The Home Service Expert Podcast - Connecting Marketing, Design and Technology To Better Serve Your Customers

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

Peter Sena is the CEO and Chief Creative Officer at Digital Surgeons, a global innovation & design consultancy firm based in Connecticut. Peter’s passion is to help brands and businesses better understand and serve their customers through the connection of design, technology, and marketing. In this episode, we talked about marketing, productivity, customer service...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey there, folks. I'm here with Peter Senna today, and he is a developer as well as a huge

digital marketer. And the reason this is important is because he's on the cutting edge of technology. He knows all there is to know about website design, about close ratios, about making your phone ring, brand recognition. We're going to dive into a lot of fun stuff today. So, Peter, how's your day going, first of all? It's going awesome, Tommy. Really excited to be talking with you today. Yeah, me too. I mean, there's a lot I'm going to dive into, and I'm really excited because the listeners are actually going to see firsthand what goes into a huge digital company. And you've worked with everybody from Fortune 30 companies down to your guys that started out of a garage. So tell me a little bit about how you got into the digital stuff and the developer stuff.

And tell me about your company, Digital Surgeons. Absolutely. Well, to start, so as I mentioned, Tommy, I'm a designer developer by trade. So really sort of cut my teeth in the market, less as a marketer and more as a designer developer. So doing really started with small websites really was the most sort of early stages and figured out that I could, you know, through Photoshop and a little bit of source code could start making businesses come to life online. So as you can imagine, you're really starting with much smaller businesses. And then really throughout my career, I had the opportunity to work with much bigger businesses. As you mentioned, you know, I sort of say, you know, my journey has been really from dorm room to boardroom. What I mean

by that is I started my company in the dormitories at University of Connecticut here on the East Coast. And from there, you know, now a number of our customers are, as you mentioned, you know, they're Fortune 500 companies. They're large consumer-facing brands that many of us or many of your listeners might have sort of sitting right next to them. You know, a good example is we do a lot of work with Camelback, helping them with driving e-commerce and continuing to better understand and better serve their customers. So we touch a lot of different elements of the funnel, which I know is a construct that you and I have discussed. And really, it's how we met on Twitter, right? It's just talking about brand experiences and funnel and lead gen. So I've touched a lot of different things. I'm now CEO at Digital Surgeons, where I was one of the co-founders here. So I've got a team of brilliant designers, developers,

marketers that are really working with me here. And my goal is to help brands and businesses better understand and serve their customers through the connection of design, technology, and marketing. So with that, that's sort of the kind of big picture of what I do. And then sort of as we start to chunk down a little bit, one of the big things, Tommy, that you and I were talking about before the call today was really around the notion of how do people focus on better understanding how they can leverage their CRM so they can generate better leads. So I don't know where a good place to start is for you, Tommy, but definitely happy to dive into any and all of those things. Absolutely. Yeah, there's so many things. I think if we go, I know you've got a lot of buckets

because you work from B to B, you work from B to C, and then you work with companies that just got a ton of angel investors and really looking to make some big stuff happen fast. We're going to dive into the best thing for our listeners, which is B to C. Whether you're cleaning chimneys, you're doing HVAC, you're doing garage doors, whatever it might be. I think it's a new age. And I know a lot of people don't embrace technology and they're afraid of change. They have a website, but it's just to say I have a website.

They don't do anything with it. Let's just go down to the basic essentials of a company. Where do you get started? If I was to say, here's this company, they're not really anything in the digital yet, but they need to have a plan, a one-year plan to get completely digitalized. How would you even sit down and start that? You do an onboarding process, I'm sure, but what are some of the questions and how do I get some of these guys out here that are listening and gals that own these companies get started?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing to really understand, and again, I'll sort of try to speak to as wide of an audience as possible, because I know some folks are going to be service repair folks that are just getting started on their own business. Maybe they work for somebody else for some time, and now they're off doing their own things. I think the first place to understand is, who are you as a business? I believe that every one of us is in itself a brand. And as a brand, whether you're a single person or a much larger shop or a company that has, say, a whole fleet of service folks, I think what it really comes down to is understanding what do you stand for? What do you believe your products, services, and experiences are that you want to have with your customers? So I think getting to know who you are and what you offer to your customers is the first place I like to start. Before I start thinking about websites or brands

or any of the other things that are going to start generating leads for your business, you got to understand and sort of start where you stand and figure out what is it that you offer, right? So generally speaking, that's where I like to start is who are you and what do you offer? And that might sound like a really, really simple thing, but what I've done with a lot of my early stage entrepreneurs that I work with, I do a lot of advising. I'm a mentor at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and do some work with some other universities. And one of the things that I get to do, which is an absolute pleasure, is really talk to entrepreneurs about as much of what they are, also what they aren't, right? So the biggest thing is as you're building your business, you have to really understand what it is that you offer and who

you offer it to, right? So that's the first place you have to start before you start building infrastructure and technology and websites. So that's generally speaking, the first thing that I like to do, Tommy, is understand who you are, what your competitors look like. And then from that point, then you start to understand more about the buyer, right? Okay.

And then once you understand the person that's buying and how decisions are made, then you can start to shift the behavior, right? So give me an example of one of the businesses that one of our listeners today might own or run. Okay, so let's say you're a plumbing shop, okay? So you fix anything from replacing toilets, clogged drains. You could do some brand new plumbing.

You know, they do the whole variety of anything a plumber would do in your home. Fantastic. And I'm assuming that at this point, they probably already have a website that they're managing for themselves or are they even earlier stage than that? Okay, so they have a website. They've got some historical data. They've got some key indicators.

