business and we need to hire people for outcomes, not just outputs, because they're the expert. They should be telling us how we're going to get the outcomes that we want as the leader and it helps us. As the hustler dies and a leader is born, we can say, okay, what's the outcome that I want? I want my books to be clean and I want to have my financials make sense. I need to find a bookkeeper that can do that. I don't need to tell them that they need to, you know, do all my auditing, all my stuff every single week, and da, da, da, all the stuff that goes into it. Or like, I want to be tax efficient. I don't want a big tax bill. So I need to go find someone that's going to do that. I don't know what they need to do. They should be telling me. It's the same exact thing in home service businesses. When someone calls you and they want a gutter cleaning or they want someone to look at their hot water heater or they want whatever you. You guys know you don't want. They're not. You're the doctor, right? You're the expert. They think that they have a symptom or whatever, but you have to reframe it and tell them, cool, you called the right place. It sounds like you want to have a safe home that's dry. You know, if your water heater's leaking, it sounds like you're calling here because you want to have a safe home that's dry. Cool. The reason I'm sharing this is because you inside of your sales process, if you stop thinking about it inside of outputs and start thinking of it, outcomes inside it allows you to sell your proactive stuff and be proactive with your clients, is that the outcome for your client is that they want to have a safe home, they want to have a warm home. They want to have a home that has no leaks in it. So you as the expert, as the doctor, you can reach out to them, you can call them, you can send them emails, you can sell them memberships because you want them to experience what they actually want. Which is the outcome of having these things. So. So, for example, let's say right now, shoulder season, let's say you called all of the people in your database and said, hey, just calling around, we want to make sure that every single person that we have contacted has a warm home this winter. We saw here that you have not scheduled your fall tune up. And has anyone looked at your actual H vac unit to make sure that it's good to go into this, into the winter? No. Well, we know that someone needs to do that. And I don't want someone on my watch having no heat this winter and being stuck and trying to call a bunch of different people and getting held over the rakes by spending a thousand dollars to have a technician come out. That sounds like you are the doctor and you're the expert and you're trying to help them. So I wanted to call it out here that it's outcomes versus outputs. And when you think about it that way, it gives you permission to make sure that everyone that's ever contacted or worked with your business is taken care of. And it's almost a duty to do those things. It's not just like, hey, you know, they'll, if they need us, they'll let us know. No, it's, you care enough about these people that you want them to experience the outcome that they actually want in their life, not just call you whenever they need you. Same thing with my business. Same thing with any other good partner that you work with. They should care about outcomes, not just outputs. If it takes a little bit more output or takes another thing over here, just do it. It's not just, oh, this is the scope that we have. Okay, I digress on that. All right, we got some Q A here. By the way, I'm live, so if you have any Q A, feel free to drop in the chat or you just want to say, hey, what's up? Where you're calling in from? Love to hear from you. All right, let me pull up some of the Q and A's that we got. All right, we are a 1.5 million dollar remodeling company. We're only spending 750 to a thousand dollars a month on ads. Should we increase it? All right, should we increase it? This is a question that we get all the time because we do. Marketing is like, what should my ads budget be? And then should we increase it or not? I felt this exact same way at my home service business because it was going into shoulder season or I was slow and I'm like, okay, let's take this and increase our budget. But the real question is that we should be asking is two. One, what is our marketing budget? So you should be spending 3 to 10% of your revenue on marketing, and then you can allocate your resources accordingly. So in this case, let's say it's $1,000 a month that you're spending. If you're at 1.5 million and you're spending 10% of your revenue, that's $150,000. So around $12,000 a month. Let's just call it so $12,000 a month. $1,000 is, you know, less than 10% of your entire marketing budget of what you would allocate. So do you think that that's a good allocation of your resources? This leads us to the second question, which is, I don't know, who knows? This is why you need return on ad spend reporting. Because if you spend $1,000 and it made you $10,000, well, then I would take your whole $12,000 and put it on that. So the two questions that you want to ask as you're thinking about what you should be spending on marketing or ads or whatever is what is your marketing budget? 3 to 10% of your revenue. Okay, whatever that sounds like. Then allocate it accordingly. I'm going to hire this marketing company here. I'm going to put this much money into this, this much money into this, and then I'm going to see my return on ad spend, and then I'm going to either go up or down or tweak, whatever's the best of our abilities. And it kind of goes back into the whole outcome thing. It's not just about output. I need to find a Facebook ads person, I need to find a Google Ads person. I need to find it. What is the outcome that we want? And then let's build a system that achieves that outcome. And that's really what it comes down to here. So remodeling company spending 750 to $1,000 a month on ads, I can't tell you if that's working or not. I would imagine if you're doing remodeling, 750 to $1,000 is probably a little bit light because what I know is that the average cost to acquire a customer is around 300 to $600. So if you're spending 750 to a thousand dollars, you might get one customer out of it and maybe your average ticket is $20,000. And that's a home run. So like maybe do more of that. But you really need the data to make the decisions. Hopefully that gives you some context as, as you're thinking about this. All right, next question. We got, I own a 3 million dollar h vac business. Our website traffic. Our website gets traffic, but we don't know if it's converting what's a realistic target. All right, another hot button here as well. Our website gets traffic. What does that even mean? Because your website gets traffic, but is it local traffic? And I'm not calling you out on this, I'm just saying like you want to ask that qualifying question, which is the traffic that we're getting, is it local people? Is it people in our local area that actually would do business with us? Because I, I could get traffic from you from overseas, I could get traffic for you from another state. I could create a blog post that just, you know, how to clean your H VAC unit. And it's just very broad and anyone could come that. But we don't care. We want specifically local people. So cool. We get traffic to our site, but is it local traffic? Is the first question that we want to ask. But then we don't know if it's converting what's realistic to target. I'll give you the benchmarks here and then I'll help you figure