From Leads to Loyal Clients: Mastering Inbound Lead Generation for Carpet Cleaner Success

An inbound lead playbook is a strategic guide for capturing, nurturing, and converting leads into customers through personalized and value-driven interactions.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:
Right now, we’re obviously talking about before the sale. This is that part of the business, and so you wanna think with that hat on, this is sort of your lead lead generation. What are you doing with leads? I actually prefer to call them inquiries, but the world likes the word leads. So, in carpet cleaning, we don’t chase leads. We chase qualified inquiries and convert them into long term clients, not one time transactional customers. That’s the languaging I like. So, anyways, we’re gonna get into all of this. So let’s put our thinking caps on.

John Clendenning [00:01:02]:
I apologize to the fellow last month who said, oh, it must be a recorded call because I asked a question and John didn’t get to it. Just so you know, I’m a fairly single focused dude. I go deep. I go I go focus mode and have a lot to impart. And as soon as I get diverted even slightly, it’s like, ah, where was I? So I prefer to stay in my lane. Let Krisha answer any questions like that. If I miss any questions, we will definitely follow-up with you afterwards, by by email or text message. Also, be a member of the carpet cleaner marketing secrets Facebook group.

John Clendenning [00:01:39]:
Let’s get started. Today, we’re gonna be talking about, inbound lead playbook. The best way to think of it is you’re running 3 separate businesses. I learned this first from a guy by the name of Dean Jackson from I Love Marketing. I actually knew of Dean before he started I Love Marketing. And he talked about the 3 businesses you own, the 3 hats you wear. I was just a carpet cleaner, maid service business owner, duct cleaning business owner, janitorial business owner at the time. This is, like, maybe 20 years ago.

John Clendenning [00:02:08]:
I fully understood that I own 3 businesses. I own a business that is before the sale, which is your lead generation and keeper of the lists business as I like to call it. And then you have a a business that is a service delivery during the sale. The service delivery business, you wanna run that as its own entity in in in an excellent fashion, hire people, be the person until you can hire somebody. But I would suggest that for in most marketplaces, I started in a town of 30,000 people in 1995, and by the end of, within less than 2 years, I was no longer in the truck. We were doing over 10,000 a month then and then bought existing businesses and grew like crazy. And I was a 20 some odd year old kid just figuring this stuff out. Right? So I I kinda didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I think that was a great starting point because I just learned every single day what I didn’t know.

John Clendenning [00:02:54]:
Every time I drove around in the car, I put cassette tapes, as I talked about. And then eventually CDs a decade later or 5, 6, 7 years later when CDs became a thing. But I started with cassette tapes sitting open on the seat beside me and slide a cassette tape in of of Howard Partridge back in the day, Joe Polish back in the day, Michael Gerber, the e myth. I had that whole book on cassette tape and a training course from him, and things like that. Dan Kennedy and marketing. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I had to learn how to speak better. I had to learn how to sell better. I had to learn how to persuade better.

John Clendenning [00:03:26]:
So Richard Bandler and, NLP programming. I learned all of that by cassette tape and stuff like that, driving around first between jobs and then eventually between quotes and and and, outreaches and stuff like that. So, anyways, you own 3 businesses before the sale, during the sale, after the sale, which is a client retention and client referral business. Right? And if you think of them separately, work on each one one thing for each one of them at a time so you’re kind of the trifecta. You’re building up all three phases of your business because you could build up a business that is too heavily focused on leads, and you suck at service delivery and you’re terrible at follow-up. You never message your database. That’s a terrible business. Most of your money is in the back end, the database, not in the front end, the first time customer, period.

John Clendenning [00:04:08]:
If you don’t live deliver a great service, you don’t get most you don’t get more money. We’ve got some clients that are averaging 7 to $800 per residential carpet cleaning job in markets where it’s $99 is special carpet cleaning guys are their competitors, and they got 50, 60, 70 competitors, and they’re averaging 7, $800 per residential job. And that’s because they’ve also also focused on during the sale and really upping that that moment as well. So right now, we’re obviously talking about before the sale. This is that part of the business, and so you wanna think with that hat on, this is sort of your lead lead generation. What are you doing with leads? I actually prefer to call them inquiries, but the world likes the word leads. So, in carpet cleaning, we don’t chase leads. We chase qualified inquiries and convert them into long term clients, not one time transactional customers.

John Clendenning [00:04:57]:
That’s the languaging I like. So, anyways, we’re gonna get into all of this. Customers. That’s the languaging I like. So, anyways, we’re gonna get into all of this, so let’s put our thinking caps on. So we’re gonna turn off our cell phones, aren’t we? Turn off our Facebook. We’re going unless, again, once we figure out a live stream, I’m not gonna be able to say that anymore. If, into the Facebook group.

John Clendenning [00:05:15]:
If you’re cleaning home service business owner, entrepreneur, serious about growing your business, you know, we don’t have to do this. We don’t have to train on the 30 years experience, the 20 years of coaching, all of that kind of stuff. We were yeah. Do I run a digital marketing agency, carpet cleaner marketing masters that helps do all of this stuff for carpet cleaners and take carpet cleaners at under a 100,000, a 100 to 200,000, 200,000 to $300,000 businesses and turn them double and triple them? Yes. We do. We have coaching that has to help with that. We have services that help, and we help you guys redefine your business and rethink it, all that kind of stuff. So we work with clients on this level.

John Clendenning [00:05:49]:
Do we have to impart this to the industry? I enjoy doing it. I’ve I’ve helped carpet cleaners. I wrote the book on it. I’ve for for the last 20 years of my 30 year journey in the in the in the in probably even longer than that. As I learned something and figured it out, I told all my friends that were buddies and carpet cleaners, and then eventually, I told rooms of people and stuff like that. So and now we do these webinars to help teach stuff. So, yeah, it is it is very helpful information, very cutting edge. We do this all day long.

John Clendenning [00:06:18]:
I’ve done it for 30 years. We wanna impart some of that knowledge on you guys. So, what we’re gonna cover today, why a strong lead database pause on that for a second. Lead database. Do you have a database of your leads that didn’t turn into customers from a month ago, 6 months ago, 2 years ago? Why not? Are they still interested until they actually move out of the area? The really crude rate way I like to say it is I learned it from somebody, but until they buy or die, but really until they basically unsubscribe or move on in in life or in in location. Right? So lead database is your secret weapon. You are the keeper of lists. Right? If I could remake a version of Lord of the Rings instead of, you know, the the, keeper of the rings and all that kind of stuff, the keeper of the lists, because, the power of warm leads unlocking 70% of the sales opportunities you’re missing.

John Clendenning [00:07:16]:
Not everybody calls and books. We know that. What is your booking percentage? Do you keep that numbers? Do you have somebody answering your phones? Do you keep that number? If it’s a repeat customer, that should be a 100%. You should be rebooking people unless you don’t have an opening in your schedule, and even then there’s a fix for that. If it’s a referral client, that should be a 90 to 95% shoe in booking. If you’re good on the phone, you have scripts, you understand what to say, you understand a little bit of psychological positioning, You under let us understand sales positioning. You’ve got that put into the languaging. You know, hey.

John Clendenning [00:07:48]:
How much does it cost to clean 3 bedrooms in a hallway and a flight of stairs? And the last thing you answer is the price. Why? Price, Pete, makes you a commodity. Asking more questions, listening to the answers, and then weaving in why you’re different, your unique sales proposition, risk reversal guarantee, founder story, and impactful brand messaging, the core four foundational parts of growing any business. If you put those in place and you answer that, then you’ve got people going, oh my gosh. Holy crap. That’s amazing. Yeah. Let me try you guys out.

John Clendenning [00:08:18]:
You sound like you’re a little bit more or you’re a little bit more expensive, but I understand why the discount guys didn’t work out in the back before. Now you’re not a commodity anymore. So discount commodity carpet cleaning means rusty vans and owners working way too hard at jobs that are below their pay scale. So understand that as well. When you own a business, are you worth 20 to $30 an hour, 25 to 35 like a technician gets these days? Or are you worth 50 to $100 an hour or more by being the business owner strategically working on the business, landing the $5,000 condo hallways, meeting with the real estate agent or agents repeatedly and interior designers that give you, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5,000, $10,000. My highest is $20,000 a year worth of work residentially from their from their database because you met with them, you work that system, and you have a system in place to remind them to refer you. So everything is about marketing and systems. If you did that and you you met somebody for a lunch for an hour and it turned into $5,000 worth of work per year, the average lifetime value of a client is 5 to 7 years in carpet cleaning.