They've got availability to look at their click-through rates and the time on page. And let's say they've accumulated some data. They've got a pretty decent size customer list as well within their CRM. So let's just say they're not huge, but they've been around a few years. They're somewhat technically savvy, but they're not to that next level of what, you know, a digital marketer would be. Fantastic.

No, that's great. And I appreciate that because I don't know where we're starting from. You know, I know there's some folks folks don't even necessarily have a website. So I think the first thing to understand is, you know, let's say they're in the plumbing business, as you just said. The first thing to understand is let's start local, right? So in the city that they're residing in right now, you know, what I like to do is put a point on the map and realistically say, how far out on that map are you willing to go as a plumbing service company or as a plumber, right? So let's say it's a 25 or 50 mile radius, just to illustrate this particular thing. One of the exercises that I like to do is jump on Google Maps. There's obviously some

really easy tooling to do that. First thing to do is put a dot on that map and put points out on that map that are 25 to 50 miles out in every direction. And then put a big circle around that map. So first understand geographically where your business can service, and then go into your analytics and understand where's your traffic coming from, right? So is it a bunch of people coming from India or from Boston that are just trying to sell you something? Or do you actually have people in your local service area that you can help? And I can't tell you, that might sound like the most rudimentary thing for some of the folks on this call that are a little bit more sophisticated. But if you've got people on your

website that are coming to you from different states and you can't service them, and you're not going to open up a business in another area to service that customer, someone like plumbing, obviously, you can only go so far, right? It takes gas in your trucks to be able to drive off to somebody. You've got an umbrella insurance coverage that might reside over a particular service area. So making sure that you've got that understanding of, are the people on your site the right audience, right? One of the first things that we talk to all our customers about is, do you have the right audience that's currently viewing the website or currently viewing any of your marketing? So that's where I like to start, Tommy. Okay, so you get started, you figure out where

their clients are, you talk about their avatar, which is just a fancy name for their best client. And tell me a little bit about what the 80-20 rule means to you and how you focus in on that. We talk about stuff like that a lot on this podcast. So tell me, how do you get that through to a plumber or an HVAC guy, the 80-20 rule and defining that customer? Yeah, absolutely. Well, again, I'm a huge fan of the Pareto principle, you know, also commonly known as the 80-20 rule. You know, I think really what it comes down to is that 80% of the effects of what you're doing is caused by 20%, right? So really understanding at the core, in some cases, do you have one or two really big customers that are 80% of your revenue? So 20% of your audience in this case

is representing 80% plus your revenue. As an example, you know, in the plumbing business, I think about sort of residential and commercial, right? So are there a list of accounts or people that we want to model after? So as an example, is this plumbing company, just in this metaphor we're sort of building here, are we talking about a residential plumbing company or a commercial plumbing company? You know, I'm going to stick to residential because I think the vast majority of the people listening focus on residential. So let's just go with that one. 100%, right? So one of the first things I'd do if I was in that person's shoes is I would call upon some of my best repeat customers that are giving me word of mouth

referrals, right? So I would start offline first because, you know, while we are extremely digitally enabled consumers that sort of live and die by our cell phones and Google, you know, at our core, there's nothing more powerful than word of mouth, right? So the first thing I would understand is who are my customers that are not family, that are not, you know, family friends of mine and how did they discover me in the first place?

And what I would do is I'd work backwards. So if people found me, you know me through a friend of a friend, what did that friend of a friend have to say? And start thinking and unpacking that language. So in the case of a residential plumber, when we think about, no one thinks about a plumber until you need one, right? You just don't.

So I know myself, I don't have my plumber in my cell phone as a contact. So when I've got a problem, I'm either going out to my network of people I know, I'm jumping on a site, whether it's like a home advisor or something like that, where I'm going on Yelp if I'm going to review something. So the first place when I'm considering searching for something is I'm often going out and searching. So the question that I would want to know as this sort of plumber or the marketer for this plumber is, you know, again, who are the

local residential plumbers in the area that other people turn to or choose, right? So I would break those down into a number of different buckets, right? I'd break down plumbing companies like myself. I would chunk up a little bit and look at the bigger system. So maybe there's the Roto-Rooters and the other franchise based plumbers that are out there that, you know, typically have a lot more dollars for marketing because they're franchise based. So I would sort of go up the ladder a little bit and I would look at what the ecosystem and by ecosystem, what I mean is what are all the different types of people that offer the services that I do? And then I would look at what people are saying or not saying about me

and what people are saying or not saying about my competitors. And that's the place I like to start because then what you can start to understand is if you know who your customer is you know you know the triggers or what I like to call the buying moments you know the buying moments of when someone's searching out you for a best plumber maybe it's a drain snag or you know a new installation if maybe it's a bathroom remodel whatever the type of plumber this person is are they gonna be a crisis plumber or are they gonna be a new home remodel, whatever the type of plumber this person is. Are they going to be a crisis plumber or are they going to be a new home remodel plumber? Understanding where 80% of your revenue is coming from, if it's good revenue or bad revenue,

you can start to mirror those patterns that are taking place, right? And once you understand those behaviors or those patterns, that's going to really inspire the name of the game, which is content, right? And once you understand your content, that's really going to shape all the experiences you create. Down to the business card that you hand somebody when you do a job, down to the lettering that's going on the side of your truck, maybe you've got one or more trucks if you're a smaller company, and especially translating into the website. So as you mentioned, Tommy, you've got click-through rates, you've got some things. Well, if we know that people are coming to us for a crisis plumbing problem, and we know

that the one thing that people hate about the Roto-Rooters is they take too long, they're too corporate, they're not friendly, you know, they're bringing mud in my house, then maybe at that point the pain point is not fast enough. The pain point is making my house dirty. The pain point is not being clean enough, right? So then you're going to want to start creating ads or creating content that's going to be specific to addressing those pain points. So wish you could have a plumber that you could reach in the next 30 minutes, click here. You know, a nice photo of a person with things over their boots so they're not going to get your house dirty. Maybe it's a review specifically addressing the opposite side

