Solving The Biggest Carpet Cleaner Marketing Challenge

in today’s training, we’re going to be talking about solving what i consider the biggest marketing challenging challenge facing carpet cleaners home service companies restoration companies things like that and also just just anybody in general that deals with the public and business depends on how your business is set up as we go through this you’ll really get an idea of what i’m talking about here so it it is a big problem in the in in the world that a lot of things have shifted i’ve kind of alluded to this a couple times in past webinars but i wanted an entire you know an hour or so just diving deep showing you exactly how to solve this problem what the problem is exposing it and then how to solve it welcome to the carpet cleaner success podcast a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business your host john clendening has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figures over his 30-year career and is the founder of carpet cleaner marketing masters a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine tune in as john shares proven tips strategies and expert interviews to help fast track your success in the carpet cleaning industry you’re carpet cleaner small business owner you’re serious about getting better results in 2022 then the next 60 minutes is going to be what you need so i’m not going to spend a lot of time on this most of you guys have been on webinars before you know me but um so ultimately i have worked in the i’ve owned small businesses since i was my final year in

high school was the first small business i owned and i have been gainfully self-employed ever since i’ve bought and sold grown and um and sold off many many uh service businesses in the cleaning space i started with um and that kind of thing but i also have an amazon store that uh sells products and a bunch of other stuff as well so i’ve been heavily invested in the marketing mindset and i’ve been teaching this stuff for over 15 years as well and in the carpet cleaning space we work with hundreds of carpet cleaners speak to at least thousands of them a year from trainings like this to events i attend to um i have a personal network of well over six or eight hundred carpet cleaners that i reach out to and chat to on a regular basis have for decades and that kind of thing so i know the industry while i’ve owned the businesses and i’ve only i’ve had the employees manage the employees watched all of that change and watch marketing concepts and strategies change with while the psychology and methodology doesn’t change it it’s a matter of tapping into human psychology and emotions so um so that’s sort of my little background uh recently i sold my final um my final business that was brick and mortar as you call it i guess um because a digital marketing consulting agency is more virtual uh but i finally sold that last year in may in the middle of a pandemic as they say uh and just uh what would be considered by some a small carpet cleaning company um we did carpets and ducks and a whole bunch of other stuff but um and uh generated over half a million dollars in selling that and it was well worth the value to uh um to the buyer carl because um it was he got fully loaned the loans he needed and stuff like that based on the

the asset equity of the company not any of the equipment that was all you know basically fires and out kind of write off stuff but the actual database the marketing positioning the local positioning and things like that the call volumes you name it the marketing assets that were in place the reputation assets that were in place so all of that stuff is what you need to know and need to grow because someday you need to sell your business you never want to walk away the majority of carpet cleaners i talked to that have never thought of this maybe get a couple you know 10 20 30 50 100 000 for the equipment they’ve got and if they were smart maybe they bought a strip mall and put their shop in one of it and have now got built themselves an asset but most of the time they don’t even have that and without a corporate job they don’t have their um you know they don’t have a pension or anything like that as well so the ultimate goal of business is to earn the money you want um hire the people to do the job for you if that’s your goal and then um exit out as being you know the number one provider in your marketplace having that that local authority that allows you to sell for multiples of what other people would possibly exit for so all of that kind of always plays in the back of my brain and always did for the 30 years of my my my carpet cleaning business career as well so um here’s just a few of our clients um just some of the stuff that
we’ve done many of these have been with us for for many many years some of them decades like over a decade or so prior to even having a full digital marketing agency we did we did marketing for them back in the days of yellow pages and stuff like that as well some of them newer but yeah um that’s that’s what our goal is we want to make um our clients

the top in in the carpet cleaning world top carpet cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they attract the best clients can charge the top rates and are booked out weeks in advance so they’re not the discount providers most of the clients we work with whether it’s carpet cleaner or any other industry are not trying to ever be the discount guy we typically avoid taking any of those honest clients as well it’s a different mindset the the growth needs a lot more owner attention it seems easy to be a commodity hey this guy’s 89 i’m going to be 79 and and then wondering why um you can’t pay for new equipment you can’t pay for good marketing we’re actually talk about ways that you can out market your competition by understanding that psychology as well so that’s going to be a core part of what we’re focusing on here today so let’s move along here oops i hanged the what tab i’m on and got myself all lost okay so what is the big spit what are the biggest challenges when it comes to to marketing your business and i’ll tell you the ones that we hear a lot and i’ll tell you why i think it’s not the case so not enough leads now in the case of some people that are brand new like bruce you’re on the line here i’m one of our newer clients and bruce is really really new to running a business um like he’s under a year in the in in in the business so obviously developing different lead sources is going to be critical to people like that but typically it’s it’s you know we hear about it being not enough leads and i’m going to challenge why i don’t think that is necessarily always the case so when you’re just starting out you need to have a mix of sort of guerrilla marketing grassroots stuff going out all

the outreach that i used to do like i did a hundred thousand dollars in my first uh um well first six months of business ended the year sixty thousand dollars in 19 well first carpet cleaning business 1995 by the end of my first full year it was over a hundred thousand dollars and there was no internet i hadn’t even gotten into the yellow pages until the last few months of that year yellow pages was the only place for people to go so what did what is what did we do to get in to get those kinds of sales um there’s ways to generate leads that has nothing to do with just running you know ads um there’s ways to physically force that as well we won’t be talking about that here probably talk about that next month actually it’s a topic near and dear to my heart but we also find that people say that the quality of the leads are really low um so you’ve got a really low lead quality and there’s ways to to deal with that as well you can always improve your messaging and up your lead quality but i don’t believe that that is the main issue as well um the lead costs are too high or the roi is too low so if you’re actually tracking this and what we do find is a lot of people just don’t know how to track this properly but if you’re actually tracking the source of the leads um especially in a paid platform or whatever and determining how many actually became bookings and you’ve got different ways of managing the dollar value you get from each customer there’s ways to play with that again i tend to push back and challenge that a little bit depending on the source there are some sources where the the roi is too low but you do need to be thinking about the lifetime value of a client and the referral value of a client not just the one-off value but that’s a different conversation as well um but a lack of