John Clendenning [00:09:29]:
That is a 25 $1,000 meeting you just had if you land them. Can you have $25,000 meetings with a missus Jones to clean her hallway and and den because her her 19 year old Chihuahua keeps peeing on it. No. She’ll never be a $25,000 missus Jones, but you can pay a technician to go do a great job for missus Jones if you know what you’re supposed to be doing all day long. Right? So power of warm leads really helps that one as well. Follow-up like a pro. The key to sales is then the follow-up. So people go sometimes will say, I don’t like using local service ads.

John Clendenning [00:10:08]:
I don’t like using Google pay per click. I don’t like using Facebook ads. I don’t like you name your ad platform. Right? Because the lead quality seems bad. My first question is, let me hear your scripts. Let me hear how well you convert either to a job or an in home quote. If you can’t sell the job, you sell the quote. Right? If you can’t sell the job, the quote, you sell the information, and you follow-up with them until they buy or die.

John Clendenning [00:10:31]:
What is the 3 month, 6 month, 9 month conversion of that person from before? Right? Follow-up like a pro. If you don’t have a follow-up system in place, you probably shouldn’t even be running paid ads. If you don’t realize that if somebody calls you today from local service ads and it costs you 25, 35, 55, we’ve got clients as high as $70 a phone call in local service ads, and they love it because their average job is way up in the 5, $600 range. And they book 50% of those people, so they just spend a $140 to book the customer the first time, customer the first time, and they still made $500. So that’s a 4 to 1 ROI roughly if you do the math, which is great for paid ads. But the lifetime value of that customer turning into a client that repeats and refers at $500 is close to 5,000, $6,000 lifetime value or more, but that’s on average based on I can show you the calculation someday on that. Probably will actually next month on our month year end wrap up, master class. But yeah.

John Clendenning [00:11:34]:
So now that’s $5,000 from your bought the client for $70 per call, 2 calls to close. Right? So now if they called and they didn’t book today, should you call tomorrow? Yeah. Let me think about it, and I’ll talk to my husband and get back to you. Blah blah blah. Okay. Great. Thanks. In the meantime, let me send what’s the best email? Let me send over some information, that if you are calling around asking, you know, here’s some questions you should ask anybody else, all that good stuff.

John Clendenning [00:11:59]:
The next day you call them up. Hey, missus Jones. You gave us a call yesterday. Our schedule is really filling up. I just thought I’d give you a a a quick buzz back to see if you’re looking to go ahead with that cleaning, in the next couple weeks. It’s not a hard call to have. You don’t have to do it. You have a office person doing it.

John Clendenning [00:12:14]:
If you don’t have an office girl, whatever, talk to us. We actually we don’t own it, but I have used a call center in the cleaning space. All they do is answer phones for carpet cleaners, for 20 years. And the manager of it, a good friend of mine, just did a podcast with her, has just bought the business. We just found out as well. So, she now is going to be the owner of it after 20 years of working in it. Loves the industry. Loves answering phones for carpet cleaners.

John Clendenning [00:12:40]:
Amazing. Anyways so, yeah, you need somebody to follow-up the next day and maybe wait 3 or 4 days, follow-up again. So we’re gonna talk about that. You gotta follow-up like a pro and automate the lead nurture. How to hit 90% efficiency or more? How can you do all of this with very little of your time and make it automated? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So that sounds exciting. Let’s move into that. Alright? So, yeah.

John Clendenning [00:13:05]:
Let’s see. Okay. Who am I? If you’re new here, not a lot of newbies find us this way. They usually follow us on Instagram and Facebook and watch our podcast and kinda know that. But if you’re brand new here, I’ve been in business since I was in high school. Just game terribly, painfully unemployable. I would not work well for for anybody else. Kind of a bit of a wild card that way.

John Clendenning [00:13:29]:
Part of it was being my shyness, that kind of thing. Hated doing job applications and all that kind of stuff. Went on the road with a band for a few years after high school. Grew my hair way down, all that kind of stuff, teased it up because it was an eighties rock band. We’re not showing you those pictures, but because I could only see the front row, and they’re all girls, by the way, but I could only see the front row. Everybody else was blur and black, and I played guitar, and I could play guitar to the front row. And that wasn’t that hard to do. So, eventually, I started businesses to challenge my shyness.

John Clendenning [00:13:59]:
And I’ve been the owner of franchise businesses and independent businesses. I’ve been licensed, licensee to be the managing group of other businesses. I’ve helped an entire network start, form, grow, and sell, from 0 to 160,000,000 a year in an 8 year period, in annual revenue. Yeah. I’ve keynotes, been a keynote speaker around the world. I’ve done elite retreats and as far away as the island of Samoa, crazy trip, 48 hours of travel just to get there, to across the times of international date line and back and a 12 hour time zone difference and had to stand for 3 days and present on the wrong time zone 2 days after, you know, or day after, day and a half after landing. Crazy. Anyways, yeah.

John Clendenning [00:14:44]:
So I’ve I’ve I’ve run all the businesses you guys run. I’ve had buddies in the businesses. I’ve consulted with them. I’ve had a consulting gig where we had a a mastermind group, teaching businesses carpet cleaners and home cleaning services to grow to a $1,000,000. And the way you have to think your way through, what you have to learn personally, 90% of it is between the ears, not out in the world. Out in the world happens because you you create it, whether you believe in manifesting, higher power, spiritual, whatever it is, but most of it is what you focus on expands. So focus on the right things. Right? Dull the chatter in your head that tells you that you’re no good at stuff, and give yourself positive reinforcement and motivation, and focus on the right stuff, and stay motivated even when things start crapping out around you because the world is chaos, and you’ll be the survivor and win.

John Clendenning [00:15:32]:
So, and just always stay always stay learning. Always stay young and interested and curious in learning. So, anyways, so that’s who I am. Wrote the book on it. If you want it, go to Amazon, Complete Guide to Internet Marketing for Carpet Cleaners. Not a bad read. Not to say that you should be the Internet marketer. If you bought the book and read it and put it all in place, you’ve got a job.

John Clendenning [00:15:50]:
You can work for me, or you can be my competitor, I guess. But, ultimately, why do you wanna learn it? Read it to know the stuff you need to know about what you want others to do for you and where you wanna take the business next. You need to know what to do, what you want to do. You don’t have to know how to do it, if that makes it. So who not how. K. So that’s a little bit about me. Clean Facts Magazine, front cover last year, industry leader of the year, stuff like that, doing different presentations on stages with people like Howard Partridge, Jeff Cross, managing editor of ISSA Media, the Association For Us Cleaners, and Clean Facts.

John Clendenning [00:16:27]:
They’re the ones that own Clean Facts Magazine and Cleaning and Maintenance Magazine and stuff like that. So I’m a featured guest every month on all of their channels and in write for them and do all that kind of stuff as well. So and we also run the carpet cleaner success podcast. So you can find that on all your favorite podcasts, right beside Joe Rogan. We don’t have anywhere near as many followers as Joe Rogan. I’m not sure why that is. I think people should be as interested in in carpet cleaning as they are in aliens and all that other stuff, but maybe it’s just me. Hey.

John Clendenning [00:16:56]:
We help our customers and clients. The stuff we teach you is the stuff we also teach them and then we do, and we help them become the top brands in the marketplace. So that’s what we do. We make our clients the top carpet cleaning or home cleaning brands in the marketplace so they attract the best clients, are able to charge the top rates for their services, and are booked out weeks weeks in advance. Right? I would still leave a few openings for, somebody who needs in in a couple of days. If you’re busy and busy enough, leave a couple of last minute openings. That’s just another little strategy. Or have a tech have a technician that’s available certain days of the week to go work overtime to solve problems.

John Clendenning [00:17:30]:
You You don’t wanna be booked out so far in advance. You are too far booked out that people you have to turn people away. So there’s a little bit of logistics in that, but that’s what we do. How do we do it? Three principles of our omnipresence marketing system. Omnipresence is how we do it. Omnipresence is how you do it as well. So our omnipresence maximize the opportunity to generate a qualified inquiry. See, I got rid of the word leads.

John Clendenning [00:17:54]:
Yay, me. So maximize the opportunity to generate a qualified inquiry to your business. Do you know what a qualified inquiry is? What is your ideal client avatar? We’ve done some trainings on that. Who is your ideal residential customer? Who’s your ideal commercial customer? What is your ideal percentage of residential commercial? We realized probably later than we should have, our ideal commercial customer is not a greasy restaurant that needs it to start at midnight. It’s just not. I didn’t I didn’t wanna go. I didn’t have technicians who want to go. They’re disgusting.