of that pain, right? So what I always like to say is if your service delivers a value, in this case, a plumber is obviously going to be either helping you with something new or helping you fix a problem with something old, understand what the other guys aren't doing, and then really play off their weaknesses, make their weaknesses your strengths. So that's where I like to start from an overall sort of service design perspective. And then that translates into all of the marketing materials, all the copy, all the images. And remember that if we're dealing with that crisis situation, well, people don't want fluff, right? They want, get me to the point, get me how I can get somebody on the telephone. I want to speak to someone as soon as possible so that they can get out to my house and fix my

problem. So that's sort of what I look at at a systems level. And once I start to answer those questions and jot those things down, then I can start to figure out what the best practices are going to be for designing a system that's going to allow me to do that. So at the beginning of the call, Tommy, you mentioned CRM, right? So for those that might not be as aware, customer relationship management system, right? There's a number of different great CRMs out there. You know, Tommy, I know that you've got a tremendous amount of experience with those.

You know, so I don't know if you want to maybe throw one of the CRMs up there for me to sort of start building on, or I can just call out a couple that we come across on our channel. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to hear about that. Sure, so obviously a really good small business tool that is relatively inexpensive,

easy to implement, lots of tutorials online. Again, if you're the smaller residential plumber, you might not have the resources that some of the companies that we work with do. So you might not have the ability to use a Salesforce marketing cloud or something that's a little bit more advanced. Maybe you start something small, like a tool like HubSpot. What I like about HubSpot is it's inexpensive. It scales pretty well. And unless you're a really large enterprise company, you're probably not going to want to look at HubSpot. But if you just want to store your customers, be able to create content and ads and track those things, HubSpot's a great tool. We work with that quite a bit for some of our mid-tier customers.

There's tons of tutorials on it. You can get certified for free very easily. And really, for smaller businesses, I think that's a fantastic tool for being able to start to understand who your customers are and then build blogs and landing pages and other types of marketing artifacts that are going to help draw people to that. So I like that as a tool. So just sort of using that as a premise, Tommy, where do we go from here to keep your audience engaged? So, you know, I always talk about the ways to make money in business. In the home service niche and most businesses, you could do three things. You could get more customers, which is your marketing, and that's really, really important. You need to have that.

The next thing is you keep your current customers coming back for more. And those are through service agreements, communication tools, which is SMS, email blasting, voicemail drops. There's several other ways you could do postcards, work with Sendacard or some of the other ones out there. And then the third one is just charge your customers more money by offering them new products that they might not have. So let's talk a little bit about what a CRM will do to help all three of those things. And how come it's so important? You know, let's go to the first one there. So how do you get new customers? Tell me a little bit about, I know what it does for me, but I want to hear from your perspective, a CRM.

How's that going to help me attain more customers? Well, I like to think about CRM as the repository that stores the information. So obviously there's a number of different ways to drive traffic. In the case of plumbing, just building on the example we talked about, I think there's a lot of search behavior. So being able to really get into someone's search funnel. What I like about a CRM is it helps you track everything that's happened, right? So generally speaking, I'll continue to build

on the sort of foundation we were building. So we've got HubSpot as a tool. We've got Google Analytics, both really inexpensive tools. Google, obviously, Google Analytics free. We've got both those tools working hand in hand. They're tied up well together. They're integrated together.

And now all of a sudden, we want to start tapping into search, right? So I want to know when someone searches for any of my plumbing-related keywords or plumbing-related problems. So think about as an audience member on this podcast, what would you search for if your toilet was leaking or something like that, right? So whatever those keywords might be, leaking toilet, et cetera. Google Paysters, so Google Ads, I think are an incredible place to play from a cost per click perspective. Depending on the area that you're in, if you're in a more metropolitan area, you're going to probably be competing with more expensive cost per click because the bigger guys have gotten much more savvy and even the midsize guys have gotten pretty

savvy. Guys or gals, don't want to make that gender specific. But I think with that, Google Pay search has gotten a little expensive, in my opinion, and depending on the type of service. Again, we're playing off of residential plumbing, where really most of the money gets made in the service call, right? Just understanding what I know about plumbing from my vantage point as a consumer and just talking to a few people, I like to inquire about their businesses. So one of the areas that I would say, Tommy, that the CRM is going to help is I like Facebook ads. I think Facebook ads are a really good thing to be able to go out there and do. But depending on where someone's at in the search funnel, again, what I like about Google paid search is it's a very, very easy way to immediately put an ad up and start driving traffic to your website, to your landing page.

So what that CRM is going to do for you, Tommy, to answer your question is CRM is going to make it really easy for you to spin up landing pages. And by landing pages, I mean like let's say it's like you do a whole ad group around freezing pipes as an issue, right? I live here in Connecticut, northeast, and it's just about dropping down, getting that November winter time going. So, you know, if someone's pipe bursts, you can think of, you know, the hundreds of keywords that someone might be searching for. So making sure when someone Googles that, that we're hitting them with a response to that,

that's going to ease their pain or directly speak to, you know, where we're at in the consideration set. Obviously, I would say pipes burst and things like that is what I would call down funnel. So it's not like looking for a plumber. It's someone's got an immediate need, right? So being able to speak to their need, pull someone through that funnel, and then drive them to that landing page. These are all things that are rudimentary and easy to do inside of a tool like HubSpot. So HubSpot landing page builder will let you really quickly build landing pages.

