Transcription
If you have a home service or contracting business, the chances are the majority of you are looking for the next silver bullet of advertising to get your phone to ring even more. But what if I told you that the answer to a lot of your job booking problems comes from the system you actually have from answering the phone, getting them in the CRM, and putting them actually out for close.
So, in this video, I'm going to go over the full breakdown of the phone system I use, the CRM systems I use, and then how I actually move the process along so I'm able to track and attribute where all of my leads are coming from so I can more accurately measure the performance of advertising campaigns, but on top of that, get a higher close rate on my jobs. So, let's begin.
[Music]
So, let me start here and you tell me if this sounds familiar. All of your calls are being routed to an iPhone or an Android phone that you either have in your pocket or you answer and you try to just book leads, book jobs all the time or maybe it's going to an office phone or your receptionist or somebody has a phone themselves or maybe you're a little bit more advanced. You have a phone system of some form but when your calls are coming in they're not being tagged properly based on the different things that you're actually advertising in.
So in my business, let me run you through how mine works. So I just signed up recently. I'm not affiliated with them at all. This is just purely I think their product is fantastic. I just signed up with Open Phone. Their name now is Quo Quo. And the reason I like Open Phone is every time I signed up for VIP systems or like voice over the internet protocols, I think is what they stand for. I found that they were extremely clunky and not user-friendly. And I just wanted something that I can turn and burn, give my office staff access to, and they could answer calls via an app on their personal phones and on the computer and the quality not be terrible.
And so this is how it works in my business. When I do a yard sign, I go into my open phone platform and I buy a phone number specifically for yard signs. And then I assign that phone number to myself, the office staff, and whatever else. And then the office staff gets like the first call from it. So, for example, I have Jess over here and then I have Natalie over here. And so, they both when the calls come in from those yard signs, it says on the on the screen, yard sign, inbound call. And so, they answer the phone that way. And then all of the calls that come in from that forwarding number that's only on our yard signs are then tagged in all of our systems. So, when that job or that quote eventually closes, I'm able to turn around and be like, "Oh, that came from a yard sign." Instead of manually tracking it.
In the past, we had to manually track this. Is we had to go in and tag like everything because we were just putting our generic phone number on our yard signs that were going in customers yards and then we were just using a Google voice number for all the public facing yard signs. So again, there's distinction there. So that's just one example.
Another example is like when I run a Facebook ad and on the Facebook ad they fill out the form everything else I have a phone number at the end when they click when the client clicks submit form right at the end I have want instant support or want to talk to someone now and then I give the client a phone number that they can instantly call in and get instant gratification. And so what happens there is in the past I was just giving my generic phone number. And so what was happening is sometimes people were calling into that phone number and then it looked like it was coming from our organic line or maybe the phone number that was on our website, the phone number that's on our Google business page or something like that as opposed to being tracked at like the final page when they fill out a Facebook ad form where at the end of it it says like you know call us now. So now when that number call gets called it's tagged in my system as that's the forwarding number there and whatever.
So in my business right now I think I have six or seven of these individual phone numbers and they're broken down like this. I have the generic yard sign phone numbers. I have the branded and people's yard sign phone numbers. I have the phone number that is on my Google ads. I have the phone number that is on my Facebook ads at the end of the form. I have a phone number that is attached to my Google business page. And then I think there's another one or two, but I can't remember where. But the difference is these are all the phone numbers that the customers see, but all of the calls can be routed a certain way. And so the customer is seeing a different phone number everywhere. Doesn't really matter because all we want to do is attribute where those calls came from accurately so we can scale into it properly and know exactly where all of these leads are coming from.
Because the issue with online advertising is when the leads come in from a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad, it's very easy to track. Where it gets a little hairy is when they call in from those things if you have just your generic phone number in because it's hard to attribute those calls back and they might be tagged into your system as just like a generic phone call. You know, the customer saw a yard sign and so we need to attribute the sale back to the yard sign. But when they call in and get Jess or Natalie on the phone in my system, they're putting the stuff in the CRM manually and they before using Open Phone had no idea that the lead actually came from that certain advertising avenue. And so that's extremely important.