John Clendenning [00:18:20]:
Our equipment gets beat up. Somebody’s gotta go back to the shop and clean it all up before the next day’s residential jobs, and the guys didn’t wanna show up at 8 o’clock the next morning. So we discerned that our ideal res our commercial clients were either available during the day, hallways of condos and things like that, at convention centers if we’re gonna do those, hotels and all that kind of stuff, or light commercial, like accounting offices, chiropractors, that kind of stuff. Right? Anything that we could do and clean, not having to go out on a Sunday. I had no guys available Sundays. I didn’t need them to go out Sundays. Saturday was from 8 till noon, 8 to 1. That’s when we worked on Saturdays.

John Clendenning [00:19:02]:
If it was, you know and they got overtime, so it was a volunteer basis. And then if they went out on a evening, it was at the end of a normal route, 5, 5:30. They’d arrive at a place, and they’d be off. They go to, you know, till 8 or 9 at night. They get paid overtime $50 an hour by the time it’s all said and done. In most cases, I’d buy them pizza or something like that before they headed out. Right? We knew who our qualified commercial customers were. Residentially, our qualified residential clients did not were not rental people in rental homes or apartments.

John Clendenning [00:19:35]:
We didn’t clean those. Not because we had truck mounts and hoses. We we bounce portables up 3 store walk ups if we had to, but that wasn’t our ideal client because they didn’t repeat. The only value to running a cleaning business is not the first time transactional cleaning. It is the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 10th time you do missus Jones. That’s where all your money is. Right? And the carpet cleaner that understands that knows how much to invest in their marketing. The one that doesn’t understand that, tries to invest at least an amount as possible believing that everybody’s price conscious and doesn’t, you know, and then it’s therefore marketing in the wrong places.

John Clendenning [00:20:10]:
They’re trying to run Facebook ads to generate a volume of customers, which Facebook ads will is like Groupon. The the volume the only way you kinda get any attraction in there is discount, discount, discount, and it’s the wrong customer. They won’t repeat with you. So, anyways, there’s ways to play Facebook ads. We might even talk about that in this a little bit here, but that’s not your qualified leads. So maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry, maximize your brand impressions. Google is an entity SEO company now. It’s topical authority content and SEO.

John Clendenning [00:20:42]:
We talked about that last month 2 months ago. Last month I think it was on the SEO conversation. SEO has changed entirely as well. Brands are the most important thing. Entities are the most important thing. Why? Because of the most important thing to customers. Customers need to know who you are, who your brand is, what you stand for, and why they should hire you. If you can’t explain that uniquely different than the 10 other, 20, other, 50, other, 70 other carpet cleaners in your marketplace, why should they choose you? If another business can’t explain that, like, you know, you’re getting your tires rotated or new tires put on the car.

John Clendenning [00:21:17]:
You’ve got all bunch of different tire shops. If they can’t explain why them, how do they get customers? It’s not just a luck of the draw. They have to actually influence the business owner or the the consumer in the right way, and it’s not about the lowest price. In fact, in every study, price is about 5th or 6th down down the list, especially with home services, even though it sounds like it’s the most important because everybody asks about it on the call. That’s just because they’re nervous and they don’t know what else to ask. They have no reference to your industry until you teach them. Education marketing works really well. So you wanna make sure you maximize your brand impression, so they wanna call you.

John Clendenning [00:21:49]:
Right? Oh my god. I see these guys everywhere, online, offline, everywhere. This is the company I want. My friend referred them and I see them everywhere. That makes sense. I’m a real estate agent. I see these guys everywhere. They reached out to me for a lunch or a coffee date to talk about the referral program.

John Clendenning [00:22:02]:
Yeah. I should probably go on that. I see these guys everywhere. Brand impressions, killer important. And you wanna maximize your conversions. This is the missing piece a lot of people talk, don’t understand. We’re gonna talk a little bit about conversions in in this conversation. We’ve had entire master classes on it.

John Clendenning [00:22:16]:
We’ll have another one coming up, you know, over the next couple months, next year, whatever, on on maximizing your conversions as well. Because, again, what you do before they see you, what they do what you do after they engage with you, and what you do in the long term follow-up determines conversions. What if somebody came into your world, and we’ll talk about this today a little bit. They came into your world. They found out about you. They’re interested. You’re not available because they need something in the next week, and you’ve you’re booked 3 weeks out as an example. Or they just don’t they think your price is a little much, and they go with somebody else.

John Clendenning [00:22:53]:
And you stay in touch with them every single month with happy, helpful stuff. You’re just a great you know? And they it’s helpful enough they don’t unsubscribe. Done well. That happens very well. Very easily. Very well. Now what if the person that cleaned for them either, a, never stays in touch and they can’t remember who it was, or, b, they weren’t that impressed with? Maybe we should try these other guys. It’s only, like, $50 more, a $100 more, $200 more.

John Clendenning [00:23:16]:
That’s not a lot. Lot once a year. Maybe I should try somebody better. He tells a better story, and he seems to have happier many, many happier customers. Right? Now you’ve acquired them the second time. You wouldn’t have if you didn’t stay in touch with them. That’s a conversion principle as well. So what is the number one mistake I see most service businesses make that is costing them 1,000? And that number could probably be tens of 1,000 and probably over the lifetime of their business, 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of dollars.

John Clendenning [00:23:42]:
If your average customer is worth 5, $6,000 over the lifetime, or client is worth 5 or $6,000 over the lifetime, and you’re generating 5 new clients new clients a week, you know, maybe on any given week, one truck does 15 jobs and 5 of them are new and 10 of them are repeat. You should be looking at about a 60 to 70% repeat rate once you’re a couple years in business, or you’re not marketing your database well enough, or you haven’t built a good database. Right? But if you do all of those things, you should still be doing 5 new customers a week that are brand new to you. If they turn into clients because you got a good back end marketing system, right, then that is $25,000 to the lifetime of your business. This mistake right here, that’s per week, is the lifetime value of your business. That’s how you go carpet carpet cleaning business, home service businesses, is thinking about the lifetime value and how does that affect all of your marketing today. Right? So it’s costing you tens of 1,000, 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of dollars. So and it’s even more costly, as our, our consumer market slows down.

John Clendenning [00:24:43]:
You know, it really depends on which direction we’re going, what’s happening in the world, all that kind of stuff. Is there gonna be a war? Is there gonna be you know, interest rates might be coming down, but, you know, home defaults and credit card defaults are going up and oh my gosh. Anyways, there’s lots of stuff going on that needs to be fixed, and it all affects consumer spending. So this is even more important as things get tighter. It’s more important in recessions. It’s more important in slowdowns. It’s more important as the world changes. And the world is changing.

John Clendenning [00:25:09]:
The upper class is getting more money, the lower income are having less, and the middle class is getting squeezed out. We know this. So there’s less of the middle. You either have to market to the upper or your debt left scrambling for the lower. So this solves for not enough leads. Right? Does it generate do you generate more leads? No. You’re gonna convert more leads that you’ve already generated. You’re not going, oh, that guy’s no good.

John Clendenning [00:25:37]:
That guy’s no good. That’s not good. No good. Oh, finally found 1. No. This guy is being okay. This guy’s okay. Like, it it’s not right now.

John Clendenning [00:25:45]:
Right? Interested, but not right now. That’s what we’re gonna talk about. Solves for that. Solves for low quality leads. I’ll show you how as well. And this also solves for the real that the the lead cost is too high and the ROI is too low. So why is it cost me so much, and how come I’m not making enough? Again, we talked a lot about lifetime value, but part of that fits into this equation as well. Oops.

John Clendenning [00:26:06]:
Let me go back one previous double click. So I often tell you that leads like, you’ll hear me say this a lot to our clients. You’ll hear me say a lot in these these these master classes that lead flow is often not the problem. You’ve got if you’re done if you’re doing your job well, you’ve got a website that’s starting to rank and ranking more and more. If you don’t, you need SEO. It’s it’s the granddaddy. It’s the asset you need to build in your company. Your organic presence online, your organic presence offline, your organic SEO search engine optimization for organic presence is gonna be critical.

John Clendenning [00:26:39]:
If that’s working, you got leads, some inquiries, leads. Your website, if it’s built properly, should be converting really, really well. Google Ads, people that are looking today, if you’ve got an ad running, will find you today. They won’t find you tomorrow because they’re not looking tomorrow. They’re looking today. Right? Local service ads, same idea. So Google’s got 2 areas on Google. So 60% of the people that are looking for a new carpet cleaner and have no name in mind go to Google.

John Clendenning [00:27:02]:
The other 40% go everywhere else but Google. That’s fine. But 60% that do go to Google, just over half, some of them look stop at the Google Ads and the local service ads. Some don’t. Some go to, the maps, and a whole bunch of them go down to read more because they’re interested in learning more about this category they know nothing about. Right? So it really depends on how urgent they are, but that’s where they go if they’re on Google. Right? So if you’re showing up in all these places, you’re getting inquiries. And if you’re good at converting, you’re getting inquiries that, that that don’t cost you too much.

