The Home Service Expert Podcast - Using Automations to Qualify and Convert Prospects More Efficiently

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

David Tal is the CEO and co-founder of Verse.io, a next-generation Lead Conversion Platform with specialized technology and highly skilled human concierges. David helps businesses create effective and authentic connections with their prospects by effectively merging the best abilities of technology and people. In this episode, we talked about SMS, sales, marketing, lead conversion...

And it all comes down to responsiveness. You know, if you have that kind of volume, how quickly are you guys responding to them around the country? What do you guys do with nighttime leads or weekend leads? You guys may be crushing it. And you obviously are at that scale to be to have that conversion rate is already amazing. But it's probably because maybe you have a really aggressive, good strategy up front quickly for speed to lead. But what happens after hours? What happens on weekends? What happens when you can't get ahold of those people? Those attempts start to drop very quickly. And there's so much there. Half your leads are coming in at night. Those are perfectly good. And our studies have shown across tens of millions of conversations, we just released the report, conversational insights report, showed that leads that come in after hours convert at about 5% to 10% higher rate than daytime leads. And the reasoning behind it is that people are more focused and they have less distractions in the evenings. 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 guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I'm your host, Tommy Mello. And today, I got a special guest joining us from San Diego, David Tell. Is it Tell? Yeah, David Tell. Is it Tell? Yeah, David Tell. Tell. I screwed it up. I tend to do that. So you're an expert in conversation marketing and lead conversion. You're the CEO of Verse.io. Been doing this since 2013, so nine years and eight

months. You're the co-founder and co-CEO of Verse. Born and raised in San Diego, a VC-backed entrepreneur for 10 plus years. David has been passionate about putting San Diego on the map as a center of tech innovation and disruption. This passion has driven him and Verse to become one of San Diego's fastest growing companies. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this business. I think it was called agentology. Yeah. So, you know, I guess just to start at a high level, what we do at Verse today is we help companies automate the conversations that they need to have to communicate with their capture and convert and qualify new prospects, or to follow up with existing customers or prospects in an automated way through what we believe and the data shows is the number one preferred method of communication, which is messaging over SMS and other channels. So that's what we focus on is helping companies engage and qualify and nurture

prospects at scale in an automated way through two-way conversations powered by versus conversational AI that carries these conversations at scale for different use cases, like booking demos, etc. And how we got here was we actually started this for real estate agents originally under the name and umbrella of agentology. You know, the science of real estate, the science of this for real estate agents originally under the name and umbrella of agentology, the science of real estate, the science of being a real estate agent. And we brought in a lot of science to it. I was a former broker, real estate broker. I had agents, I was generating leads. I would pass them to my agents and my team and found out very quickly that they were pretty terrible at following up consistently, effectively, and efficiently with any of those prospects that I sent their way.

And so our first approach here was to really solve this for the real estate industry. And from there, we just kept expanding. And as we expanded beyond real estate and mortgage, and really started to focus in a very heavy way, as we do today in home services, the entire umbrella of home services we rebranded from agentology to verse inspired by helping companies converse with their prospects you know anywhere on the journey so i'm guessing you guys probably have a pretty strong api as well as the um like a zapier zapier i've brain farted so Zapier, we have APIs, and a lot of direct connections with the biggest CRMs that we work with. We work with all the big name CRMs.

Can you give me just the five quick ones? Salesforce, HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo. We work with very specific ones that are built for real estate agents, ones that are built for brokers, ones that are built for lenders, solar company CRMs like Shape and Total Expert and others in the home services space. So tell me a little bit about how the software works. So obviously you could have a one-on-one conversation with a client. There's programmatic or AI, I guess, involved. How does that conversation look? And is it a good customer experience? I'm just wondering from your point of view, when is it okay to use this bot versus have a real human? Yeah, so we created this with

the consumer in mind, thinking that there needs to be a better way to communicate with consumers that doesn't annoy the heck out of them. If you fill out a form right now, let's just take a solar company and you fill out a form on a solar company and you're interested in solar and you want to quote, you want someone to come out to your house. Today, most solar companies are calling you hours or days after that. And you don't know who it is. It's hours later, it stays later. You don't answer. 87% of people don't answer the phone anymore for numbers they don't know. And you're just bombarded with these unknown numbers that are just bothering you. You're not answering. With Verse, that same customer, you would receive a text message within a minute from when you fill out the form, day or night. It would say something along the lines of,

hey, Tommy, Alex here with ABC Solar, just received your request for a quote. Would love to help you out. When's a good time? And while I have you, let me ask you a couple of questions. And so we'll take that opportunity to actually qualify you, make sure you own the property and you don't rent. What is your average electric bill? Are you shopping around? How soon are you looking to make a decision? And all of these qualification questions that are set by our customers, and we build them into conversational scripts, help automate the entire process of engaging all of those prospects that the solar company is generating. In many cases, the companies we work with

are national companies like SunPower and Semper Solaris generating tens of thousands of leads a month. And how do they go through that efficiently beyond just dialing millions of times trying to get ahold of people? Ultimately, what ends up happening is people burn out from all the calls and they just say, stop, nevermind, I don't want to talk. And they just opt out. Whereas with SMS, you get them the moment they're interested,

the moment they raise their hand, they have context, they're ready to talk. And you're able to do so in a way that's respectful of their time and their preferences. If they want to text you back an hour later, fine. They're busy. They're on the way to pick up the kids. With phone calls, it's really intrusive. You have to answer and be ready to talk then. Obviously, most sales are going to eventually happen in person or over the phone. But initially, to get somebody to the right place in a convenient way, there's nothing more powerful than starting off with SMS, which has a 98% open rate. And 90% of those are read within the first few minutes alone.