And then obviously through Google AdWords, where you're going to be sort of placing and bidding on your ads, those two tools in tandem can give you every understanding of who's clicking on what, what it's costing you per click, what they're doing when they land on a page. Once they're on the page, you can easily hook up with, I like to use phone tracking or call tracking because the thing we want to remember is that if someone's in a crisis, they want to speak to a human, right? They've got a problem. They don't want to deal with a bot. They don't want to wait for someone to get back on an email.

So immediacy in that scarcity moment is really powerful because typically speaking, someone's going to call multiple plumbers, right? So the first person to respond or make it easy for that person to get connected to you, they're typically the ones that are going to land a business. I think I saw a stat in the service business. The number escapes me now, but it was some incredibly high number, like 30% or 40% of service providers are immediately kind of removed from the consideration set if they take more than an hour to respond. You're seven times more likely to use a company that gets back within an hour and 60 times more likely if they wait 24 hours. Exactly, right? So that's the stat. Thank you for reminding me of that. So the whole point is we've got to be fast. We've got to be relevant.

And what a CRM is going to do is give you the data and let you understand what is and isn't working. And by is and isn't, what I mean is someone who's actually signing up with you or clicking to call and what ads are working, what ads are not working based on the content, based on the time of day those ads are running. And what I like to think about when it comes to lead generation is just think about the funnel, right? So by funnel, I don't mean there's a lot of tools out there now for developing what they call click funnels. There's software in itself that really focuses purely on that. But when I say funnels, just think about all the different steps that a user or a potential customer is going to go through to go out and discover you, whether they're going to your website or searching for something on Google or Facebook or whatever. All the different steps in that journey and the end of that journey being when they've become a

customer, right? And what I like to say is that's when one funnel ends and to your point, Tommy, and another funnel begins, right? The more you can keep that customer happy, you know, following up with them post service. I always like to explain it like a good movie, right? Which is what happens before the movie, during the movie, and after the movie. And that pretty during post is a really good way to think about funnels. And what I'll tell you is I work with some of the most sophisticated marketers in the world, and it's so funny to think about how little focus we put on after the sale takes place, right, Tommy? Everyone works so hard to get that customer. But to your point, back to the 80-20 rule, how do we make sure we're keeping that customer, right?

Keeping them happy, keeping them referring us, and the little things, right? Like those send-out cards, just thanking them for their business. You know, if I was a small family of four, as an example, just imagine, you know, imagine a 40-year-old plumber. I've been doing plumbing for 20 years. You know, I've got a wife and two kids at home. You know, a nice little Christmas photo or pateko, whatever you celebrate. You know, taking a photo, sending out that send out card to all your customers and saying, you know, happy holidays, or thanks so much, you know, because of you doing business with us now, you know, me and little Tommy are going to have a nice holiday. So just those little things, you know, pulling at the heartstrings a little bit, that's going to make me as a customer or

consumer want to do business with, you know, Tommy's Plumbers versus working with Roto-Rooter, that's some big, greedy corporate corporation, right? A hundred percent. You're preaching here. I love this stuff, man. It's those little customer contacts. It's 10 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer, first of all. And I wanted to tell you, I have right now about 1,100 VoIP numbers that I use for tracking. And I renegotiate every month with a good majority of my marketing. So that allows me to not necessarily get more customers, but indirectly it does because I get rid of marketing sources that aren't working. And I always use pay-per-click first and foremost when I go to a city.

We use SpyFu, which tells me what my competitors are doing. Totally. And guess what this is? Garage door repair, Houston. Guess how much that costs per click? I would argue in Houston, probably at this point, somewhere between $18 and $30 if I had to guess off the top of my head. $80. Yeah.

I don't know the Houston area very well, but that's my point exactly, right, Tommy, is that those short tail keywords, you know, they're crazy, they're expensive. So sometimes by using data and using the technology, and I'm not wanting to confuse anybody here,

but a lot of times it's better to go to, you know, Pete's company here, a digital surgeon. That's what he is. And that's his company. But you got to think about the tools out there because sometimes you could see it's better to be the second position than the first

and cut that cost in half. And that's why having a CRM to aggregate this data is so important. And going after long tail keywords. And what I do is I'll build pages of manufacturers and I'll rank organically because I still believe that the status somewhere around 70% of searches still end up on those organic listings.

But Google rolled out with their new algorithm, which is the Google Guaranteed Platform. Are you pretty familiar with that? Absolutely. Yeah, no, we're always bopping and beeping with Google. So this platform, they're working with a company

that does background checks called Pinkerton. And I'm not trying to get on the bad side here of Google because that would be a death spiral for me because we use them all the time. But, you know, Pinkerton, I think we're a large company. It took a while to get that process going. It's a process. But basically, for those of you that are just getting familiar with the Google Guarantee program, it's going to be rolling out and it's going to be rolling out fast. It's already rolled out here in Phoenix. And they just do a background check on all your employees and then they guarantee the client, I think, $500 or $1,000 that we'll do the job right.

And if we don't do it right and they've got to pay the client, well, they're probably going to take you out for their advertising until you pay them back. So Google's super smart, innovative. They show your rankings as far as the five star. And then you get Google guaranteed. And right now, our acquisition costs for those of you out there listening is only twenty seven dollars, which is far cheaper than almost every type of other marketing source we do. So it's great. Now they're probably going to raise their prices, but their goal is to take over 90 percent of all the clicks and make money on them. So the high percentage of their marketing of their entire revenue source is through

their pay-per-click. And can you talk a little bit about that? What are your thoughts on what's going on with the Google Guarantee? Well, I think, you know, number one, one of the things I love about Google Guarantee is most people don't know this, but the two biggest issues of fraud that were happening were locksmiths and plumbers, right? Everyone that knows anything about sort of search knows that. Because, you know, just imagine for a moment, you're locked out of your house or your car, you know, you hop on your phone, which is the thing that, you know, your phone's the remote control of your life these days. I tell my customers that all the time. And they go out and

they do a search, and then lo and behold, they find a locksmith, right? Little do they know, the locksmith is a complete fraud that just spun up, right? So when I think about what Google has done with their guarantee, Google's job, remember, Google's in the search business, right? Google makes almost all of their money through advertising, right? Pretty clear, right? Their search engine is their cash cow, always has been, and I believe always will. No matter all the other things that they've tried to get into,