John Clendenning [00:27:34]:
You also wanna be well known around town. So, you know, this is just an example with billboards and and, you know, sponsoring teams and, you know, yard signs and door hangers and back of buses and all of those things have a place at different levels of growth of your business. Not a you’re probably not gonna do a back of a bus or anything like that in your ideal neighborhoods because once you know your ideal customer, you know the ideal neighborhood the bus goes through. Right? Makes marketing really easy. But you’re not gonna do that when you’re at a 100,000 a year, but when you’re at half a1000000 a year and you’ve got a marketing budget that’s dialed in properly to the right percentage of revenue, you’ve got money for backup buses too. You’ve got money for radio, and now you become even more and more. Now that gets you into 3 quarters a1000000 dollars and a $1,000,000. Right? In a small town, you go wide, you buy more service businesses.

John Clendenning [00:28:17]:
In a big town, you go deep. You do just your carpet upholstery, tile, area cleaning, and that’s all you need to do to run a multimillion dollar business if you get the marketing and entrepreneurial mindset right. Facebook ads, another one. Again, Facebook ads can don’t generate a high volume of of of inquiries at a high price. So at, like, a high, like, a high cost per cleaning, but they can generate a massive amount of awareness at a decent ROI. And so that’s not a lead problem. Direct mail, door hangers, done well, not a lead problem. Again, we got billboards.

John Clendenning [00:28:55]:
We got referrals. If you’ve got programs and marketing for all of these, and in fact, all of these, right, paid ads, Google Maps, organic, social outreach, local awareness, repeat and referral programs, JV partners, that’s just 3. We had 9 different categories. Maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was 10, 11 different categories of JV partners, including, hair salons and Mercedes and BMW dealerships and chiropractors. I found ways to actually get them to all refer us to their clients as well. Once we figure these guys out, we just rinse and repeat into other niches. Right? Or are there other client bases that have ideal customers that are like ours? Website that’s built to convert, retarget people that show up, run ads to the people that came to your website and didn’t do anything.

John Clendenning [00:29:38]:
You can actually even mail them in today’s day and age. You can actually somebody comes to your website and leaves, didn’t even fill a form out, they can tell you another address. Scary, but there’s data out there that will send them a a postcard. So you’re interested in that? Talk to me. It’s kind of really cool new AI stuff. Anyways, online directories, neighborhood marketing, yard signs, postcards, door hangers, all that stuff, and then authority, press releases, charity events, sponsored meetings and presentations, on and on and on. I used to, like, there’s sometimes this time of year where financial planners and a bunch of other people get together and rent out a room at a hotel and bring all of their clients together. So maybe 3, 4, 5 different disciplines to do a half hour presentation.

John Clendenning [00:30:22]:
It’s a 2 hour night, plus they have hors d’oeuvres and some wine and stuff like that. And those are great people. I would, a lot of times, rent a booth. They’re not charging a lot. Like, again, it’s just a a financial planner renting a room and trying to get a message out and tell people to bring friends. And he also brought his, you know, mortgage broker buddy and his, you know, finance or, like, name another discipline, like, you know, whatever, brought them all together. Try trying to think of the other ones that they used to bring for those, you know, insurance and financial and and mortgage and house and real estate and and and things like that. And he would bring a bunch of these guys together, but they all had to bring their own invite their own list as well and who could bring friends.

John Clendenning [00:31:06]:
Now it’s cross pollinate, but a lot of them were smart enough to at least allow people in the back to set up a bit of a vendor booth area. Right? So I would send up a vendor booth with my carpet cleaning and talk about healthy home cleaning services and give everybody one free room of cleaning with any minimum job that came up and chatted to me at the booth and and and, right, and things like that. And I paid a $150 for the night. That was well worth it as well. So you can do sponsored meetings and presentations, and I would always make sure that I had about a 5 minute presentation. Not about me, but about a topic that the audience was interested in related to my area of expertise. Allergies, healthy home, cleaning, proper maintenance, stuff like that. Just, you know, the right vacuum cleaners, all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:31:53]:
Like, there’s things that we know about is as carpet cleaners that the average homeowner doesn’t know about that we could teach them, and I would just allow give, you know, ask for I will I will invest in one of your booths if you give me a 5 minute quick little presentation during that, you know, just before the break, you know, the the p break in the middle of the the evening events. So things like that. So that’s you don’t have a lead problem. Our digital dominance method talks about how to build the entire program and process to become the authority and have all the visibility in your marketplace. You get your brand right, you get your authority right, and you get your visibility right, and you just cycling around and around, and you build a $1,000,000 business. We have a formula for that. We have a digital dominance method for that. I’ve coached on that for 20 years.

John Clendenning [00:32:34]:
I’ve run my own businesses through that. I learned that and developed it and built it. Right? So it’s not a lead problem. So what is the number one mistake I see then? Good question. Not following up with your qualified leads. 90% of the carpet clean right? Actually, probably 95% of the carpet cleaners I talk to on a daily basis, hop hop on a calendar, wanna consult, wanna learn more about how to how their business can grow, we have a few spots for that. I charge $500 an hour for consulting, and I offer a few free spots from time to time. Right? So you can have a strategy and growth consult with me about your business.

John Clendenning [00:33:10]:
We might be able to help with some stuff, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not sales pitch. It’s about how do you grow your business? What are you looking to do next? Where are you looking to go? What’s the gap? And how do we fill that gap? How do you fill that gap? Not me. And I you know, it’s a consult. And where do you go to learn more information? If we can help and it makes sense, we talk about that. We if it doesn’t make sense, we don’t want we we don’t want you as a as a as a as a one of our clients yet. You’re not there yet. That’s totally fine as well that you can join this world.

John Clendenning [00:33:36]:
Right? So what I find is that you’re not continuously following up with your qualified leads. They if they called today, lucky if they get a call tomorrow if they didn’t book. That’s one day is about the most I hear. Are you still is anybody still talking to them 12 days, 14 days later? Nope. What’s the problem with that? Conversions are in the in the follow-up. So what we’re actually talking about here is the difference between lead generation and lead nurturing. 2 entirely different things. Can you generate leads? Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:34:07]:
But are you nurturing them? Let’s see what that is. So let’s clear this up. Definition, lead generation. Where is any online or offline process, been in my world online, such as social media, content marketing, web design, email, SEO, pay per click, you you know, all of that stuff used to engage and attract potential customers. Lead generation is focusing on finding new leads. Right? Your existing customers should never go to Google to find you. You should be in front of them so often and reminding them so often, and the fridge magnet and the sticker on their vacuum cleaner and the spotting guide on the inside of their, kitchen sink drawer and or, like, your or cupboard and door and and and and and and. They should have no the free bottle of spotty you gave them with your phone number on it.

John Clendenning [00:34:54]:
They should never have to go back to where your competitors lurk to try and find you. Right? So these are finding new new leads, new inquiries. Right? What is lead nurture? It is the process of actually building strong relationships with individual potential customers leads over time with the intent of turning them into loyal paying customers at some point in the future. That is what lead nurturing is. Not everybody is a one and done wham bam thank you, ma’am. Some people are urgently looking right now. Other people are doing research. That’s lead nurturing.

John Clendenning [00:35:30]:
So lead nurturing, therefore, focuses on communicating with a person who has already shown interest in your business or category, but has not chosen to buy from you yet. Keyword there is yet. We gotta talk them into it even if they went with somebody else. Right? Think of that, you know, that they you know, if you’re one of the guys, think of the girl that you wanted in high school. Maybe you ended up marrying her, but maybe you had to nurture that relationship a whole bunch of times. Maybe she even dated your best best friend for a while or dated somebody else. Right? They tried somebody else out, you know, went on dates and and met this other person. Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:36:09]:
You just haven’t converted them yet. So that’s the goal here. So why lead nurture matters? Your prospects are doing their research. They may need to get sign off from their spouse. So they’re only researching right now. These are reasons why people give that they didn’t book today. They need to get signed off from the other things are grabbing their attention. They’re on a call right now, but, also, they’re looking at the door and the neighbor’s running frantically down the street.

John Clendenning [00:36:39]:
What’s that all about? Wow. Next thing you know, they’re you know, they got distracted. On the go. They’re on mobile. They didn’t book right now. They didn’t book and they forgot about you. They’re largely unfamiliar with you. What you just said to them sounded different, but they don’t know enough about you.

John Clendenning [00:36:55]:
Right? May not remember who they contacted. Maybe they called 5 people today. Which one were you? They took some notes. They’re not good at taking notes. All these things can happen. Right? It takes 7 touches to make an impression. Have you had 7 touches? In fact, Google’s ZMOT, 0 moment of truth, go look it up, great studies that Google did, found that it takes 11 touches, 11 impressions of a brand of a brand before we make a buying decision. When we go to buy the shampoo on the shelf, this box of cereal, or our a service provider, we have actually engaged with that brand at minimum of 11 times, says Zmont.