So you cut through all the noise and you're able to start that conversation. When you start the conversation, it's the conversations that can build the trust and the relationships. And those relationships are what win the business. I want to look at something real quick here. I've got your website open, but I'm looking into... I use a company called Service Titan. and I got the call metrics popping up. We've gotten 452 leads today. That doesn't include any form fills on any sites. That doesn't include anything from the website that might've came in. We don't really do a great job of the chat. On a company like

mine, obviously your garage door is broken. You make a phone call, like typically. So people, what do you find in a home service company? About 500 possible leads today. I'm guessing the traffic has been a lot. Our website ranks really, really well. It's the second highest ranked website in home service that I've found.

And that's just all the big companies. So we get a lot of traffic. We're in 20 states, 30 markets. What would I expect volume-wise? Let's say I'm willing to make this transition. I'm willing to go all in on verse. What does that infrastructure look like? And how do I prepare for that?

Does that make sense? Is that a fair question? Yeah, sure. Well, we work with companies your size and big national brands like HomeAdvisor and others in that scale, right? And so we're able to handle millions of conversations a year for customers. So we have an entire integration department. And over a couple of calls, we figure out how to connect the systems and what are the trigger points of outreach. Basically, you have to think of what Verse does as conversation campaigns, just like you do a marketing automation campaign with your HubSpot, right? And I believe you guys use HubSpot. So rule A or trigger A, you know, triggers a sequence of emails that go out, right? Someone fills out a form, raises their hand, downloads a white paper, and all of a sudden

they get this kind of drip sequence of outreach over email. The problem that we see and what we're really solving for is those are really one-way communications, one-way triggers, one-way conversations. They're not designed to start conversations. They're designed to reach out and try to get someone to do something on their own. With conversation automation, it's like marketing automation, but we trigger the same thing based on rule A, B, or C, just like when you would send an email. Instead, let's send a two-way conversational SMS outreach campaign that reaches out and actually tries to launch an actual two-way conversation and get you on the phone with the right team. The ultimate goal here is to qualify you and get you on the phone or to an appointment with the right salesperson at the

company. But it's to get to you quickly and effectively, screen people out that just don't meet the criteria that maybe aren't in the states that you service, and really normalize the quality of all leads to leads that matter and should be focused and paid attention to. So with us, a lot of companies start by saying, okay, I'm going to create a rule that says any leads that matter and should be focused and paid attention to. So with us, a lot of companies start by saying, okay, I'm going to create a rule that says any leads that come in after hours, almost half of all leads come in after hours. And maybe you don't have any systems at all to respond to them right now after 6pm. So you can set up a rule in your CRM HubSpot saying after 6pm, I want Verse to engage these. We'll build a script, you'll approve it. Say, this sounds like a great script for you to follow up with these leads and tee them

up for me for the next day. But let them know it's after hours. We're closed. I want to help. We're here to help. Let me ask you a couple of questions. And the next day, you just have appointments filled up for your service reps around the country with qualified opportunities.

Like a Calendly. Oh, exactly. We integrate with Calendly, Chili Piper, Microsoft Calendar Systems, and Google and any others. So it sounds like to me, you know what the worst thing in the world is, and I've had a lot of conversations, is when you call into a home service company with the demand request and you hit an IVR. I don't think IVRs were designed for people that have choices. Now, if I call the Southwest Gas Company for the gas in my house, an IVR is appropriate because I don't have any other choice. So this is much better than an IVR, correct? Well, in a lot of ways, it's similar in its logic in that it makes sense that people come in in a funnel and you need to navigate them to the right place.

What's frustrating about an IVR experience today is you're stuck in that experience. You can't hang up. You can't go anywhere else. You have to keep listening to these really boring options. Nothing ever fits perfectly. And a lot of times you get cut out in between and you have to start the whole process all over. With an SMS, you can kind of navigate that experience. You can cut right to the chase and say exactly what you need. And smart AI systems can capture that and skip all the IVR levels to get you to where you need much quicker. Two, there's no being stuck and waiting and having that, did I hear that right? It was noisy. Did I press the right button? And it's conversational, which also means that as we're talking, we can actually take the conversation and start to move it forward and actually get you

talking directly with the sales rep right from there. I think the worry that a lot of people have in my industry, just home service in general, is what happens if you don't have somebody in there like, hello, I need to know how much is this part? That's all I'm asking. I just need to know how much this one thing, or just whatever people do. And let's say it's 11 o'clock at night or something. I don't know. But what's the scenario is, listen, unfortunately, I'm not the qualified person, book an appointment. What's the best reaction to that? So we build these kinds of scenarios into every script, right? Things that don't fit in perfectly. We introduce ourselves as a client

care coordinator or a member of the team, but not necessarily the one with every answer. Now, if questions are asked frequently enough, we can build them in so that our AI has easy access to them and can spit out that information when it's requested. So if something is consistently asked about, what is your minimum? What is your service? We can instantly grab that, pull it and display it and show it to them and get them the information they need. That being said, we're really trying to be conversational and let people talk naturally as they prefer and how they want to describe their issues. So we take that path. Oh, if you don't have the answer to everything. Yeah. So we split to, you know, Hey, Tommy,

I'm just a client care coordinator. That's a great question. Let me ask my team and have them reach out to you with an answer in the morning when we're open. When's a good time for our team to reach back out? And so what we're doing is, is we're not saying we have the answers to everything. We're saying we want to be attentive, right? And we want to be respectful of people's interest and time. And when they put in their information, people want a response before the next guy gives them one. And if they know, hey, someone responded to me, of course it's late and they don't have the answer in front of them. But they told me they'll get back to me in the morning. And by the way, I told them to call me at 9 or 10 a.m. and boom, we will initiate that re-engagement exactly at the right time and set that all up so that it keeps the conversation flowing, which is the whole goal. You know, there's one thing that bothers me because I'm on a lot of websites and I'm always testing things out and I just don't like it when it spits back. I put in something like with Amazon and all of a sudden it spits back this much text.

