Beyond the Star Rating: Marketing Reputation for Your Carpet Success in the AI Age

Having a competitive volume is important—typically, you want as many or more than top local competitors. But after a certain point, the freshness, consistency, and authenticity of reviews matter more than just numbers. Focus on gaining recent, detailed feedback on all major platforms, not just stacking volume on Google.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:
So we've got a great a great topic to talk about today. As you've noticed over the last if you've been on the these, master class webinars, if you've been on follow the podcast where some of these are simulcast on the podcast as as well as interviews with other people and stuff like that, you know that we've been talking about massive shifts happening in the world around us. And I kinda rant a little bit about it. We had a couple weeks ago now, three weeks ago now. I guess it is, a two day intensive with Cleanfax magazine. Jeff Cross and I had a lot of great speakers on, Jon Braun, Frankie Finn, Nate Sisney, Troy Harrison, a bunch a bunch of great great guys, that all sort of contribute to Cleanfax, contribute to ISSA, clean, cleaning maintenance magazine, stuff like that. They know the cleaning industry really well, and they kind of we we we all were talking about how to double your business in 2025. And part of it or a lot of it, my opening presentation was called the brutal truth about what's actually happening around us.

John Clendenning [00:01:06]:
We are in a seismic shift right now that we'll talk about because not since the industrial revolution have we seen the amount of massive change that's gonna happen, and it is happening to humanity. The way AI is changing every single facet of life and role and job and search and and marketing and and and and more so than anything that ever has. And on top of that, we're dealing with an economic crunch and cycle, that we'll talk a little bit about as well, and how we respond is entirely different. So we're gonna get into that today. What we're gonna be talking about today is beyond just chasing leads.

John Clendenning [00:02:25]:
I hear from from cleaners all the time. I, you know, I talk to hundreds of cleaners a month. I've been in the cleaning industry myself for over thirty years now. I I know thousands and thousands of of carpet cleaners, and duct cleaners, and area rug cleaners, and maid service owners, and and all like that, that's been my entire life, ever since I was just out of high school. And, the this industry I know inside and out and backwards, and the one thing that irks me more than anything else, is somebody telling me that they don't have enough leads. We're gonna explain why that is not your problem. Leads are never a problem. In fact, it sounds weird.

John Clendenning [00:03:07]:
Starting a new business. Oh my god. I need more leads. No. No. Not at all. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about this. We're gonna talk about, beyond chasing leads, AI and automation, and other things.

John Clendenning [00:03:21]:
One one very, very important critical factor, to three x your customer conversions. So if you can convert more people from interested to buying from you, if you can increase those conversions, then you don't need as many people. You don't need as many leads. If you can convert more people to coming back, if you can convert the right customers to become long term clients. So languaging is very important. In fact, I don't even like the word leads. I like to call them inquiries. I'm using leads because it's sort of a keyword, a buzzword, kinda helps the algorithm a little bit and it's the words everybody else tend to use.

John Clendenning [00:04:00]:
I don't like the word leads. I like the word inquiries. People are inquiring about you. Maybe they're inquiring about you because they got referred. Maybe they're inquiring about back again at you because they're a past customer that is turning into a client. The language is important if we if we talk the right way. So we wanna talk about how AI and automation can help this, and how AI and automation is changing everything. It's the great equalizer, and if you're not leaning into it, you are massively falling falling behind.

John Clendenning [00:04:28]:
Right? So I just want that kind of that kind of caveat put in there. So just a second to make sure I've got the ability to change slides. Okay. So we're gonna do our normal turn off cell phones, turn off Facebook. If you're cleaning or home service business owner and you're serious about getting better results, the next sixty minutes, I'll try and see if we can get hit sixty minutes. Let's call it seventy five, eighty minutes. We'll we'll see how fast this one goes. I like to impart a lot of information.

John Clendenning [00:04:52]:
I like where you guys can go back, listen again, take snippets, and really create an action plan out of these. I call them master classes for a reason. If you listen to all of these every single year, like, you know, you know, it was twelve months in a year. Some of them we repeat as things change. You know, this one, I think, we talked about this topic back in, say, October of twenty twenty three, so a while ago now. But now it's due. There's been so much changes. It's worth updating and and talking about the current state of affairs and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:05:23]:
But if you kind of stay in touch with all of this, you know, we've got the book, The Complete Complete Guide to Internet Marketing for Carpet Cleaners, and and that there's lots of other things as well we recommend. You become a, a student of your craft. Your craft is not cleaning. You can go to I I I CRC training courses and and training courses at your local Bridgepoint dealership and all that kind of stuff, and learn how to kinda do the job. I'd rather just send my technicians. You know, I was in the truck in 1995 for, like, what, a year and a half, under two years, thirty years ago in a town of 30,000 people and grew a multimillion dollar business over over those years, by deciding I wasn't gonna be the guy in the truck. Not saying that you don't have to be the guy in the truck and you don't want to, but you gotta understand that if you're the marketer of your services first, then you can market to higher end people. You can market to the right people.

John Clendenning [00:06:19]:
Again, I said hi to John Remus. We can market to, like, people, like rentals and and Airbnb's and and and groups like that. There's, like, marketing becomes a thing that you do to get work. If you wanna be the guy that does the work, totally fine. Right? Good for your body, good for your soul, good for, you know, all that kind of stuff. Stay young, stay fit. If you wanna get out of that, if you want to, you know, if you wanna be, hand the business off to somebody else, if you wanna semi retire, have technicians go out and clean and still earn an income, then now and and be able to wade through the challenges. Now you need to now you need to be the marketer cleaning services, and part of that is learning these types of things.

John Clendenning [00:07:02]:
So what are we gonna learn today? We're gonna talk about the critical difference between lead generation, I need more leads, and lead nurturing. Huge, huge difference. How to maximize conversions through persistent and automated follow-up. What does that mean? We're gonna unpack that. Building and leveraging your lead database. If that pauses for a second, go, wait a minute, John. I don't have a lead database. That's a very telling sign as well because as the marketer of your services, you would be kind of considering, hey.

John Clendenning [00:07:35]:
How can I market more to the people that were interested a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, three years ago in the services I provide? Are they still are they still did they find somebody else that may be interested in me again because they didn't like the person they found? Who's staying in touch with them? How am I becoming the best known cleaner? Things like that. Long term growth comes from not waiting for other people to just decide to come back or decide to come to you. It's it's about, you know, the difference between push and pull marketing. So implementing AI and the digital dominance method, our training, for local brand authority. Why is branding important? Again, that that that brutal truth, ninety minute presentation I did for for for CleanFacts ISSA or or or some was really, really deep into this, and we we kinda we're releasing little segments of it as well. And our clients, there's there's an area where they can kinda learn more about that as well, or anybody who joined that program. There's a replays and all that kind of stuff is available in the, in the community. But anyways, so who am I? So I started actually in 1990 while I was still in high school, a window cleaning company, owner of several cleaning franchises, independent service businesses, ecom product lines as I learned how to market better.

John Clendenning [00:08:50]:
I actually had products on Amazon and stuff like that, unrelated to the cleaning field. Just just got good at doing digital marketing SEO and thought, hey. Let me see what else I could try. We're up to 50,000 a month coming in from product lines being sold on, on on Amazon for a while until COVID, got them from China, decided to back off, and we kinda got rid of that business, sold that one off as well. But, I've done consultancies since 02/2007 in in this industry, the cleaning industry, and and that kind of thing. So I've lectured, done three day elite retreats, two day virtual symposiums now, stuff like that. So keynote speaker, all that kind of fuzz stuff. I'm the host of the Carpet Cleaner Success podcast and the author of the number one selling book in the space, and kind of all over Clean Fact magazine and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:09:38]:
So, yeah, it's about me. More importantly, we work with people that own cleaning businesses that I've known. Many of these have been customers and clients of ours for for for longer than we've actually had carpet cleaner marketing masters. Prior to that, I was, kinda had a side hustle digital agency while running my own cleaning businesses and doing a consulting for a large, conglomerate that grew to well over a hundred million dollars a year and sold to the Belfor network, during all of this time as well. But this is what we care about the most is making sure our client are grow and become successful. So what do we do? We make our clients the top cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they can attract the best clients, be able to charge the top rates, and get booked out weeks in advance. As Grant Cardone said, it's more important to be the best known than being the best. You gotta be competent.

John Clendenning [00:10:33]:
You gotta be great. But if you're the best known, people are beating a path to your door and your prices you have price elasticity because people want what you offer in any field more so when you're the best known, you're considered the authority. It comes with positioning that helps ride out any economic storms that keeps you away from the commodity side of the business as well. So what we always talk about is how do we do this? The three principles of omnipresence marketing, our our omnipresence marketing system. Number one, you wanna maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry. Again, don't like the word leads, so I put inquiry by this point. But, and we'll go interchangeable leads and inquiries throughout the presentation. But you wanna maximize the opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry.

