Transcript:
Well, happy Friday, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Service Legend podcast. I have a real treat for you guys today. Uh, welcome to the webinar. Jeff Rowley Thank you so much for being here, man.
Yeah, yeah, Thanks for having me.
Ryan Yeah, man. Uh, Jeff, for those of you that don’t know Jeff, um, he’s the founder of Groundwork, a software company that specializes in virtual estimates. Jeff is based in the Midwest, hailing from the states of Indiana. Go Boilermakers in Ohio.
That’s right.
His background is in commercial construction and renovations. His wife’s an interior designer, which has really given him a lot of exposure to the home improvement and the service industry and everything in in between their two kids, nine and seven. Uh, Jeff is a family man who loves adventure. We love that businesses and adventure, uh, and his family himself and his family have been to nine national parks making memories and exploring the great outdoors. And today we’re gonna have the the privilege of learning more about Jeff and his journey as an entrepreneur and how he saw this opportunity in our industry, in home services, which really led him to developing and founding, um, groundwork. We’re also going to dive into the benefits of virtual estimates and how they are revolutionizing the way we approach home service projects. So guys, sit back, relax. We got a treat for you guys today. Jeff Obviously that’s an intro from me about you, but if you could just give us some more insight to you and maybe even some origin of like how you led up to this, this whole awesome thing that you guys are doing right now.
Yeah, First of all, thanks for thanks for having me on the show. It’s been kind of fun to get to know you and your business as we’ve kind of crossed paths at different events and everything. Yeah, I mean, you nailed it with the intro, man. You know, we my background, I’m an engineering grad, um, and started out in commercial contracts long just have a kind of a passion for the nuts and bolts of construction. You know, like my engineering side of the brain is definitely there, like process. I like efficiency. Um, and you know, that is what I learned. A big part of what software allows a contracting business to, you know, reach is, is efficiency. So really the story of getting started with groundwork was I had been in commercial contracting, worked on technology implementations and different pieces of software in that industry. Um, wife, interior designer. We’ve, you know, we were like the poor man’s Joanna chip and Joanna type of deal. So we, you know, blow up a house and put it back together. And I like doing that work and, you know, framing out my basement renovation on my on my house this, this past weekend finally finished it. So that’s a good thing. But like, I like to get my hands dirty. So, um, you know, doing those projects, understanding the opposite.
Probably Jeff, of, like, most software owners, right. You know? Yeah. Well, I mean, you have that insight. Yeah.
I mean, the reason I love it is because, you know, software is like, it’s all out there in the cloud somewhere, you know, And like sometimes you put a week of work in and it’s like, okay, numbers went up and this happened and that happened. But like, you know what, what real world thing did I do? And like, man, you know, even just tossing some mulch around or, you know, doing a project is kind of fun to see the, the benefit of it. But yeah, so through some of those experiences, I just kind of realized that, you know, the world’s changing pretty quick. Um, the notion of having a contractor drive to your house to, you know, maybe or maybe not, you know, wasting our, your time or the notion of a contractor driving across town for something they aren’t sure is a real thing. Like maybe there’s a better way we can do this. And with the tools we all have in our pockets, like what does it look like to collaborate virtually on a project? Um, you know, certainly before you do an in-person appointment, although sometimes that’s still needed. Many times it is. But you know, how are we connecting, How are we allowing contractors to connect with homeowners in a modern way? Um, you know, the handshake of today is very different than it was, you know, way back ten years, ten, 15, 20 years ago, right? Like the way we build connections, very different now.
Um, so that’s really the tool we’ve built is a connection building tool that, you know, you can call it virtual estimating or virtual sales, virtual selling. But um, you know, we’re, I would say a much more than that. And there are certainly some misconceptions. Maybe we can dive into some of those, but misconceptions on what that means in light of, you know, everybody decided they needed to do COVID, you know, estimates virtually like overnight. And that was a thing for a little bit. And, you know, and then, you know, we are where we are now from, you know, a couple years out from that. So it’s been a wild ride. And, you know, love it, love it, love. I mean, one of the things I love about it is like, I get to meet entrepreneurial people like you who have, you know, grown something from nothing because that’s what I’m doing too. And it’s fun to just share the stories and to partner up with people who are just working hard to make a better life for themselves and, you know, treat customers well and, you know, make money and, you know, spend time with your family and all that good stuff.
Yeah, it’s awesome. And it was kind of interesting, too, because you and I chatted this was maybe a couple of years ago when I think we were I was a little bit earlier on in the marketing company we rebranded and so it’s been pretty, pretty awesome to see you kind of go from there to where you guys are now. Yeah. Likewise.
Likewise.