And it made me a little more intuitive than most because I've been around technology. And then I'll say, hey, listen, I was wondering when this is going to be available or if I get faster shipping or whatever it might be. It's almost like I'm talking to somebody in the Philippines because I'm like, you're not getting that. Does that make sense? How do we deal with that? We don't do that. So we're very intent based in our conversational AI. And so with every question that we ask, and usually we're the

ones asking the questions, not the other way around. We're reaching out to someone who wants a quote, wants information about a service, and we're the ones asking the questions to qualify. So we can guide that conversation. And the way we ask questions is done so in a strategic way to hopefully return a like-kind response that's natural and our system can understand 90% of the time or more. And by the way, if our system cannot understand what someone is saying, it loops in one of our own humans. And we have three different call centers, the US and around the world that have coverage to jump in and carry those conversations forward at any

time when the AI cannot. So we don't leave anything hanging or to chance. So here's a question that I know everybody's dying for. There's not as many people that join the live that'll be listening to this podcast. There's probably 10,000, 12,000 downloads just of this podcast. So what I like to do is do outreach. And I know there's certain limitations to who you're allowed to text and you got to get like a double verification, but there's certain ways kind of around that. Like if I say, listen, we installed something one year ago, here's the warranty information. Let us know if you want us to come service that. Have you ever seen it? Because we have service agreements, right? So we've got to outbound to our service agreements to book an appointment for the time.

So have you seen this more on the offense than the defense of booking calls? First off, a couple of things. For one, it is absolutely important to have the right opt-in language so that you can continue to communicate with your customers over SMS or really any channels. And so that's something that we expect of our customers, but we also cross vet ourselves to protect ourselves and our customers. And we stay ahead of all compliance, TCPA, and every updated regulation, which can continue to get updated throughout the year. And it's common too. And it's all done to protect the consumer from spam.

And that's good. We think that's a really good thing. We don't play in any kind of spam world. We focus on people that are actual customers or real prospects that just raised their hand and said want to start to reach out to people ahead of that renewal. If you're a car dealership, you also want to reach out to people three or six months before their lease is up to get them back in your dealership before they start looking at a competing car manufacturer. So there's a lot of ways to leverage conversation automation at different parts in the journey to stay top of mind. So one of the things I asked my COO to do, my previous COO about three years ago, and I don't think it got done, is to put that special language that TCPA, whatever the compliance is, that they had to click it and then sign. Is that something pretty easily available to get? We can give any company the boilerplate text that should be under any form

that will cover you for all of that, for sure. Okay, I'd love to get that and throw that on the site so people can start thinking about that before they start using your software. Ultimately, let's say they have a small list, they just got into business, whatever. I mean, it's really nice to have that. So another question.

It really is as simple as, it is as simple as by submitting this form, you consent to receive communications over phone, SMS, email, from our company, et cetera. So it's not like rocket science, but we can give you the boilerplate material that most companies use. So if I got it on a recorded call, I've heard from a lawyer, this is not legal, is that they say, I'm willing to receive text from your company. It doesn't matter if they didn't sign their name and click a bubble. On a voice recording of their voice, would that stand up? I'm not actually 100% sure on that because we've never opted people in based on voice recording. So I'm not sure. The signature thing, because we've never opted people in based on voice recording.

So I'm not sure. The signature thing, you must mean just filling out a form because there's no other signature needed. But just it's part of the same kind of contact form that you're used to. So this is what I've heard. Because what if I put it in my terms and conditions that we have the right on the 10th page of our terms and conditions? I heard there has to be. That's what they're trying to make more visible and transparent to the consumer and saying, hey, when you fill out a form, it should say clearly on that form. So it's not hidden somewhere else that you're able to reach out to them and contact them.

I've gotten 10 text messages today, mostly from political crap. For some reason, political doesn't have the same laws as the airlines doesn't have the same rules as like, for some reason, they go in ahead and said, we could do anything we want with political campaigns. I don't get it. And then I, one day, cause I have a real estate company too. One day we sent out a mass thing and I had this lawyer reach out and said, Hey, we're coming back after you for this and this and this. And it never stuck, but there's lawyers that kind of wait for this for these lawsuits. And they do like a class action. And it came from the same phone number? What's the deal with that? Well, you know, there are a lot of predatory attorneys out there. It's why it's good to work with companies that have compliance as a part of

their infrastructure to protect you. And to make sure that you're doing things by the book. It is important to do so. And I think it's important too, for the consumer's experience and for the industry as a whole, and to separate out the good players from the spam artists out there. I'm all for it, but unfortunately there are predatory attorneys that are just waiting. But again, most of them, if you go and you show them, hey, here's my compliance process and copy, and I'm compliant, you could pretty quickly get them to stop paying attention to you. They didn't want to bark up the wrong tree and waste their time either. So I'm just going to go keep firing questions. Cody Johnson had a question here. Converse booked the appointment. And I think what he's talking about is we use a thing called Schedule

Engine, most of the large companies, and it allows for a quick, easy schedule because it understands capacity planning. Is that something where if we sent the link, it could automate or how does that work? Absolutely. We can work with those systems. And even if it's not an automatic system where it automatically pulls and shows the available times, our team, when someone is ready to book, can pull it up manually and book it right at the time. We have a 24-7 team. This is all they're doing is they're jumping on to complete those bookings and get the job done. And the majority of what we do is booking appointments after we qualify opportunities. It seems like to me, the average home service company, I think garage doors, locksmiths, demand type services, HVAC, plumbing, electrical.