I mean, I think we all remember when Google tried to get into the social media space right no offense to no offense to the Google folks but that's not their game right so but in order for them to be that trusted leader in search right so you're not going on Bing or Yahoo I mean what are those two platforms right question mark in order to really do that I think what it comes down to is being able to understand and deliver the best possible results on search. So we do a lot of advanced level marketing. Some of our clients were helping get involved with machine learning and AI. And by AI, I mean augmented intelligence because contrary to what the movies are showing, there's no such thing as artificial intelligence yet. When a machine beats the Turing test, run for the hills, because Skynet is coming for you Terminator fans out there.

But I think to answer your question, Tom, I could go on a long diatribe, but really when it comes down to Google search and Google guarantee, I think the biggest thing is by playing by the rules and continuing to get great service and get real humans that are creating reviews for you and talking positively about you, that's the number one thing in the game, right? I always say create content for humans that is optimized for the search engines. We all remember back in the day, some of us remember back in the day,

when you would be able to launch a website with a white background with a bunch of tiny white words at the bottom. Oh, yeah, invisible. Yeah, of course, and invisible keywords, black hat techniques. I mean, some of us have been involved in that. Some of us have fought against that. Now, I like to see myself as more of a white hat marketer for, you know, for the geeks on the call like myself. But really, you know, again, I like what Google's doing with Google Guarantee. I think, you know, it's made the best man win. And I hate to say it, but it's really made the best marketer win, right? So I think the more you can focus on how to deliver value for

your audience with authentic content that really speaks to how well you know your customer. You know, one of the things I like to do with smaller businesses that I've worked with in the past, I do a lot of, you know, pro bono consulting to help local businesses and such, specifically nonprofits, really to be specific. I don't really work with plumbers and such, specifically nonprofits, really, to be specific. I don't really work with plumbers and such, but I have. I came up from that sort of avenue before getting the pleasure to work on a lot of larger consumer-facing brands. But in that audience, what I like to say, Tommy, is really think a lot about once someone

does business with you, just interviewing them. So one of the techniques I do is I'll talk to someone. If you're using a call tracking service, a lot of the call tracking services, whether you use like RevTracks or MarkChecks, there's all different ones out there, obviously, the platforms are a dime a dozen these days. And a lot of them offer call recording, which is a little bit more money. But the benefit to call recording is you can download the recordings. And what I like to do, which is a little ghetto, but it works really well, is I like to take all my audio recordings, splice them together, and who the hell has the time to listen to it? Not me. So what I would do is I would run the audio

files through a transcription service. So a service like Rev, R-E-V, it's a little less than a dollar a minute. Rev actually recently launched a machine learning version of it called Temi, T-E-M-I, for all you listeners on the phone. And I think the nice thing about that is you can then really quickly scan through and see what keywords are happening most. So you can imagine if I do business with you, Tommy, let's say I'm a plumber and I come out, do my service call, and then someone follows up with me 24 hours later. Hey, how was Tommy? Maybe you've got an intern or a junior customer service rep at your office that follows up. Oh, Tommy was great.

Oh, would you be open to a testimonial review? Everything they're saying now, all the keywords that they're using, once you understand those keywords, that natural language, as I like to call it, now you can start creating killer ads, right? Now you can start creating killer ads, right? Now you can start creating killer search. And that's where I think it's really, really going to be beneficial because the content speaks to the pain point, and the pain point speaks to the person. And that's ultimately how you're going to be able to really launch the most authentic things. And you mentioned cutting that cap cost in half, Tommy, obviously really impressive lead generation costs in terms of your cost per acquisition. What I would say is, you know, for everyone listening on the podcast, what Tommy's done here is figure out how to, you know, very authentic way, use the tools that are out there that are available in a very natural way,

right? So being able to understand it's not about being number one and paying the highest cost, it's about being everywhere, right? Because now consumers, they're going to do on average, I know consumers search anywhere from three to seven other searches before they make a decision. And depending on the industry or the particular moment, that number goes up by the day. You can read about a lot of these stats on many sites. HubSpot, I mentioned earlier, they do a great job of launching free white papers for all the listeners out there. So again, what it comes down to, like Tommy said, is I think it's about knowing your audience, which I think might sound a little cliche or generic. But once you really understand your audience and really understand their journey and the

language that they use to get there, that's when you can start to create really killer marketing experiences that are going to drive your business. Because at the end of the day, if you're a plumber, you're not in the marketing business, right? But if you're a plumber, you're in the service business. And the only way to build a service business today is by having great marketing and great referrals. Man, I love this stuff. Listen, I'm working with a guy, his name's Joe Troyer,

on a daily basis in Florida. And he's working on a concept that transposes everything on the phone call and it talks to Google's PPC campaign and it literally splices and tries out the keywords for you in real time and it optimizes it. You talk about augmented and basically what that means to me is that it takes data and it builds probabilities. The more data you give it, the better it gets. And my CRM, which I told you about, and drive time being fans and the technology helps us do that. I mean, it helps us like the Uber feature of knowing where your tech's at, seeing a profile, what do they like to do?