And so the beauty of this is once those are tagged in Open Phone, we know the phone numbers that are associated with the leads in our Snipy Lead account and in Jobber. And so what happens is I look at where our sales are right now. So for example, in October for new business, not returners, for new business, like 7 days in, we've sold like I want to say 25 or $30,000 of new business in October for my for my Christmas light business. Just new business, not returners, not renewals, anything else. What's cool for me is I just go into Sniple now. I look at the entire opportunity pipeline and I'm able to see crystal clear, okay, this month I've put $3,000 into uh Facebook ads and I've gotten back $19,000. So that's a 6 and a half return on my ad spend. Fantastic. That's going to get better as the year goes on. And then I'm also going to be able to track like, okay, how many yard signs do we put out? How many mailers did we put out? Do we put unique phone number tracking system in all the mailers? And now we're able to see crystal clear how each marketing avenue is doing.
Because you guys have to remember, one of the things that I preach until I'm blew in the face on these videos is when you find the marketing avenue that is working, you scale it to death until it stops working. And so, as we're filming this right now, a perfect example is we've sent out $5,000 worth of mailers over the last two weeks to the richest and highest income homes in uh Scottsdale and Paradise Valley where we do our Christmas site operations out of. And so what happens is if you're not accurately tracking, like truly accurately tracking all of the calls and leads and everything coming from those mailers, you might make the wrong decision as a business owner because I might have sold a $10,000 job from a mailer, but the person called a phone number on the mailer and my office tagged it as an organic phone call lead. And so that could be completely factually incorrect data on how profitable my mailer campaign was simply because I wasn't attributing the phone numbers and QR codes and all that on the mailer's back. And so it's one thing to put a bunch of ad dollars into a marketing avenue. It's another thing to make sure your systems are set up to accurately track that.
When I do that, for example, with Dope Marketing and we send out these mailers, each one of these mailers from their neighborhood Blitz has a unique QR code on it and I get a notification every time that QR code gets scanned on those mailers and the person's name is on there. And so the second those jobs close, I'm able to track back right to where the QR code was that that customer found us from the postcard. And then I'm able to say, okay, if I've spent $5,000 on these mailers and I've sold six jobs and the average ticket on each of these jobs is $5,000. I spent $5,000 on mailers. I sold six jobs for $5,000. $5,000 job, six jobs, $30,000 in sales off of a $5,000 spend on mailers. So in that context, I got a 6x return on ad spend, which means I'm going to keep scaling that until it breaks because that advertising avenue is working.
But what happens with a lot of guys that follow me or comment or even when before they join Home Service Accelerator right in the beginning, we audit their processes and we see like they're doing like 18 different marketing things. They're doing some mailers. They're doing some yard signs. They're doing branded yard signs. They're doing door hangers. They're doing uh gosh Facebook ads, Instagram ads, organic Google business page, Google paperclick ads, thumbtack, Angie, all this other stuff. But they truly cannot easily at the end of the month see where that income is actually coming from. And so if you don't know where the income is coming from and you're guessing, you're probably going to make incorrect decisions based on that data. Because if I wasn't tracking the postcards correctly, I might look at $5,000 and be like, well, I can only really tell that I sold like two jobs from it. So I feel like I just spent $5,000 and only got back, you know, 8 to 10,000, so I should stop doing that. When in reality, that might be the thing that's crushing for you.
It's really interesting what happens. Is like I I get on here and I and I preach to you guys that you scale it to death. When Facebook and Instagram works, you scale it to death and then you go find something else. And so for us, we scaled Google pay-per-click ads, like Google PPC to death to the point where like we can't spend any more in the areas we advertise. And so then a few years ago, I added Facebook ads to the mix and we scaled that to the point where the daily spend we have the frequency score is getting so high that like I can't put more money into it because it's just getting more expensive, but the return on ad spend isn't scaling. And so for perspective, we're spending like $300 a day or something like that on Facebook ads in my market. And so now, if you think about it, I've got Google pay-per-click ads going, I've got Facebook ads going, now I've got mailers going. And so now my mailers are going out in the same areas. So now that's my third thing that is cranking sales and marketing, and that's also a profitable advertising avenue. And then you take in what I talk about all the time organically where I have four vehicles on the road every single day now branded A-frames going out in the yards, gift cards being given out to customers, all that jazz.