John Clendenning [00:11:26]:
You get to determine what qualified is, which is kinda cool. Everybody's level of qualified is different. We got some clients that, qualified to them is four, five, six thousand square foot home with carpets and area rugs and ducts and tile, and and they wanna get a thousand, 2 thousand, 3 thousand dollars a year out of those clients. That is their qualified, and they know that in their marketplace, there might be 500 of them. And if you're gonna get a thousand a year, thousand dollars a year from 500, you know, say you you you know, 500 to a thousand people that that fit that that, you know, in a smaller area, and that's that's the that's the rich crowd, and you can get a couple hundred of them, that's still a good solid business. $202,000 a year from 200 people is a half million dollar business roughly. Right? So and you could do that with one crew on the road. So other people qualified is, you know, middle, upper income or is I get some people like the commercial and and, you know, light commercial, not 03:00 in the morning cleaning greasy restaurant commercial, but, you know, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, condos, that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:12:36]:
So what is qualified for you? Maybe it's a couple things, but you wanna maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry. You wanna maximize your conversions, which is one thing we're gonna talk a lot about here today. Or your impressions. Sorry. Number two, maximize your impressions, Brand impressions so that they know who you are. That's your that's your authority in the marketplace. And then you're gonna wanna maximize your conversions. So that's the one, two, three punch.

John Clendenning [00:12:59]:
Get in front of the right people in the right places. Maximize your brand impressions so when they see you go, I know those guys, like the billboard of the personal injury lawyer that you see everywhere, don't care about until the day you get hurt in a car accident. Who you gonna think of? At least they come to mind. Do you have did you ask friends and family as well? Is there other people that you might be interest you know, might might look at look at as well? Maybe you had a friend who went through a different personal injury lawyer and had a good experience. Right? But you've seen the billboards of the other guy. If if this one person doesn't answer their phones, doesn't call you back, you you'll probably hey. I tried your guy. He didn't answer me.

John Clendenning [00:13:33]:
I called this guy that's all over the place, and that's who I hired. Right? So, you know, you wanna you wanna be your brand impressions, brand awareness be seen as the market leader, and then you wanna be able to maximize your conversions. So we're gonna talk about that because it all dovetails into the number one mistake that I see most service businesses making that's costing them thousands of dollars. And there's a warning at the bottom. It's even more costly as the consumer market permanently shifts. This is not a temporary shift. We have, the erosion of middle class. We have, you know, the world gone woke.

John Clendenning [00:14:13]:
We've got the pushback against woke. We've got, you know, the left and the right, and and look what just happened to the, you know, Klaus Schwab and the WEF, like, yesterday, the day before. And, you know, after fifty five years of running that interesting organization and and and and the globalism around that, Well, there's a battle going on behind the scenes. Do we care about it as carpet cleaners? Well, we gotta we gotta keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on. This shift is permanent because, you know, there the the the wage gap, the profit gap, all of that, Greg Crabtree, who wrote Simple Numbers, great book if you haven't read it, especially for people like us, was showing that even by, 2019, '20 '20, the big the end of twenty nineteen, just before COVID, the whole quantitative easing, the whole handing free money, this turning on money money printers, which never really happened in in in the modern world. It happened in, you know, ancient Rome when they diluted down dollars or coins and stuff like that, added more, you know, secondary metals and don't tell the public if they figured it out, that dilution created inflation, which eventually became one of the downfalls of the Roman Empire. Well, we started doing that in the seventies. Like, we we got off the gold standard, and the world did, not just The United States, the world did.

John Clendenning [00:15:33]:
And, in different different degrees, at different timings with the Western world for sure, and got into fiat currency, and then started allowed us to to change what was happening, and the way money was controlled. Well, it created a massive debt problem. And then we had the credit crunch, 02/1989 recession, and and then there became a new paradigm and all of that. In the meantime, we are watching technology change around us. We went from, you know, first, you had to be the first guy on the Internet, first mover advantage. You got all kinds of attention, and then everybody was on the Internet. And you well, first person going after cheap clicks. I got really cheap Facebook leads.

John Clendenning [00:16:16]:
I got really cheap, Google pay per click. I got really cheap local service ad. Again, those things mature and become very expensive, and it goes back to being the most savvy marketers win. Again, the ones that know how to do it right and understand that how you can spend more to buy a customer that you turn into a long term client is how marketing always works best. Right? So there's a permanent shift going towards who is our ideal client, who actually is gonna continue to clean, how are they gonna find people, how are they gonna trust you, all of those kinds of things as AI and the world around us massively changes. So what is the hidden gap between getting leads and getting paid? So leads don't pay you a dime. So you can generate a whole bunch of inquiries, and if you generate a hundred and and get 20 jobs out of it, and somebody else generates a hundred and is able to get 60 jobs or 70 jobs out of it, right, the other guy's getting paid more than you for the exact same volume of people. And if you're able if you're if you're generating work and you're doing and your average job is a hundred and $5,200, and the other person is generating work and influence and increasing their conversions and understanding, you know, the whole world around lead management properly and, and lead nurturing and all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:17:45]:
And they're able to generate $3.04 or $500 per lead turn to a customer getting paid. They're getting paid more. So it's not again again, I keep saying it's not about leads. It's about quality of leads, what you do with the leads, how you nurture and influence the leads. There's a whole bunch of little steps. We are business owners. If business was easy, 80% of small businesses wouldn't go out of business in the first five years, and the another 80% in the next five years, which leaves you down about four percent success rate after ten years. That would and that same for the carpet cleaning industry.

John Clendenning [00:18:23]:
That wouldn't happen if it was easy. It's not it's not meant to be easy. If you wanna be a cleaner and keep it easy, go work for somebody else who's figured out how to market and grow the company and just be their employee. Because it's that that's easier. Right? This what we've chosen to do as business owners need strategic thought. We're in a world where that strategic thought has a helper now. And, like, one of the smartest helpers you can make, one of the smartest helpers on planet Earth help you run that business, but you still have to put in the work. Right? So lead generation has a front end cost.

John Clendenning [00:18:56]:
How much does it cost to generate an inquiry? I go back twenty three years ago to, 02/2002. I was running numbers there not that long ago. I talk about it quite quite regularly. Just going back to looking at all my old yellow page ads back in the day, flyer marketing, every door mail before it was called every door mail, things like that. In 02/2002, it cost it it I invested $80.82 for every single customer cold customer we got from the yellow pages that turned into like, that that turned into a job. $80.82 was when I put call tracking numbers on because everything's gotta be tracked to the detail and followed those people until they, you know, knew when they converted, how much, you know, and then eventually how much they they they they gave to us in their first time cleaning, how many we converted into second, third, fourth cleanings, all of that, all of its track, all of its numbers. We now got tools like, you know, Service Monster and Housecall Pros and all that kind of stuff, and you can learn to use those really well. We did it by pen and paper.

John Clendenning [00:20:02]:
We had a book on the desk, the a dentist's booking book, and we'd have to erase the person from this column, put three trucks on the Road. And we had three columns and color coding and you name it, all that kind of stuff. But lead generation has a front end cost in today's day and age. You expect to pay for a qualified inquiry that turns into a customer, first time customer, I would I would we know this. We suggest anywhere between 80 and a hundred and $50. There is no $20 inquiries that turned into jobs. If you find that little chink in the armor, it'll be shut down very quickly. It'll be it'll be competitors jumping in it.

John Clendenning [00:20:41]:
It doesn't stay hidden for long. The price goes up. There's competition because there's only so many eyeballs available, and all of a sudden, they have more choices and gone again. Like, if there is that little window of opportunity, it's very small. You do not build an entire empire of business or long term strategy on it. The cost of generating inquiries and leads is expensive. There's a front end cost. The back end profits come from lead nurturing.

John Clendenning [00:21:07]:
Most people leave it dead on the vine. They either booked today or not. That's it. Lead nurturing is where a huge chunk of the profits sit. So lead flow, as I said, is often not the problem. Do you have enough poles in the water? We talk about this a lot. Do you have are your is your website ranking? On Google Maps? Have you checked all your service terms, all the different ways people can type in the services you do? Is your Google Maps optimized? Which is right. Where's Google Maps? One of these.

John Clendenning [00:21:44]:
I know this. Can't remember. Buried into the SEO. Google Maps, that's a big part of where people go. If they don't have a name in mind, they go to Google. You got local service ads. You got pay per click ads right here, here, you've got Google Maps, and then you go to organic. And it splits about 10%, ten, twelve %, so about 22%, about 30 to 40% depending on the marketplace.