Yeah. It’s been pretty cool to see, um, from, you know, my, my perspective on the outside in from you. And then also it was really fun sharing the stage with you a little bit on the panel. Sure. This was well, in February at the the Painting Contractor Association. I thought you, you know, brought some good value. And, um, your booth was really cool, too. It was a pretty big booth, so. Thanks, man. Yeah. Um, but what’s interesting about this concept of virtual sales is I think the home service industry is so, um, you know, accustomed to the, you know, in-person. And then there was a time where, like, people were charging for estimates, right? Like, you know, they might charge 60 bucks or 50 bucks. That’s like, you know, charging for an estimate is like, who does that anymore? I mean, it’s pretty few and far between. And then then you have this whole concept of like ballpark estimates. So a lot of contractors do like these ballparks or estimates over the phone, which I’m you know, I’m not a huge fan of that because it’s it’s over the phone, It’s texting, etcetera. Yeah. Um, now I own a home service company or, you know, I’m partnering a home service company and we do mainly in in-home sales. But, um, there’s a lot of opportunity for over the, you know, like over the phone sales or whatever where if, you know, and what we’ve kind of decided is that if they’re further than about 45 minutes away, we’ll do a virtual estimate.
So we’re here in Phoenix, there’s Sedona, Prescott Williams, um, you know, and you know, like even South you might have like Maricopa, like further than 45 minutes away. And so we’ll have our sales manager do a virtual sales appointment, but we try to do that appointment more similar to an in-home appointment versus, hey, it’s a quick phone call, takes two seconds, like, yep, treat it a lot more professionally. And I really love what you’re doing because I think from my perspective, it brings so much professionalism into doing virtual sales. You know, you see a lot of companies like A1 Guettel’s, the industry leaders have these really professional in-home sales experiences. But, you know, if they ever do over the phone sales, it’s super and, you know, non-professional, it’s over the phone. It’s a text. It’s an email. Yeah. If you could speak to us a little bit about that, like how you guys kind of revolutionize this virtual sales space and also how how it helps the contractor be more professional, even if you’re going to do over the phone sales. But like or, you know, a portion of your sales is over the phone talk about how this is more professional than just using your phone or something like that.
Yeah, Yeah. So a lot. I mean, I could talk, we could do the whole pod. I could, you know. How much time do you have on that question, right?
Like to give you the best question up front, man.
So, so a couple, couple of things. Uh. Sales is a process. Right. And it and it at the beginning stages it melts in from the marketing process. Right. So I think one of the biggest misconceptions with virtual sales in air quotes is, um, is what you’re saying, like, hey, try to get a picture or I go on Google Maps or something and like get a rough estimate and like, I just throw a number out there, right? It’s like I think everybody figured out that that wasn’t the right way to do it at some point.
I mean, you can make some sales, but I’m not sure there’s going to be any profitable projects.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re undercut yourself. You, you know over promise all the all the things right. Um, not to mention you need to have a good enough lead flow to sustain, you know, what is likely a low, close rate with that type of a strategy. Um, I think what we’ve seen with some of the companies that we’ve worked with is that technology allows us to connect in a very mature and like interpersonal way, even if you aren’t there in person. Um, and so that’s what our product is all about. It’s about building connection and what you lose with kind of the text, text me a photo, I’ll send you a price. Is all of that connection. You lose rapport. There’s like probably no more damaging part to losing rapport than getting a text message from a random number that you don’t know. Like there’s zero rapport building in a random text message. Like that’s um, so we also recommend against that. In certain cases, people do use our product cabinet refinishing and other like kind of cookie cutter type of easily estimated type of projects if it’s simple or a front door repaint is another good example. They will send a price through our tool, however. Um. That is in the form that is after some sort of connection rapport has been built, which we allow for, you know, asynchronous video conversations, texting. We have some templated ways that contractors can put information into our tool and then like just easily quickly send it out to the homeowner. So they’re they’re knowledgeable. They understand who they’re working with from a personal perspective. So once you check some of those boxes with even if even if it’s with technology, um, you can start to get closer to that, to that cell. But it is a process. It’s not a quick thing.