What kind of case studies do you show over the last couple of years when text message has been growing? What do you see as far as results? What can we expect this to do for our company as far as revenue and bottom line? The beautiful thing about what we do is it's fully, fully measurable, right? And you know exactly out of every 100 prospects you receive today, roughly how many you're able to get a hold of and jobs booked. And then you can test that against averse a couple months later and just compare it and see for yourself. I will tell you that results vary based on what you're already doing. We work with companies that are super advanced and already have a lot of automations and they have big teams that are open late, that are responding even on weekends.

But even they see a 50 to 75% increase in engagement and conversion rate when they include two-way SMS conversations and when the speed to lead to those are always a minute, 24-7. It doesn't depend on their time, their holidays or anything. And consistently following up through that channel with prospects.

And then we work with companies that have very little in place in the way of an engagement strategy, a follow-up. They just have salespeople that are just kind of picking off the list every day and dialing out and there's no real systems in place. And we can see two, 300% lift in engagement and full funnel conversion in those cases. And we have case studies in both of those on our site. If you go to our customers page, you'll see case studies in home services from solar companies, from garage flooring companies, from turf, painting, and others.

So I'm on verse, where is that? There's platform solutions, resources, pricing. Where would I go if I wanted to see those case studies on your website? You go to resources and then customer stories. In fact, our first study you'll see there is from Panasonic for a shoulder company. Yeah, there's the garage flooring company using instant response and two-way SMS conversions. versus help garage flooring pros decrease screening costs by 83%. What does that mean exactly? So they were doing this all with in-house humans and we were able to automate so much of it that they could do so much more with a smaller, more lean and efficient team. So it says here, engage your customers the way they want. 90% of your leads prefer to text.

98% of the texts are read compared to 20% for email. 90 seconds average consumer response time. So pretty powerful tool. Yeah. And if you think about it, when you get a text, don't you look at it almost instantly? I don't even understand why we make phone calls. Yeah. It should be farther down the funnel. Yeah, it should be farther

down the funnel. A phone call should be like hopping on a Zoom, right? It shouldn't be into your computer anytime they're trying to cold reach you. It's super invasive and it puts you off. It's almost offensive to your schedule and how you run things nowadays. And most people do. If Zoom's just popped up and out and you were expected to just start talking to people, a text is like an email, but it's a more modern approach that's read more, responded to more. It's easier. It's shorter text. It's quicker communication and doesn't get lost in the shuffle with the spam of email and really allows you to get that conversation going and then hop on that Zoom or phone call at the perfect time. You know, one of the things I hear a lot of from these guys

that I speak to a lot of home service people and they're like, you got to log into HomeAdvisor, you got to log into Angie, you got to log into your LSAs, you've got online chat, you've got, I can keep going, Thumbtack. I mean, and a lot of them like you to live in their platform, but if you don't live in their platform, you're late. Your speed of lead goes down. So do most of these platforms now sink in with this and all in one place? Because it's a nightmare to have to be 20 windows open, you know? Yeah.

So we do integrate so that all of them can come into the Versa platform. And we have a beautiful user interface that shows you all the conversations, all of the consumers or leads that we're talking to, where they're at in a conversational journey, qualified, unqualified, tons of insights, response rates, engagement rates, time of day, which campaigns, which lead sources are producing better than others. We have a ton of conversational insights. And then we also integrate very directly with the CRMs for this purpose, the service titans and others, where you may already be funneling all of your leads to as one central repository or CRM, and we can just connect to there. And what we do is as we're qualifying leads, we're updating the CRM through our connection in real time. So we engage or we qualify with Bob, and in real time, we'll update the CRM through our connection in real time. So we engage or we qualify with Bob

and in real time, we'll update the CRM with any stage or follow-up activity necessary or the appointment. Oh, and the full conversation that we have, it can live on your CRM as well. We will post the full conversation history, the back and forth communication with timestamps into the CRM as activity history

and Salesforce as activity history and Salesforce as activity history and HubSpot and others. I forget what they call it, that section, and we can load it into there. So I asked you earlier what local service has for Google. Google has- Google is where you can text right from, right? Google Guarantee is a big deal. And right now we allow the customer to book right into LSA, but you said a lot of that Facebook Messenger. I saw Angie on your home advice. Does everything sync

or does not all of them sync? Every single thing you can think of syncs. Yeah, everything syncs through direct API, Zapier, or even email parsing, which we do, which is a big catch-all if there's something that doesn't. And we give you magic numbers.

Our new product is called Verse Capture, where we'll actually give you magic phone numbers that you could place on different marketing materials. You can place it on your Google account so that people can text and call that number directly. And it goes through our automated response system. Yeah, it's just a call tracking number. So a lot of these companies,

I don't know actually one text tool that doesn't use Twilio on the backend, except Twilio is the fulfillment center, but it doesn't have the UI. So like, what's the difference between, obviously you guys are way more integrated, but there's companies like Scipio. I must know like a couple dozen of them. What's the difference if someone said, yeah, I've already used a tool. Why would you tell them to switch to your tool? Obviously, you've got live agents. You've got a probably more sophisticated AI. What other things do you think separate you from the pack? A lot of companies right now are trying to solve for the problem of enablement, of powering internal teams to use SMS solutions to text because they recognize

that that cuts through the noise and gets a hold of more people. So they're powering internal reps with technology to use to send SMS and text. I think what really differentiates us is that we build unique conversation campaigns for different parts of the customer journey that don't just reach out over SMS with a drip, but actually have a full two-way humanized and authentic conversation that can book appointments, schedule demos, schedule tours, disqualify people and move them out of your way, and even generate inbound phone calls. We even have a solution called Call Connect, where we initiate through SMS. And when someone says, I'm ready for a call now, which is something we'll be prompting for, when's a good time for a call, this and that. Insurance companies, for example,

need this a lot of home services companies really just need to get on the phone with people. So we use SMS to find that perfect time to get on the phone. We initiate the phone call, get them on the phone and live transfer them in real time. So no time is wasted from the company. We're doing all the work in the back to follow up and kind of chase people down respectively in a respectful way, I should say. Get them on the phone and get them in touch in real time with your team. So there's a lot of capabilities we have that are just different than just a tool itself to send SMS from like a phone, right?