They're coming into your home. They've done a background, a drug test. So, and another thing you said is locksmiths, man. I remember reading a study because one of my partners in the lead gen business used to be a locksmith guy, did lead gen for locks-O-N-D, and they've got a machine that actually recreates a pen. And it handwrites the letters and it handwrites the address. And you write a big paragraph and then it mimics your handwriting. And they could embed pictures in there. It's around $3 to $4 a piece. And I can't tell you enough how powerful it is to send out a can written card, but you automate the process. And what I've done is I'm working on an API and a cam card. So when I get

a business card from somebody and I get 30 of them, if I'm out networking and I just put in a tagline, I tag it with that client potentially could work with me on. And then I put in a little note and it actually feeds it into this bond company. And that's what I'm working on right now, because it's powerful stuff. And as me and you are talking about this, it gets me more and more excited, but it's probably scaring the shit out of our listeners. But that's why I tell them, you don't have to be a jack of all trades. You don't have to be a marketer, but you need to have a marketing team or a great company to stand by you. And that's where I think Peter's company, as you guys are getting to know,

is so far advanced over a lot of the ones out there. Talk to me a little bit about a chat bot. Why is it so important to have a chat bot on a website? So one of the things that I want to be very, very clear with everyone about is conversational commerce, right? So when I think about chatbots, I like to think about how can you leverage people's natural impatience to answer their questions, right? Because none of us, even if you're a Fortune 50, everyone's understaffed these days.

Everyone's overworked. We live in one of the most oversaturated countries in the world here in the United States when it comes to a lack of work-life balance and just overall inequality in a number of ways. Don't let me get on that soapbox, Tom, because I won't get off unless you kick me down. But in all seriousness, the reason I'm saying that is what a chatbot can do is help to facilitate the handoff between what a customer needs and wants and what they're ultimately going to get. So many of you, I'm sure, have used Uber or use it on a regular basis. One of the co-founders at Uber left and started a really interesting company called Operator. What Operator is, it's actually humans that you can converse with, and they'll recommend products. And it's part machine learning, so chatbot, part actual human. And I think when chatbots are done well, there's lots of examples of chatbots going wrong.

I don't know if you guys saw the Microsoft-powered Tay, which was basically Microsoft created an AI chatbot that went crazy and was creating racial slurs and slangs. And obviously, when you feed it Twitter as a data source, there's a lot of trolls on Twitter. So naturally, it learns from the wrong audience. So again, I get pretty deep into this geeky stuff. But I think for the more broader audience, what a chatbot can do is a chatbot can help to facilitate moving someone to know more information. So I like a platform called Drift. I like a platform called Intercom that will help you with sort of predefined messages,

depending on what a user is doing. So just imagine for a moment if you are a larger plumbing company that specialized in bathroom remodels. So people were remodeling their bathroom. Maybe you've got a tile guy in your network and you're offering sort of, you know, that's what you do, a little less of a crisis plumber. So where a chatbot could be great is imagine you've got some pages on your website, maybe every job that you go and you do, you take some photos, you put those up on some landing pages, testimonial where, you know, Jen and Bob talk about how great you are, Tommy's

plumbing. And then at the bottom of that page, there's a contact form. Now, just for a moment, if someone's on that site and they're not scrolling down, they're not making their way to the contact form. I'm a big fan of when you're doing longer storytelling, I like to not throw the call to action in everybody's face. So while I do think pin call to actions and top of page call to actions are great for lead gen pages, what we've found, we've done obviously thousands of multivariate testing, is if you lead with the conversion, in some cases, you're not going to get as high of a conversion rate. So in a page like that, just imagine if someone's scrolling through, and all of a sudden, if someone's on the page about bathroom remodels, a little modal or pop-up comes up on the bottom

of the screen that says, hey, thanks for stopping by. We see that you're looking for bathroom remodels. Here's the top three most useful articles or top three most useful pages on bathroom models. Click here, or if you'd like to speak to somebody right away, click this button. So what I like when it comes to Chatbot, Tommy, is it helps to facilitate conversational commerce, and it lets us to more mimic a conversation that we would have with a human being. But what we know specifically, you know, one of the stats I heard recently is this year, I think it's this year or last year, the first retiring military professionals that were in the millennial generation, I think was the stat I heard.

And again, sorry, I haven't had enough coffee today. But the reason I say that is that a large amount of people now are entering the millennial generation and millennials don't like to speak to people. They want to text. They want to tweet. They want to snap. And they don't want the whole rigmarole of sitting on a hold. So what I like about chatbots is quickly we can get people answers.

Quickly we can get people decisions. And if you've ever used chatbots for some of the people on the listening end, you can book travel with Facebook Messenger bots as an example. You can, of course, book Uber with chatbots in a lot of different ways in terms of being able to transact with your voice or transact with natural language. So when I think about chatbots, a very powerful utility for them is helping to move people through the funnel on a site. But you want to be careful, right? Because if what you stand for is small, local family service and someone's interacting with a chatbot, it's not going to be authentic to your business or your brand.

And at that point, you'd probably be better off with a little button that says, thanks for stopping by. Click here to speak to someone in our office. You know, most people speak with someone in under five minutes, a little call to action. They click a button and that's going to trigger a phone call. So click the call. I'm still a big fan of, it's not, it's certainly not as fancy as chatbots. You know, we're, we're actually building, um, for one of our global customers. Uh, I can't say who, but let's just say it's in the footwear business. I'll end with that.

We're doing a really interesting thing right now with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. So imagine just being able to interact with a business or a brand through your voice. Very, very similar to a chatbot, but obviously if I'm trying to tell people how to build their plumbing companies and service companies,

that's probably a little bit too much in the future and a little less practical, right? So the goal of this discussion, Tommy, is how do we use CRM and better digital marketing to really build our businesses, if I had to understand. Yeah, yeah. You know, I don't mind going off of this. I think some people are really going to dig it. It's fun. It's cool. And, you know, usually we get a lot of home service professionals on here that have done it.

