Transcription
If you own a home service or contracting business, most of you are leaving four to five figures a month, maybe even six on the table because you're not good at answering this. So, in this video, we're going to go over the exact script that my businesses use on the front end at the first time our business is called in and how it can be the difference between closing 20% of your leads and 25, 30, 40, or even 50% depending on what your trade is. So, let's get started.
[Music]
If you don't know me, my name is Steve Hunaker. I own multiple home service businesses. My main one is a seasonal lighting business that does $400,000 a month in our peak season. And then I've also previously owned a junk removal business in the past that I've since gotten rid of. And I'm the founder and owner of the Home Service Accelerator, which at the time of filming this video has over 400 home service businesses in the program that have all taken control of their marketing without hiring agencies to run their Facebook and Instagram ads, optimizing their Google business pages themselves, and are running their own signage and branding campaigns. So, I know a thing or two about home service businesses because I own a couple home service businesses, and I have access to a lot of the inner workings of a lot of different home service businesses. So, let's get started on today. We're going to talk about how you're answering the phone with your leads.
So, most of you guys businesses are operating something like this. You get an inbound lead and your phone, you get a text from whatever platform you're running the leads on, or you're getting an email that says you have a new lead and then you go in and you manually call them on your cell phone. Your office calls them and tries to connect with them once and then if they don't answer, great. You move on. You send them a text saying, "Hey, it's Tim with so-and-so painting. Hope you get back to me, whatever." And most of them don't. Or the other side is someone calls into your business. You're either on a job or your receptionist is at your at your building or whatever else. You're hoping you answer every call, but if we looked at your call logs, you probably have a lot of red on your call logs, meaning that you have a lot of money that is not going into the machine.
But in this video specifically, we're going to talk about when you do get them on the phones. If you want to see a video about the systems and processes that can instantly connect you to leads, there are going to be other videos on my channel that talk about that. This is going to be specifically when you make contact with your prospects.
So, the first thing you want to do when you're answering the phone, whether it's you or your office staff, is you need to build operating systems just like you do in the field for whoever is managing the phone. And so, I've broken it down this way. This is directly scripted from my office staff for my lighting business. And it goes down this way. The first thing you want to do is you want to go over the greeting and intro. This should be the same greeting every single time you answer the phone. You need to have uniform processes in this part of the business so that you can replicate them, thus knowing that you can get a similar result because you're doing the same thing and your office is saying the same thing every time. So, greeting and intro is the first piece, right?
And so, before we get into that though, we want to make sure that we have a clear goal of what the objective of your inbound calls are. And this can change depending on what type of business you have. Let me give you an example. The way a roofer who sells a five-figure product answers their phone and moves that prospect along in their sales process is completely different than the way a window cleaner or a pool cleaning company answers their phone. The roofer is trying to schedule an in-person appointment in most cases, and the window cleaner or the pool cleaning company is trying to close the sale on the phone in most cases. So, the first thing you need to do is you actually need to understand what's the goal of these inbound phone calls. Are you selling an in-person estimate? Are you trying to book and sell jobs over the phone? Again, a window cleaner is going to run this a lot different than a roofer. But with all this being said, know the goal in mind before you go any further. Are you trying to sell them on the phone in a one-call close? Are you trying to book a sales appointment, an in-person estimate, or something like that? Or do you need more info from the customer? Regardless, the reason this is so important is this scenario here.
Let's say on the second paragraph, let's say 10 calls are coming in from inbound leads, right? So, these are people calling your business from your Google Business Page, your Facebook ads, whatever else that have showed some level of awareness or interest in your business. Let's say of this 10, five are disqualified and the other five would be called qualified leads. So maybe it's telemarketers, maybe it's people who thought that you would cost $2 and a pack of Snickers to do the job, whatever else. So you pre-qualify them out. So let's just say five people that are calling your business actually have the potential to be a customer that's going to give you money. In most cases of this five, I would say two are going to be what we're calling laydowns. Whether they're from referrals, whether they're from gosh knows whatever else, they saw you somewhere, friend of a friend, whatever else. They don't want to shop around. You got lucky. They called you. You have a service they want to do and they're a laydown. Let's call those two.