We're a full marketing automation platform for SMS. So right now I'm at about a 45% conversion rate and rising on new doors, which means I'm roughly leaving $6 million a month on the table. Can I get ahold of a client? So let's say I come out to your house, David, we go over everything. You're like, you know what, Tommy, I really like you. Want to talk to my wife, want to look at the catalog a little bit more, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Were you working on a buyer's guide built in HubSpot to know what pages they landed on, how long they spent, where their time's going?

But ultimately, I'm looking for building scripts that say, David, your time is important to me. I've got authorization from my boss to do whatever it's going to take to earn your business. If you could please pick a time, it'll take less than 15 minutes. And I got some really great news. You know, and then I can I A-B test?

I'm just curious to the capabilities where we're going. Can I A-B test two scripts and then run it with a hundred here, a hundred here? Can I use it for follow-up? What are the capabilities? A hundred percent to all of that. We A-B test anyway. We do? A hundred percent to all of that. We A-B test anyway.

We do it on our end all the time too. There's different kinds of A-B testing. Like we're A-B testing pay versus hello, that type of kind of simple testing to optimize scripting. We're also A-B testing times of day to follow up when people are unresponsive. You know, are people more responsive in this area in the morning, in the afternoon, at night? So we're A-B testing and constantly self-optimizing the system. And then we're A-B testing separate campaigns and scripts entirely or promotions entirely,

to your point. And so we can do all of that. And I'd, of course, love to see what we can do and see if we can be helpful. Because obviously, if you have that kind of volume, even just getting that from 45 to 60 isn't a huge leap. It is a huge leap, believe it or not. It is a huge leap, but it's not in the grand scheme of things. It's very doable. We see that all the time, getting from 45 to 60 or 70 with better, smarter, more efficient, and effective engagement, which is where it all starts.

You can't get the business to start talking to them in the first place. What people don't understand is the difference between 45 and 70. 25%, what that allows me to do is do what I call the ultimate branding. It's the next level. I go to TV, radio, billboards, and I could afford to do that. So now I turned into branded searches, which they want me, conversion rate, average tickets go through the roof, and they're willing to be a lot more patient. They don't need it done today because they want me. So that's the difference between owning 18 to 20% of a market or 3%. That one thing, I don't think people understand that. Yeah. And it all comes down to responsiveness. If you have that kind of volume, how quickly are you guys responding to them around the country?

What do you guys do with nighttime leads or weekend leads? You guys may be crushing it. And you obviously are at that scale to be, to have that conversion rate is already amazing, but it's probably because maybe you have a really aggressive, good strategy upfront quickly for speed to lead. But what happens after hours? What happens on weekends?

What happens when you can't get ahold of those people? Those attempts start to drop very quickly. And there's so much there. Half your leads are coming in at night. Those are perfectly good. And our studies have shown across tens of millions of conversations. We just released the report,

conversational insights report, showed that leads that come in after hours convert at about five to 10% higher rate than daytime leads. And the reasoning behind it is that people are more focused and they have less distractions in the evenings. I talked to a guy that built a massive business in HVAC for the marketing side, just marketing. And he said 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. is the best ROI to be advertising on Facebook, probably for that same reason. We work with a lot of AC. If you check out Baker Electric on our site, we have a whole video testimonial there.

And he talks a lot about that as well for the after hours. Basically, for a fraction of the cost, we were covering all of the after hours as if they had a full team during the day and reduce their costs by 50 so what i love about this podcast you know i've been doing three to four a week but we only release one a week so by the time i release this the guy's smart enough to jump on the six people right now by the time i release this i'll be like 90 miles ahead of everybody but i don't keep secrets it It's just when I release it. If it's too good, you never release it. You keep it in the ballpark.

Keep it in the hopper. All right. This is live, so these guys are smart. But, you know, they have lives that they're at work, too, and they're making the time, these business owners. I'm watching some of them here. Very smart. So what are some strategies that are working right now for reengaging

unresponsive leads? Because we basically use – are you familiar with GoHighLevel? I think we, yeah, we do something with them. That sounds super familiar. Well, GoHighLevel, they've got a lot of tools and they use a lot of it. Basically, all these guys are using Twilio on the backend, but they allow you to build funnels. And what we do is reengage people that want to apply for us.

So I don't think of just clients. I think about internal customers-engage people that want to apply for us. So I don't think of just clients. I think about internal customers, the people that want to work with us. And a lot of it has to do with re-engagement. Sometimes somebody will apply and a week later they go, who is this? So you got to send them a shot of where they apply so they know. And then I got a thing that has been again, my dog, it says, Hey, my dad's not going to give me a treat unless you finish out the application, like funny things. And then throw me a bone. Yeah. Yeah. Throw me a bone to do this.