John Clendenning [00:22:10]:
And then people higher up in the funnel, people that are earlier, you know, thinking about it more, trying to do some research, that 40 to 50% of the crowd actually ends up in the webs like, the organic listings down below where the directories are, stuff like that. But you wanna make sure that you have you you you how many of those terms do you show up for when people are typing? How are you found? What what happens when they they they they show up? But you've got tons of inquiries can come from there. People can go to your website because it's on the side of your van. It's on the door hangers. It's on the yard signs. It's on, you know, every everything and anything that you put out there. Again, running Google Ads, local service ads, Bing Ads, all that kind of stuff. YouTube ads have become really good as well.

John Clendenning [00:22:48]:
Facebook ads done properly generates awareness in the marketplace that when the person is ready, a person is ready, they look at Google they go to Google if they have don't have a name in mind. When a person is not ready, you wanna be in front of the right people with a message that starts some wheels turning, but it might be three weeks, three months, a year before they're ready. Are you still top of mind? Are you still in front of them? That brand awareness. That's tools like Facebook, Nextdoor, things like that. Sure, there might be somebody right now ready, but they didn't go to Facebook to find a carpet cleaner or, you know, a septic tank sucker or, you know, you name it. Name the business. Right? But they can be influenced there so that when they are ready or if somebody asks them a question, oh, I've heard of these guys. I keep seeing them all the time.

John Clendenning [00:23:35]:
Maybe you should try them. Also, you get a referral from somebody who's not even a customer. Right? So done well. Your vans, your vehicles, your again, Facebook ads we talked about, direct mail, billboards, backup buses, sponsoring the little league team, all that kind of stuff. Right? So where do carpet cleaners find jobs? Well, here's 40 places to start with. You have to have a all these poles in the water. Think you've yourself as a little boat, little, you know, aluminum boat sitting there going out fishing. Do you want one pole in the water, or do you want 40 poles in the water around the boat all on automatic riggers, you know, cast them all out.

John Clendenning [00:24:11]:
When it catches a fish, it goes back and forth and eventually pulls, pulls the, pulls the fish in. Right? Do you want some automation that is pulling the fish in for you Twenty, thirty minutes later, you're done your quota for the day and you put away the other guy who's got his $3,000 pole and $800 reel on that pole and and ties his own lures and does a great job. And he's caught one fish. Why? Because he doesn't have enough poles in the water. We wanna have a lot of poles in the water. Repeat referral systems and social outreach and and chamber of commerce and DNIs and everything Howard Partridge ever taught us. Stop by all the, you know, carpet stores and interior designers and and furniture stores and and real estate agents and offices and stuff. Make friends, JV partners.

John Clendenning [00:24:57]:
Right? Have a website that tells your story, not somebody else's, not not stock photos. Right? Babies lying on carpets and families and dogs sitting on couches is not influencing a single person. Right? So, all that kind of stuff. So you wanna make sure you have all your poles in the water and you you lock and load as I say. You put them in, you automate, you put the next one in, you automate, you put the next one in, you automate. You build that that muscle up. Right? Part of our digital dominance method. You build your brand definers, why you over everybody else.

John Clendenning [00:25:26]:
If you can't explain that, you're a commodity. What is your guarantee that's so much stronger that your competitors think that you're silly, that, you know, that that you they think you're getting screwed over left and right. That's starting to become a great guarantee. You stand out more and get more inquiries from the best people if you stand behind your work. You personalize everything, then you become the authority, and then you build your visibility. It is a system. It's where you do all of this changes. Why and how you do all of this does not.

John Clendenning [00:25:54]:
The psychology behind it is the same. Where you do it changes massively because right now, Google, as an example, search is no longer people don't search to find websites, read through websites, and and build their own context. AI now does that for us. So Google has Gemini, and a lot of people are using things like chat. They're investigating your market, your cleaning method against somebody else's cleaning method in an AI tool. Is your website do you have content being written on a regular basis about, answering those questions so that AI finds your answers and go, well, this guy uses this method because of this reason. And here's here's actually a breakdown between the methods and how you should make a decision as it says, according to ABC Carpet Cleaning, who we just found the answers from. Right.

John Clendenning [00:26:47]:
That happens if you understand. SEO and marketing and hire somebody who can stay on top of all that stuff, because that's all changed in the last well, since May. So we are what is that? Six similar days. So, twenty one days away from when the entire world changed and got announced in search last year. So so you gotta stay on top of all of that. So the number one mistake I see most service businesses make, I think we've kind of alluded to it, but not continuously following up with qualified leads as we, you know, marketers kind of rudely say until they buy or die. But they literally until until they decide to unsubscribe, or become a customer that you then continuously market to and follow-up with to turn into a client. So I like to tell this, a lot that stats are really, really offensive.

John Clendenning [00:27:37]:
In the restaurant industry, they know that unless you have been back to our restaurant four times, the likelihood of you becoming a regular is very slim. In carpet cleaning, a first time customer who shows up once has an 80% chance of never using your company again, even if they like you. They just go with somebody else. Right? If you market well, do a great job, deliver a great experience, market before the job, during the job, after the job to them and stay in touch, and you get into their home a second time, the chance of use them using you regularly drops. That goes from only 20% to 50%. You get in the house the third time, you have an 80% chance you're locked in for life until you screw something up. And if you never do, you've you've even got a little bit of a license to to screw some stuff up because you've become their people, the ones that they they'll give you that little bit of if you market well and communicate well and nurture well and be real and authentic, you will get a little bit of of latitude around that as well. So so your goal is to try and get into that house three times to build a legacy client that builds your business.

John Clendenning [00:28:50]:
One time transactional customers do not build a business. Soon as things slow down, you're out of business again. You're you're slow. You can't pay the bills. Right? Legacy long term clients build businesses. So you want to generate qualified qualified inquiries. So clear the things up. Here's quick simple definition of terms.

John Clendenning [00:29:09]:
Lead generation refers to any and it doesn't even have to be online. We put a strike through through that. Marketing processes such as social media, content marketing, websites, email design, pay per click, every door mail, yard signs, real estate agents and referral partners and knocking on doors and all that kind of stuff. Lead gen, used to engage and attract potential customers. Your van, your, like, fully labeled van, it should be there to attract potential customers. A white band with a magnet on it repels potential customers. There is not any any person I know of of quality, like an ideal qualified inquiry, an ideal qualified customer who goes, oh, look at that white van with that magnet stuck to the door. That's the company I wanna use.

John Clendenning [00:29:55]:
No. They look at that as a fly by night company. Will they still use it? The odd person will 90% go. No. Screw that. Yep. We're fickle creatures. You wrap your van.

John Clendenning [00:30:05]:
You smell good. You wear a good uniform. You change your shirt. Carry a couple of extras with you. So if you get one stinky or dirty, you've changed put it on. You give your technicians, a a a large number of shirts. You wash them for them. Don't beat up your technicians to make sure that, oh, you do your laundry.

John Clendenning [00:30:20]:
You smell bad. Do you know? Drop them all in the bin. We'll wash them on the weekends. Give them one extra one or two extra shirts. We used to buy our technicians, 12 shirts. So they had there would be 10 in the wash while two are available. And we just washed and I just took them home. We ended up going to laundromats and washing our rags and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:30:40]:
So we just open up a second washing machine and wash all our our uniforms for our client, our technicians, and replace them if they started to look a little ratty. We stayed in control of that. Why? Because we wanted to make sure that we put the best foot forward, because that was part of our lead generation strategy as well. Everywhere they went, they had to look good, smell good, stay tucked in. We police that, all of that kind of stuff. That's just one of the many things. Right? So just think of it. Everything you do and anything you do that is designed to attract a potential customer is lead generation.

John Clendenning [00:31:11]:
Lead generation focus on finding new people. Lead nurturing is a process of actually building strong relationships with individual potential customers over time with the intent of turning them to loyal paying customers. We all kind of think that, oh, they called me. They didn't book. Maybe they'll call back someday. There's nothing about nurturing that that's that. Right? Lead nurturing, therefore, focuses on communicating with a person who has already shown interest in your business but has not chosen to buy yet. So we're gonna talk about what do you send them? What do what do you do? How do you stay in touch? How do you become valuable and not become annoying? Right? Do you go, hey.

John Clendenning [00:31:51]:
Buy from me. Buy from me. I got another deal. I got another special. I got another special. I got another deal. Do you want my special? Do you want my deal? Do you want my deal? Do you want my special? Do you want my deal? Do you want my deal? Do you want my special? Do you want my deal? Do you I wanna continuously be bugged by this spammer. That sounds fun.