John Clendenning [00:37:31]:
So have you been in their radar at least 7 to 11 times? And, again, as I said, they may try somebody else this time. So lead nurture is all about inform, educate, involve, validate, convert, keep alive, and just keep going around until they book. That and that process should be automated as much as you possibly can. There’s a should there be a human element? Yeah. Yeah. The more AI develops, the more human elements are actually gonna become important. It’s kind of interesting, but the more the human element will feel different and unique. So, think of that as well.

John Clendenning [00:38:06]:
So lead nurture. Take 7 to 13 successful touches to turn a prospect into a customer. You know this from commercial cleaning. If you just go and do a quote and leave, chances of unless you got the lowest price or something like that, of converting that, very little. If you go out and do a quote, you contact the the contact a day or 2 later. Yeah. We’re still making a decision. Cool.

John Clendenning [00:38:26]:
Would you like me to come and do a demo? Blah blah blah. You do you reach out. You reach out. Yeah. We’re thinking of going with somebody else’s time. Okay. No worries. You know, what you can tell me what made you this decision, blah, blah, blah.

John Clendenning [00:38:35]:
It would be based on this and that. Okay, well, I’m gonna when are you getting the cleaning done this date? Okay, let me follow-up with you afterwards, see how it turned out, if you’re happy with them or not. Right? Maybe there’s, you know, if there’s anything that happens, maybe we can help resolve that. You know, no, I think we’re happy with them. Okay, we’d love to be second on your list. If you ever need cleaning and they didn’t, they they don’t show up or you whatever, we’d love to be the second contact. Is that okay? Yep. Cool.

John Clendenning [00:38:56]:
Okay. You stay in touch. You stay in touch. Boom. You land them. How many times that’s happened in my business where, you know, we chase somebody for 6 months, a year, 2 years, and eventually we get the contract, and now we do the entire retirement home. If I just let it happen here, quote it, and hopefully they call us back someday, none of this happened. Right? So you wanna, you wanna make sure that you have a process.

John Clendenning [00:39:20]:
50% of all cost you know, salespeople give up after one contact. 65% give up after the second contact. Maybe they call the next day. You wanna be down here. If they said no, you wanna stay in touch in a in a in a loving way. Right? So what is the ideal lead management to 5 x your conversions of the ones that didn’t say yes today? Well, it’s this messy thing. It’s how you stay in touch over a a a wide variety of stuff. So let’s take a look at what that’s all about.

John Clendenning [00:39:56]:
So you wanna first maintain a lead database. You don’t know who to get a hold of and get back to unless you know who to get a hold of and who to get back to. How to carve that out? I mean, Housecall Pro, Service Monster, Marquette, all those cool tools in our industry, yeah, they have do they have the ability for you to keep leads as part of that database? Yeah. But they’re absolutely terrible marketing out of. Sorry, but they are. They’re trying. They try hard, but SaaS companies like that are just terrible at it no matter what. That’s why we actually have a better strategy around that.

John Clendenning [00:40:27]:
But, ultimately, you wanna keep somewhere a database of leads who didn’t book yet, and you wanna kinda categorize and organize them. Right? So, your active lead list should be about 10 times bigger than your customer list. Right? So your customer list is not the past 20 years that you’ve done work or the past. The customer list, active customer list, arguably is is customers that you’ve cleaned for at least once in the last 3. Sometimes people go as much as 5 years. I find 5 too much. But your active customer list is about the last 3 years of customers. Your active lead list usually is about 10 times bigger than that of the people that reached out and haven’t made a firm decision yet.

John Clendenning [00:41:06]:
Right? Are you capturing all the sources of your leads and where they’re coming from? Do you know what led them to call you today? So if you answer the phones properly, what information can I get for you today and what research have you done on us so far? Really good neuro linguistic programming questions to ask at the beginning of a phone call, to get really deep information and get their brain off of a pattern. So it’s called a pattern interrupt. Yeah. They’re gonna tell you the different ways they they found out, what what journey led them. Oh, I just saw an ad versus, well, I’ve seen this. I’ve seen that. I talked to this person. I I went to your website.

John Clendenning [00:41:42]:
I watched these videos, and now I thought it was time to call you. And that’s what led them. Right? So where are they coming from? It’s not usually one source. Zmot says there’s 11. So how did they interact with your brand? What contact information are you capturing from each source? Every single person that calls you has a phone number. Every single person that text message you has a phone number that you’re seeing. You’re physically seeing it. Confirm it’s the right number.

John Clendenning [00:42:06]:
Read it back to them. Hey. Is the best number if we get disconnected? Awesome. At the end of every call, hey. What’s the best email address? Let me send you over everything we just talked about if they didn’t book. Right? Find ways to collect their data. And if you’re able to, collect their mailing address. There’s actually tools that can do that for you, and you can send them postcards if they didn’t book as well.

John Clendenning [00:42:26]:
But are you are you collecting all of their contact information? And, what defined lead nurture steps do you have in place to find lead nurture steps do you have in place for each contact? Do you know your chase sequence? C h ace a s e. Sorry. Chase sequence. It’s it’s an acronym, but it was stand Sanford Business Sanford Business School. And, anyways, it’s it’s a training program about, for salespeople, what you know, over 14 days, how to do 8 to 10 touches in 14 days that do not feel aggressive but are being very influential. Right? So do you have at least several of those in place? Are you following up with other happy customer stories? Are you telling them what you’re what you do differently than your competitors and all of that kind of stuff, why they should choose you over somebody else? What steps do you have in place? We’re gonna talk about that. Right? So lead list, 10 times size the customer list. Right? They come from all of these sources.

John Clendenning [00:43:20]:
They may not book right away, and you’re just putting them on the lead nurture list to stay in touch with. Are you tracking all your lead sources? We talked about that. Right? So telephone calls versus website leads versus paid ad leads versus referral leads, inbound marketing from newsletters, social media, stuff like that. Do you know where everybody’s coming from? Every every lead should have a tagged attribution source. Then you know what’s working, and you you also know how to follow-up with people. Some people, if they call you, you know they’re phone people. You call them back. Some people fill out a web form lead.

John Clendenning [00:43:52]:
Let the emails and text messages start. I would still try and call them and become influence them on the phone with your voice, but if you can’t, you now know at least that they are they’re kind of a little bit shyer and like to do these, you know, email and text message. Doesn’t mean you get to wait today to send the text message. You still gotta do it instantly, but you have to now learn how to sell by chat. Right? So you wanna make sure you know how they came in and what marketing is working. One cat one cat what contact information are you capturing? Full name, email, phone number, business name, location, address, services needed? Are you collecting all of that so that you have a really targeted follow-up? How many touches? Here’s an example right here. Convert leads into customers through lead nurturing. Comes in, send an automated email, make a phone call, send another email.

John Clendenning [00:44:43]:
Commercially. Maybe it’s a site visit walking in, Hey, you know, blah, blah, blah. You reached out to us. Haven’t heard back from you, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Send more emails, then stay in touch. You want to have a process that you know what is happening at every stage. Strategically follow-up with all your hot leads. So multichannel follow-up, call, email, SMS, you maybe even social media, Messenger, whatever, multitouch, over 1 to 2 weeks minimum.

John Clendenning [00:45:15]:
You wanna stay in touch. After 2 weeks, if you’ve been ghosted that long, you can put them into long term nurture. Hey. You might not be interested. You might have find somebody else. Sorry to hear that either way. You know, I’d like to stay in touch with you, give you some great helpful tips around the home and and that kind of thing. And, if you do need a a quote, second opinion, or any help with anything, we’d really love to hear from you.

John Clendenning [00:45:38]:
And then you once a month, once a week, whatever your your lead nurture cadence is, you stay in touch with them. Check their social media and find something that you can relate to if it’s especially if it’s commercial, large contract, somebody reached out to you. Is there anything that you can can you check them out on LinkedIn and just say, hey, I noticed you’re into the, you know, whatever the Pittsburgh Penguins love Sydney Crosby and stuff like that. Went to the game on Saturday night. Did you did you see the goal he scored? Right? You might might be able to play that game with some large contact, you know, and then maybe you send them next time, you know, maybe you send them some Pittsburgh Penguin swag and say, hey. I’d really love to get a chance to to quote on the facility again. In the meantime, just happened to be thinking about you when I was at the game or whatever. Here’s a scarf.