And even what we’ve learned is we got a review from a customer, unsolicited feedback from a customer. Um, I’m going to butcher what he said, but I do know for a fact he said life changer in the review, so that’s a good thing. I was happy to hear that. But one of the things he said is that, you know, every situation is a little different, right? So you have to just like if you’re in an in-person sale, you have to kind of bob and weave with what they’re saying, how they’re reacting. You know, what you’re picking up. You can do still a lot of that with with our tool and, you know, maybe some others out there or if you’re just savvy, um, you can start to pick some of those those interpersonal cues up, um, and still design a process and work a lead in an interpersonal like a connected way. And so, um, hopefully I answered some of your question and gave some good thoughts there. But there’s a ton of, I mean, if you just part of the backdrop of our business is, you know, Amazon, Netflix, like people want. I mean they want, they want stuff quick You know it’s there’s so that in certain cases we talk to customers who are just like I can’t keep up and people want to you know they want to move quick and you know the customer expectation does not match, you know, the kind of what I would call the old school sales process in a lot of ways. So how can we take all of the best connection points, rapport, building value, creation of the in-person sales process and put that into a more digitized process that saves everybody time? That is that’s the mission of what we do at Groundwork.
Yeah, I love that. And we can get into that a little bit deeper. And I think everyone would love to know, like, what is groundwork? Like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, if I’m a contractor that is doing in-home estimates right now, maybe I’ve done some over the phone stuff here and there when it’s when it’s when it’s time save or whatever, but like what is groundwork and mean you can do it from like, hey, I have I have no clue what virtual sales is or, or hey, you know, I do virtual sales right now and this could be kind of a momentum thing for me. But like what is groundwork? And just give some context to the software. Yeah.
So at the core, we are a video based system. So think about how a, you know, many contractors have done the photos thing, right? Like send me a photo and I’ll give you an idea of what the thing costs or something like some, some some flavor of that. We have developed a video collaboration tool, so the general flow is wherever your leads come from, we can accept them. So if it’s we have a widget, you know, an embed that goes on a contractor’s website, usually on the Contact Us page. And you know, we can message it one of 14 different ways. But the general gist is, hey, send us a video and you’ll get a get a quicker response from us. Um, you know, get started fast. You know, those types of calls to action, Um, if you’re driving leads to a landing page. We can put our form on that landing page. If you’re doing print campaigns, we can develop a QR code and a landing page for traffic to go to, all with the with the interest of getting people collecting the information, not just name, phone number, email address. So, you know, you’re creating homework for the admin and, you know, playing phone tag and all that stuff. Our goal is to engage that homeowner, help you engage that homeowner with a kind of a curated and customized experience that, yes, collects all the critical information that that you need to address and project type and some of that stuff. But maybe most importantly, a video walkthrough of the project. So show me your painting project, show me, you know, your cabinets and which drawers and drawers are falling off and you know, all sides of the kitchen island and, you know, tell me your vision for the project.
So we have a guided video upload process that allows a homeowner to talk through their project, just like they would if the contractor were there with them. So that’s the core of the product, is that the entry points of getting a homeowner engaged, homeowner gets a text message with a branded link and then it goes through the process and walks them through the process of uploading that video. So that’s kind of the first step of things. And then we also have a dashboard on the back end that allows for some you know, people ask me if it’s a CRM, we are not a CRM. I don’t bill ourselves as a CRM. Some people use us as kind of a CRM, but you know, it does have some collaboration features where you can share videos back to the homeowner, you can text message with them. We have a kind of a lead Kanban view if you’re familiar with kind of the rose drag and drop leads across the columns and there are some automations built in, but we also integrate through Zapier with almost anybody. So and we have some direct direct integrations coming out as well. So our goal is not to duplicate the CRM estimating project management side of things. We are very, very focused on what does it look like for contractor to kind of turn their their sales process on its head to be more efficient for themselves, better and more convenient for the homeowner, and then just fit right in with all their marketing and project management, estimating tools?
Yeah. And then like so, you know, if somebody had this, let’s say on their website like so, would somebody self book an appointment or would they, would it be more of like, like from the customer perspective, like, hey, I’m booking an appointment right now or am I giving my information and I’m waiting for something or somebody to reach out or like, what is the customer journey walk? Yeah, I’m asking is because I think, you know, self booking is huge. And so like, you know, I’m wondering, you know, is this more leaning towards the customer self booking themselves and going through that process? Like, you know where I know, hey, I’m self booking or am I just giving information? And then I’m like, Oh, then there’s more reach out. And then I get kind of pulled through a process.
So the, the cop out answer is it’s flexible, but usually the flow is one of the one of the challenges with self booking is just the organization and especially for smaller companies, they don’t know if that lead on their appointment is a waste of time or a great a great use of their time. So lots of times with contractors will do is put our tool as the contact us form. It is an automated process so homeowner goes through enters some like the first bit of information and then our system automatically sends them a text message and says, Great, thanks for getting in touch with us. Click this link to share your project with us. And then they go through the rest of the process of sharing the project video and all the other information. So it’s automated. Think, think about like a, you know, a homeowner on a Saturday saying, Oh, I really need to get that project done. Go hit your website, hit contractor or XYZ website and go through the process instead of just a voicemail or a inbox thing in your email. Just like, Oh, hey, you need to call this person back. That person is in the system. They’ve already shared their project with you. You already know exactly what what they want. Um, now to the scheduling point. A lot of contractors will put their Calendly link in the automated success message that we send out. So think about the scenario in one case can be, uh, groundwork submission completed. You know, hit homeowner hit the website groundwork submission completed with a video and a bunch of other information from that homeowner. We have a Google Maps view so you can quickly go check the house out and all that good stuff. Uh, from the.