John Clendenning [00:32:02]:
Or do they go and subscribe? But do you say, hey, by the way, do you have enough children and pets? Are you concerned about the indoor air quality of your home? Here's a guide. Here's some information. Right? Just thought I'd share it with you. It's one of the things we do with our clients. Right? Oh, by the way, you got a spotter stain? Did your cat just vomit on the carpet? Do you know what to do about that? Yeah. Let me tell you what to do about that. If it's if it still doesn't come out with that, give us a call. We'll come up for your charge to take a look at that, working on that stain for you.

John Clendenning [00:32:29]:
You think think they'll stay in touch for that? You're nurturing a relationship. You're coming across as an expert. That's how you impact people properly. So why lead nurture matters? Your prospects are doing their research already. They may need to get sign off from their spouse, other things that, you know, are just gonna be grabbing their attention. So they might find you and then leave. They might show up on your website and do nothing. They might fill out a form, pick up the phone and call you, start a chat, and then ghost you.

John Clendenning [00:33:04]:
Right? They are busy. They're distracted. They're on the go. They might be completely unfamiliar with you. Probably are unless they've been referred. Right? Forget or may not remember who they already spoke to. That like, if you actually do some cert market research survey and call back people that haven't you haven't heard from yeah. Oh, I forgot.

John Clendenning [00:33:22]:
I forgot what your name was. I went with somebody else. Wait. Start asking those questions. Market research has a it's not just for the big companies. Market research can be done by all of us. Hire a high school kid from 03:00 to 05:00 every day. Pick up the phone, call all your past customers, see, you know, if there's anything they need, if it's, you know, anniversary reminders, and and maybe even call leads and inquiries from yesterday, from a week ago, from a month ago, from three months ago.

John Clendenning [00:33:49]:
Find out if they got it cleaned. And, hey, if I if you don't mind me asking, why did you choose them over us? You'd be shocked. Great great information. Great we did this every couple of years. Right? I had Heather in my office. Prior to that, we had Sheila. Started with Cheryl, then had Sheila over the thirty years. Oh, Tasha.

John Clendenning [00:34:08]:
For almost forgot about Tasha. And then then we had, Heather for the last quite a bit until COVID, and then I sold the business. That was part of their job. That was part of having an office staff, calling databases, calling referral partners, calling past inquiries, staying in touch. Right? You're gonna learn a lot. It takes up to seven touches to make an impression. And then also, they actually may try somebody else this time. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

John Clendenning [00:34:37]:
That other guy shouldn't be as good as you. He probably shouldn't follow-up as well as you and shouldn't be building relationships as well as you. So if you're still staying in touch with happy customer stories, and you're staying in touch with great information, even if they went with somebody else, gosh, I wish I went with ABC carpet cleaning and not the other guy. And I should have just spent the extra few bucks. They're more money, better customer. Right? And you just found them. The one that goes, oh, I'm totally happy with discount Harry. You know, Chuck in a truck.

John Clendenning [00:35:05]:
Totally happy with that. Was never gonna be your best customer anyways. Was never gonna be your ideal customer, and they're just deciding between hiring the discount guy or renting a machine. That is never a long term customer. And as the economy gets tight, as people have price of eggs cost more, whatever you wanna put the label on it and all that, they just stop spending money. The crowd that doesn't care about the price of gas and the price of eggs and, you know, they have investments that are going up and up and up, Even if their monthly payments are a little bit higher on a few things, it doesn't impact their $200,000 a year household income, hundred and $50,000. They're not $5,060,000, 80 thousand average household income. They are well above that.

John Clendenning [00:35:49]:
You find the crowd in your marketplace that does this regularly, and then you you build a business for them. You build what they're looking for. Right? If there's one other guy in town doing it, you become number two and try and beat them. If there's nobody else, you stand out. But you do that, and you gotta do that by staying in touch. They say seven touches. Google did a, a a report a number of years ago called Zmot, zero moment of truth. And they proved that back there about ten years ago, it took 11 interactions with a brand before you grabbed it off the shelf or pick up the phone and call them.

John Clendenning [00:36:26]:
Today's day and age, Google's update to ZMOT, it's way more than 11. It's in the twenties to early, low thirties. But the interesting thing is people are more skeptical. They take longer to make that final buying decision. And what what was really weird is by and large, they go back to the first. They still remember well enough to go back to the first impression source. And that's the one they reach out through, but they've gone down a ton of rabbit holes. Right? So that you need to be in touch with some people.

John Clendenning [00:37:00]:
Again, brand impressions. I saw the van. I saw I got the door hanger. I saw my neighbor talked about it on on Facebook or on social media. I saw this. I saw that whatever this this this little relationship could go on for weeks or months or years. Right? And then they finally decide they go go to Google. Can't remember a name still because we're still humans.

John Clendenning [00:37:22]:
We're still all forget the same way we go to we go to Google. We search for or we ask a friend or whatever, and somebody says, well, I use ABC carpet cleaning. Like, oh, I've seen those guys. Right? You're already at five, six, seven touches. They pick up the phone. That might be the person who books. And then you on the phone, you have scripts, and you say, for example, hey. You know, what information can I get for you today? Great way to open a conversation.

John Clendenning [00:37:46]:
And the very next question after they answer that is, and what research have you done on us so far? And you will find out how far down the rabbit hole they've gone, how many touches they've gone. You will notice that the ones that go, I didn't see anything but your ad, they are gonna be much harder, much harder to convert than the one that gives you the story. Well, I saw your van in the driveway, and then I went to your website, and then I talked to my friends, and then I did that. And I saw you over here. Oh my god. I've been I've been seeing you guys around for the last six months. How how much easier are those people to convert into a customer? We all know that if we've answered the phones. Right? They've had more touches.

John Clendenning [00:38:21]:
So keep that in mind. You wanna inform, educate, involve them, validate, convert, keep them alive, and just keep going around in circles until they buy or die. Seven to 13 successful touches to a prospect to turn them into a customer is actually considered average. The average company from a prospect interested inquiry to a customer, seven to 13 Successful touches. That's you back to them. You reaching out to them. 50% of of all companies give up after one. Inquiry, one contact.

John Clendenning [00:39:00]:
That's it. Some people call back the next day or two if they're not too busy. Some very few. When we call around with all our clientele and we talk about that, I would say it's one out of about every 30 clients that we work with in carpet cleaner marketing masters actually follow-up more than once or twice to an inquiry. They're just all about new, new, new, new, new. Right? You need to nurture and touch and drip and validate and all of those things that we saw on this slide. Right. Validate and convert and do all that stuff.

John Clendenning [00:39:33]:
So if we agree that we that we need to do this stuff, that sounds hard, John, doesn't it? Yeah. What is the ideal inbound lead management to three x? Well, it's kind of this messy. This is an actual internal graphic. It's kind of this messy. This is inbound lead management and all the different channels and ways you can funnel it. This is mind mapping it, mapping it all out properly. So let's break it down. You have to first and foremost maintain a lead database.

John Clendenning [00:40:07]:
You are the keeper of your list. You have a customer database. If you have a if you do not have a customer database that you can sift separate screen if I say, hey. How many customers do you have that have pets? Three clicks later, you should have an answer for me. Why? Because you should market pet mark market to your pet owners differently. How many of your clients have children? How many of your clients are empty nesters? Do technicians know this? If you've been in the home, you know this. You can have those conversations. Now you can put that in your database.

John Clendenning [00:40:41]:
If you tell me my database is my cell phone, John, or my QuickBooks, you haven't even learned how to be in business yet. You haven't you've literally not even started year one. I don't care if you're one year, five years, ten years, twenty years in business. You haven't even learned what business you're in. You're not even a you're not even done year week one to week two yet of of running a successful a successful company where you're the entrepreneur. You're the business owner. You're the leader, not just the technician. Right? You need a database.

John Clendenning [00:41:11]:
You need to know who is coming into your world, where they live, and and what they're buying from you. You can't just wing it on the top of your head. You should have more than enough inquiries and customers that that that's not a thing. You also need to maintain a lead database. Customer database broken down and segregated, separated, a lead database, and then a referral partner database. Those are your three primary databases that you need to be keeping, the ones that referral partners you're working with, the ones you wanna work with. Right? So lead database is everybody who's been interested in your services, who is buying in your category that hasn't bought from you yet. And that list should be 10 times bigger than your customer list.

John Clendenning [00:41:58]:
Your active leads list should be 10 times bigger than your customer list. Not everybody that calls you, you book. I have customers that tell us all the time, hey. What's your booking percentage? Oh, I booked like 80%. Do you track that? Oh, no, no, no, not really. We start tracking it, we listen to calls, we try that's interesting, you're about 17%. Oh, I don't call the ones I don't count the ones that say no. Right.