And so now what's happening to my brand and it's becoming really clear is because I'm scaling all of these things individually and they're all profitable, they actually start to build brand omniresence in my market. And so what happens is like Tina Smith sees my Facebook and Instagram ad because I'm targeting in Paradise Valley and Scottsdale on those ads. She also might get our brand in mailers, Facebook ads, organic Instagram. Maybe she sees our vehicles doing installs at her neighbor's house or anything else. And now she's getting mailers as well. And so then maybe she's like, "Dang, I keep seeing this Valley Christmas lights company everywhere." And like yes, the final touch point, like the last touch is likely going to be the thing that's attributed to the marketing avenue in our system, but who's to say Tina hasn't seen us four, five, six other times from all these different advertising channels. And then finally, the postcard is what got her to the finish line. Or she Googles Christmas light installers because we put the idea in her mind. And then she sees, gosh, I keep seeing that Valley Christmas Light Company everywhere. And she goes there. or she's driving in traffic and she pulls up next to one of our trucks because there's four trucks on the road all going and doing work in that small confined area most of the time.
And so what's wild about this is it's impossible to quantify. It's impossible to quantify brand at this stage. But what I can quantify is at this stage last year, I'm filming this on October 10th, 2025. on this date in 2024. So 365 days ago, we had like $250 something thousand of installs booked for the 2024 season. We finished that year at about $88,000 in sales. As we're filming this right now, we're at $549,000 booked on October 10th, 2025 for this season. So the same date last year, but we're at double the sales booked than we were at this date last year. And part of what I think that is from is from the fact that we have scaled all of these profitable advertising things to the point where we can't put any more money into them without losing like without losing a little bit of profitability on that advertising avenue. And so now we've expanded into different channels and we start to build this crazy brand omniresence.
And so what happens is if you're a newer business, you can't do that over a 40 square mile radius. You can't like if you're in LA, you can't be going like all the way in South LA all the way up to like an hour and a half north or whatever the cities are up there. You just can't because you can't spend enough to do that. And so what happens is you're just diluting your advertising avenues across the board everywhere. And it's just like all you're relying on is did this one avenue convert and that's it. What's happening to my business is they're all kind of helping each other. And so, yes, there's direct response marketing, which is like all we do for the most part, but that direct response marketing is also building brand because of the way it's set up. And people start to recognize our name a little bit. And that's the beauty of sniper targeting your advertising into the dream areas first and then trying to chase business elsewhere.
And so, for example, like if you're a garage door company in Arizona, how are you going to compete with A1 Garage Door if you're trying to advertise at the same scale that they are across like a 40 50 square mile radius when their advertising budget is literally a 100 to a,000 times more than yours is in your market. So, they've got billboards, they've got mailer campaigns going, they've got radio ads, they've got all this other stuff. They're running more Google pay-per-click budget a day than you are in a month. You're not going to compete with a company of that size across the board in an entire city. You're going to compete with that company by dialing in your marketing in a super hyperargeted area like the dream areas you're looking for and trying to build a brand omniresence in the ultra ultra wealthy area you want to go at first and then expand out. And I think that's where the majority of people go wrong.
And so in this model, the beauty of the setup we have now is all of these phone calls are funneling in. And look behind me and it's very clear. None of what I'm talking about matters at all if you don't do the most important part. And the most important part is a YP answer your phone. I had to have a talk with my team because last Saturday there was two missed calls in the morning. One of those came from a Google pay-per-click ad, which means that I paid probably somewhere for that conversion somewhere between like $50 and $80. And no one on my team's in trouble, whatever else. But that is something that is absolutely unacceptable in my business. Like if it is during business hours and I am running ads to the tone of $300 a day on Facebook, $350 something like that, $300 to $350 a day on Facebook, spending another $200 to $400 a day on Google pay-per-click ads, we better be answering every single phone call and getting out to those people same day or next day because I know the statistics behind the speed to lead and making sure that we get out there. And so if I'm going to make the investment into advertising at the scale that I am right now, you bet your bottom dollar I better have my systems dialed in because it doesn't matter how good of an advertiser I am if we don't do the most important part and that is answer the phone. Get the people from interest to quote booked to quote approved to job done. That's all that matters.