The difference here is your process of your sales, your phone script, your in-person estimates, all that other jazz is the difference between how many of the rest of these five qualified leads you close. Do you close one? Do you close two out of the rest of these five? Do you close all three? Chances of you closing all three are very slim because that would be that's sideways. But the chances of you closing all three would be very slim because that would mean you have a 100% close rate on your qualified leads. Probably not the case. But the difference between closing two out of five and maybe three or four out of five is the difference between you having a massive growing business and a business that just stagnates over the month because all you're selling is laydowns.
So, let's go back up to the top. So, let's start here. And you could also copy and paste my script and you can put it in ChatGPT and make your own. This is just what we train our office staff on how to answer the phone and all that jazz. Especially in the beginning, and then we let them kind of put their own twist on it as it goes along. But in the beginning, it's very simple. The second the phone rings, we answer it on the first ring. If my office is busy, if they're doing something else, drop everything, answer the phone. And the first thing is really simple: "Thank you for calling [Your Company Name]. This is [Your Name]. How can I help you today?" Very, very simple. That's the first thing.
Depending on your trade, that person's going to say something like, "Oh, I'm just looking for a window quote. I'm just shopping around." Or, "Yeah, how much would it cost to do this?" And most of the time, this is the part where your your staff is going to be trained to deflect and make sure that you have everything in the right spot without seeming like a salesperson or anything like that. And so, the next step here, if they say, "Yeah, you know, we want to get our windows done. We want to get our lights done." Whatever it is. And so, typically what we say here is the customer's going to tell us what they want. "How can I help you today?" They're going to insert whatever thing they have a question about. The receptionist is going to briefly answer that and they're going to say, "Cool. Let me make sure that you're in the right place. I'm just gonna have some questions for you. We make sure we can get you dialed in." So, first thing we do in this scenario is, "Yes, we do your windows. Cool. Let me grab some info from you. We can do all that jazz."
Then, we're going to go straight to qualifying the lead. Now, this is really crucial for businesses that have a high average ticket like mine. If you're a window cleaner and things like that, you can probably skip this step if you have a low-budget trade or like a low average ticket trade. But for my roofers, my Christmas light guys, my plumbers, electricians, this is where you would mention your visit charge, um, anything like that. For us, I'm going to go off of my business's stuff. This is the reason the channel is so successful because I'm still actively running my business. So, I'm not sharing this stuff to you because I think it might work. I'm sharing it with you because this is what works in mine. So, we always go great and we go right into qualifying them financially. And so, what we say is, "Cool, we just want to make sure you uh are in the right spot." Our first question is always, "Great. Have you ever had Christmas lights installed on your home before?" The reason we ask that question is because if a person has paid for Christmas lights before, they're going to fall into two camps. Now, this is very market-specific. This is very trade-specific, but I'm just sharing you the method behind my madness. If someone has paid for Christmas lights before, they're going to say, "Yeah, I've done it before." Our next question is always going to be, "Cool. Was it like, uh, you know, did you use a company in the past? Why are you looking to change?" And this is for us to determine whether they paid the high school kid $20 last year to do it and they didn't like the result, or if they've paid a company $2,000 in the past before and they just didn't like the service because that's going to drastically change the way the next part of the conversation goes.
So, then this customer talks about that. We go, "Perfect. Before we get started, I do want to let you know that we have a $1,000 install minimum. Does that work within your budget?" Now, we've massaged this a little bit more and all that jazz, but I'm just bullet-pointing it for you here. The reason we ask that is because you have to remember what my business deals with. My business deals with a ton of call volume in a two-month period. So, we have to get the qualified leads as fast as possible in the right place, which in this case is to our salespeople, and not send our salespeople a bunch of tire-kickers and broke people. So, we're way more aggressive on the pre-qualification than most businesses are. In this case, for most of you guys, I would venture more into like, "Cool, just letting you know like this service range and ranges from this to that if you want to do that if you sell a higher ticket product, or you can just skip this entirely if you just want pure lead volume all the way through."