John Clendenning [00:42:24]:
That doesn't even make sense, but I've had that answer before. Right? Are you capturing all the sources of your leads are coming in from? Right. What researcher have what research have you done on us so far? Are you using AI and automation so that when anything comes in digitally, it gives you the attribution? We have our tool. We'll talk about it where we we can we can have the first and last attribution. What is the first thing they ever that ever brought them into your world ever way back? Z mod zero moment of truth? What was that very first one? What was the most recent attribution? All of that is stacked up, you get to see every interaction they've ever had. They get tagged, they get right, they could you go, Holy crap, this person has been checking us out for three years. They finally booked. You need to have that level granular level of data.

John Clendenning [00:43:11]:
Our world is now just better marketing, better anything, better stock investing, better finances, better budgeting, better you name it. It's a data problem. The data, one of the best companies on planet Earth right now, you know, agree with them or not on any politics of it, is is Palantir. Palantir came out of the PayPal mafia. Palantir was the originally, the algorithm and the, the the the team member. Can't remember his name. Alex Karp is the guy that runs the is the CEO of the company, but the other fellow, trying to remember his name right now, he was just a junior at PayPal and built the the tools that the like, using AI back before AI AI was AI, to find fraud inside the pay the PayPal payment ecosystem that carved out and became, you know, plat is a platform, I believe they call it starts with the p and it doesn't right Palantir. Anyways, their their their their main their main products, they have a couple of them, they install them into your software system.

John Clendenning [00:44:15]:
And they can they can find they can find, you know, in big corporations, dollars 50,000,000 of of waste and fraud. They can find terrorist cells that the government uses. And they they using AI and data to solve problems. Right? So data is one of the most important things as a business owner. You need to know your data. You need to hold your data, control your data. What contact info are you capturing from each source? They got their name, first name, last name, email address. I've got people that say, hi, John.

John Clendenning [00:44:43]:
I can't get any email addresses. That's interesting. I have taught for twenty years now since email became a thing, how you can get 97% of all cost all inquiries to give you your email address, like, not only freely, but eagerly. It's not a hard thing at all. You need email addresses. You need to have the ability to communicate. Well, I just text text my, my my customers now. Text marketing works great.

John Clendenning [00:45:08]:
Yeah. The first couple of times. And you better not do it a lot, or you start to piss them off, and then they type stop, and you'll never be able to text them again. So you need multimodal marketing, multimodal marketing. You need to be in front of them in a bunch of different ways, including real and authentic. As our world goes more digital, the human connection becomes even more important. So you wanna actually have a phone call outreach as well, not just to your customers, but even to your leads. Right? And what, what the, what defined lead nurture defined lead nurture steps do you have in place for each contact source? Do you have lead nurture steps and you have a different set of those as you get more granular? Good is having something, better is being more thoughtful, structured, running the data, making decisions and changes based on that.

John Clendenning [00:46:01]:
Best is having it nuanced right down to, contact source. If somebody comes in through Facebook versus Google My Business, is there a different set of lead nurture steps? One of them is gonna be a longer chase. The other one, they should be interested right now because they went into a source. Google, searching on Google. The only time your listing is gonna come up is if they're searching for your services. If they're searching for your services, they are farther down. They're not top of funnel. They're closer to middle, if not bottom of funnel.

John Clendenning [00:46:35]:
They're ready to buy. Is that is your lead nurture different? It's worth thinking about. So, lead list has gotta be 10 x the size of your customer list. We talked about that. Right? So and, again, it's because it comes from all of these sources that we talk. All the poles in the water generate inquiries that need to be on your drip list. And there's a billion different ways to generate inquiries. Right? Hey.

John Clendenning [00:47:02]:
You know, the pet urine odor removal guide. Sure you know that if they can't get rid of the odor, you have a an enzyme and a, oxidizing product to get rid of urine. You might even peel the carpet out, cut out the underpad, seal the subfloor. In the really bad situations, we've taken off drywall, pulled off, baseboards, treated all of it to save, you know, to save the structure, rental home or customer's home or whatever, you know, a senior in the family calls you in and their pet has just peed everywhere and solve problems like that where the carpet is only a few months old and can be salvaged. Because nylon and glues and plastics do not absorb urine, you can you can rinse them out, you can treat them, Under pads, subfloor, all that needs treated. Right? So, and and and that kind of thing. So you you could have, like, again, all of these things on the go. So let's move to are you tracking all your lead by source? We talked about that.

John Clendenning [00:48:00]:
Telephone calls. AI powered call tracking. Right? So we're building into our tools, AI listening to every single phone call, turning it into a transcript, and determining were they a qualified inquiry that didn't that they if they booked, did they listen? Did they book or did they not book? Right? If they did not book, what were they interested in? Can we put them into the right right now you can do it manually, but AI is in a world where you AI powered tools can now start making some of these human decisions for us. Website leads, forms, and chat. Right? Are you using any form of automation? I highly recommend you don't you do not hide behind an automated phone answering, like an AI phone answering, an AI chat. On its own, it sounds, oh my god. That's amazing. No.

John Clendenning [00:48:52]:
That should be the rollover. That should be the answering machine when you can't get to it directly. You can have it start. You know, have those conversations in the middle of the night, all that. You need a really alive human being that says, hey. Thanks so much for, you know, checking out our website and popping into our chat. Yeah. We can definitely help you with your inquiry.

John Clendenning [00:49:11]:
Can you, you know, I've got a few questions for you. First, is this the best number to give you a callback on? It's easier to to have that conversation over the phone. And it is. And you can influence people with your voice with a great script, and you will book a much higher percentage if you get real people having a real conversation. You can't do that with chat. If they say no, you can have that text to chat conversation and that kind of thing, but you don't want automatic bookings on your website. You don't want click here and book yourself in. Why? Because your prices should be so much higher than your competition that they're gonna go screw that unless they have context why you charge what you charge, why you're different.

John Clendenning [00:49:51]:
You have context, that's a conversation. Your best customers are gonna use you year after year after year, come back again and be a thousand, 2 thousand, 3 thousand dollars, a year, lifetime value of $10.20, 30. 1 of our clients mentioned that their their number one customer, top customer, had a lifetime value of over $200,000 so far. High watermark for sure. Blew me out of the water. I've never had a client one one residential client worth $200,000 worth of cleaning they've already done so far, but that is the lifetime value you can get out of a client that you will never get out of a customer. So why are you trying to put automatic automated bookings on your website and automated stuff to turn most people away as a commodity search and never ferret out the quality ones that comes from people in conversations. You don't have to have the conversations.

John Clendenning [00:50:39]:
You hire somebody to have those conversations all day long. Right? But you wanna have chatbots and and things like that that are there as a backup when you're busy or after hours and things like that. So third number ring goes to a, you know, auto voice attendant that is an AI. That's great. Have a conversation. Have them book into schedule for a callback to talk about their what they're what they're interested in. Paid leads, AI driven optimization for higher converting. So what you do wanna do, again, you you don't you wanna track your paid lead sources.

John Clendenning [00:51:11]:
Are you following up with them, but are you also taking all that data and figuring out who's converting, who's not, helping Google pay per click, Facebook dial in the right audience, having the right ad sets, having the right information? Some of these tools say they're gonna do it for you, like dynamic ads in Google. Anytime Google, who makes an absolute fortune in profits, like, 80%, ninety % of every dollar you give to Google is profit that goes to the shareholders. It's insane. They don't have your best interest at heart to provide a system that you just, you know, hand them your credit card and let us figure it out. Sorry, but it's not in their best interest to figure it out. You want a data driven decisions, data driven landing pages. AI can help with this. AI can do some deep research as an assistant and give you some ideas back.

John Clendenning [00:52:06]:
Referral leads, referral tracking and reward system do have a a system that tracks referrals, rewards the people that refer you, keeps control of all that? Again, automation, not really an AI answer on that, but you you can take AI in your database and and say, hey. Here's all the people that referred. Is there any commonalities? Like, there's things that you can do to use AI to dig into the data as well. Because once you know that once you have the data, you can ask questions against the data, but you wanna be tracking all your lead sources. Inbound marketing, AI personalization. Right? So, are you tracking where people are coming from based on your marketing, and are you personalizing that marketing back to them? We'll talk a little bit more about that in in in a minute as well. So, what contact information you're capturing? Obviously, the basics. You need the full name, the email address every single time.

John Clendenning [00:52:58]:
Phone number, is that a seller home? Know that. If it's a business, what's the business name? The location, where do they live, and the services that they're interested in right now. Those are the basics. Like, you you need to be capturing that from every single inquiry source. There is more. Do they have pets? Do they have allergies? Or any allergy sufferers in the home? Do they have children? You know, there do they have, others ex ancillary services? You know, they might be calling about tile cleaning. Okay. But do they have carpets, area rugs, upholstery in their home that how often do they clean those as well? There's even more information we can stack and add to this whole thing.