clear tracking is what i’m talking about here as well is we do find that people just tend not to track source specific leads and relate it back to the specific roi from that source and and and that and then there’s always too many options and and i agree with that as well but um but i do ask the question is lead flow really the problem and in most cases it’s not you’ve got everything from seo it takes time to generate but it will generate local service ads if they’re available in your area can generate leads at a at a profitability and i’ll teach you how um direct mail always a great way you just got to be strategic about it but direct mail works brilliantly for your database direct mail works brilliantly for your staying in touch with your strategic partners and and large accounts that refer you a lot of work direct mail can can be a compliment to your digital strategy your website will generate leads fully signed up vehicles that look snazzy in the marketplace um just the branding in general or or billboards i know um john that’s on the call here he’s got actual billboards in town um that just stand out like crazy and attract a lot of attention and that that generates an amount of awareness and amount of lead flow google ads are always a great option as well um anytime you’re paying for ads you’ve got to have that balance between how can we how can we get the maximum value out of the client how can we target the right client but we’re going to teach you how to land more of them as well facebook ads have become really important more of a disruptive ad platform than a targeted so targeted we always say with google ads is they went searching for you so and google ads can include youtube pre-roll videos and all that as well because it’s all part

of the same platform but they they went searching they asked to find information about what your what you’re going to present your ad in front of the ads are targeted to the keywords they’ve typed in facebook not at all facebook is you try and influence the right demographic and show them so part of its awareness part of its lead gen um part of it is is you know again trying to get people that are active and interested right now and there’s a lot of psychological influencing going on with facebook and things like that but it is just a matter of trying to to influence a lot and that’s why facebook charges per impression whereas facebook google charges per click and then google local service ad charges per lead that actually fills out so all different ways of getting it and then referrals and repeats in your referral network there’s just lots and lots and lots of ways of getting of generating leads and in fact our full digital dominance method talks about all of the different ways to generate lead influences leads more high conversion websites personalized things like that um all help when people end up at the website but building that awareness and into into the into your messaging making sure that you’re marketing your reviews you’re asking for feedback from clients and then marketing that feedback as well you just want to drip upon them everywhere while you’re amazing and why everybody else thinks you’re amazing and there’s ways to do that and then you expand expand your visibility as well and all of that um all of that together becomes our digital dominance method but i’m going to show you something that takes that everything that we’re talking about here and puts it on massive steroids so um the other thing is um where do you get your leads from and we talk about this with every

single one of the consulting clients i work with and every single one of um of our current clients when we when we hop on monthly or quarterly calls we’re talking about this kind of stuff as well so you might be doing some paid ads on facebook and google maybe some instagram like overlapping and even possibly youtube really good strategy with the right budget you definitely want to be ranking organically that takes a while but you want to be doing that you want your google maps rankings to move up organically as well there’s ways to influence that but you know you want to get leads from all of these sources you want to get leads from social outreach so online groups sharing projects you’ve recently done properly you want to have awareness ads going as well out on display ads you might even get to the point where radio is helpful um that’s at a bigger budget and and there’s a reason why some companies can afford that and some can’t and we’re actually going to explain exactly how that is and for some of you i think the light bulbs are going to go off and going oh now i get why those companies are able to do all of that um so and then you do want active repeat and referral campaigns and programs in place and active means they literally are um set up and mapped out and flow in the way you want they’re going to get an email they’re going to get a phone call they’re going to get a mailing they’re going to get a follow-up they’re going to get this and you’re going to create a pace of making sure that that is active so that you do generate more repeat business and more referral business over time so strategic partners are huge who are the people that can refer people to you um who have customers that are
similar to your customers and how can

you work with them and and you know share some value so what are things that you can do for them in the carpet cleaning space flooring stores interior designers realtors don’t just stop there spas like um hair salons you go to a high-end hair salon almost every single one of their customers is an ideal carpet cleaning customer are a woman usually between the age of 35 or 55 maybe slightly older um college or university educated decent income and you know good discretionary income obviously if they’re in a high-end salon things like that that’s that’s more likely they’re the ideal client why not make that jv relationship with those people and see if you can have your message go to their clientele as well we we’ve done it in the past with mercedes dealerships for carpet cleaning chiropractors um wellness clinics all kinds of stuff um i’ve spoken stood in front of monday morning realty meetings more times than i can imagine for five or ten minutes just giving tips and ideas and then handing out business cards at the end never selling our services selling our knowledge um and um anyways website conversions retargeting anybody lands on your website should be followed up online directories there’s hundreds of them neighborhood marketing uh brand marketing and authority building all kinds of there’s a million ways that you can be getting business but as i said what do i believe is the actual biggest challenge facing carpet cleaners small business owners personally from our data and from talking to literally thousands i know i know for a fact that it’s it’s unconverted leads because here’s the problem 50 to 60 of inbound leads tend to stay unconverted so even the people that say oh i’m

amazing i booked 75 of my jobs if we listen to all the calls and look at the back end that is simply not the case um what we do find out is it’s much lower than what they think it is um across all platforms 90 of web form fills um in most cases do not turn out to become a client and there’s a reason for that it’s just very strategic it’s it’s just human psychology so uh and and what you know there’s a couple reasons why we’re gonna we’re gonna get into why that happens but here’s a few of them right now what we know is that leads that are not followed up with within 15 minutes go cold so a lot of companies we work with they get all of their inbound leads and they have a routine in place whether they’ve got a staff member that does this or whether um whether it’s the owner operator doing this or not they’ve got a routine where twice a day they check their inboxes they check their lead sources um they maybe pop on facebook every so often and see if anybody’s chatting over to them over there and there’s all different kinds of ways to talk to people but um but yeah if if it’s over 15 minutes they tend to go cold to go to the competition because he who answers the message first tends to win and i’ll show you the numbers on that so so that is a common that’s that that’s old school that all that used to work in the day we used to do that in the day too check your email in the morning check your email maybe after lunch and maybe one time at the end of the day before you lock turn off the lights and things like that but there’s ways but the customers tend to not want to sit and wait that long anymore now if it’s a repeat client sure all bets are off because they want you they’re waiting for you but if it’s somebody who’s never heard of you before