So what do you have to tell us about re-engaging unresponsive leads? Let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree, right? Maybe if your dog wants to apply at first, we could use someone a furry. You can lose, you can lose a good person with a softball. Yeah, for sure. The hours are rough, but we'll make it work. A couple of strategies. And I think a lot of this sounds like common sense, and it is, but it's just about actually doing the work or working with a company that will help you set this up. But it's continuing to provide value. It's staying top of mind and

consistent and friendly. Not with just, are you ready now? Are you ready now? Are you ready now? But like you said, more conversational. Hey, this is Tommy just reaching back out from last week. Is now a better time? We find that one of the tricks of the trade that you can take with you is to write something out that's purposely misspelled and then follow up correcting it. And people start to feel guilty, I think,

that they're ignoring someone and will respond. Another trick is just first name question mark. Because what happens a lot is people just delete, so they don't have the full thread after you follow up. And so if you just send a, hey, Tommy, question mark, you respond. And yeah, what's this about? And then you can get right back in a conversation and remind them. So those are effective strategies. We don't do them a lot. They're meant for people who were engaged

and kind of just dropped off right when they were hot. So we just want to try to capture them one last time before they move on. Well, the one thing that I think that if I was on the phone, I always try to look at it not from what I'm doing to my customers. I try to view myself.

For example, my landscaper came by on Saturday, so a few days ago, and I got the bid via email. What I'd like to do is I'm just trying to envision the conversation. I'm just thinking about how I close more. We talked about getting a 70% conversion. There's a lot of clients that say, you're the only one that followed up with me, so I'm going with you, period. The fact is, the top of mind awareness, I want to do it now. You came at the right time. I just got my tax check, whatever. A lot of people say, you've built a lot of different companies, a lot of different follow-up. Real estate agents, hey, you're going to list with me.

What do you think the secret sauce is on a follow-up to just get me on the line? Is it about discounts? Is it about better pricing? Is it about just having a conversation? I know this is a really, really round question that could go a lot of ways, but is there something in the script? And then what do I do? What is it going to take to earn your business? Where do we go from there? It's a tough question because it can depend a lot on your own standards, what you're willing to do or not do, how busy you are, how kind of exclusive you may be based on time and limitations and capacity. But I would say that at a high level, the number one thing, and I just spoke about this at the Conversion Conference in Las Vegas, is removing friction from the process. So an example for home services of friction would be, hey, I have a minimum three-hour charge and it's $150 an hour. And so if someone just needs a

toilet unclogged, you're probably going to lose those, right? Or just annoy them, right? Having set pricing for standard items, I think is really helpful to the modern consumer. I think they just want to know it's going to be a hundred bucks or 150 or whatever it's going to be to just come snake my toilet. And that's all I need. And I think it's the uncertainty that comes from, oh, well, it's $75 to come out. And then we give you that towards any repairs. But they don't know if the repairs are going to be $700. And in a lot of ways, unfortunately, people look at this industry like car mechanics in a lot of ways because it's an industry where they don't know about their plumbing.

They don't know about electricity. So they don't know how to fix things themselves and what things should relatively cost. And it really just comes down to trust and building some rapport with somebody. And I think you do that by removing friction from the process and meeting people face-to-face and earning that trust in person, explaining to them the issue and then offering them a quote. I'm really against any type of generalizations because here's the deal. If I asked you how much my tires would cost, you tell me this. And then you say, well, you didn't tell me you had a lift kit.

The problem I have with that is all of a sudden I'm a bait and switch line son of a bitch. So here's what I would ask is I would say, can you send me some pictures and I can get them to the right people to take a quick peek to make sure. Because I just think if it's this much and I show up and I go, wait a minute. That for my industry, I didn't know you had a Wayne doll. You never mentioned that you had a wood overlay door.

Like it gets us into a lot of trouble, you know, especially if it's a lot to this. Yeah. It's like, if I could talk to you and I say this, David, you know, a spring job could go from here to here.

Let me ask you this. What's the radius of your track? Do you know exactly approximately how much your door weighs? How wide, how tall is your door? Of course you you're if you're going to get out there do all that work you might as well do the springs yourself to just give you a quote over the phone then you go listen you guys are not kidding me you didn't tell me any of this stuff and now we look like liars that's why the process has always been get a lot of information from the client before you start giving them prices if you're going to do i could say listen a roundabout price roundabout price is this. Why don't I stop by, David, and here's what I'll

do for you. You don't want to pay the service call. Tell you what, if it's on our time, I've got a guy on your street in San Diego, right near there, five minutes away between this time and this time. If I have him stop by, he'll take a peek at it, won't charge you for it. I got to ask you a question, though. If you like what he has to say the value makes sense if the investment makes sense to you will you go ahead and do the work if that makes sense and then i'll go ahead and do that and i don't like waving the service call because sometimes i get these freaking tenants that they gotta get 10 bids to you know yeah a waste of everybody's time but i understand what you're saying and some people say i like to give all my pricing on the website. And I'm like, then you look like an asshole. Because when you go out

there, it's a bait and switch. And the companies that do that, they're always the loser companies too. They're always like the guys that pay the least. They can barely keep their technicians busy because you can only compete on three things. And tell me if you agree with this. Price, speed. I'm going gonna get out there today on christmas the best company meaning that they got the best parts best warranty they're gonna stay in business they got the best tools they got drug test background checks so you can price my dad i was telling me you can pick two out of the three you'll never be all three my mechanic that kicks butt in milwaukee he's four months out because he does a damn good job and he's really, really affordable. So he's busy. He can't get out there anytime soon. So you got to choose.

Do you want to be the cheapest or do you want to be the best and the fastest? Or do you want to be the cheapest and the fastest, but have really low quality? I don't know if you get me. I think you're right. And I agree with you on the more communication and transparency there is up front about what's needed. And I think SMS is another perfect way to do this with photos is just, hey, quickly text me photos. And you're right. When I do call a handyman or even a plumber, they ask me to take photos and send.