John Clendenning [00:53:36]:
So we want to consider that as well. What do, what are your defined follow-up steps? Defined for you probably be on all caps in yellow, because that's the you have to have these defined. How many initial touches? Right? You've got the inquiries coming in. Do you send nurturing emails about your company? Why you started it? Why you're the founder of it? Who your happiest customers are? All of that kind of stuff. Do you send those nurturing emails? Do you pick up the phone and call them real live voice? Hey. Just wanna follow-up on you inquired about our services. I don't wanna leave you hanging. I wanna make sure you got my email.

John Clendenning [00:54:15]:
Let's assume they didn't, and you pick up the phone and call if they don't answer back. Right? So and then, you're gonna get hopefully a site visit, either a job or a quote on-site. That is your goal. Everything from this is to get into their home. Once you've got a site visit, did you they agree to buy? And then are you keeping in touch? And how? Calls, emails, social media, direct messaging. Right? Direct mail. Are you doing all of these to your leads and your dot customer database? Once they become, Are you keeping in touch? Right. You got to be you got it.

John Clendenning [00:54:53]:
You got to be working the system because the money is in the multiple steps. So are you street strategically following up with hot leads? Number two, how to follow-up with hot leads? Multichannel follow-up is essential. Just because they texted you doesn't mean you just text them back forever. You call, you email, you direct mail, all of these things. You put them in into a multichannel follow-up process. You try and find them where they are. You try and get in front of them. You pixel them if they came to your website or opened your email, and you pixel them with an ad ad pixel, and you follow-up with them on social media and, like, Instagram, Facebook, stuff like that, and you start following them around.

John Clendenning [00:55:46]:
All of a sudden, they see your ads everywhere. What do they see? Not a discount or a deal. Happy customer stories. Stories about the owner. Why we're different. Things like that. That's the ads you follow around with. Multi touch follow-up.

John Clendenning [00:55:58]:
One to two weeks minimum. You want two weeks I would even say one. Two weeks, you are chasing anybody who inquired about your services for a minimum of two weeks before you move them into your long term nurture. You wanna check their you check their socials. You can do this as well. Check their socials. Find something, you can relate to. Reach out to them about that.

John Clendenning [00:56:18]:
It sounds a little creepy, but if you really if they're a great customer and you're marketing in the great neighborhoods, why not stand out and feel different? Like that again, you don't have to do that. You have somebody in your office that is trained to do this stuff. Right? Send them that mafia offer. What's that? Well, we used to have it where, again, all of this was built back in the day before anything automated. It was a literally a rolling crate that one of those crates you get at Kinko's where you can put like the hanging folders in, and we had, one to 30 and then one to 12. Right? The days of the month, one to 31 and one to twelve months of the year. And if if a inquiry came in today, they got written and didn't book. They got written on a card and slid into tomorrow.

John Clendenning [00:56:59]:
Tomorrow, they got a phone call. Also might be on tomorrow, somebody from four days ago because we then if they didn't answer the second one, we sent them an email, left a voicemail and moved them four days back. So now there might be some four day people tomorrow as well. They all get the next series. They're all sitting there. Right. And then you move them back again. I think we move them back to day seven so that we hit the same day of the week that they started on in case that's an important day to them.

John Clendenning [00:57:23]:
Right? Just a little bit of psychology there. And then we hit them around day 15. That's no. We went to we went to day 14. So days halfway through the next week and then a final notice. That final notice, we called a mafia offer. We know it took two days to get mailing to them. So what we would do is on day 12, Heather in the office would have them all prewritten.

John Clendenning [00:57:48]:
If somebody inquired about carpet cleaning services or upholstery cleaning services or area rug cleaning services, we didn't do tile at the time, back when we had this thing. And they inquired. They are from a great neighborhood. They're from one of our marketing. We knew that by by, you know, referral codes and things like that. And and and, you know, offer codes and whatever else. And if they were from one of our best neighborhoods, they weren't Floor 18 of a 40 story building, 80 year old Granny Smith, she's a lovely person, but we're not chasing her this hard. But what we would do is we would send that off mafia mafia offer, which was one free room of cleaning, one free armchair, one free area rug up to whatever size, absolutely free to try us out.

John Clendenning [00:58:35]:
But you have to respond in forty eight hours. Of course, if you want anything else done, you will still get that one free area room, whatever. We wanna impress upon impress you and impress upon you the reason why we're the best cleaning company in the area and the number one most recommended, most preferred, and all that. Why could we do that? Because our prices were three times higher than our average cost competitor. So we could go out, spend $20 and or $10 and solution, dollars 5 in solution, dollars 20 worth of labor. So for $25 we went we already spent up to $100 You know, we spent $100 to buy a customer. If we're booking 50% of our leads, we spent $50 to buy to buy a lead, a hundred dollars to turn them into customers. Right? Because for every two inquiries, one became a customer.

John Clendenning [00:59:23]:
Well, if if we're at a 50% booking percentage, well, we might. What's wrong with spending another $25 to send a technician out to impress the crap out of them? Right. So we would send that mafia offer of one free room and a free home cleaning and health health audit assessment. So a lot of times what it would be is I would actually go up first because that was my job. I didn't clean after the first year and a half, twenty five years old. I would go out and do a whole assessment audit and offer the one free room of cleaning way back. You guys remember thirty years ago, it was a Joe Polish idea. You know, we had our own little tweak on it, changed it.

John Clendenning [00:59:58]:
But the one free room, he got it from Dan Kennedy, right? Give them something. If you have the right target audience, give them an offer they can't refuse. So we did that at the end of our two week cycle. And then if they still didn't book because they had forty eight hours to respond, they were put into our forever follow-up. These things are easy to do now. So your ongoing forever follow-up looks like this. You wanna add stale leads. Right? So build a follow-up email, SMS, and voice drop where you leave a ringless voice mail and then a real phone call as well in the mix, which you briefly share project happy customer stories, testimonials, offers, not discounts, bonuses, extra services as a bonus for the same price, all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:00:48]:
And you just you stay in touch with them once a week, once a month, no no less than once a month. Use AI and automation to personalize these messages. What do are they interested in tile cleaning? Put that in your messaging all the way through. Right? Use AI and automation. Use things like tokens and custom values so that when they get a message, it's about what they're interested in, with their name within it, their neighborhood within it. Right? All these things are totally doable. Right? Have a check-in call every three to four months. You should do that with every one of your commercial customers who are clients now.

John Clendenning [01:01:21]:
You should physically check-in every three to four months. Knock, walk in the door. Hey. You know, John here from John's Carpet Cleaning. Is Tony in? I just wanted to you know, we we cleaned the carpets there a few months ago. I just wanna do a quick buzz around, see if there's any spots and stains I can take out. It's just a courtesy service. Why? Because you wanna be their best friend.

John Clendenning [01:01:41]:
Oh, actually, you know, Tony, the the, the account manager or the, you know, maintenance manager, he's gone. Actually, Jeff is the new guy. Oh, cool. I'd love to introduce myself to Jeff. Jeff, buddy. How's it going? Yeah. So I know Tony used to take a, you know, a large triple triple coffee. When I came in, I brought one.

John Clendenning [01:02:01]:
I don't know if you drink that, but what do you take the next time I come in? But here, by the way, here's who I am. Here's what I do. Here's what we're all about. Do you need a copy of our proposal again, or did he keep it on file? But, anyways, yeah, we clean here. We're doing this. I just I pop in every couple months and just make sure, you know, things are being, you know, well and good. And I I provide a free spotting visit. So instead of charging a hundred $25 spotting visit, I'm here to do that for free.

John Clendenning [01:02:23]:
So I'm just gonna pop around, take a look around the coffee machines and different areas like that. That sound cool? Yep. Yeah. Let me follow-up with you. What's your email address? Got a business card? Cool. Let's stay in touch. Made friends with the new guy. Right? You wouldn't have known that if you didn't stop in.

John Clendenning [01:02:37]:
Well, you need to be making check-in calls with your clients every three or four months. Hey, missus Jones. It's been three months since our last cleaning. Just wonder how that, you know, that those stains and spots and stains down that hallway, that, James took out for you there, if they stayed gone. Like, I'm you know, I hopefully have. Is there anything else that you'd be looking at? You know, as a reminder, we do all of these kinds of things. And, oh, by the way, Mother's Day is coming up, and we do have our VIP offers from for all of our very special clients. Let me just tell you what it's all about in case there's anything else that you need that you wanna, you know, you you wanna take advantage of of the VIP promotional savings that's not available to anybody else.

John Clendenning [01:03:11]:
Right? Is there anything in there that you'd like to to take advantage of? Because we can get you in early on that before the rush. No. Okay. Well, I'll tell you what. I'm gonna send you an email with, the information on that. Anyways, it is only for our VIP clients. But if you've got one very special friend, I'll allow you to gift that to them as a as a gift from you to them. Our VIP offer, again, not a discount on offer, extra services, maybe even a bonus gift set.