John Clendenning [00:46:24]:
Sydney Crosby, Pittsburgh Penguins scarf, whatever. There’s things that you can do like that as well in in business. You wanna send them a mafia offer message. Mafia offer is a offer that’s too good, like, as, what Don Corleone said. I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse. Right? Very bad impression. Anyways, you wanna send them a mafia offer. So in carpet cleaning, at the end of 2 weeks, what we would do is put it take a have mailings waiting, write their name at the top, pop it in the mail.

John Clendenning [00:46:54]:
If they didn’t call back, and we gave them 48 hours to respond from the time they received the mail, one free room of cleaning, no strings attached. Why? Because we knew where our marketing was going. We knew the quality of the client. We were willing, hey, you called in, you didn’t book anything, blah, blah, blah. We’re gonna give you we’d love to give you tries out. Of course, you get the whole rest of the house done. But in the meantime, we’d love to give you if it was carpet cleaning job, one free room of cleaning, no strings attached, up to a 150 square feet just to try us out before booking us for the rest of the home. Right? Obviously, if the customer only wanted one room, we wouldn’t be sending that.

John Clendenning [00:47:27]:
And and we’re we’re we’re strong, smart, strategic about it, but our ideal marketing messages went to people with, you know, 1,000, 2,000 square feet of carpeting. So, ideally, the message is the people that were calling us, we knew our target market. We send them a mafia offer. Right? And add add them to your forever follow-up. So following up, adding to ongoing forever follow-up for success. Add stale leads, stale leads after 2 weeks into your long term nurture campaigns. Build a flow of emails, text messages, voice mail drops. See, a lot of tools.

John Clendenning [00:48:03]:
One that we have as well available, we’ll talk about in a minute, that can, allow you to prerecord a message. You know, you don’t have to put their name on it. Hey there. So sorry I missed you again. Just following up on that, the inquiry inquiry you had with our company. Just, send you a couple of emails, couple text messages. Just give us a callback on this number. Let me know or send a text message back to this number.

John Clendenning [00:48:26]:
Let me know if you’re, still looking to go ahead with the project. That could be an automated message that goes out on day 9 as an example. If they’re still ghosting, you got no answer. Right? You should do a check-in call every 3 to 4 months. A live phone call to leads, You should be doing that to your regular clients and your commercial clients anyways. But to leads, hey. It’s been a couple months you reached out. I just wonder if there’s anything else that you might need done, anything you need help with.

John Clendenning [00:48:53]:
So put them on a newsletter list. If they seem like a highly qualified person, send them a company newsletter. Print may like, not email. Email doesn’t get open that much. I should send a print print newsletter and add to seasonal promotions and client database marketing. That might make sense as well depending on the quality and the neighborhood and you know who they are and where they are. There are some people that should be, you know, hey. Having reached out to us this year, you qualify for our our client secret client VIP offers.

John Clendenning [00:49:20]:
Not discounts, not deals, but extra services for the same cost. And then leverage automation everywhere you can because you’re gonna go, John, holy crap. This is all amazing stuff, but it sounds like a ton. How do I do this? I’m just a carpet cleaner. I’m just running a carpet cleaning business. No. You chose to be an entrepreneur. You are now the marketer of cleaning services first, everything else second.

John Clendenning [00:49:43]:
HR, hiring people, system autumn you know, system grade of the the guy that fixes the machines, the guy that goes out and does the cleaning right now, you know, all of it. Train the the head trainer. You know, you might be the, you know, the, you know, the the the the chef and the bottle washer and everything else in the in the in the business. But, ultimately, the most important is the director of marketing. You are now the marketer of cleaning services because without marketing, nothing happens. Right? So you market to get customers, you market, get customers on your list. You market to get referral partners. Once once a customer calls them, you market you market to them to book a job.

John Clendenning [00:50:22]:
Right? So they might book on the phone with good sales script, which is a bit of marketing on its own. But and then if they don’t, you do this nurture follow-up. You market to them. Once they book the job, you market to them how great the job is gonna be before between then and show up so they don’t they don’t, bail from your, systems. You have an automation for that. You don’t have to do it manually, but you have them dropped into a system that markets to them how great it’s gonna be. And then when you show up, you have a whole bunch of marketing events built into your cleaning experience. So you build an experience where you market to them even more.

John Clendenning [00:50:50]:
And then after the you know, when the job is done, you start right away by market to them for referrals and and and feedback, and then which also indoctrinates them into repeating with you and you market market market market market. Right? That’s what you have to do. That’s what you signed up for. You didn’t sign up to go out and clean because if you did that, you’d be working for somebody else as a cleaner so you can go home at the end of the day and just be done. You are the business owner. You are the marketer of cleaning services first and foremost. So let’s leverage automation in this. So pull all leads from different sources into one lead database.

John Clendenning [00:51:24]:
Somebody messaged you from Messenger, that should go into one place. Somebody DMs you on a on Instagram where you should be putting your before and after pictures. That’s the new image gallery of the world. They DM you. You should be that should all come into one communication source and identified who they are, where they came from, and they get different cadence of messages based on that. You wanna put your leads into different pipelines based on their interest. Like I just said, a different cadence, a different if they’re talking to you about, you know, commercial versus residential, carpet cleaning versus tile cleaning, there’s different ways you can play with these people and message them differently. Set each pipeline with its own workflow and automate the emails, calls, and SMS.

John Clendenning [00:52:04]:
Have it set that it stops. Right? I’ll follow-up until they book or bail. Again, that’s a plight of way of saying of, you know, buy or die, but until they book or bail. So you wanna be dripping on them, and you’ll know that, you know, it’s it’s no different than the way people, you know, manage shopping carts, multimillion dollar ecomms. That people got here, they went here, and then they bailed from the cart there. What if I change a few things? Oh, my gosh. I got more people. 20% more came through the shopping cart, went to this point and added the extra the extra whatever on the extra, you know, different color, the add on piece, the the carrying case that came, you know, that is a bonus or an upsell or whatever and things like that.

John Clendenning [00:52:47]:
That’s all by split testing. Same idea here. You provide consistent automated follow-up, and what you can do is start noticing with the good automation if there’s a point at which a lot of people fall off. You know, maybe it’s 3 months, 6 months, 9 months. At that point, you can check what’s happening then, what you have been sending, what you haven’t been sending, and maybe there’s something you can change right there as well. Because now you’ve got automate, you’ve got data, and we can use data to build a better a better mousetrap. And stale leads go into your forever follow-up for long term nurture until you’re ready to service you. So it looks like this.

John Clendenning [00:53:22]:
They come in, they jump into different funnels, They get SMS messages. Like, it’s just workflows. These are were just automated workflows inside a lead management system. It’s all that is. Right? So the one we built called Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro, we built it for our clients. It is available as a stand alone as well. Not try not a sales pitch for it at all, but what I’m telling you is you need some sort of automated lead nurture system that has emails, text messages, knows the cleaning industry, or you have to build it yourself, write all the emails, all the text messages, have it a nurture system put in place that converts them quickly right now, allows them to buy at prices higher than your competition because of the way you influence them by that first message, second message, 3rd message, 4th message. And then anybody goes stale, you put them into a long term nurture.

John Clendenning [00:54:09]:
Right? So you need to, you need to actually consider your lead nurture because the people that don’t book right on the phone right now, there is a chance that 70% of them are ready to book with you in the next week, 2 weeks, month, 2 months. And that’s still you’ve still spent the money to get them as a lead. You still spent the money to to influence them in some way to show up and call you. And if you can’t book them now, book them later. It doesn’t cost very much at all to stay in touch. It costs the biggest expense was to get them to show up in the 1st place. So you’ve already spent all that money. Might as well convert more of them.

John Clendenning [00:54:48]:
Right? So how to automate your lead flow with carpet cleaner lead, lead pro. So how to automate all of that. So right. One of the things we have on ours is smart forms. Somebody fills out a form on your website, and there should be a form at top of your website. Some people go, I don’t like forms because they never convert. Wrong psychology. Some people like to chat.

John Clendenning [00:55:08]:
You have a chat on your website. Right? Or at least or at least a chat to text, which is what I prefer, where it goes right into their cell phone, and now they don’t have to sit on your website. Some people like to phone. You have a phone number, easy to find, and every time they scroll, you put more phone numbers. That’s go look at our conversion, master class. It talks about how to think of your client and and the fact that they kinda get distracted and are like goldfish. As soon as a goldfish turns around, oh, where am I? I don’t know where I am. Customers are like that when they scroll through a website.

John Clendenning [00:55:34]:
So you wanna treat them like that. But this form should be at the top of the page. Some people just wanna fill out a form. They’re just shy. If you took the form off, oh, I’m gonna take the form off, so I’m gonna force them to call. You can’t force people to do anything. 1 or 2 extra might call. The other ones are gonna go, I don’t have a form to fill out.