uh don’t be so vain to think you’re the only one they’re reaching out to um the average customer needs to be followed up five to seven times before booking um and that’s i mean there are some people that are ready to book right away and there’s ways to influence that as well the other people need something very specific needs some very specific psychology i’m gonna show you what that is as well and today’s consumers actually prefer to interact by messaging text messaging um versus phone calls or emails so we know email open rates are pretty low so it doesn’t mean throw the baby out with the bath water and don’t do it it just means do it strategically but also make sure that you’re you’re you’re kind of a multimedia approach you’re going across different modalities so you’re you know you’re thinking of different ways to communicate with the the same customer um to to get their attention and to get their attention over again so here’s here’s what the solution is you need to be leveraging marketing automation to follow up with the web forms within the first two minutes um and you want uh via phone email text message and other and i’ll talk to you about that um automated follow-up so that you you have every prospect is is in touch you’re in touch with them at least five times and you engage with them in two-way text messaging so and we’re going to talk about that and why that’s important because you know some of you this is intuitive and if you like you can put in the chat if you if you text message like a lot of your clients like what percentage of clients of your of your new leads maybe not your existing clients that might have your cell phone number for example but of of new interested people are you actually

messaging by chat or text you can throw that in the chat here i’ll take a look over at it and see what you guys are kind of letting me know perfect so bruce is saying that he’s got he’s he’s finding that it’s about 80 and again as i said bruce is one of our newer clients and he is bang on um because we’re finding that and some some of you guys are saying 20 and stuff and you know so keep that in mind um because yeah we’re finding that the shift has already happened so that that is one of the shifts you got to take away from this is giving people the opportunity to text message um or chat like two-way chat but i’m going to explain to you why i’m not even a big fan of 2a 2a chat as much as i am um specifically text messaging but we’ll talk about that here as well so but um i’ve shared this on a couple recent webinars if you’ve been on it but we’ll do some simple math here just to show you because this is um this just shows you um some conversion rates i’m going to get into some live examples as well but this is just the generic um you get 100 leads that come in and they come in save to your website so who cares where they came from what if they were again from thumbtack what if you’ve got facebook ads running google ads running you know you name it you’ve got all this kind of stuff going on and um and and you’ve got 100 leads that land on your website i can tell you from personal experience the average conversion rate um just from listening to phone calls and everything else like that um is about 30 from people that actually reach out to you and i can tell you that the outreach is even is even um not as great as it should be if the the mechanisms for outreach aren’t designed into your website the conversion stuff we had a whole webinar on designing your website for proper conversions back a

couple months ago and it’s on our website under the free training go take a look at that but ultimately if you want to run the math get 30 bookings in this scenario this is an average carpet cleaner average ticket of 325 bucks so those 30 bookings from 100 leads is just under ten thousand dollars in work right so if we take that and say let’s get that conversion rate up to 70 with all of the stuff i’m going to share with you today now you get it up to 70 we’re seeing that across the board in our clients in the background is that 65 to 75 on a high end percent um you can get um we’re seeing that the uh from people that actually reach out to actually booking um for the ones that give us the data and help us track that we’re seeing that that is the that is a common increase from low 30s people that are really good we see them in the low 50s on on this conversion rate over here but getting them up to 70 see what that does to the numbers nothing else changed you didn’t spend an extra dime in marketing you didn’t spend an extra time in lead sources and you are now almost three times more more revenue two to three times is what it works out to um increase in sales revenue from the same volume of leads and there’s a psychological reason for that so um again that’s why i call it simple math so what we’re talking about is making every lead that you get way more valuable so um put in the chat what some of your key takeaways are so far you know um what you’ve kind of gotten out of this that you know we’re talking about automation we’re talking about conversion rates and lead value and

there are some strategic ways we’re going to show how to do this but what have you gotten so far about some of the numbers and data about people needing to be followed up five times and having to contact them within 15 minutes is that what you’re seeing in your own business as well that if you if if you wait for a while to call them some people that you talk to go you know what i’ve already found somebody else you know for example the old way of doing things where you’re not being proactive so if you’ve noticed that we’ve got a few yeses coming in yeah yeah yeah for sure and that’s what we find as well is the exact same thing is that there’s you know you might get some people that are waiting on you because your marketing message is so great that they go no i want these guys period and i’m going to wait on them the rest of it is is you know hey i like these guys but i’ve got two or three choices and i just want to solve this problem i’m moving on with my day i want to solve this i don’t want to wait around so that’s that’s what we find as well so oops so let’s talk about solving this problem okay so we’re going to go through the three key triggers on this and then we’re going to get right into the actionable events as well and show you exactly what you need to do so three triggers the first one is engage how your customers want to be engaged and this is becoming really important 98 of all text messages are open that’s just national stats right now so we respect our text messages more than we respect email and even phone calls the number you know the number of time phone calls just go to voicemail um a lot of people go i don’t know what that number is or i don’t want

to pay attention to that right now and they don’t pick up their phone but they respond to a text message um so 98 of all text messages are open 95 for text messages are open and responded to within three minutes that’s great for us to know and what’s more is consumers are five times more likely to send and receive text messages than phone calls so there’s an entire generation that is hey text me first don’t just call me right and it’s it’s sort of like um i think it was a hint from heloise i saw years ago that basically said finally technology has caught up with decorum why do you think that you should be able to interrupt somebody’s day somebody’s activities what they’re doing and why they’re doing it because you feel that you’re so important that the call should be picked up and that doesn’t matter if it’s a family member a friend um or or again a customer and that kind of thing so businesses obviously we live and die by customers so we should be picking up the phone every single time it rings but um but consumers they they don’t they don’t necessarily have to so if you’re you know if you’re trying to call them back um we’re going to talk about that but it’s going to be you know you’re going to find the text messaging is probably going to be your number one source following up quickly lisa and i have followed up with in 15 minutes go cold we know that but here’s the actual data a follow up within five minutes has been statistically shown to be 20 21 times more effective than calling after 30 minutes so more effective means that um if you follow up within five minutes they’ll answer you because they’re still in that mode um you have a a much higher chance of of booking with them 50 of leads in in in our space say that they