John Clendenning [01:03:38]:
Father's Day, it's great to give out, like, a apron and a barbecue gift set. You can get on, like, AliExpress and available, you know, as as one of the bonuses if you book now between now and Father's Day. Right? Things like that. Like, there's ways that you can run promotions and offers that you can have a reason to phone call. Well, while you're calling, check-in with all of your stale leads every three or four months. Hey. I know you didn't go with us a couple months ago. Just wanted to see if, if you ended up getting it done, maybe with somebody else where you have it.

John Clendenning [01:04:17]:
Cool. We'd love to be, in in the running next time, and we also do these other services. I just thought I'd check-in to see how everything's going. You come across if done well with a good script, you come across great. Send send them a company newsletter. Printed and mailed is preferred. Don't just email people. Understand your emails don't get open most of the time.

John Clendenning [01:04:37]:
And if they do get open, they don't don't get read beyond the headline. Even if you got a 30 or 40% open rate, which is incredibly good, understand that about that much of your email got read. So, and you wanna send them maybe your seasonal promotions and any of your your client database campaigns. Think about that. Like, where do these stale inquiries fit in to your promotional window? Give them access to some very special VIP programs or or offers, extra services for the same price. Don't ever discount your your price. Give them that because they stepped up and reached out to you. So they kinda get a kind of got an in on their got an insider.

John Clendenning [01:05:19]:
Right? And then you wanna leverage the crap out of automation. We've kind of led into that a little bit. So you wanna automate your lead nurture. Put all of your leads, from different sources into your lead database. Put your leads into different pipelines based on the prospect's interest and intent. Right? You should have different pipelines, different message flows based on their interest and their intent. Set up each pipeline with its own workflow with emails, calls, and that is related to what their interest and intent was. Provide a consistent automated follow-up until they book or bail.

John Clendenning [01:05:52]:
Again, buy or die. That's called our hot lead follow-up. Add stale leads to your forever follow-up. So hot and then forever, and use AI to personalize. That is the winning strategy. So it kinda looks like this. Another one of these messy graphs, but they come in, they get a bunch of stuff, and then they bail. They didn't, you know, respond, so then they get a bunch more stuff, and then they end up and eventually, they end up in your long term nurture till they oh, they pop back up again, and then right? And eventually, you get them as a customer or they unsubscribe.

John Clendenning [01:06:23]:
Right? So a lot to build out. We call it Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro. So Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro is our lead automation tool that we built four years ago now, five years ago, that takes all of the stuff that I've ever done by paper, by campaigns, all that kind of stuff, builds it into a lead automation dashboard, and we'll kind of walk you through a little bit about what it's all about. But it's it's how you automate your lead flow. And again, you're not a % automating it. You should have a human in the loop. You should have a moment where the automation says make a phone call. Here's the people you should call this month.

John Clendenning [01:06:59]:
They've been in your automation for four months, three months, whatever. Even your your past customers need to be in automation flows, but you should remember, you should be pulling lists, having a drop list, and say, hey. It's been it's now ten months since their last cleaning. Start the anniversary. Early bird, month ten, early bird light. Month eleven, anniversary month, extended one month only in month thirteen. Now you've got a reminder system. Well, this is the same idea, but you're automating your lead flow contacts.

John Clendenning [01:07:33]:
So it starts with smart forms. Anytime somebody fills out a form, whether they got to it from mailing, Google, Facebook, saw the van, whatever, they end up on your landing page, they end up in your website, wherever you've got these these forms, you wanna start with you wanna have the forms, give them follow-up with them in a in a in a in a way that it brings them in. It's not just a form that sends you an email and says, this person's interested in this. Go get them, tiger. Right? No. It's like, as soon as they fill out the form, they get a text message and email. Hey. Thanks so much.

John Clendenning [01:08:08]:
Appreciate it. We're gonna get back to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, answer a few more questions. Here's a little bit of information about our company. Here's why we're different. You know, start indoctrinating them. Start nurturing them. Right? And then follow-up manually on top of that as well.

John Clendenning [01:08:24]:
Now, Smart Connect, that's that's another one of our services. That's where soon as soon as somebody fills out a form, if it's Monday to Friday, eight to five or whatever your phone systems are turned on and then as soon as they fill out a form, your phone rings, and it says, missus Jones just filled out a form on your website. She's interested in carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning. Press 1 to connect with her now. Smart connect. You press 1. Her phone rings. It says it's coming from ABC Carpet Cleaning.

John Clendenning [01:08:52]:
Hey. That was fast. Yeah, missus Jones. I just, noticed that you filled out a form on our website and about your interest in carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning. I didn't actually read the rest of the notes. I just thought I'd get back to you quickly before, you know, as quickly as I could because I have a few months, before the phone rings again between calls. Whatever you wanna say. She might have told the whole story.

John Clendenning [01:09:11]:
Don't really care. We just wanna ring you, pick up the phone, ring her. If she doesn't answer the phone or you're not able to answer the phone, your staff is not able to answer the phone, then the call disconnects, and she automatically gets a text message. Hey, miss Jones. Thanks so much for filling out the form on our website. Sorry. I wasn't able to, or we're you know, I get a voice mail ringless voice mail being left in the background at the same time. I'm gonna try and get a hold of you as soon as I possibly can.

John Clendenning [01:09:37]:
In the meantime, let me ask you a few questions about what you're interested in. Either going to an AI that's gonna ask these questions, AI chatbot, or now to get that started, or an automation flow that just asks a few questions to try and get the conversation. Why? Because then they start closing all the other tabs of all the other cleaners because you've speed to lead got a hold of them. That's what Smart Connect does. It allows you if you can get answer your phone within two rings, if you can get back to form fills and chat messages within two minutes, you have a chance, a much greater chance, a 287% greater chance of booking that customer than if you wait thirty minutes. If you wait to the end of the day, declines to, like, way less chance. And that's, again, run your own stats, do your own data. That's what we've noticed.

John Clendenning [01:10:27]:
The industry has noticed this. Aberdeen Research Council has noticed this who's, who does all the research. There's a report they sell every year for $450. I've bought them for the last eight years in a row, purchased it. Botten is probably not a word. Sorry. Purchased it for the last eight years in a row, and, it's it's it's the voice of the consumer research about what for the service industry. So us.

John Clendenning [01:10:54]:
Right? What what people, do, how they interact, stuff like that. And speed delete is one of those big, big, big, big things. So I wanna stay on top of that as well. So on your website, you'll have, you know, make an appointment is not for them to book a job. That is it for them to book a conversation. You got the smart form, and you've got chat. All of it should lead into an automation workflow. Every lead needs to get followed up within five minutes or less.

John Clendenning [01:11:20]:
We talked about that. Oops. So you wanna put the leads, from different sources, direct, organic, referral, paid, social, email, other, and you wanna put them into a pipeline that gives them the right messages, again, until they buy or die. You wanna get Facebook messengers and DMs from on social media. You know, you're you're posting to LinkedIn. You're posting to Twitter. You're posting to Instagram. You know, Instagram should be your before and after picture gallery.

John Clendenning [01:11:51]:
That's the world knows that already. You can put a plug in to put pictures back on your website, but you no longer put before and after pictures on your website. Nobody that's not where people go for that. They go to Instagram. They go to social media. So that's your that's your before, during, and after, and during is important. Make sure it shows you in the picture. Anybody can fake an AI picture nowadays or borrow it from somebody else.

John Clendenning [01:12:11]:
If you're in it, in the middle, before, during, after, it becomes more authentic. The more authentic we can be in a digital world, the better we are. Right? So you wanna make sure that, you know, all of your DMs and messages come into one platform that starts the conversation, that gives you the attribution source. This is an example of the back end of Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro right here. Messages come in. You've got, you can have conversations with them, emails, texts, phone calls, all that kind of stuff, and you got the entire history of all of the conversations, where they came from, how they found you, all of that kind of stuff. Right? Works on phone, works on desktop. You wanna make sure the leads are put into different pipelines properly.

John Clendenning [01:12:55]:
So being very strategic, if it's is it Facebook and social message, DM? Is it an offer, a paid ad? Is it a website or landing page? Right? Is it did they book yet? Are they stale? Did they get a job on-site quote booked? A job booked? Is it is it completed? Each one of these pipelines as the customer or the inquiry moves through to become in a hot lead, you talk to them, then a follow-up lead did not book yet, and then stale forever maybe, quoted jobs, booked, all that kinds of as they move through, they stop getting these messages and they start learning this stuff. And this is now a whole new series that they're in until they buy or die. That's the way it should be built. So you have smart messaging workflows is what we're talking about. So, again, you move from one pipeline, put into another, you create these workflow trees, all of this kind of stuff. Right? So, again, we build all of these things out in carpet cleaner libra. We built them all out for proven processes, for for carpet cleaners and home cleaning services because that's all I've done for thirty years. We've done these all by mail.