I tried to get a quote recently for a new water heater and two different companies asked me for the model number or photos because they wanted to get a sense of what they were really replacing and the work involved and the connection, et cetera. So I think you're right. The more you qualify a potential customer, the better the results are later and everyone's more on the same page. And it's just as important to qualify as it is to disqualify. Or I should say, it's just as important to disqualify as it is to qualify. It looks like you had that done with the garage door flooring. It disqualified a lot of decreasing screening costs, right? It's a lot better. All these people that are wasting your time, you may want us to ask how many other bids are

getting and if it's more than two others to disqualify them and not waste your time, right? So that's a perfect question to ask to qualify. based on time you can really get a sense engage how quickly you might win a job if they say this is urgent i need this fixed now you know they're not going to take their sweet time interviewing five companies and it has a lot to do also sometimes the price point of things i mean if you know what the number one ROI HVAC ad was, is new HVAC units starting as low as $39 a month. And that was the best because it's financing and the promotion. If I was selling you a hot water heater, first, I'd be asking you a lot of questions. Number one, do you have gas or electric? Do you want an instant demand? How many people are in the home? I'd be asking all these questions because I got to diagnose the person

before the problem. I'm not going to be the one to assume that it's just you and your wife and maybe one child. What have you got a lot of families staying over? And what if you have eight kids? I don't know those things. So these things got to be discussed. And I'm more than willing to have these conversations, but I don't think anybody does it very well. And when I get on the phone, typically when I'm out at the home, I'm looking at a lot of things. I'm asking a lot of questions. If I'm in your garage, I can say, oh my gosh, David, I didn't know you're a woodworker. How much time do you spend in your garage? Oh, I'm out here at least 15 hours a week. It's a hobby. So you care about keeping the warm air in, in the winter and the cool air in, in the summer.

Yeah. Okay. Now we're going to talk about a polyurethane door because I didn't know. Or you got an office in the garage. There's certain things sometimes I can't see. But anyways, I'm beating a dead horse on the wrong topic. But I just, there's a happy medium here. And I agree, text messages is the way to do it through picture messages. And I just went off probably in the wrong direction on this. But I just think a lot of people need to listen

because there's mostly home service professionals. And when they're just quoting over the phone, they're devaluing what they do. Most of the conversations we have, we don't really quote anything for customers, except for TV mount installs and some of those things that are a little more standard. Most of the leads we're talking to are requesting a quote and we're qualifying, basically asking those exact kinds of questions, as you just said, confirming certain details and then saying, great, when's a good time for our installer to come out and give you a quote on site. For home services, that's the vast majority of what we're doing is we're qualifying people, making sure they have a pulse, they have interest,

getting a few details from them that are going to be important for you to come prepared and actually set the appointment in person. So let me ask you, you know, it's interesting. This guy I've had every time I got him on Craigslist a decade ago. I go on there. He's the cheapest guy to move a pool table, right? It's like 350 bucks to move it completely. And then the guy gets in my house and he's making dead eye contact. And he goes, you shoot pool, don't you? You're a billiard player, I can tell. I go, well, yeah, I got a pool table. And he's like, are you pretty good?

What do you play, eight ball or nine ball? I'm like, I play both. He's like, how important is it for you to bank? And I'm like, pretty important. He's like, the cushions are worn out on these. Let me show you why. The felt has been stretched again. I don't recommend stretching it again.

Owning a pool table is like owning a boat. Are you going to use this lambskin cover? $1,300 later, I got the cheap move, but he was so good. So I like the idea of getting into the home because it's a big advantage. Let me ask you this. So a lot of listeners right now, you know, not a ton right now, but there's a lot of. Let me ask you this. So a lot of listeners right now, you know, not a ton right now, but there's a lot of people going to listen to this. What kind of budget am I looking at? And I know it depends on a lot of factors, but getting in the door, getting set up, getting just the feel for how this is going to work. What kind of budget

am I looking at? What should I prepare for? You know, we're the fraction of a cost of one employee. So you could start at $2,500 a month with Verse. That can cover you for many, many hundreds, even a couple thousand conversations per month that we're having. Something that no single one human could ever handle and do efficiently and 24-7. You'd have to have four to six people to handle that. And we do it for the fraction of a cost of one person doing that. And we're 24 seven consistent with an entire platform around it to do much more with as well and get intelligence and insights that help you optimize your marketing campaigns. So I would look at us as an extension of your team

for a fraction of the cost of one additional human. And usually companies, you can see on the case studies, they add us and they could be five or 10 people lighter and more lean and efficient with automation that's doing just a lot of the heavy lifting and then letting humans come in to do what they need to do, give quotes, meet with people on site and actually be the high impact personnel that people need by their side? You know, it's crazy. There's a lot of people out there. I think that's a lot of money. But the problem, I think that's a lot of money is because they don't understand

how this industry even works. And you can't buy every tool you look at because if you did, we're a pretty large company. We've got about 500 employees, should be 2,000 next year. Ultimately, it's an investment and it should pay for itself times 10. But I think this one is one that could pay for itself a lot more. But the thing is, I think most people listening to this, they got a fair chance of getting on it. Even if you got great people to build a roadmap for from, I think they're going to be underutilizing it. It'd be dangerous what we could do if we did this. Because look, I'm building some advanced API integrations into ServiceTitanet. When you hit a button

in ServiceTitanet, it automatically text messages you from me and it sends a video. Hey there, Mr. Customer. My name's Tommy Mello. I just wanted to thank you for approving the work. I wanted to make sure you ask about our amazing service agreement that gets you a discount today and takes care of this investment. Also talk about the flooring that we do. You've heard of those epoxy jobs. We use polyaspartas. It's amazing. Lifetime warranty. We also have the storage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're building some things that because my guys, I can't guarantee they're going to talk about it. So I'm going to make sure they talk about it. So there's so many opportunities.