John Clendenning [00:55:49]:
I can’t find a form, and they leave and go to your competitors. The lifetime value of your client is 5, 6, $7,000. Do you want them to client? Not transactional value of a customer might be 2, 3, $400, 500. Lifetime value of those clients, when you repeat and refer with good marketing, is 5, 6, $7,000. Do you really, really, really want, 5, 6, $7,000 customers to go somewhere else because you don’t like forms? No. You just automate it. So our smart forms, when they fill it out, tell us what they they’re interested in, and hit submit. The office of our client’s phone rings if it’s during business hours, and they answer the phone.

John Clendenning [00:56:28]:
Hello. This is Diane at Carpet Care Solutions. What information can I have for you today? And our robo voice says, this is another lead from carpet cleaner, Lead Pro. Diane Smith is interested in carpet cleaning and area cleaning. Press 1 to connect with her now. Press 1. Missus Smith’s phone rings. She sees that it’s coming from Carpet Care Solutions.

John Clendenning [00:56:49]:
She just filled out a form on their website. Oh my gosh. This is amazing. Takes the phone call. Speed to lead. Book the job. We have a 240% higher chance of booking that call if you get to get to the lead that fast. Right? So cool.

John Clendenning [00:57:04]:
We did that. What if missus Jones is shy? She filled her form because she doesn’t wanna talk. I’m cool with that as well. Because if if she doesn’t take that call, or what if Diane is too busy on 2 or 3 other phone phone lines and can’t take that call right now? Okay. That that happens too. So the call didn’t go through during normal business hours or it’s after normal business hours. That’s fine. Text message shows up right away in a smart form, the way we do it.

John Clendenning [00:57:27]:
Hey. Thanks so much for, filling out the form on the website. Somebody’s gonna get back to you soon. In the meantime, I got a couple questions for you, and we start a conversation. We’re actually building AI into that so AI can actually start an intelligent conversation, And we’re actually looking at building some voice AI in as well that can have a basic very, very, very basic conversation for somebody who calls in if you can’t answer your own phones after the 3rd ring. I suggest first or second ring, you answer it or call center who understands carpet cleaning and could book into the schedule. But on the 3rd ring, it should at least go to an auto attendant of some sort, not an answering machine. So things that we’re working on, but smart forms was the first thing that we built out on that.

John Clendenning [00:58:00]:
Right? And then smart connect as well. So, ultimately, what this is is you wanna be able to stay in touch with these people. So we’re gonna try and get some information, start a conversation by text, pick up the phone call the next day, but we’re gonna drop some emails and SMS messages and even some voice mail drops into a series. If they reply, then they move off into a different chain, which could book them into a sched a calendar to be to get a callback. Maybe they’re a shift worker. Oh, no. I don’t want you call me at 8 o’clock in the morning. I’m not up until 2.

John Clendenning [00:58:35]:
Can you call me after 3? Right? So they should be put into a calendar. Hey. Give this person a call. They’re interested. They came in overnight. And because of SmartConnect, we know that they they want a, they would rather a conversation at the end of the day after 3 o’clock. So they’re booked into your Google Calendar for a phone call after 3 as an example. So that’s what we’re we wanna talk about.

John Clendenning [00:58:58]:
So what it looks like on a website, good buddy Walter, he’s got a new van. We’re actually gonna be changing these pictures up soon. I think we already have. Maybe haven’t. Anyways, but one of our clients right. You’ve they can make an appointment to go to a form. They, have a phone number calls through. If the if if our business owner misses the call, this customer gets a missed call, text back saying, hey.

John Clendenning [00:59:21]:
So sorry you missed your call. How can I help you? And start a text conversation. So even if somebody calls in and the call is missed, even if they went to answer machine, we should be texting them back right away. Right? We should start a conversation because they got another tab open with one of your competitors. They’ve gone if you don’t answer them. Speed to lead is the most important. You’ve got chat. Again, chat to text up in the bottom corner.

John Clendenning [00:59:41]:
You’ve got the smart forms. Right? And that’s all before they even scroll down the page. Every lead gets follow-up within 5 minutes or less. Right? Answer the phone live, but and in fact, in Google local service ads, if you don’t answer the phone by the 3rd ring, they start demoting you in Google local service ads. They know it’s that important. But leads are pulled in from different sources. Right? And you need to know what the breakdown is. So all sources come in to 1 tool.

John Clendenning [01:00:06]:
One tool, they get broken into the right pipelines like we talked about, and they get the right messages and they get some text messages. And then you get a reminder from the system, hey, it’s been 3 days. If you haven’t gotten a hold of this person, give them a call today, a live call as well. Some of it can be voice message, but some of them, you just wanna try and get them on the phone. Right? So you don’t want a voice mail because they might not call back. But if you get them live on the phone, now you have a conversation. You don’t wanna be shy and miss that. You don’t wanna be out on the job worrying about that.

John Clendenning [01:00:31]:
You wanna have somebody dedicated in your company who’s following up with leads. Because if you’re not chasing your leads, you’re losing a lot of work. So it’s part of what you need to be doing. Right? So you might have a lit a lot of automation and a little bit of live human beings put into the mix. Alright. So, again, Facebook Messenger and chat, all of that kind of stuff can come in as well into the same dashboard and have a a chat conversation. So you need to learn how to sell by chat. It’s a whole different way of chatting.

John Clendenning [01:01:01]:
Leads need to be put into different pipelines as an example of all the different ways people come in and then the pipelines that they are in. Right? So Facebook offer leads, Google leads, Facebook Messenger leads are different than an offer lead from a paid ad versus went to your landing page. Website and paid ad leads from, like, again, pay per click is different than people that just showed up. Did not book yet. Stale lead follow-up, quoted jobs. All of these are different conversation flows. So you need to have different pipelines and different workflows for them. Right? It’s something to think about.

John Clendenning [01:01:34]:
Smart messaging workflows as well. So, you want to start and stop specific campaigns simply by what stage they’re in. Right? So if you finally got a hold of them, but they didn’t book yet, you got moved them into the didn’t book yet column. It stops all of the, hey. We’d like to talk to you messages, and, hey. Thanks so much for the conversation, but messages. Right? Things like that. So you wanna make sure that you have smart messaging workflows, so that and your campaigns all contain all that stuff we keep talking about, and all of that is automated and tokenized as they say.

John Clendenning [01:02:07]:
So every time a mess email goes out, it’s personal. Why is it personal? Because it’s in it’s their contact record. So it says, hey, Jane. Because it knows Jane’s first name. You know, whatever. I know you’re interested in carpet and upholstery cleaning. Why? Because those are tokens because she dropped she mentioned those on when she filled out the form or in her chat, things like that. Right? So you wanna make sure that all of that’s captured, and then you wanna automate your hot lead follow-up.

John Clendenning [01:02:32]:
So multichannel follow-up call, email, SMS, multitouch over 1 to 2 weeks minimum, mafia offer, we talked about that, and put them into the forever. You want that automated. We told you that you need to do this, but now we’re saying automate it. Have it fully automated. So that is the full process is you wanna make sure that you are thinking about leads that didn’t convert and how deep you’re you’re going. So what are some of the takeaways? Jot them down. Think of things that that you just learned from this that you didn’t kinda think of. Right? Because ultimately, to recap what we talked about here today, you wanna maintain a lead database.

John Clendenning [01:03:10]:
Is that a takeaway? If you don’t even have one, how are you gonna start that? Every call, every message should be put into a database, a digital database, not a notepad, not left on your phone. It should be in a database somewhere. Right? We recommend carpet cleaner lead pro. If you’re gonna do it in house call pro service monster, stuff like that, make sure you really have it well identified and you know how to pull those lists out very, very, very regularly, how to stay in touch with them and how to warm warm them up and nurture them. You want a strategic follow-up with hot leads multiple times across multiple channels over that 2 week warming period nurturing period. You wanna add them to your forever follow-up. Right? So maybe you do maybe you have leads and you have a follow-up process in place, but you haven’t really thought of the forever follow-up. What do you stay in touch with them with? Happy customer stories are a great one.

John Clendenning [01:04:00]:
Healthy home cleaning tips, healthy home tips in general. Our average best customer is a homeowner, 35 to 55, college, university educated, skewed 80% towards women. Not that I know the industry inside and out backwards, but that’s our ideal person who has 1.9 kids, under 2 what? Two pets, I think, is the number actually off the top of my head. And they have kids of soccer, karate, dance, you know, extracurricular activities, after school stuff, all of that Kumon training and, you know, studying and stuff like that as well in today’s day and age. And, you know, mom works outside of the house just with like dad does and incorporate medical, owns her own business, something like that. Very, very stressed out. So you wanna have that conversation in the you know, what are the things they’re interested in? How do I keep a healthy home? How do I maintain a good home? How do I keep my pets healthy? How do I deal with pet stains? Some some things are directly related to your industry. Some things are just related to the class of ideal client you’re touch you’re talking to.