So, now that we've pre-qualified them with the minimum, we go down to if they've qualified, yes. If they say, "Oh my gosh, that $1,000 is crazy. I paid a kid $200 to do it last year. I just wanted somebody better here." Then we will politely end the call and thank them for reaching out. If you can find somebody in your market that is like more of a fly-by-night guy that you think is a good human being, but they're probably not insured or anything like that jazz, maybe you connect them to that person, whatever else. But most of the time, we are politely trying to get off the call because in our business, we're never going to turn somebody that is shocked at a $1,000 minimum into a massively paying customer. Maybe one out of every 200 you potentially could sell into it. But the difference is the amount of operational lag that would happen to my sales team. If we sent every inbound lead through to go do in-person estimates, they would never be able to service the good ones in time. They'd be out running out to quotes. They'd have a 5% close rate. So we have to pre-qualify on the phone. So after that, we could we end the call and go there.
After that, we go straight into expectation setting and explaining the process. So, this is typically how we start it: "Wonderful. Just to give you a background on how our process works because we're a little bit different than something you might have worked in the past. Here's how it goes." So, now we're going straight into our process and telling the customer this is our process, not what you want because you think you know everything and you think whatever. We're telling them what our process is and making sure that that's exactly what they're looking for because there's a lot of nuance in Christmas lights. We want to make sure that they know exactly what they're getting into. So we do a talk track that's very similar to this: "We're a full-service end provider. After this call, I'll set you up with our designers. They'll meet you at your home, walk the property, and create a design based on your vision." Because we've already pre-qualified them on price, we already know that they're ready to play ball. Now, we're kind of selling them on the dream and the process of the next step.
Then, the customer is going to say like, "Yeah, I was actually just looking to get my roofline done." Or, "Oh, we have a few trees we want to get done." Boom. This is the menu of options that they're able to read from to provide the customer. "Yes, we do this. No, we do that. Blah blah blah blah."
Let me give you a little side note here as I'm erasing. The more technically sound your phone person can be, the better you're going to convert inbound calls to quotes. And so, what happens to a lot of businesses is they just throw like a VA on the phone or they just throw like somebody on the phone like just answer the phone, give me the good leads, whatever else. And what happens is if you go back and you listen to the recordings of some of your calls, the amount of technical questions that get asked to this position is probably a lot more than you think. And so, this position at least needs to know baseline what you do and don't do so that they can massage the prospect and get them to the next step. So, here's a few examples for us. A lot of time people will call in and they'll say like, "Oh yeah, can we do other can we do like uh different colors on our roofline?" Like, "Okay, can we do red and blue?" Yes. Can we do red, green, and white? Yes. What about on the trees? Can we do red, green, and blue on the trees? The answer to that question is actually no. And so, my office staff has to have a decent understanding of the system and processes so they don't tell this prospect at their first touch with our business something that is incorrect. Get them excited about something that we can't do or anything like that. And so, there's little nuance there. So, I highly recommend training this position more on the technical side of things than you think you need to because prospects on the first end sometimes are more educated than you think on the process and they're going to ask more technical questions and you don't want to have that failure point which is, "Oh, let me go ask the owner and then get back to you." And then you have to hope that she gets to you in time or he gets to you in time, asks you the question and then gets back to that customer, connects with them and then finishes the job. Even just getting back on the phone with them is going to be a massive failure point. So, the more you can actually qualify this position that's answering the phones and have them have an understanding of what you're selling, the better off you're going to be.
So, after that, we go through all this jazz and we walk them through what to expect next. So, "Once your design's finalized, we're going to provide you with a quote. After you approve it, our team will assign you an install date." So, now my salesperson doesn't have to go through all of this nonsense with them again and they can just focus on what matters is the sale. They don't have to go through all the questions and all this jazz. This prospect has been kind of primed for what to expect on the sales process before the sales people ever come out.
Typically, this is the point of the call where the customer might have a shred of an objection, a question that might seem like a little combative or anything else. And this is where we go to the credibility reassurance section. So, for example, a customer might say like, "Well, are you guys just like hanging lights from the store? Like, I don't know, like do custom fit. What does that mean?" Whatever our process is. Whatever your process is, you know, the type of questions you get at this point in the call. So, I've given a canned response for my team so that they're replicating the same thing every time. They don't back themselves into a corner on the conversation and start having a conversation about something they may not be an expert on.