They've made it through. But I think what I'm getting from this conversation, and I got so much. If you've got the time, I'm digging this. But number one is it's just it's almost too hard. I mean, and I'm not going to say an age, but as you've been in the business 20, 30 years and you're hearing all this stuff, I'm sure it could seem really intimidating. And I just think there's guys out there, like I keep saying, like Pete, and that know the latest and greatest. And you got to really know how to qualify a company to do this stuff for you. One of the things I was going to say, a chat box also helps your time on page, which increases your quality score, which is really cool. But I wanted to talk a little bit.

I met a guy named Ken Goodrich recently. He owns a huge air conditioning company, a very successful marketer. He spends a lot of money on radio. And I was talking to him and he goes, Tommy, I just don't think people understand in the marketing days in the home service industry that the radio, what it did for me is not generate a lot of calls. What it did for me is it increased my click-through rate by hundreds and hundreds of percentages. He said I was at low 20s and he ended up being in the high 80s because he had the data. Okay. So that was just fascinating because he spends a lot of money. You got to pair up Google

and Bing with your TV or radio or billboards. You just have to because they're a branding thing. Talk to me a little bit about, because you've built brands. Tell me about direct response, which actually I got a book sitting around here by Dan Kennedy. Are you familiar with Dan Kennedy? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so he's all about just no BS about direct marketing. And he says if you can't get a direct response, then it's not worth doing it because direct response will brand you.

What are your thoughts on that whole topic about TV, radio, billboards? And I know there's different times in a company when you want to do that, but what are your thoughts? Well, I have a mixed thought on direct response because I think ultimately what it really depends on is what are you trying to accomplish? I think one of the cheapest, most effective ways to build a service business today is traditional ways of media. So for example, I did a ton of digital marketing for a campus actually that I'm a shareholder in and a physical location. And I was sort of using it to book up tenants. And we did all kinds of fancy digital.

And obviously I've got top shelf pros on my agency team that are really rocking that out on a day-to-day basis. And one of the things that one of my strategists did was bought up some local billboards. So when it comes to billboards and radio, more traditional forms of media, they're not as sexy anymore. But when it comes to trying to garner a direct response, billboards and direct mail are two incredible ways to get an immediate action or response. So I want to just go out there on record and put that out there. Again, as the digital guy here on the conversation, analog works very well. But I do think, you know, one thing I would disagree with Tommy when it comes to direct response is I like

to think of it as dating, right? So I'm married, but many of the people on this call might not be. And I want everyone who is married or in a relationship to think about the time that they met their significant other, right? So think about that first interaction you had with them. Well, I would probably go on a limb here and say that not every single one of the people that met and are still in a happy relationship slept together on that first date, right? So what I like to sometimes counsel people on is don't just ask for the sale right away. And again, this is contrarian to everything that we were just talking about, because we were talking about crisis situations. Right. Sure. When you think about service based businesses, the first question you have to ask yourself is, am I in the need business or am I in the want business?

So I'll give you a really particular example. I got a close friend of mine that she owns a blow-dry bar, right? So women, before they're going out on the weekend, they want to feel good about themselves. They go and they pay to have their hair blown out, nice blow-dry. They look all dialed up and they're ready to go out for the night. Maybe it's their day away from their kids or just they've got a big date, whatever it is, right? But this is not a need business. Well, I guess it depends on what woman you're talking to because it might be a need business. But in most cases, this is a want, right?

Sure. Versus someone that's got a broken toilet and there's water all over their floor. That's a need, right? So I think you have to ask yourself the question, are you in the need business, the want business, or both? And obviously a lot of the listeners come from a wide array of backgrounds here. But what I would say is that's the first question you have to ask yourself. And I go back to that, the analogy about getting together on that first date. You have to make that lasting impression. The number one thing that I tell all of our customers is the importance of trust. Nowadays, where we see that brands take years to build trust

and just all it takes is one moment, one tweet, one stupid comment from the CEO, and all of that trust is eroded and gone. So I think what's really, really important is when you're branding your business and you're building your business and you're building your reputation, I don't think that that is a transaction. And what I'm a firm believer in is that I think that relationships are far greater than transactions. And if you look at the businesses, you know, the small dry cleaners down the street that is next to a global corp, the reason that they've been around for as long as they have, now granted, everyone's facing disruption now and the internet, and don't get me started on

that topic because we do a lot of work in that space. But I think just at a deep belief level, people want to be a part of a small niche community, right? I say small is the new big in a very big way. And authenticity is a big buzzword that gets thrown around here. But what I mean by that is really think about the courting process, much like you did or would with a significant other. I like to think about that when someone is building a service-based business, because ultimately that level of trust, loyalty, and experience. Trust, loyalty, and experience are, in my opinion, the three pillars or paradigms that are going to create a shift in your business versus the business down

the street. And that's why branding organizations like myself get sort of paid well to think about that voice and tone, to think about that image, to think about that content versus really just trying to generate leads. So again, I think direct response is a time and a place. I think depending on your goals and objectives, if you want to create a lasting business that has a level of trust, I think you have to think about that brand experience. And you mentioned Bond, Tommy. Bond is an incredible example of that. Why is Bond better than send-out cards? Really simple answer. It looks like someone hand wrote the note, right? It feels like something that you're interacting with,

you know, Tommy, the owner of that small company, and not just some pre-canned letter that got printed out and put in a box. You know, and I think one of the most powerful things, we do a lot of e-commerce work, right? A lot of e-commerce work. And one of the biggest places to innovate when it comes to e-commerce is that brown box. You know, we all know that brown box moment when that Amazon package shows up on our doorstep. But the question is what happens next, right? In the moment between opening that box and getting to that product that's in the box, which is what they're trying to get to, what is that unboxing experience, right? So you think about your business as a service business, What's that unboxing experience look like or feel like?