You could have the greatest marketing team in the world. You could have Alex Hormoszi and the best agencies on planet Earth running your pay-per-click ads, running your Facebook ads, running your entire content strategy. But if you don't have the simple basic structure of your business down, which is just speed to lead, answer the phone, have your follow-up sequences for quotes dialed in, then all you're going to be doing is continuing to spin your wheels. And I say that with love because I say that as somebody who ran a junk removal business for three years poorly. And I probably ran the Christmas light business for three years poorly as well. The Christmas light business just has such a higher average ticket that our sales kind of masked a lot of the problems. But I remember I used to hire agencies for junk removal and I would get so mad because I would get like four or five leads a day and I'd be lucky to close like one or two of them because the process I had was I was getting an email that said you have a new lead in a text message and I I wasn't calling them instantly. Sometimes it would take me five minutes to call them. Sometimes it would take me 10, an hour, an hour and a half. And then on top of that, my follow-up was just sporadic. Let me call him again and follow up if I can remember to do that. And it was so manual and clunky that the results from my advertising showed that. Now, thankfully, we had been in business for 2, three years in the junk removal company at the time. And so, we had a book of business and everything else. But I know that if I was using SnipyLead and Jobber and the phone system that I have now in all my businesses back then, my return on my ad spend on all of those campaigns would have been even better.
And so it's very easy for me as the guy who talks about running your own ads and all this stuff to say like all you need to do is run your run your ads properly and all that jazz, but the brutal reality is the more important part is your systems and processes. And so when I look at right now as we're filming is like 460 470 people have come through Home Service Accelerator Pro, something like that. And without fail, the businesses that I see repeatedly booking high five figure, six figure, some even seven figure months, there are businesses in home service accelerator that are bigger than mine. The most common trend I see across all of these successful businesses is they they all have committed to building the system to where most of their phone calls go answered. Like I'm talking 90 to 95 plus% during business hours. And if the phone doesn't get answered, they're figuring out why. And then the other half is their follow-up. They are bulldogs. They have their teams built like bulldogs. They are following up like like savage animals. And when a lead comes in, the lead is either being turned into a yes or unsubscribing. And like that's it.
If you want to see more social proof about this, go watch the video where I interviewed Cam Bodin from Green Mango Pest Control. He talks about how they were hitting like when they were getting inbound leads and their office was for their pest control company. By the way, he's sold five home service businesses for over nine figures, so he knows a thing or two about what what we're talking about here. Ham was talking about they were sending selfie videos to prospects and calling them two to three to four times a day for 3 days. Calls, texts, emails, selfie videos because they understood that like the layowns come. The layowns are the people that you get a hold of them right away, they book the call, whatever else. But the sauce behind having like a super profitable business and a business that scales is how do you get the middle of the pack people to convert? The people that probably need two or three or four or five touch points.
Because if you're looking at business just like a competitive sport, business A is doing what Cam was talking about at Green Mango where they were ripping selfie videos and calling people until they unsubscribed or became a customer. And then company B was like doing what I was doing in junk removal three, four years ago. We're like, "Oh, the lead comes in. Let me try to call them once. Okay, they didn't answer. Let me try to call them again." Like, who's going to win over time? This might make you or your employees a little bit uncomfortable. And it should like it is uncomfortable. That level of follow-up is uncomfortable, but walk through it mentally for yourself. Like one, you have to coach your employees into like this is just the system. I don't care if you're uncomfortable. I empathize with the fact that you might be uncomfortable, but I don't care that you're uncomfortable. This is what we're going to do. But the other side is like, think about yourself as a founder or an owner. You saying, "Oh, like that gut feeling I get where like I feel like I'm annoying or it's like hurting my brand or whatever to follow up with people that much." What you're actually saying is like, "I want my business to be successful, but I don't want my business to be successful enough where I have to be uncomfortable to get there." And like that's a really sad place to be as an owner and you should honestly probably find a new trade and find a new profession if you're running a home service or contracting business and calling people twice or three times or following up with texts makes you uncomfortable to the point where you can't do it because I have such a onetrack mind with my business. Like I think that we do such a great job servicing people and we also do a better job servicing people than everyone else. And so the way I view it is we are doing them a disservice to let them go with someone else because our follow-up is so bad. We are the best at what we do. And so we are going to get in front of and close as many people as possible because our experience is better than everyone else's. And the people who get annoyed about incessant follow-up after they submitted a request to be called, keep that in mind. If they're giving you their info, they are expressing interest. And so those people signed a social contract with you to be followed up with because they said they wanted your service. Go provide them the service. Go find a way to get in front of them. And that to me is like the biggest difference maker.