With the credibility reassurance for us, it goes, "We provide all the lights, professional grade, custom fit to fit your home properly. Our installers are fully insured, licensed, bonded, and so you're always covered. You'll be getting the best quality and peace of mind from a business that does just Christmas lights. A lot of other businesses that do other ancillary tasks, other things like that, do Christmas lights on the side. It can be really dangerous. We want to make sure that you know that we cross all of our T's and dot all of our I's from a safety perspective and we take really good care of our guys. So, you are in the right place if that's important to you."
So, I didn't put all that in here because I for the sake of time, I didn't want to bore you guys with a bunch of text, but this is where the customer goes, "Great, that sounds awesome. Here's what I'm looking for." And so, this is where the receptionist or that position is going to take notes for your sales team. And so, typically the customer might ask about it or you can lead them to that. So, with all that being said, they know the minimum now. They know exactly what you do. They know where you do commercial-grade custom-cut displays and all that jazz. If the customer is still on the phone, they're a pretty good opportunity. They know what our sales process is. They know what they're getting into.
Now, we're going to grab the customer's kind of wish list on the phone briefly so the sales people can have a little bit more understanding of what they're getting into. And so, we ask the prospect what areas of the home they're looking to do this year, what scope of work they're looking to do. So, if you're a roofer, a plumber, if you're a backyard design, display creator, whatever it is, just insert whatever possible things you do here and get nice bullet points of what this customer is looking to do. And so, we take notes here, we do all that jazz, and we get it dialed in.
After that, this is the really important part. Do not let this person get off the phone without gathering all of their information. Your receptionist, your office staff, whatever it is, should be grabbing all of the info you need to make it a qualified lead in the CRM on the phone. Do not send the customer a link to fill out themselves. You'll have a 50% failure rate right there. Gather it on the phone. "Cool. What was your first and last name? Great. What's the best phone number to reach you at? What's the address? Email, everything else." They've already been pre-qualified above. The reason this is so important is maybe this person isn't an amazing like maybe this person isn't amazingly excited right now, but now we've gathered info, we've put them in our CRM, they've obviously opted in, all that jazz, and now we can actually put them into our marketing database, whatever else. So, they'll be added to email nurtures and all that jazz and keep going.
So, then from there, this is very nuanced for whatever business is listening. You're going to go one of two routes here. If you're selling on the phone, you're going to sell the job on the phone. If you're selling an estimate, an in-person estimate on the phone, I highly recommend giving your receptionist or your office staff the ability to instantly book appointments on your sales team's calendar or your estimator's calendar. Do not let this be a failure point. Do not say, "Yeah, let me get you in touch with Mark. Let me get you in touch with Tim." And then you guys can coordinate times. Find a way to allow the customers to instantly book this estimate on that salesperson's calendar because your no-show rate will be higher if the customer is not choosing their most ideal spot. Your cancellation rate will be higher. And if it takes a lot of time to get there, every hour that passes between this phone call and when your salesperson gets out there or gets on the phone with them is going to be an hour or time that your competitor can get their little grubby little paws in and finish selling for you. And you don't want that. And so, gather that info, either sell it on the phone if you're a small a small average ticket, or instantly book with a calendar invite the sales process, the sales appointment, all of that jazz for that sales rep, for you, the owner. Give that prospect a tangible calendar invite on the phone so they can check it off their list and move on to the next thing. You'd be shocked at how many of your leads, if you're just connecting them to a salesperson, fail to actually create an appointment because now you're hoping to get the customer on the phone again. And then time's passing and they don't remember you versus the other company versus whatever else. That is the most important part.
So, now we're at the final part. Customer's got the appointment. This should have all happened in less than five minutes, five, six minutes at most. Uh, some customers are chatty Cathy, so they might take a little bit longer, but you want to have a uniform close. So, this is how we close on every call. So, "Perfect. I've got everything I need. Here's what will happen next. I'm going to connect you with a designer if you just instant booked that. Great. Our receptionist will make an intro. But then remember, the appointment's already been made. So, now they're just introing the designer. All that jazz. The salesperson. We call them designers. And you go from there." Or if you're a different alternative and you're not instant booking for whatever reason. "If you're home, they may be able to swing by today. I'm going to connect you with the salesperson. Excuse me. I'm going to connect you with the designer. We'll see if we can get them out today and get you knocked out. Otherwise, you'll see them within a day or so."