John Clendenning [01:14:08]:
We've done these by digital. We've done these by email. We've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients, and we know how to personalize. We know how to perfect. We know how to write these. We know how to create multimodal text message during this voice mail, email. I remind you, do you guys pick up the phone and call or to your call center that does that for you or your your gal in your office and all that good stuff. So you want smart messaging workflows.

John Clendenning [01:14:32]:
Right? Start and stop specific campaigns simply by moving the the lead from one stage to another, adding tags that will create a different set of information being sent to them. AI is helping even a lot more with this as well. AI can listen to a call, add tags, stuff like that. We're investing a lot of money in carpet cleaner lead pro to add all these different layers of AI as they become better and better and better, and can integrate through APIs and webhooks into these these tools. You pull out the call, turn it into a transcript, get a tool like Perplexity to listen to the column become a transcript, take that, put it into a workflow on a tool called, like, n8n or on, Make.com and have it run through a workflow of of qualifying the lead, having AI determine if it was a legitimate call, all of that kind of stuff, and then drop it back into your tool to be chased the right way. Right? Again, there's ways to make it really, really efficient using AI. There's ways to good, better, best, and AI is allowing us to do some very advanced stuff that a manual person would have had to do, which is fine, but without the manual person having to do it anymore. Right? Just a little bit of AI cost.

John Clendenning [01:15:47]:
Right? There's still always a cost to run run AI. Right? ChatTPT might be free for the average consumer, but you better be on the $25 a month plan, if not the $200 a month plan, if you're really using those types of tools a lot. And you you you pay for AI usage time. Right? So so there's ways to build out these workflows. We're building them out. We're becoming an AI powered AI leading AI first marketing agency, because we can build out command centers for, on our client dossiers on our client, and everything we do and talk about and train and our chatbots and all that kind of stuff is all based on, like, two, three, four, five hundred pages of research about the local area, the company, the competition, all that kind of stuff, and really, really create really cool stuff. So campaigns include emails, SMS, call reminders, ringless voice mail, messages personalized using smart automation, and tokenization. AI voice and AI chat add on service.

John Clendenning [01:16:45]:
Right? So, again, that's what we're talking about where it should not be the main phone answering service. It sounds so cool. I just I just gonna get AI to answer my phone, so I'm just gonna go out and do the cleaning jobs. No. That's not your job. Right? You're the owner of the business. You'd have somebody pay somebody who is much better at influencing, having a real conversation. Right? AI is not there yet.

John Clendenning [01:17:06]:
Will it be there? Maybe. Yeah. I'm not ready for it. It's not there yet. And I'm in I spend anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours a day invested in AI learning, building, understanding, and research alone just for our agency and my own personal life, and I don't think it's there yet. So, AI chat assistance, they're assistance. Right? Good rollover stuff. Seamless integration, sync your sync your CRM, Housecall Pro, ServiceMonster into a a a system that caused that has all of this follow-up, this lead database marketing and stuff like that as well, to have that smooth experience And automate your hot lead follow-up.

John Clendenning [01:17:51]:
So automate multichannel follow-up. You want it to be automated. Lead enters the funnel. It's cold, warm, hot. Right? Multi touch, mafia offer, automated forever follow-up campaigns. All of that is just happening and reminders for you to call, and maybe you can even have automation where it triggers a postcard. Gets to this point, triggers a postcard variable print through, you know, postcard gurus, postcard mania, dope marketing. There's lots and lots of places that have that ability to just send a trigger and send a postcard.

John Clendenning [01:18:25]:
Think of it around that 80¢ to a dollar, US dollar 20 Canadian kind of idea. Print printed to mail because they just variably print cut up. Also, the entire sheet is all different postcards cut up, pop mail. They have bulk rates all works really, really well. So you could actually even mix that in. You test it. Where would where could the postcard go in? What is the postcard selling and sending? And what's the messaging? You fit you put all that and then you test your marketing. How many that's the data? How many people after you've got statistically significant amount of postcards going out? What would that be? 500 to a thousand? How many people responded? What was the return on investment for having that piece in your follow-up string so you're not just digital and phone and text? Now let's try postcard.

John Clendenning [01:19:12]:
Let's see if that helps the mix. Right. More steps, the better in most cases. So let's recap. Right. We've gotten in under an hour and a half, so we're doing pretty good. Lee, what's the difference between lead generation and lead nurturing? I think we figured that out. Are we generating leads or are we nurturing them? Are we chasing leads? Do we think our business is is all about I need more leads, I need more leads, or can we nurture the ones we have better and get a lot more, you know, squeeze more juice out of that that that, that lemon? Right? Are we maximizing conversions through persistent and automated follow-up? Persistent and automated follow-up.

John Clendenning [01:19:54]:
Are we leveraging building and leveraging our lead database for long term growth? When you go to sell a business, it's your assets, not your truck. A truck and a truck mount is not an asset. It's a it's a if it is, it's a depreciating consumable asset. Your asset to your business is your database, is your brand recognition. It is the soft assets, is the, things like, your goodwill and your your reputation in the marketplace and all of that kind of stuff. That is stuff that can actually be shown, you know, your turnkey system. That can be shown to a potential buyer and a backer and a banker and say, hey, here's all the things we have in place and here's how it produces. Here's my data.

John Clendenning [01:20:38]:
Here's my numbers. Right? It's no longer about your truck or your truck mount. You sell a one or two truck operation for half a million dollars easily with this in place. Right? So implement AI and digital dominance method or local brand authority. So, hopefully, you had a few takeaways. Again, lead nurturing. If you need help with any of this, give us a call. Marketmaster.com/ schedule.

John Clendenning [01:21:09]:
Cyrica, who's in the background here, she will take a look at that. She'll probably call you up or somebody on our team will give you a call just to ask a few more questions, see if you're a good fit. If you are, you can actually jump on a one hour consultation with me for free. We'll actually do a whole bunch of research on you and your competitors ahead of time, and then we'll have a conversation. No sales pitch, just a chat. We'll give you a plan. I will walk through all of it. I charge for my consulting.

John Clendenning [01:21:33]:
I have an hourly rate. You don't even wanna know what it is. I have a daily rate. You don't even wanna know what it is. I do a little bit of consulting on the side. I don't have time, but it it I do this for a living as you can tell as well. I make it available for a few people to jump on a call. You know, every every so often, we can have that conversation.

John Clendenning [01:21:52]:
We can see where you're at, where you wanna go, how you can double your business in a year, and we could talk about that. And then if there's a fit for some of our services, I've got a marketing company that can help you with that. But it's it's it's less about that and more about what are you willing to do to grow the company. What are you willing to do to up your standards, up your pricing if you're a low price? How are you gonna go from, an average job of a hundred and 50 to an average job of 500 in the next, you know, twelve months? There's a strategy for that. Do you know it? Do you even know how to kinda lean into the market to figure out who your ideal customers are, how many there are, and how you can enact that strategy properly. So anyways, if any of that sounds interesting, give us a call. If you if you wanna hop on the podcast, reach out to us, carpetcleanersuccess.com. You can go there and, we'll interview you.

John Clendenning [01:22:47]:
And we'll give you tons of marketing cred for your local marketplace, and we'll share it out to the industry so people, you know, other other cleaners can can a little hurt hear a little bit about your story and just get a little bit inspired to do more, that kind of thing as well. So, anyways, if you're new, that's a great thing to say, hey. I'm new. Here's what I'm all about. If you've been around for more than ten years, you're one of the few. There's only 8080% of businesses go out of business within the first ten years. You're one of the special ones. So if you lasted more than ten years, you should probably be telling your story anyways.

John Clendenning [01:23:19]:
So, anyways, hopefully, that you've enjoyed everything we just, discussed here today. And really appreciate your time. Thanks so much. We made it in an hour and a half, ninety minutes. Trying to do it a little bit quicker, but there's a lot to cover as you could tell. We want you to be omnipresent. We want you to succeed and thrive in the changing marketplace. And to do that, you need to know a lot of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:23:39]:
So this is a little bit of that that lot of stuff. So if you found this value at all, whatever platform you're watching this on, reach out to us. Just thank us. Say hi. We'd appreciate it. If there's, you know, if there's any topics you wanna want covered, anything you want deeper, let me know. Go to our Facebook page. Go to our, LinkedIn.

John Clendenning [01:23:56]:
Join our Facebook group, Carpet Cleaner Marketing Secrets. Like, different ways to just to tap in to a lot of free community resources. So, anyways, hopefully, that makes sense. Till next time. Take care, guys.