Dashboard of groundwork.
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So, yeah, that all goes down. Um, and then our automated message went to them on Saturday afternoon at 2:00 and that included the Calendly link or your whatever acuity scheduling link. They already booked an appointment. So you have that appointment linked in with a video with somebody who already knows you. Um, and so you’re starting.
If they don’t self book then it’s probably, you know, hey, I’m an admin or I’m a lead converter, I’m going to call the lead and I’m gonna be like, Hey, thank you so much for the video. This is amazing. Here’s what we need next. Or they self book and we kind of might do the same thing.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And even even better yet, that admin or sales lead or whoever gets the lead sends a video back to the homeowner, they get assigned the lead. You can assign a lead to a specific sales person inside of groundwork. They get assigned the lead. That sales person gets notification. Hey, you’ve been assigned this lead. They send a quick 15 second video. Hey, my name’s Ryan. I’m the I’m the sales guy that you’re going to be working with. I’m going to include a link for you to schedule a time. If I don’t hear from you, I’m going to call you this afternoon. Text me back if there’s any times that are more convenient for you. So highly valuable. Communicate ocean. And that’s really where we get excited when we see customers developing that habit. High, high, high conversion on those. Because think about that personal touch, the value build. I’m a professional. I know what I’m talking about. I’m clearly communicating, providing next steps. That’s when the sales process truly accelerates and when contractors start to set themselves apart from their competitors. Right?
Yeah, I love that. Um, it’s definitely a more modern, sophisticated way of. Acquiring the information, Getting more information is very professional for both parties. And then, um, when you don’t. So let’s walk through like if I’m a salesperson. So I call the person, I send them the video, and now I’m ready to start kind of maybe moving along with the video they gave me and the dimensions or whatever. Um, do I call, you know, so let’s say I’m calling the person. I got the video we’re talking now. We’re communicating. I’ve already sent that video you mentioned. Do I go out there sometimes and say, Hey, appreciate all of this, I’m gonna have to go out? Or is it more of like, Hey, I appreciate this, Here’s our next steps. Um, through the virtual process, like kind of walk me through those two different. Yeah.
So like I said, there’s, there’s a bunch of flexibility on how we’ve seen, you know, we learned from our customers sometimes more than, you know, I like to think I’m a smart guy, but, you know, turns out there’s a lot of other smart people out there who have like kind of shown us the way a little bit. But a lot of times what we see is either there’s some price bracketing. You know, sometimes you kind of want to do that, right? It’s a it’s a homeowner in an area of town that you don’t typically find success selling in. Right? So like, hey, just to let you know, this is like a this is a $4,000 project. You know, we think we think it’s around this. If that’s in your budget, I’d be happy to come take some final measurements and get you a tight number. Homeowners love that. Turns out they love the transparency. They love that you’re not trying to waste their time. Um, and it.
Doesn’t feel like that at all because they’ve seen the video and we’ve understood it and now we’re making a professional decision based on the information that we have. That’s right.
Which is typically what, you know, those over the phone things are sometimes like I think homeowners think it’s like a contractor just trying to take the easy way. But this is the opposite. This is very different. This is a this is a rapport building type of you know, I like to say like you need to sales people need to, you know, show that prospect that, you know them, show them, you know. Right. That’s a big part of the sales. Any sales process is like, do you know my needs? Um, and the way that we collect information and help to build rapport that that can happen, right? So then that, then that number doesn’t feel like a slight. It’s like, hey, I’m just trying to give you the information you were looking for, right? That’s going to be part of our conversation. We can also put like product information process videos, like all those things that good contractor can provide that can also go along with it. Um, so that, that’s, that’s one aspect, you know, a little bit of price bracketing or, you know, you can kind of feel it out. Truly the answer to that, Ryan is just like be a sales person, you know, like you got good, you got better information than you’re probably ever going to have, um, be a sales person.