And I just think that it takes a real pioneer to go in and understand their industry. I guarantee you, I don't know crap about solar, HVAC, plumbing, electrical. I go through all these things. But I understand. Another thing, there's three ways to make money from customers. You either get more of them you charge them more or you keep them coming back more frequent those are the only three i know and referring you as part of the third bucket yeah so those are getting new ones right so

the referrals do you do anything with text and referrals yeah so perfect opportunity for us to set something up with you for at post job automate the the follow up to ask how it was anything you could have improved and I'll leave you a review if they were happy with the service. That goes a really long way. It helps you understand what's happening at scale as well. If there's any weak spots, it helps you address people who are unhappy quickly before they go and kind of rage on Yelp or other services. Like you can get to them quickly because you're listening to them and asking them. So if someone has an issue and they were unsatisfied, you can reach out to them quickly and try to resolve it. Which is going to, again, a lot of times when people do that, it leads to more business from that same customer because it builds so much trust when someone knows that you care.

Well, you just got to be careful that you're not gating. Yeah. If you're gating, I've heard of everybody's reviews getting wiped out because they were sending one review to Google. They were sending another one to a manager to deal with. And if you take the chance, if you do it wrong, and Google is... I love Google, but they could also be your worst enemy if I've seen some stuff happen that's just out of control. Yeah. No, and it makes sense and honestly you know a great way to go about this is to engage people to see how their

experience was if they say they were happy then you can automate a response saying well thank you so much for that i'm so glad you were happy here's a link if you'd like to leave us a review if someone was unhappy you're not asking for reviews yet. You're asking if they were happy. And if they're not, then you can address it, help them out, follow up. Are you happy now? Great. Would you leave us a review? I think that's not against any terms that I know of, unless you're taking all the reviews. There are certain systems that know if it's a negative one and doesn't send it into the system. But that's one that you ask for reviews and then you're eliminating the bad reviews. What I'm saying is to approach people

in general, just after a job saying, did everything get taken care of? And are you happy with the service? Fantastic. Would you leave us a review? Or I'm unhappy. Okay, what can I do better? How can I make this better? And then ask for a review afterwards. It's interesting because there's a new platform out there. I don't know the name of it, but now they're looking at reviews so deeply. They're getting the FBI involved with if they think it's massive spam reviews. And this is not what I'm talking about, but it's crazy to know. And Google's taking it amongst themselves to create LSA.

LSA, they actually listen to the phone call. They've got AI on their end. They can control LSA a lot more than they control GMB, Google My Business. So the podium seems to be a really big one I hear a lot about. Obviously, there's a lot of different things out there. Are you familiar with podium? Yeah, sure. They're kind of more enablement-based, and they're good for collecting reviews as well over SMS. And then if you have a team that can man the conversations, you know, you kind of have to man your own SMS conversations. But you can automate outreach for reviews and for other kind of small tactical outreach needs. Let me ask you, if someone wants to reach out, I don't want to take up too much of your

time here. I've already, I had a blast by the way. We're not completely done yet. You got a few more minutes. I got a few more. Okay. So how do people get ahold of you if they want to reach out? Well, they can email me directly anytime and I'm happy to route them to the right team member. My email is david at verse.io. Or just go on verse.io and schedule a demo with our sales team. They take a consultative approach. They want to really understand your business, your funnels, where you generate leads from, what you're already doing today, and then see how we can complement that with additional, you know, filling the gaps in the holes of engagement to complement not necessarily to

rip everything out and replace it but to augment and improve everything you're doing by adding a conversational to a sms channel to the mix okay and this is a question i ask every time you could go as quick as you want but there are a lot of books that have changed my life literally rich dad poor dad never split the difference i've got a pretty lots of shelves influenced by robert cedini emits revisited who for recruiting what are some of the books that have really influenced you you look like a who moved my cheese type guy no i'm kidding i love anything motivational so anthony robbins you know think and grow rich napoleon hill i just love the mindset it puts me in it keeps me really positive So Anthony Robbins, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, all those kinds of books.

I just love the mindset. It puts me in. It keeps me really positive and gives me the energy to talk to a lot of people and get out on the road and be active. So I love any kind of self-help motivational kind of books. So the last thing I ask, and I'll finish this out, is we talked about a lot of stuff here, mostly on lead capturing, follow-up, really making the most out of what you're already spending. It's a great thing to add on to really get a better customer experience overall. Speed of lead matters. I'm sure there's some things we didn't hit on, some things we might have not talked about. I'll let

you kind of speak a couple of minutes to close us out. Whatever you'd like to talk about, maybe something we missed. Yeah, well, speech elite is crucial, obviously. I forget the stats. I have too many in my head at any one time. But 87% or 86% or so of people will work with the first person they meet with face to face. So speech elite is important to build that relationship, get in front of them. And then once you get in front of them face to face, people will stop looking for alternatives. So speed to lead. Secondly, is the fortune is in the follow up. You know, most people make one or two attempts and they just move on because they're getting more and more leads all the time.

And so they just move on. It takes on average six to eight attempts to get a hold of 80% of your bucket. So if you're not making at least six to eight attempts, you're going to absolutely be having a leaky bucket of people you're just not reaching out to at the right time and just completely wasting them. And lastly, it's about a consistent, respectful, automated follow-up, which allows you to do this at scale so you can tweak and make updates and optimize like you would any marketing function or any business function that you're trying to improve and optimize. If you're not measuring it, you're not going to be able to improve it. So our insights are really powerful in letting you measure that. But it's

important even before you start with us to understand your funnel as best as you can. We'll help you, but as best as you can, so you know what you're benchmarking, where you're starting from. And then we can actually measure the levers that are creating the lift that we all want to measure and see you succeed with. It's really powerful, David. I do appreciate it. Thank you very much for being on here, brother. Thank you, Tommy. Appreciate it. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.

Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions

to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership.

It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're gonna do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program.

So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.