tend to go with the vendor that responds first so that’s important to know as well so and then after five minutes the odds of um qualifying a lead drop by about 80 percent so there is a massive amount of magic that happens within that first five minutes and i know what a lot of people are saying is well that sucks because how am i gonna ever make that happen um some people have these systems dialed in beautifully internally with staff members and payrolls and budgets um i’m going to show you a way that can help that a little bit along now and and minimize uh the need of expanding that budget too much i’m not trying to get anybody fired on this there’s ways that our our office staff can can do other things but in a lot of cases the person that’s answering the phones is also dealing with some dispatch work they’re also dealing with some customer follow-up work they’re dealing with a bunch of stuff so they’ve got a lot of stuff on their plate that’s why if an email comes in right now they’re not going to turn their attention directly to it because they’re on the phone with somebody else they got three other calls to call back perhaps and then they’ve got to go make sure they know where the crews are how is all that going to happen when an email just came in or a text message just came in so i’m going to talk about that as well because that is the the core advantage of levering automation and leveraging ai as well so not just automation but we’re in that world now where we can actually leverage some really cool ai as well so the ideal outcome is this here’s here’s how we run an ideal business every lead um gets an email and a text message back within 30 seconds of them

messaging you or less and someone on the phone with them from your company during business hours within five minutes i know some companies that actually have this set up where when they’re not available they use like a jill’s office or one of those kinds of services to 24 7 somebody is on the phone with them getting back to them from emails and sms and with the right automation that that call center gets a message i know people that have just hired um stay-at-home moms and say hey i’ll i’ll pay you for every booking you you get me so you know twenty dollars thirty dollars whatever that is so if they’re already at home anyways and today they book one tomorrow they book five you know decent decent money there um and it’s just based on when the phones you know or when messages come in and then calling them back and talking to them or messaging them back and talking every lead that’s followed up with at least seven times um uh every lead is is follow up the ideal income is that they’re followed up at least seven times via email sms and phone and this isn’t an or this isn’t an or that’s an and statement until they book or tell you that they’re not interested and that’s the core you continue to follow up with all of your lead sources until they book or tell you they’re not interested slash unsubscribe so and that’s that’s important so do you think if you followed up with every one of your leads in the way we just talked about so within seconds of them reaching out to you and on all platforms on every source um and using automation and assistance to do that and then actually able to get them on the phone within five minutes um or at least having that

booking conversation within five minutes while there’s it’s still fresh in their mind and they haven’t moved on to one of your competitors do you think it would actually help you convert more and we’re not even going to get into scripting right now on ways to actually make that conversation very very psychologically strategic but write that alone just put one in the chat if you think um um if that’s going to uh if that’s going to help you yeah yeah and even yeah we got yeah great thank you we got a bunch of ones coming in bruce said earlier that he was thinking that three to four times um he’ll keep working on the seven to eight times um and good good takeaway bruce um you know thanks for being so engaged you know anybody else who wants to kind of keep chiming in remus monitoring the chat as well uh but yeah absolutely it really is important um the number of touches like even in our marketing it’s like there there is sort of a sense like some people just you know think of those people that turn around and say for example um i’ve got kind of two tangents to go off on here for a quick second one of them is that people say um i’m interested but i’ve got to talk to my wife i’ve got to talk to my husband i’ve got to talk to my boss if it’s commercial i got to think about it i’m going to call around right those people are interested but right now it’s a soft no right or a soft maybe those people need to be stayed in touch with if you go in the world of that didn’t have automation existing what should you be doing with those go if any of you have been involved in multi-level marketing before you know that they all teach you about the tickler file like reach out to somebody then reach out again and reach

out again and it’s never like there’s there’s times that that’s 15 20 times before they go you know what yeah i’m interested now again if it’s done meaningfully well and done in a strategic way it should never come across as a pain in the butt if it comes across as a pain in the butt to to some of them they may not be your ideal client if it comes across as a pain in the butt to a lot of them then your messaging is wrong so it is really a matter of and your timing and your your strategy is off so if you get the strategy right it works brilliantly and there’s ways to stay in touch with people consistently ongoing you know there’s ways to stay in touch with your leads that never converted for for years until they either unsubscribe or finally use your services if it’s done strategically well so we’ll talk about that as well oops let me click over here so i can move along so here’s what it actually looks like notice that we’re talking about carpet cleaner lead pro here so that’s our our tool that we have we have built that that’s built by our team and our company our dev team um and uh um ahmed and and and his uh and his group there’s six of them on that that side of the development team that that work on this for us all the time and continue to build out really really cool concepts that pop into my brain and um that can fit into the technology and the ai flow so but ultimately we’re going to break this down i know it’s really hard to see but we’re just going to kind of walk through this a little bit but um carpet cleaner lead pro allows regardless of lead source a way to message automate communicate stay in touch and um have a better chance of converting your cl your your leads

to clients then then then not having any of this in place or trying to hack together some sort of manual process that normally works for a little bit and doesn’t continue to work after people just stop doing it and it’s it’s it’s if you’re the owner of the business and it’s your job to do it you’ll stop because it just feels grueling if you task it to somebody else unless you monitor it very very specifically they’re going to start slacking it’s better to have it automated and make it super easy for them just to engage so here’s actually one of our clients this is a multi-million dollar carpet cleaning client so here’s their actual math so i’ve kind of blurred their name so you don’t see that but here’s their actual math on this and the math is very very specific they we generated in a month 599 leads um 10 000 total investment they spend a lot of money on on paid ads and and other ad sources and other lead sources and stuff like that so that is their fee with us including all the paid ad fees and the management fees of all of those things generated 599 leads on an average of about 18 a lead in carpet cleaning that’s pretty good um anywhere anywhere around twenty dollars a lead across the board is great uh some some lead sources you’re looking at forty and fifty dollars an actual lead so this is just leave this in the book job this is just the lead um other sources you’re you can get down around 10 12 15 bucks but if you can blend it all in at about um about 20 a lead then you’re doing pretty good so that’s that’s definitely the way to think about it um so and we we break down where they’re coming from and all that kind of stuff as well but if we kind of go through and look at what that is