So they got a dog in the video. Hey, I got a dog, too, you know, like those things, you know, pick up the phone, be personable. Just know that you’re. You’re just going to be working with far more information than you would would have otherwise. And the homeowner is going to feel that, too. They’re going to feel closer to being able to make a call. Um, but I would say just to put a number out there, I would say 90% of our customers still do an in-person sales appointment. It’s actually probably higher than that. The difference is, you know, you’re rounding third base. You know, you’re equipped, you may have a price bracket on them or at least a good feeling of the space and the project. And you know what? You’re going to you have a sales plan going in. You’re not starting the sales appointment with like. Hey, what’s your name? You know, like, it’s a much more. It’s a friendly conversation. That just makes everything go faster. Yeah.
No, I love this. And I love the the concept of virtual sales, too, because there’s a lot of companies that have very large. Um, service areas, you know, especially with the price of gas these days and just logistics in general, but like, like even for Cardinal like and we have a small operation, I’m not sure where our, our brochure is at. Um, but, um, Cardinal, I mean you’re talking five cruise, you know, so you’re talking to people with Cruise, you’re talking, uh, ten people, right? So like five different cruise Not a lot compared to, you know, a, one of the gals, you know, and things like this, but. Right, Um, like even in Phoenix, you know, again, like I was mentioning earlier, um, you know, anything further than 45 minutes away, you know, even for a good sales person that’s closing 40%, it’s like, you know, or more, it’s it still makes a lot of sense, especially in concrete coating and painting where, you know, if you get a call from 45 minutes away and the guy’s like, Hey, I got my entire interior of my home, potentially my cabinets, it’s like, well, hey, you know, let me get a good look at that real quick before I drive 45 minutes and realize that, you know, we’re not going to, you know, kind of jive or whatever.
Right. Um, I want to talk a little bit about the virtual sale there. So like, if I’m kind of the admin or the sales manager or whatever, I get the information I call how what is the best way to walk through that virtual sales appointment? And by the way, guys that are listening here live, we get a lot of our listeners on the replay and also via Apple and Spotify. So if you guys are live awesome if you guys are on the replay. Um, I’m really curious how many of you guys are doing virtual sales or in-home sales and you can put it in the comments. So in the comments for the guys live here, just put in hashtag in person or hashtag, you know, virtual, let us know what you’re doing. Or maybe it’s a mixture of both. And then on Apple and Spotify, if you guys could leave us a review and let us know or potentially come back over to the Service Legends Facebook group on Facebook and let us know in there as well. We’ll let you in. Um, we’ll here real quick we have, uh, what is Groundwork’s website? I believe it is. Hello. Hello. Work.com. Right? Yep, that’s.
Right. Hello. Groundwork.
Hello. Groundwork.com. And I’m just going to show you real quick guys that are here and then if you’re on the replay, you’ll get this as well but it’s hello groundwork.com and Jeff and I and our and our teams are going to work together to provide some sort of discounted rate to get onboarded. You know obviously it’s an amazing software it’s a lot of people in here working on this software. So we don’t want to discount our our services, but we’ll see if we can get some sort of, um, you know, incentive to work with this software from the Service Legend Academy being a client of service legend. And Jeff and I had talked about also doing a webinar to kind of break down these concepts even further. Um, but let’s kind of jump into the virtual sales side. So at that point, like if I wanted to do a complete virtual sale, not going in person ever until maybe confirming a couple things, but what does that look like? If I’m using groundwork? Yeah.
So we do have what I would call like a very light proposal flow. Um, so you can send a, just an estimate. It’s intended to be like a high level estimate. Lots of people use it for like an estimate range. But, um, you can outline some quick information about what you’re going to do and that type of stuff. Um, we do not have even have e-signature on that yet, but it’s just a, it’s a quick, easy way to get project information with the price out there. Um, they can respond to that with thumbs up, thumbs down. We kind of have like a three, you know, literally like a sad face, an okay face and a smiley face type of deal. Um, so they can respond to that if you get them to say, yes, hey, that’s great. Like, hey, 800 bucks or whatever to do a thing, um, or whatever, whatever it is, small project that’s 100% done virtual. Um. Then we say we’re already likely integrated with whatever contractors estimating tool. So let’s use, let’s use, uh, Paint Scout as an example because we’re working on a direct integration with them.
Let’s say it’s a paint scout thing. It’s already in Paint Scout as a project. Um, and you just jump in because we’ve already integrated, right? So when the lead comes through, we create the project opportunity and there’s some options on when we can create an opportunity in those forms. You can even in those systems, you can even just click a button and then it’s like then you know that it’s clean in your proposal software. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so everything’s already in there and then whatever you need to do to write up the, you know, T’s and C’s and all that stuff and all the, you know, you know, all the stuff you need in a proposal. Um, you take it from there. So truly, we’re on the front end. We are enabling the, uh, virtual collaboration, the ability for you to, like, actually we close a deal virtually without losing that personal aspect, and then you just run your business process the way that you would run it any other way. Um, so that’s, that’s kind of how it works. Yeah, I.