This is crucial because this tells you that I'm not just telling you in the other videos that I think speed to lead is a cool little concept, but I'm not implementing it. I am implementing speed to lead. If you see this script right here, I am trying to get my salespeople out same day in these cases. Same day. Because I know the data. The faster you can get this thing done for the customer, the higher your chances are of closing somebody where price is not their number one concern. And if price is not their number one concern, their other concerns are always going to be speed, reliability, your brand, and the way you make them feel. Like, this is the type of customer you want. And so, do not make them wait. Find a way to get out there and finish the job as fast as possible or close them on the phone if you're one of those businesses.
This is what I'm talking about in all my other videos. I don't just say this for my health. I mean it. Speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. Give you an example. I got connected with a luxury hotel today because my friend's dating the GM there or something like that. He said, "Hey, Steve, my girlfriend just got an estimate for Christmas lights on their hotel. I told her, 'You guys do that?' Um, do you want me to connect her with you?" I said, "No, let me put you in a group chat. That'll put you directly with Kyle, our salesperson." That was at 10:00 a.m. today. We were out there at 1:00 p.m. today doing the estimate. It is September. Like, speed matters. What do you think the reaction of that customer was? That prospective customer was when we said, "Oh yeah, it's 10 a.m. We can be out there by 1." What do you think her reaction was? It was, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing. You guys are so fast." Stop trying to look busy to like somehow build clout for yourself. Like some guys say like, "Oh, I don't want to look desperate by getting out there fast." No one thinks Amazon is desperate by getting you your package fast. No one thinks the credit card companies are desperate by instantly approving you for $10,000 on a credit card without ever filling out an application. No one cares. People want results now. And people with money want results now and 10 minutes ago. So, you have to build the system and process to give speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed if you want to attract customers that aren't just tire-kickers and just going for the cheapest price. It seems really simple, but it's amazing how many businesses take a day or two to get out to do estimates while they have no jobs on their schedule. So, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. You do not look desperate when you're fast. You look competent. Let me repeat that. You being fast in every step of the sales process does not make your business look desperate. It makes your business look resourceful and competent. Get that out of your head that you need to like look busier for these people. It's not it's not how business works. Trust me.
Um, then boom, we friendly close here. All that jazz. "Thanks again for calling Val Christmas. Have the best day ever. I'm going to connect you there. Done." That's the process.
So, on the phone, let me wrap it up. Speed to answer. Answer on the first ring if possible. Get them the answers as fast as possible. Instantly book this process. Pre-qualify the customer. Get them in the next step of the sales process. Whether that's an in-person quote or whether that's a virtual quote. Move the opportunity along as fast as humanly possible in your sales process. Don't let days go by between each step. What I mean by each step is inbound lead. Now the lead replies. Now the lead wants to have a quote, whether it's virtual or in-person. Now the person gets the virtual quote or in-person quote. Now that quote's being followed up on and being pushed and nudged to close. Then the job gets done. Those are each stage of your sales process. Minimize the amount of time it takes between each stage and watch what happens to your business's topline and bottom line at the end of the month. I promise you, you'll be more profitable and your revenue will be a lot higher.
So, if you like this video, please feel free to subscribe to the channel. If you want to join the Home Service Accelerator, which is what my logo is on my shirt, and join the other 400-something other home service businesses that are in there currently right now running their own Facebook ads without an agency, optimizing their Google Business SEO by themselves without an agency, cranking their automations and CRM setups and all of that jazz in-house without paying some guy who sits in an office all day and has never ran a home service business in their life. The application will be in the comments and the application's in the description as well. We do have an application process. Not everybody will get accepted. You have to meet a certain revenue criteria and you also have to meet a few other things that we talk about on the process. But if you do want to join the Home Service Accelerator, book here. If not, please feel free to keep watching the channel. Click subscribe. Follow me on Instagram. Follow me on X, aka Twitter. And I'll see you guys in the next video. Thank you so much for watching.