out how to get those numbers. So first, the average website is converting between like 3 to 5% of their website traffic into leads. So you get 100 people to your website, you're getting 3 to 5 leads. Out of that hundred people to your website, 3 to 5 leads. Our goal as a company is to get that to 10%. We have some companies that are at around 20, 30 or even 30% because they have such high intent searches on their website. And then they have the right call to actions on there. And I'm going to give you those next. But the first thing is what's a realistic number to shoot for? 3 to 5% is on average. And the way that you figure this out is you go and you say, okay, how many people to have my, to my website I had a hundred. Then how many forms did I have completed on my website? How many calls came from my website? And then any other things like online scheduling or chat or anything like that, those are all different lead opportunities from your website. That's going to give you your total leads from your website and then you just divide the difference. This is called your conversion rate. So what another term for this is called conversion rate optimization. CRO and what conversion rate optimization is Is if you have 2% or 3% conversion rate, how do we get that to 10% conversion rate? And I'm going to give you some of the strategies. So the first thing on your mobile, website, because about 50% of your traffic is going to be on mobile. So those 50% of traffic, it usually takes them longer than five to 10 seconds to turn into a customer on your website. So you need to add what are called sticky headers right at the top of your mobile that say call now and get an estimate or schedule service right at the top. So as they scroll on their phone, they still have these sticky headers right at the top. Very important. It helps with conversions. The other thing is adding a chat widget to your website. This usually adds around 2 to 3% of your website traffic into leads just by adding a chat widget. The reason is what I mentioned kind of at the top was that 87% of people are doing their research offline. Then when they go to your website, they usually have either one lingering question that maybe your website answers, or when they hit your website, they're like, okay, do they actually do this service or do they do that in this area? So they want a quick place to say, well, do you do this service or do you do it in this area? Or how much does something cost? And that's a lead capture that they might not be ready to fill out a whole contact form and schedule a service. They just want to ask a quick question. The other way to increase your conversion rate is to go top higher up the funnel. So as I mentioned, there's this funnel. Everyone wants people to just schedule service and just like get on my calendar down here. But as you move up the tiers, right, like moving up a tier one might be a chat because they're not fully booking a call, but they have a quick question. Moving up, another thing is an estimate calculator, like what I mentioned with the new way to market your business. Because people are like, okay, well how much does it cost? Estimate calculator, that's up here. You still have to kind of work them through questions and then book an appointment in that funnel. But it gives the people that are like 60, 70% of the way there something to actually fill out to turn into a lead inside of your business. If we move up to the next one above, that is maybe like a buyer's guide or a pricing guide or a buyer's journey that they might download or even just have it on your website. That's like super top of the funnel. That you don't have to convert then. If you want a more specific estimate, then let me answer your questions, then actually schedule a call. And this is the actual buyer journey as you move out the funnel. So all of those things you should add to your website. It's going to help you with conversion rate and it's going to build a lot more trust in your business. All right, next question we got here is. And by the way, I'm live, so if you have questions, be sure to drop them in the chat and I'll get, I'll get your questions answered. Next question we got our close rate dropped from 55 to 46%. What's a simple nurture system we can implement to increase close rate without hiring more salespeople? Okay, great question. I actually, I just recorded a whole video on this process, but I'm going to give you the two quick things. So I was actually on a webinar earlier, the webinar about the outcomes and output a couple days ago, and this exact situation came up. And there's two things that I would recommend with this. First is set up a manual rehash program. So I worked with this $3 million business. They ended up going to 8 million and then selling to private equity. And what we did was we took their number one CSR and we said, hey, we're going to actually turn you into an inside sales rep and we want you to rehash all of the estimates. The owner's going to go out and do the estimates, but you are going to be the one that rehashes. So this person's already nice on the phone, they probably have some downtime and they want to make more money. So nice on the phone has downtime, wants to make money. Perfect person to be calling your estimates. So we said, hey, all these estimates, call them and we'll give you a light script. But basically you want to call them and see if they have any questions. And if they have a question, then we can have the owner call them and answer it. But we want to keep moving the ball forward. And if you close a deal, we'll give you fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever that looks like in your business. It gives them the opportunity to take their downtime, talk to their customers on the phone and make more money. It's a win win. And this will help you take your closing rate, which before, if you were the number one salesperson, and following up on your estimates, as you grow your business, you start to get less time to spend on all these calls. So your close rate starts to dip. And this is that it's a vicious cycle, usually happens around like 1 to 3 million dollars in home service businesses because you think, oh, I'm just going to spend a bunch more money on marketing to grow. But then your close rate is actually dropping because you have less and less time to spend on your business and you can't hit, you hit a ceiling. So the first thing is you need to recover your revenue, fix your close rate issue and do the CSR rehash. Now the second thing is set up some automations for this, right? Set up like a 14 day text and email nurture sequence. So that way when you send an estimate to someone, they get a text, they get an email, it nurtures them through the process. We have a customer, they were closing at 52%, they dropped down to 47% and we set up this 14 day nurture sequence and they went back up to 52% and they ended up closing an additional $15,000 a month in revenue because of this automation recovery option with their estimates. So huge opportunity for a lot of businesses. I think a lot of people just they're the number one salesperson. Their close rate and their opportunities drop and then they can't grow their business because they're stuck and they can't even work those 60, 70, 80% of the opportunity leads because all they're worried about is just these bottom of the funnel people and they get stuck spending leads. You get the gist. All right, that's the last Q and A I got. Thanks all for joining today. If you have any Q&As, feel free to drop them here and I'll add them to the next Q and A live that we do and.