Like that a lot because, you know, I see people doing their like even doing zooms with their customers, right? Hey, you know, instead of doing an over the phone situation like we talked about earlier, hey, we’re going to set up a day in time just like a regular in-person appointment and we’re going to do a zoom, right? And on this zoom, you can use your phone, you’re going to show me the product. Like, you know, we’re going to have a 25 minute, 30 minute appointment just like we would in person. However, we’re going to do it virtually over Zoom. I’ve seen that and you see over the phone text, you know, all these different things. And there’s no way to, you know, well, with the zoom you could be consistent. But like, you know, the other ways, it’s hard to be consistent. It’s hard to predict different things. It’s hard to collect the data on closing rates because there’s so many different variables like, you know, if you would have, you know, actually spoke with the person or whatever, you might have had a higher closing. There’s all these different variables with it. Yeah, I like how this streamlines the process for the contractor where they have this software. Here’s our process and they still need to kind of write some processes up to go along with the software. Yep, nothing’s plug and play, but um, I want to know real quick and I’m sure. Go ahead. Go ahead.
One comment on that. Um, you know, I think that’s also where it can be flexible too. You know, like we’ve, we’ve seen people do all sorts of stuff to, you know, it’s like, um, the zoom thing, maybe that maybe that’s a good value add. I mean, like I said, 90 plus percent of our customers still go out and do an in-person appointment. And, and you know, you might think like, oh, this virtual sales software guys telling us to do in-person appointments. Well, yeah, because like, that’s important at some point. And yeah, like I’ve been there when I’ve mismeasured something or you know, and it’s like, yeah, you don’t want to be unprofitable on a job because you did a thing. But I think it’s just all about the time. You know, if you look at one of the metrics that like the unofficial metrics that I, you know, coach people to track is how much, you know, how many sales hours does it take you to sell $100,000 and, you know, lump a gas, you know, your gasoline, you know, fill up the truck expense in there, too, Right. What does it take you from a dollar perspective? And so what we’re doing is. You know, completely obliterating those metrics. And we’ve seen it over and over. Like we’ve we’ve had people tell us they close 90% of their in-person, close in-person votes. Um, you know, so if you do the work, you know, and build rapport and, you know, run it through, you know, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to sell like this. Um, even if it does take a ride across town to to confirm some stuff and make sure you’re not losing your shirt. You know, so be it. But at that point, you’re 90% pretty good reason to take a trip there, too, because.
A lot of contractors and a lot of history in contracting and home services come from this concept of ballpark bait and switch where it’s like, yeah, you know, hey, it’s going to be five grand and I get there and it’s going to be 6300. Yeah. And the customer is going to feel like, well, dude, frick like, well, you said X, y, Z, but if we can get ahead of that. Yeah, you know, like what you’re talking about where we’re going to put some sort of price bracket in place and but when I get there I’m going to confirm, hey, there’s an extra 25ft² or whatever over here. There’s verticals here, there’s some damage here. Right. The customer is not so, um, shocked. You know, I guess that’s kind of nice.
Yeah. And there’s another aspect of it, too. You know, I know the. The handoff from sales productions, a big, you know, conversation we talked about at the event. Heard some conversations about that. You know, you know, if you close 90% of the sales appointments, you go on like you’re probably more confident and have more time to do a proper handoff to your production. So maybe that’s a part of that sales appointment at that point. Right. Is like you’re not getting the things signed and hightailing it out of there because like you did your job, right? It’s like, Hey, we’re going to get the paperwork signed. And then here’s the other thing we’re going to do. We’re going to check this, this and this, and I’m going to document and make sure that the crews know exactly what they’re going to be doing. Um, so it really kind of brings efficiency down the line when you’re able to like, you know, put this process in place.
Yeah. Yeah. I like that point that you make, actually, because on the project side or the production side, you get a lot of this information upfront, even even upfront as you know, as upfront as the lead being generated where they’re providing that photo, which you mean the video, and you can take that video and actually provide it to the production team, like, Hey, this is what the customer showed us. Here’s what I took. Here’s the plan. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s pretty incredible what it can do in addition to just selling or customer journey stuff.
Yep. Yeah. And we actually have a feature that’s like a almost even if you have subs. So it’s a, it’s an unauthenticated summary of the project that you could send to subs. So that was requested early on that we incorporated. So yeah, there’s, there’s some, there’s some cool production tie ins as well.