And that is where I think loyalty and trust is such a critical component of the branding process. So, again, it's different strokes for different folks. It's different tools depending on the goal or objective. If you're going direct response, I think you have to be a server of a particular thing. And that's just my opinion, Tommy. Again, I don't want to preach here as if I know it all. go to work. So they direct response works really great. They go to the computer, they type it in, they need it. Boom, you're there. Now, a want is a really nice carriage style looking garage store that's all wood with decorative hardware. So on that, we use Facebook lead pages and we have an education process and we do FAQs and we position ourselves as the experts and the best. And then we educate.

Did you know that 40% of your home's curb appeal is your garage door? Literally, it's the smile of your home. And we educate, educate, educate on the ROI they could get when they sell the home, why it makes sense to get an insulated garage door. And so you kind of struck a chord there because Facebook works like crap on my repair side, but it works really well through lead pages and an education and retargeting and pixeling process of the education.

Because I work with a lot of guys on lead gen and stuff. And one of my good buddies who actually I own a company with called Garage Door Nation. You need to look at that, garagedoornation.com, because our conversion rate sucks. We're at like 1%. I want to get it up to like 4% or 5%. But that's neither here nor there. But he said he's working on motivated, they're $10,000 in debt or more. And that could be your education, tuition, it could be credit cards, or it could be taxes. And he builds lead pages on Facebook. And what's interesting about it is one of them is how I got my credit score from 473 to 720 in two months. So people click on that, there's a

story, and then he gets to retarget to them to a squeeze page, right? So it's genius. And I just think that when you really said that, I think I just wanted to bring it into the context of home services. People want to have a really beautiful, nice door, but they go through this different process. They go through. I want to get a few estimates. I want to educate myself. I don't need it right now. So do you think that's a good example? Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that's great, Tommy. And again, I appreciate that clarification because, you know, one of the things that we all hear as marketers, you know, we're all reading a lot of the same different sources, is it's really important that you understand the big picture strategy

and the specific tactics that are going to work for the different stages in your business. You know, for the guy who just left an HVAC business, working there for 10, 15 years, just got sick of his boss not treating him well and just decides, you know what, he's got a little bit of money saved away. He's going to jump in and start his own business, right? That's a person that's got to instantly get with what is the fastest way to generate leads and get, you know, sort of customer one, right? So I definitely empathize with that, you know, as a person who worked for sort of corporate America and then left and started his own thing from scratch. And I remember that feeling when I first had all the bills and I'm looking around going, how am I going to pull this off?

You know, how am I going to get my first customer? And, you know, how am I going to pay for my insurance, pay for all the bills I got to pay for? So I can certainly empathize with that. And I think that's where direct response is so powerful. I think that's where, you know, having the simple tools like, you know, whether it's HubSpot, CRM, or, you know, a ClickFunnel related tool, there's lots of them out there. You know, Infusionsoft as an example is one that comes up a lot in service-based business for me. There's all kinds of tools and platforms,

but I think the most important thing is, you know, knowing what tools and platforms. But I think the most important thing is knowing what tools and techniques and tactics are going to help you is super, super, super critical. Don't play against those guys or do you want to play it the right way? I think ultimately the number one way to build a brand today is to understand the marketing tech stack, understand how Google is bobbin weaving and shaping, how Facebook is doing the same. Again, the amount of people that I know that make millions of dollars. I had a friend of mine, she's got a small custom jewelry business and my wife was bugging me to help her out. I helped her out, gave her about 30 minutes worth of tips, you know, as a friend and she started killing it on Instagram. I mean, she went from making no money online to, you know, I think her first month, like she made like 10

grand online, you know, which is a lot for a small jewelry boutique. You know, I think that's 120K a year in online sales, you know, direct high margin sales for custom made jewelry. So I think, again, Tommy, you know, I like to err on the side of white hat. I like to follow the rules. I think the two most important things to do is have a strong marketing tech stack and create content that's directly attributed to your user. Know your customers. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of a book called – I think it's A Thousand True Fans, which – have you heard of that one, Tom?

No, no. I'm going to read it though. A Thousand – It's incredible. A Thousand True Fans? Yeah. A guy by the name of Kevin Kelly wrote this incredible book years ago called A Thousand True Fans. What he basically said is if you have a thousand true fans or super fans, it doesn't matter how big your audience is because you can literally live off of that.

You can generate enough revenue income from that to make a pretty good life. And he goes into a number of scenarios, the process to do it. And that's to me, basically says one thing, know your customer, know how to create content for them and have the right marketing tech stack to do so. And you're going to win. Well, it's a short term. And I think that's excellent advice.

And I think you're a genius. I really would love to spend more time with you down the road, but I know you're super busy. I appreciate the time you spent today, and I think I got a lot out of it. I'm sure that the listeners did. I'm going to go ahead.

A Thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly. Tom, it would be my pleasure to chat with you offline and find some different ways that we can work together. You've got all my info, and for anybody that's listening in, I try to publish wherever I can. Definitely follow me on Twitter. I'm at Pete Sena. That's P-E-T-E-S-E-N-A. I post a lot. I like to respond and

take it pretty seriously. So definitely shoot me a tweet or check out my company, digitalsurgeons.com and definitely let me know what you guys think. Looking forward to hearing from everyone and good luck in building your business. And Tommy, I would be honored to come on your podcast again and would love to have you on our podcast for Forward Obsessed, which we're going to be launching in January. That sounds great. Listen, Pete, I appreciate everything. We'll be in touch.

You have a great day. You too. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. This was the Home Service Expert Podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12-hour days,

seven days a week? If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today. I will repeat that. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery

and book your free call today.