John Clendenning [01:05:01]:
So let’s talk to them about that stuff. Right? We can follow-up with that kind of information. We should be doing that kind of information on our social media as well and and all of that that stuff. So what you wanna do in your forever follow-up is talk about happy customers and talk about healthy home tips and things like that. So that’s how you stay in touch. Right? And in multiple different disciplines as well as we said. Right? Multiple channels. And then you wanna automate or leverage automation to make it happen.

John Clendenning [01:05:27]:
The last thing you wanna do is think this all through, plan it all out, have it manual, and do it for 2 weeks or 2 months. And then, oh, I used to do that. I forgot. No. You wanna automate the crap out of this. So you need an automation tool of some sort. We’re living in an automated world. You wanna use automation to drip on leads that have not become customers yet so that it gets done.

John Clendenning [01:05:46]:
Right? And you can connect with us if you need it done for solution built exclusively for the home cleaning industry. Why? Because that’s all we work with. It’s all we know. It’s all I’ve written emails for for the last 30 years and through 20 years of emails probably and sales letters and mailings and stuff like that. We understand the psychology of the ideal client. We understand what questions we need to ask you to know what to put into these campaigns, and they just run they just run, and they they help you get more more conversions. That’s all it’s about. Right? So how to implement this in your business? None of this matters at all if you don’t implement it.

John Clendenning [01:06:20]:
Nothing I just said is to have any value to you and your business if you do nothing with it. Right? We hear lots of great information, but we don’t implement. So the best way to think of implementing, I call it implementation is everything, part of a training course I used to I I I built and ran, part of our coaching that we give our clients. But, what are the top three initiatives that you need to implement right now on this topic to hit your goal? What is your goal? Right? So when you implement something, what is the desired outcome or goal, and what are the top three things that you can implement right now? Always think in threes. Your business is in 3 categories, the top three things you can you you can implement to hit your goals. Start with 3, get them in place, move on. Right? So and then you pick the first one, the most impactful one. Right? I learned a strategy.

John Clendenning [01:07:10]:
Like, I get coached and mentored on being, you know, a better digital marketing agency owner and a better coach and all of that kind of stuff. Like, I pay big bucks to be coached and mentored as well. I always have. I’ve I’ve paid big bucks to be coached on how to be a better carpet cleaner or marketer of carpet cleaning services and things like that as well. So, and one of the things I learned was, can you put a scale on it where, the, you know, the rate on a scale of 1 to 5, the impact on your business, and a scale of 5 to 1, the easiness of implementing it. Right? So 1 to 5, this has got a 5 impact on my business. If I got this in place, oh my god. It’s amazing.

John Clendenning [01:07:50]:
But on diff on easiness to implement, it’s a one. It’s hard to implement. So the reverse scale. Right? So 5 on value, one on easiness of implementation, that’s a 6. Say if you’ve got another one that’s a 4 on value, not quite as valuable as the last one, but still really powerful, but ease of implementation, man, that’s easy. That’s a 5. That’s a 5. I can put that in place in the next week.

John Clendenning [01:08:14]:
Right? I can call up John, have a good conversation, and be running carpet cleaner lead pro in a week. Example. Right? That’s a 9. Now that number’s higher than 6. The first one was a 6. Really good idea. Hard to implement. The other one’s a 9.

John Clendenning [01:08:28]:
Do the 9 first. That’s all it means. Just that’s that’s the way you think through these things. John, I don’t know which one to do first. I just taught you how to figure that out. That is just a strategic framework on how to know what to do next in your company. You’re always working on something next. That’s how you figure out what it is.

John Clendenning [01:08:41]:
1 to 5 on on value to your business, 5 to 1 on ease of implementation. Just run the scale. The one with the highest number start with first. Right? So all of that fits into our digital dominance method. As we know, we’re talking about, lead follow-up authority building visibility, all of that kind of stuff. Right? So it is part of our digital dominance method. It’s one of the pieces running a business is about implementing all of the pieces over time. As you do so, your business grows.

John Clendenning [01:09:11]:
It’s about leaning in, leaning in and learning. Right? Learning for people like us, learning from books, learning from tapes and cassettes and audios and podcasts nowadays and all of that and and and books. I have Apple Book on my phone, like the the app, and, you know, I don’t mind spending 10, $15 to download the audio version of a book. If I like it after I listen to it, I buy the physical version and I listen to it a second time at 2 times speed with a highlighter and make a mess of the book. That’s how I studied. Right? So I didn’t do that well studying. I I at the end of high school, I didn’t go to college. I went up and played in the road in a band, then jumped over the side of 40 store buildings as a window cleaner before I went, wait a minute.

John Clendenning [01:09:52]:
I should get over my shyness, and I started clean a car a cleaning business. Right? So, but, yeah, all of this is that’s how I study is listen, when I’m a little walks, I’m cutting the grass, when I’m doing chores, whatever, and take in the information. If that’s really impactful and I got a whole bunch of, you know, oh, wow or oh, shit moments during listening to that, buy the book, grab a highlighter, and off we go. So, hopefully, all that makes sense. If it does make sense, you might wanna reach out. Maybe some of you might wanna reach out. So you want you can hop on my schedule. You’re gonna fill out a survey first just about your business.

John Clendenning [01:10:33]:
Make sure you kinda qualify where you’re at. You’re gonna maybe talk to Harvey or Krisha that’s on the call here right now or Harvey, one of our our coaches, just to have a quick conversation about your business and what your goals are. If it makes sense, they’ll slide you into my calendar, and we’ll our team will do a deep dive research on your company, your competitors, about $1,000 worth of value by the time you’re all said and done. You get an hour of my time. That’s $500 consulting on its own, if you’re hiring me 1 on 1 to help grow your business. So you’re going to get that as a complimentary, you know, conversation, all focused a 100% on your business. And our research team has already gone out and done the research that we already do, an audit and assessment of your digital marketing footprint, your competitors, where you fit in, and the gap, that gap analysis that we talk about. So, if any of that makes sense to you, you can just go to carpet cleaner marketingmasters.com/schedule.

John Clendenning [01:11:23]:
If you’re learning a lot from these, different master classes or podcasts, depending on how you’re consuming this content, please let us know. We appreciate knowing. If you’re not a member of the carpet cleaner marketing secrets Facebook group, think you should be. It’s good for carpet cleaners, any home cleaning service. Just a great place to share ideas and strategies and things that work. One of the guys in the group, Kyle from oh, I hope I get I I think you’re in Australia, New Zealand. Kyle oh my god. I I get the confused.

John Clendenning [01:11:54]:
I am so sorry. I know Australia and New Zealand don’t like to be confused. Anyways, Kyle from down under, I will say that. Lovely young fellow, and he’s, always got great marketing ideas that he pitches past me from time to time. Like, hey. I’m thinking of having, air fresheners that have that are basically little floating billboards in the customer’s cars. And I’m going, that’s brilliant. Yeah.

John Clendenning [01:12:19]:
Fridge magnets, air fresheners. Yep. With your name and logo and stuff like that on it. As a carpet cleaner, you do, you know, do a nice clean healthy scent. Right? If you’ve got a scent that is your business, do it that way. If not, do it like a lemony scent, like that nice fresh clean scent, something like that. Think of that. We used to do oil diffuser, like a little tea light underneath and a little oil diffuser, as a handout, like a like a little ceramic thing we bought at the Dollar Store and that we gave them some lemon scented oils that matched one of the scents that we could put into our cleaning solution if they wanted to leave a scent behind.

John Clendenning [01:12:59]:
Right? So some people wanted no scent. Some people want scents. If they wanted scents, we’d also we could give them one of those as a gift with our name on it, and they could light the little tea candle, put their own scents in later, whatever oil they wanted to to, you know, vapor or whatever, but it would fill the room up with that scent again, which was the same scent we left when we cleaned. Things like that. There’s ways to there’s ways to do all this kind of stuff. So, anyways, if you wanna learn and have a conversation about really cool marketing and how to take your business to the next level, how to stand out, how to become the best known cleaner in your marketplace, then carpet cleaner marketingmasters.com/schedule if it makes sense. And join our Facebook group, as I said, carpet cleaner marketing secrets. Reach out to us.

John Clendenning [01:13:37]:
We’ll, you know, it’s go.carbuckleenermarketingmasters.com/joindashgroup. But if that’s too long to figure out, yeah, just message us. We’ll we’ll get you into the group, and that kind of thing. And until next time, I hope everybody had a great time, learned a lot. And, yeah, that’s, that’s what we’re here for is to help you grow your business. Take care, everybody.