Yeah, it’s pretty incredible. Um, and then also too, you know, um, I’m kind of curious, like, do you guys see this software being more for the owner, operator, contractor or, you know, or, or is it also available for guys that are doing, you know, 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, etcetera? Who is this mainly for based on like team size or those types of things?
Yeah. We, um, we actually thrive larger businesses. Um, the larger the business, the better we do. I will. Um, you know, we’ve coached our sales team that, you know, if you’re not, I guess if you weren’t, if you’re working with Ryan Davis, you’re getting plenty of leads. So that’s like the that’s, that’s the metric that we track, right? Usually it means there’s that correlates to the size of business. But, um, if you’re, if you’re only getting a couple of leads a week.
Like.
Go, go, go shake some hands and kiss some babies and, you know, sell your pants off. Right? Like that’s that’s probably what you should do. But if you’re, you know, in the spot where you have good lead flow and want to optimize, that’s where we can be effective. So honestly, the larger the the better.
Yeah. So, you know, guys that are listening here live on a couple live but on replay you guys are here on replay also Apple, Apple, Spotify if you guys are listening um this is a great software. If you got that lead flow in place, which is really if we’re being honest, anything needs, you know, anything to work or integrate um, effectively into a business must be inserted when that business is has a lot of front end lead flow, you know, because you don’t have that front end opportunity. So if you guys don’t have that front end opportunity, obviously you can reach out to service Legend, another marketing company or or do something, generate those opportunities, generate the front end kind of opportunity kind of phase, if you will. And then this is going to help you convert those opportunities into actual money, into actual customers. And I really like this this twist, if you will, on customer journey, you know, because I think we all focus so much on customer journey. And um, in the agency world, the first 90 days is, is, is mission critical. Like, you know, if you do anything wrong there, you know, the customers just want to leave and for contracting you don’t really have, oh, the first 90 days, you know, it’s really the whole thing. It’s the whole thing. Like if you mess up, even if you call somebody in, you’re scheduling a project they’ve already paid for or put a deposit in. Yeah. And you ruin that situation. It can really put a lot of doubt in their mind. Um, can you talk to us a little bit, Jeff, about how this benefits a successful company’s customer journey? Like how does this like, well, let’s say that there’s a company that already has a decent customer journey in place. It’s a good company, great reputation. How can this maximize the customer experience for the customer? Because, you know, we talked a lot about the contractor. How can this how can this improve the customer’s experience? Yeah. Um, in addition to the contractors experience.
Yeah. So, um. There’s a subset, a growing section of home improvement, you know, people who buy in home improvement, home service projects. Um. That are tech savvy. And you ask anybody if homeowners are wanting more tech, you know, leaning more into tech or less into tech mean the answer is they’re they’re they’re leaning more into tech. Right. So, um, that buyer’s journey in the in the trades has typically been pretty old and stodgy. Um, you don’t have to look very far to get a review of a contractor or a homeowner disgruntled about the way that, you know, so-and-so didn’t show up or they were 15 minutes late and we’re, you know, got my house all dirty and like, Oh, you smelled.
Like a hot dog. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so, I mean, like, those stories abound. And even if you’re a company with that, with without that problem, like you’ve kind of brushed yourself up a little bit, you’re still fighting the stigma, right? You’re still fighting against what they think it is. So, um, I think what’s interesting about the customer journey is that contractors have really mean the amount of contractors. At one point I was saying like eight out of ten contractors I talk to are redoing their website like it’s a thing, right? And I mean, we just relaunched our website, you know, So it’s like, you know, it’s every couple of years you want to get something fresh. Um, a lot of time and effort goes in there, right? And like, the websites are awesome. And then what we found is there’s a pretty big drop off, um, in that contact Us box. It’s kind of like there’s a twiddling of the thumbs that happens, right? It’s like, okay, even if you have like an automated text message or something like that, um, or even if you have a booking tool, you know, it’s kind of like, okay, am I connecting with an actual human being? Um, that’s, that is the part of the customer journey that I think has been challenged.
And if there’s opportunity for trades business owners to, you know, revamp and like from the get build value and say, hey, I’m a legit high end contractor, that’s a place that there’s a ton of opportunity. Um, you know, you don’t have to take it from me. The guy trying to, you know, do, you know, change the game here. But like, I mean, that’s a it’s hard to refute that, right? Especially, you know, lots of contractors still have that contact us box and it’s like you get a thumbs up or like a success we received it and then it’s like crickets, you know, until Monday at 4:00 when the admin gets through calling all the leads back and then it’s a missed phone call and then, you know, pretty crappy experience, pretty crappy experience. So like when you look at when you look at that process as is a lot of room to grow, a lot of room for contractors to not only like fix it, but to end up standing out from their competition and build value for customers.