so conversion rate they were averaging 40 um 39.65 if i remember accurately when we ran the data on them so they averaged 239 bookings in in a month when there’s 599 leads going to them the average ticket is 350 bucks it’s actually just a little bit over 352 something um and it varies different times a year slightly goes up slightly goes down but 350 is a decent mark to aim for um in a home service business carpet cleaning pecifically uh so 83 000 in revenue generated from all of the marketing efforts that we’re involved in that we we can track so there’s ones that we just can’t track but that that ultimately we knew that again of their million dollar business we’re responsible for about that much um driving that much of the business to them so projected roa eight to one and if i tell you that you’re gonna get an eight to one roi for every one dollar you put in you’re gonna get eight dollars back you’re gonna be a happy camper and that comes from you know a really good ticket price and even but i consider that a very low conversion average in the old days low now and i’ll show you why so take the same number 599 leads um so we say that this month here got duplicated it didn’t we’re now we’ve now um upped their actual conversion rate to 65 and we’re still working on increasing that
that may be the cap we’ll see but there’s little psychological elements that we can add in as well that can really help teaching people how to answer the phones better or call back better message better script themselves better things like that there’s ways to

do that but they’re up to 65 um conversion rate now and that’s the important part so if we go back to that previous month where they only got 599 leads but they were able to continue to get the 65 booking rate um that they are now enjoying same average ticket now we’re at 136 000 from the exact same volume of leads and the exact same spend so a 13 to one roi so that difference it’s almost double like it literally is and you just think of it nothing changed but this the percentage of people that booked and that’s that’s the core message here that you need to kind of understand is um and dan kennedy if you guys don’t know who dan kennedy is start following dan kennedy the gentleman almost died a few years ago um and he’s kind of back at it again but i have been personally mentored by dan kennedy over the years um spent a weekend with him at um um in in disney uh him and and the rest of the glazer kennedy um uh gkic it’s called group but dan kennedy writes an amazing amount of books for us for small business owners um on exactly how to do what we need to do and he’s he’s just considered the godfather of direct response marketing and you know customer psychology and just he’s also considered the godfather of harsh truth he does not sugarcoat anything if if what you’re doing is stupid if it’s idiotic he’ll tell you it’s stupid it’ll tell you it’s idiotic he’ll show national campaigns that are just stupid and idiotic he’s been brought in to consult on massive massive massive multi multi multi hundreds of

millions of dollar campaigns and stuff like that and um just told them to throw the whole thing out it’s not even worth looking at start to start again and one of his best comments is the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins and just think about that for a minute so you wonder why again i’m saying like that radio ads oh i can’t afford radio ads but there’s people in the marketplace that can in your own service category that can why can they well they’re able to spend more to acquire a customer well why can they spend more to acquire a customer not necessarily a lead problem it’s a conversion problem and then a pricing and upsell so if you can make enough money by changing the messaging the psychology the delivery the experience everything about your brand that they see becomes more aligned with what they they actually truly want if you can change that and you get more business and it’s not at a discount you now are able to spend more to acquire more customers than the guys at a discount i know companies that went bankrupt getting two in jobs from groupon in carpet cleaning oh my god groupon’s around i’m going to do groupon and they these super deals the super discounts that they have to apply two and three hundred people bought the groupon and it made the company go bankrupt because they did not have the ability to make enough money at that discounted price and wait long enough for the repeat business a year or two down the road you know at full price and not even being attracting the right clients that would pay full price next time so

they’ll always go back to a groupon you’ve basically just gutted your entire business and you’re not able to spend the most to acquire customers so key takeaway right there is if you’ve got your business set up right that’s great so let’s talk about how to implement this thing um so ultimately what we what we call ours is smart forms so smart forms are we all know about website forms but what do we do differently with with with smartphones how what can you do with automation that makes the forms on your website smart so somebody ends up at your website i don’t care how they got there any matter you know from adwords to facebook ads to organic to they saw the side of your truck do you have a door hanger like you know you did postcards there’s a million ways email campaigns anything um just straight search um google my business whatever they land on your website interesting enough your website is con you know psychologically converting enough um personalized well enough tells the right things gives them the right messaging that they go you know what i’m interested i want to reach out to these people so they complete a smart form and we even include the way we do chat as a smart form as well so they complete some sort of call to action and they end up on some sort of thank you page and but where this actually starts to get smart is the automation that can be built into instantly on the back end of when that happens what are all the little things that can be instantly triggered one of them can be even like on the thank you page there’s ways to say hey um you know

there are some clients that like to have people self-book i disagree with that because now one they see your whole schedule they know that you’re free tomorrow which can set up a psychological deterrent well if they’re free tomorrow but they keep telling me they’re amazing that doesn’t make sense to me and it’s a disconnect so depending on the booking app um if they if it can be set up where they can do that um without seeing sort of every opening that might be an option i haven’t found one of those yet but what we do like to suggest is possibly soft booking so it’s like you know hey what what would be the ideal day and time or day and time window you know eight to eight to noon ten to two noon to four two to six what would be the ideal time window and date or day of the week that works best for you if they’re ready to go and have them fill that out as well there’s ways to do that on a thank you page to have them give you a little bit more information after they’ve they’ve asked their question ask them for something else afterwards so don’t make it too opposing all in the front end but ultimately what do we do with smartphone forms so want to make an appointment that should either be a pop-up or taken to a page where it’s a smart form so they fill out a form thinks that they think it’s a normal form that they’re just sending a message and someday you’ll get back to them and it allows you to communicate with them instantly um on the home page ask the expert hey you got any questions at all um we’re here just ask like let’s start making friends here let’s start building a list these should not be dead leads they should all of a sudden be in a lead funnel that you’re actively involved even if it’s the stupidest question you ever heard if they landed