And so to kind of put a bow on this, what you need to do is you need to have your phone and your systems and everywhere you're getting calls attributed properly from your marketing avenues. Then you need them to feed into something like snipe lead, which is the speed to lead phone system that we've built on go high level. Most of the home service accelerator people use it, but even if you're not in home service accelerator, you can still sign up for it. I'll put the link in the description. But the beauty of that is if you have the open phone system dialed in there, or quo is now they just rebranded. And then you have Snipe Lead. And with Sniple Lead, I've gone through this a few times, but if you're new to this channel, this is basically what it does. Someone submits a form on your website, your postcards, your Facebook ads, your Google ads, whatever else. They give you their name, their address, their phone number, all the details to be a lead. The second that lead gets submitted, the phone instantly calls your office or your team. And the phone, I mean like Snipy Lead's phone calls your office or your team, whoever you have assigned to field calls for sales. And it says the second that lead gets submitted, it calls your office and says, "You have a new lead. Press two to get connected." You press two. It instantly attempts to connect with that lead that just submitted on the phone. All automated. No manual calling, no entering phone numbers, anything like that. If they answer, you bring them along your sales process and your speed delete is less than a minute. If they don't answer, it drops a voicemail automatically and then a text message automatically that says, "Hey, this is Steve with Valley Christmas Lights. Saw you submitted on our website to get a quote for your lights. Just want to let just just let me know when a good time to chat is. You can call this number or you can reply back to this directly." And then it nurtures them for like you can set it for three texts, four texts, five texts, six texts over two, three days, whatever else. You would be stunned at how many people respond to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth nurture. We've seen it in Home Service Accelerator. The businesses that use Sniple Lead versus the businesses that don't. The businesses that use Snipe Lead have a higher close rate on their ads. Plain and simple. Because it's not just about running a good ad, it's about having the good system and follow-up to make sure that you're not leaking any leads. And the way you don't leak leads is you follow up more than everybody else.
Because the reality is your prospect might have submitted while they were at work, which is really common when you're running Facebook and Instagram ads. And so if you call them, they can't answer when they're at work. And so what happens is you called them once without snipe lead, without go high level, without any speed to lead system, they don't answer. You send them a text, they get busy, whatever else. And so now you had one chance to connect with them and then life happens to them, they get busy, maybe it's not a priority. And then they also reached out to company B and company C. they were slower and they caught them at a better time and then they got the job because they caught them when they were in the car or something and got the job across the finish line. So just by you following up multiple times, you're giving yourself that many more at bats to find that prospect at a good time. Let me explain that again. You following up four or five or six times is not just to annoy them. Most of the time you're giving yourself at bats to find them at a time that is convenient for them to finish what they started which was getting a quote request or getting a job booked. And that is like the biggest difference.
So here's my process from start to finish. All the phone numbers forwarding through open phone or quo the leads and everything submitted go into sniple lead. Sniple lead is there to book appointments. The second the appointments or the quotes are booked. take payment and we process and we schedule in jobber. All of that info is going into each one of these platforms individually. We're not manually entering data anywhere. That's my model. That's the one that works well up until about I'd have to guess like 23 $4 million a year. Then you should probably switch to Service Titan. Service Titan's really expensive, but once you start getting to that size, you're going to have to pay for like a little bit more enterprise model because like it's just better that way. But for businesses like that are doing less than a million, even like most of the time less than $2 million a year, Service Titan is not going to make a lot of sense from a price standpoint. But you will grow into it. Like I would say even my lighting business is probably a year away from switching all of this over to Service Titan. But again, most of the people that are watching my content are watching my content at somewhere between like zero to $2 million revenue a year. And so for most of you guys, that's the case. But if you do have a business that's bigger, you can reach out to us as well and we can consult you on that. We just from a marketing standpoint, we do it quite a bit.
So, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to join the Home Service Accelerator Pro Group, all you have to do is click the application below. There's a few parameters we actually have to make sure you're eligible. We don't just let everybody in. We need you to meet a certain income level. We need you to meet a few other parameters. So, fill out the application here and we can find out if it's a good fit for you. Just like it's been a good fit for like 460, 470 something other home service businesses. But if you don't want to join Home Service Accelerator Pro, which is totally fine, which is why I make these YouTube videos for free, subscribe to this channel, give me a thumbs up, it means the world. Share it with a friend who also has a home service business. And then follow me on all of the other platforms as well. I'm on X, I'm on Instagram, I'm everywhere else. So, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you subscribe, turn the notification bell on. And I'll see you guys in the next video.