Yeah, man, it’s incredible. Um, and one thing you mentioned and guys, we, we have a couple minutes left here with Jeff. But you know, one thing you mentioned, Jeff, was, um, the crickets in the contact form. And I think it’s so important because. What happens when a customer fills out the form. Normally they go to another website, right? They go back. I mean, think about it. If I’m a customer, I go to Google. Let’s say I’m searching. You have Google ads, you have your Google business profile and there’s some ads in there sometimes, and then you have your SEO rankings, all the organic rankings under that. Let’s say you’re on all three. You have a Google ad position number one. Number two, number three, you’re in the map pack, you’re on page one of Google organically and somebody goes to your website, right? They fill out the form. What do you think they’re doing? They’re hitting the back button and they’re going back to page one of Google and then they’re going, okay, that person as well. And they’re filling out another form. But, you know, I like this a lot because that first experience, you know, they go to Google. They they go to the Google ad, the the the map pack, the ranking. They click the website and they have a different experience, a a innovative experience. And maybe this is a far shot for me, but I’m thinking about this is maybe that person doesn’t go to other places as much. I was going.
To say that, you know, like human nature if if you can get, um, you know, we’re, we’re kind of, you know, it’s like the alligator brain, right? It’s like you kind of just do what you’re doing, you know, It’s like, find the path of least resistance is kind of like the way that humans operate. So, um, if you can distract, maybe that’s a weird word to use, but if you like, uh, maybe disrupt that flow of like, Hey, my mind says I need to go to three contact us forms on, you know, three contractors for this XYZ service. Um, if you can distract and, you know, kind of shake them up out of the what they thought they were going to do and like give them a couple of aha’s and like make them feel taken care of, they feel taken care of and maybe they don’t go back. Maybe they, you know, maybe their, you know, their kid needs a snack at that point. And, you know, you already got all your stuff from them. So it’s an interesting site. I mean, so much of sales and so much of like how we build is the psychology of how people act and those little triggers and um, you know, attention span and all those things go into how we build, what we build.
Yeah. And that same person, even if they go back to other places. But if you’re delivering that amazing first touch, that, that, that first experience of customer journey and they go to 2 or 3 other places and it’s crickets like what you mentioned, or even if there’s a scheduling software, it’s not as user friendly, all these different things they will go back like, man, that that place was amazing. I got to put a video in place, all these different things. I got all these different things back in place. I can self book, I can get in-home. And so you deliver that, that, you know, that concept of your first impression, right? Like you can never recreate a first impression. Uh, same thing with our customers. You’re in contracting, you know, and I think we, we think about it more so in personal life on friends, family, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. And I think a lot of times we forget about it on our customer that our those little tones, the body language, the text, the non text like the things that we do, but also the things that we don’t do. Yeah you know so true. Yeah, man. Um, so, dude, thank you so much for your time today, man. Yeah, I know. We got started a little bit late, but guys, if you are here live on the replay, Apple, Spotify, let us know if you’d be interested in doing a deeper dive during a webinar on this software, how to use it, how to be profitable, using the software, all those different things. Let us know in the comments if you’d be interested on that. We’ll make sure that we put this content, the training and different resources into the Service Legend Academy for you guys that are clients. But outside of that man, again, thank you so much for your time. Any final words you want to share with anybody on, uh, on this session?
No, I think it’s, um. Well, say I say no, and then I start talking. Uh. Um. You know, I think the the cool thing about what we’re building is it’s, you know, sometimes it’s, you know, you build something from scratch, right? And this is a bunch of entrepreneurs who are going to listen from this. And, you know, you learn along the way and you build and you learn and you build. And, you know, we’re just excited that contractors have come alongside and us as we’ve done that. And it’s just been a blast. And I appreciate you having me on the on the podcast to share the story, man.
100%. Man 100%. Um, well, you guys have an amazing weekend and we’ll see you guys next week. Next Tuesday. Uh, real quick, next Tuesday, we have a webinar with Pete Johnson on how to build a world class concrete coating, installation, training filled leadership, and also how to optimize your schedule for profitability. So we have that on Tuesday the 25th at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. And then we have another podcast on Friday, that same week, next week on the 28th with Joe Crisara. And he calls himself America’s home service sales coach. Like he’s like Uncle Joe. He’s like the Grant Cardone of sales for HVAC. So we have him for Friday. Pete Johnson from Valent Protective Coatings, the manufacturer, um, on on Tuesday. So stay tuned guys have an amazing weekend and we’ll see you guys all next week. Thanks, Jeff. See ya. Yep.