on your website there’s a reason for it and if they’re a potential customer let’s talk to them right well we’re gonna make these smart and then also chat and it’s chat to text not not a two-way chat bot on your website i don’t like two-way chat bots because a lot of times unless you’ve got a full dedicated staff to sit and stare at them um they don’t get communicated fast enough that the person sitting on your website gets frustrated chat to text gets rid of all of that so and then we make all of these smart so what does smart mean smart smart means um smart forms top mean also smart connect so smart connect is basically um the second they fill out the chat um or they fill out the form on the website any one of the forms wherever they are the automation kicks in in a very smart intuitive and ai way so one of the very first things that should happen done properly is you should get a call right so you get a phone call at your office you pick up the phone so i don’t care if you stared at your screen checked your emails saw an alert i don’t care at all your phone rings you pick it up and it it says um you’ve got a you know a lead that just filled out one of your one of your smart forms press one now to connect with them that can happen during business hours and you’re instantly within within that five minute window you are now back on the phone with them and if for any reason they can’t take the call then um it rings and rings and rings hangs up you actually drop a voicemail and the voicemail hey it’s ashley here over at abc carpet cleaning i noticed

you filled out a form and looking for some more information i’d definitely love to connect with you here’s our phone number i’m going to give you a quick message back on on text and email as well so reach out to me whichever way works best for you right there’s a voicemail dropped so and if you can’t take the call at all the phone rings say you’re an owner operator in the field i strongly suggest you have somebody answering your phones all the time even if you’re the guy in the field never have it try to answer on your hip how are you going to be able to talk to the customer or order your coffee at mcdonald’s on the way through while your phone’s ringing it just doesn’t happen and you’ve just lost that person so i suggest you always have somebody answering your phones even if it’s that stay-at-home mom strategy but ultimately you have if you can’t take that call then you definitely want them within 30 seconds they’re gonna get a text message and an email right away and then the customer replies to you by text message boom you now know their channel they reply to you by email boom you now know your channel but you can still continue to influence all of these if they reply to you you know um you know would you like to schedule time on our you know a a service like this just a natural message
this is automated hi it’s ashley this one plum perfect heating and cooling um thank you for reaching out to us via our your for your service call so that could be part of the messaging right and you’re going to get a yes or no the no would mean they want more information no problem

we can reach out to you further answer any questions you have and discuss your needs um yes can again automate open up that form hey tell us tell us sort of when you’re looking at what services you’re looking at um and we’ll find a suitable time and get a hold of you so there’s ways that you can actually make this again ai automated so that you can take the 50 to 60 of the people that might just be coming through a one of just book um out of sort of the cue of needing more influence so that’s part of the ai as well and that can be done through um through email and through the text message done properly so and that’s what we call a soft booking so we talked a little bit about that i don’t need to spend a lot of time on it but basically you’re gonna get sort of their ideal windows of time and days um if they’re saying yes i want to book with you guys i don’t need any more information um and but you know here’s what i need kind of idea so again a lot of times on our um on our outreach forums on our on the website we even just say hey when do you need when do you need this this completed by give us that idea um but again if it’s in the chat and it’s automated uh and you’re not actively engaged with them right away then this could be some of those questions that that kind of go out back and forth a little bit as well um depending on sort of the way you want to use use an ai system like this but ultimately what we’re trying to do is we’re going to get every lead followed up within five minutes or less and if we can do that we’ve we’ve solved that one game that one part of the game now the other part is the automatic lead nurture follow-up what about those you know those people

that’s you know hey i need to talk to somebody or they just they don’t answer back when you message them and you just need to stay in further communication so all of this should alert you so we talk about that where you’re going to get all the alerts um when this happens you’re going to you’re going to know right away you’re going to get an alert with our system you’re going to get alert within the app so the app can be opened on your your desktop and can also be put on anybody’s phone just with the logins um and you’re gonna get the alert in-app just like normal you’re gonna you know if it’s on the desktop you’re gonna get a pop-up in in windows that says hey you’ve got a new chat started whatever you’re also gonna get the email and we can even set it up where you get a text message just on your phone saying hey pop back over to your carpet cleaner
lead pro you’ve got somebody looking to talk to you right whether that’s email whatever and we can actually even have it where all your phone calls root through there as well and then bounce to your main phone um there’s there’s tools that we’ve built that way where if you don’t answer the phone they end up with a voicemail message as well so if it rings so many times and you didn’t pick it up it’s in the system so there’s ways to play that game as well but ultimately what’s automatic lead nurture what are again that five to seven times we’re talking about so if you know if you’re actively able to sort of say hey yes this person booked that’s you know that’s a trigger that says so i don’t need to you know to ask them if they’d like to book anymore right um if this person didn’t book hasn’t been communicated with yet you talked to them but they said you know they didn’t say they’re not interested it wasn’t a hard no it

was let me think about it let me talk something those are the people that need to be dripped on what are some of the ideas on ways to drip on them showing them customer testimonials telling them your story the history why you started the business telling them about your technicians um showing any sort of charity events and awards that you’ve got as well um talking showing some recent projects that’s a reason to stay in touch with people for a long period of time if you know what they’re interested in or even if you don’t say in the carpet cleaning world say um you don’t take the you know you can take the automation to any level you want hey they were interested in carpet cleaning let’s talk about carpet cleaning from now on or you can just say hey once every two to three weeks they’re a lead that never booked they never got moved into the book column um let’s just stay in touch with them let’s every two or three weeks hey here’s a recent client we just did a cleaning for not sure if you’re still interested in the cleaning or not but i just wanted to share with you some of the results that we’re getting and their comments their feedback so not always a review but they’re just their testimony just their feedback that you got through the feedback system you want to get the clients comments and you can share one of those those case studies you know once or twice a month that works as a great email um just to show them hey we just did up some upholstery hey we just some tile hey we just did some you know um hardwood floor cleaning again for some of our other clients that are on the the call i know uh john wiley’s here and that he’s uh that’s a you know vehicle wrap and sign business so any of the carpet cleaners on the call if you need that i would

suggest you reach out to to john wiley at don’t drive naked they do amazing work but what their their clients showing them hey we just did a fleet for a ben franklin plumbing outlet here in town or we just you know on and that’s a reason to stay in touch with them that’s a reason to message them another messages are called spears so spears are messages that are just they’re usually text messages or a voice drop and they’re very very simple and specific hey i haven’t heard back from you um you reached out to us on our website i haven’t heard back from you are you still looking to go ahead with um getting some work done question mark very specific very short and normally gets a yes or no and again that yes or no can be put into other flows there’s ways to go really really deep with this um and we do that with with clients that want to expand their the the usage of the of their carpet cleaner lead pro for most of our clients it’s just a matter of let’s get some communication in front of these people let’s nurture a little bit longer and let you guys jump into the conversation but that’s what automatic lead nurture long-term follow-up is so if you think about it now we’re back to that original all the different ways that leads come in and now we’ve taken every single one of our lead sources and for no matter where they come from and i’ll show you a couple of new exciting ones as well and you put them in to the funnel you get alerted that’s
this whole section here they get the smart forms and the smart connect and you got the ai automation routing things back and forth properly based on what they say part of that ai is sentiment analysis so they don’t have to come back and say yes they can go sure yep nope whatever and again

ai is smart enough to understand the general sentiment of that um and there’s even ways to say hey if it didn’t get the sentiment at all if they said something that is totally off-base then hey i’m sorry um you know didn’t quite understand that or move them in a different path entirely and try and get them to actually give you a yes or no um but one of the newest things that we’ve added into carpet cleaner lead pro is we’ve worked with google to be able to get the google chat um and facebook messenger facebook messenger integration um is is is doable it’s it it’s easy it’s an api and facebook made that available as soon as they opened up messenger for for business within a few months after messenger for business they allowed the api it’s not great api but it works and allows you to have all your messages coming to one platform so they all come in one place you’re not bouncing around and you can message them back right from that platform um google chat is cool so it’s now called google google business profile um not google my business you used to be gmb now is ggbp but ultimately if you turn that on the only way to turn that on is you have to normally is you have to download the app on your phone so if you’ve got an office person they have to download the app on their personal phone um and then and connect the app to your google business profile logging in and all that kind of stuff and they have to have managers access and all that and then you end up with this button right here that says message and google’s saying that they might open up the chat to even be allowed to be done on on from the google listing on on desktop but right now it’s only on the mobile devices but 60 to 70 of our clients are starting on mobile anyways

so they see your listing they know your name they want to chat they can message you right there and that chat integration is one of our newest apis that we spend a ton of money on um but we’ve got that integrated as well so anybody who wants to chat right from there um pulls in and we’ll automatically start to start the conversation for you give you that window of opportunity to get back to them and um and let them know that at least hey yeah i’ve got it we’re gonna get back to you as soon as we possibly can and here we’re chatting to you on your phone we’re chatting to you right here we’re not you don’t need to be leaving you know staying on the screen on the platform on our website and things like that so um pop in the chat if there’s any questions you have at this point does that make sense are we are we sort of tracking you understand sort of how the world has changed and you know the kinds of things that we need to be looking at because we really really want to start dealing with the fact that people need faster answers business can’t be slow we can’t have messaging people back this thing that happens once or twice a day it has to happen instantly and um and even in off hours you can have it where hey nobody’s a you know um we’ll get back to you as soon as somebody’s back in the office kind of idea um there’s ways to make all that happen so yeah just put in the chat if you’re if that makes sense to you guys so just put a one in the chat as i always say if that works or if you got any comments that’s great as well awesome cool okay so we seem to be tracking well on this so that’s good so any question you guys have as we’re getting close to the end here um just respect your time we’re almost at an hour so you know how these go but remember what we’re talking

about um leads that are not followed up with 50 minutes go cold a follow-up within five minutes is 21 times more effective than calling after 30 minutes so waiting 30 minutes and calling is just all stats across across the service industry in general find that you’re 21 times more effective to have an engaging conversation that can turn into a job than um waiting 30 minutes 50 of leads will go to a the vendor that responds first so if you respond if the vendor responds first and they actually know what they’re doing in that communication then then that’s important and statistics show that 98 of all text messages are open 85 95 of all text message opened within three minutes so these are really key stats right here as well that we know that you have to be talking to people that are interested in you within seconds to minutes period one thing i do want to say about um about chat messaging so if you’re old school like me having run businesses for years you understand the value of a phone call a lead is normally a phone call and the ones that get the most priority the ones that call in and talk to you everything else is sort of yeah i’ll get around to that that’s that other channel but people that call in um i know what to say i know how to influence them i know how to sell them i know how to you know answer their objections and all of that kind of stuff as soon as it becomes chat or an email chain back and forth ninety percent of that knowledge goes out the window how can you influence them when you talk to them you can influence them with psychology you can influence influence them with neuro-linguistic programming there is ways to influence people and say hey just to get them to get one thing out of their mind and something else into their mind right so

if they think that all carpet cleaning is 99 and you can you start off a conversation on a script saying hey you know thanks for calling um you know how did you hear about us or were you referred to us by a friend no no i just found you online okay that works too you’ve just told them that most people get referred to you which changes the influence and then you say um okay well let me tell you why most people who call do choose us to be their carpet cleaner you state that in the beginning of the conversation somewhere once you’ve gotten some of their information well when you turn around at the end and you’re not 99 and they think that that’s the price that carpet cleaning should be hopefully what you’ve told them is why most people call choose you and now at the end of the call they have that cognitive dissonance they they um they can’t understand why you know their brain pauses for me to go i just was expecting like this commodity price i thought all carpet cleaners were 99 and they don’t get that well you’ve influenced them with these little strategic conversations that’s hard to do on on text you have to learn how to have a meaningful conversation on text in short one and you know one sentence two sentence blurbs and you have to have that scripted ahead of time so even your staff that are answering these need to understand that when it’s not somebody’s just ready to book and they need more information you’ve got to find a way to either get them on the phone or you’ve got to find a way to automate that information back and forth have you checked this video out on our website have you seen this have you you know wobbled there’s ways like that there’s ways that we can actually help you um if you’re having a problem with that teach them so you don’t just answer the you know how much for a 5×7 area rug

5723 thank you that is entirely the wrong way to to to sell by chat just so you know so well you know do you think this will make money for you will it help you um convert more leads and grow your business if you had systems like this set up yep just put one in the chat if that makes sense to you as well if you think you can actually grow your business um just getting some automations in place cool we got a bunch of ones coming in awesome so um yeah and i i i don’t just believe it i know it i want to show you an example another example um why i do know this so recent client case study first quarter on carpet cleaner lead pro october to december 2021 right so clients been with us a while but they added we added carpet cleaner lead pro um it’s um it’s typically an upsell in our service some people um it’s part of their package but a lot of times you know the development of it different there’s different levels of carbocation elite pro as you saw when i talked about the way we can scale the automation to extremes there’s some levels of that that are um again more involved by our team and not just the base price because we’re actually creating and recoding a whole bunch of stuff but um just so you know for that software it’s a software as a service that we we provide but again it’s just a matter of figuring out your own automation if you’re not having a conversation with us about that but lead conversion was exactly 31 um and we were able to change that to 65 percent and growing so not the same client we talked about before this is just a new client that we’re talking about here this is their um

they’re much smaller client 367 leads in a quarter and that’s their total investment over a quarter so just over two thousand twenty two hundred dollars a month um to generate that many leads and again their average ticket is quite a bit higher they’re in a higher end area they’re really good upselling it’s 415 bucks um so that’s really good in the car anything over 400 in carpet cleaning as an average ticket um in residential is really good so we do i’ve got some clients that are way higher than that but 400 is is a really good benchmark to aim towards as you grow your business so we’re talking 98 000 in work in that three months 15 times roi which is a great roi and um so the new revenue captured versus what based on their previous conversion rate prior to sort of implementing all of these things because everything was just manual before it was the owner following up at the end of the day um trying to get on the phone with people he was in the truck with one you know technician there’s another crew on the road and basically most of it was just done on the hip and having some of this automation um and and all that and actually stay-at-home mom was was
brought in to uh to to answer some of the calls and messaging stuff like that that’s a net gain over that quarter of 51 000 that wouldn’t have happened if he’d maintained his 31 um level so as i said at the beginning i don’t think you have a lead problem i think you likely have a conversion
problem again unless you’re brand new you need both you need to generate more and more lead sources and again grassroots and guerrilla marketing and

digital marketing and paid marketing and let the seo grow and do all that kind of stuff let your gmb start to to grow um start generating those leads and all that kind of stuff just and repeats you know keep mailing your database and your strategic partner sources there’s just all kinds of really cool stuff that you need to do when you’re just starting out um i usually say never stop it just keep adding to it over time but there’s grassroots stuff that’s needed to get to just really get awareness but for the most part anybody who’s been business for a year or two or more you don’t have a lead problem you specifically have a conversion problem you can always add more lead sources if you can afford them and you can afford them when you convert better so and it’s easily solved so that’s it that’s all we’re going to talk about today uh we always say let’s connect if you’re looking at just sort of the automation side of the platform we do on selective cases carve that out and make that available if you’ve got a bunch of the other stuff um already in place and you’re just really going dude i need this i need what you’ve got you just told me all about i need that part plugged in i’ve got other stuff figured out perfectly most of our clients what we basically say are or people that you know reach out to us is schedule a call um you’ll talk to reema first you’ll get a bit of information on your your company it’ll go back to our research team we’ll do an entire deep dive on you and your competitors all that kind of stuff see what everybody’s doing in your marketplace and and and look at all of that and then it all lands on my desk we schedule a time for a one hour consultation so you don’t pay my 500 an hour consulting rate you get it for yet as a complimentary service so between that and the research we do and all the

material we give you and the step-by-step plan that we hand you on how to sort of overcome a lot of the obstacles in your business not just um you know maybe a bad website maybe bad ads maybe you know you know not positioning yourself well we’ve had clients have come on they’ve been three and four years in the business i’m sorry leads and people that we’ve talked to that still had white vans with magnets on the side of it um and weren’t actually branding themselves in every neighborhood they were in properly and that alone can grow your business a lot more than just a white van with a sticker on the side so um things like that so we talk about all of that we just literally tear your business apart and rebuild it on the way to become you know what we promise is your your brand your authority and your visibility over time needs to become the strongest player in your marketplace and there’s ways to do that so um anyways um and rima’s going to get mad at me i’m sure because she would have wanted me to drop a button in the chat a lot sooner that if anybody is interested in scheduling a strategy session click that button um if that that’s that’s for anybody who’s not one of our clients yet um if you’re a client you want to hop on a call and talk more about this you know this type of thing um just you know either reach out to reema reach out to our help desk you guys all know that um and um you can get on the schedule to have a conversation uh and things like that but if if if you’re brand new to carpet cleaner marketing masters don’t know much about what we do we just we just help you run your business better um and we give a lot of great free advice and if it’s time to work with us then we’d love to have you as a customer if it makes sense um and some marketplaces and

some clients it just doesn’t make sense but if it does make sense we’ll let you know that as well if there’s any information that you need any questions any final questions pop them in the chat if i miss them i’ve got to balance shortly um but if i if i miss them then um marimo will collect them and we’ll get back to you by email uh so just make sure you put your email in the chat as well and um yeah we’ll we’ll stay in touch if there’s anything we can help you with great again next month we’re going to be talking a lot more about the um a lot of those grassroots strategies and the outreach strategies that i again everybody had to do back in the day when there was only the yellow pages and nothing else uh but nowadays a lot of businesses shy away from business owners shy away from doing the leg work the feet to the pavement work and what i suggest is that not only do you do it you never stop and we’ll talk about what those things are ways to you know influence the marketplace and continue to become that authority and stuff like that so we’ll talk about that next month we’re wrapping up for this month hopefully you guys got a lot of great information and understanding about the technology that’s changing our world and the way you can use you know smart forms and smart connect
and messaging two-way messaging and instant replies and ai and all that kind of stuff to just generate more and more and more conversions to the leads you’re already getting you