The Home Service Expert Podcast - Using Text Messaging to Turn More Leads into Happy Customers

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Aaron Weiche is the co-founder and CEO of Leadferno, a text messaging platform that aims to help close more leads faster. He is an entrepreneur, founding and leading multiple companies and digital marketing agencies over the past 20 years. Prior to Leadferno, he was the CEO of GatherUp where he led the company to experience 5X growth in a span of four years and appeared in the INC 5000 list for 2019. He continues to share his expertise as a co-host for a podcast on running a SaaS company called TheSaaSVenture.com, as well as through international speaking engagements on the topics of digital marketing, customer experience, conversion, and messaging. In this episode, we talked about text messaging, digital marketing, conversion…

So when you put all the power in their hand to start the conversation in the channel they want to, to schedule something, which what works on their schedule instead of, oh, these are the two times we can do for you. And it's super frustrating. It's like we have so many tools now and it's just putting them together the right way so that you can put all that power in the consumer's hands. So they feel like, man, these guys couldn't be easier to work with. They're on top of what they're doing. And then if you take it further and you use text messaging to communicate when you're going to be there and following up and making sure everything's okay and all of that, then you're just sealing the deal for a great review and for them to be referring their neighbors and friends. 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. Welcome back to Home Service Expert. Today, I have have Aaron Wyke with me. He's an expert in digital marketing, customer experience, and sales and conversion rates. He's based out of Minneapolis. Aaron launched Leadferno in 2021, a text messaging platform for businesses to close more leads faster. Aaron is an entrepreneur founding and leading multiple companies and digital marketing agencies over the past 20 years. Prior to Leadferno, he was the CEO of GatherUp, growing to serve over 25,000 businesses. He helped found the Minnesota Search Association. He's a partner in the local university and speaks internationally on digital marketing,

customer experience, conversion, and messaging. Aaron, pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks for having me, Tommy. So I get a big kick out of this stuff. I'm a big fan of lead funnels. Text messaging is my favorite, actually, in a certain aspect, especially to close deals, right? Because the worst answer I could get when I ask my closers, I say, people did you get a hold of today they're like we left 10 voice messages i was like

how many text messages you send out like nobody checks their voicemail we got voicemail blast text message email and then we also do the phone calls but we also use the usps and we also use priority mail and we also use handwritten letters. And it's nice to use a tool like HubSpot to be able to see what's working the best and how much it's costing you per acquisition. Salesforce, I guess, is okay. There's active campaign. There's all kinds of lead nurturing platforms. But tell us a little bit about your company, why you got in this industry and what's going on with you in the business. Yeah. So as you alluded to, I'm a longtime digital marketing and entrepreneur addict. I spent about 15 years running digital marketing agencies of various sizes, building

websites, search campaigns, social campaigns, all of those things. And then about eight years ago, I switched over to software. The company I ran there was GatherUp. It's a reputation management company. So online reviews, customer feedback, led that to an acquisition in 2019. And after that, it was time to start thinking about the next idea, which is actually something that married a bunch of different things over my couple of decades. And that led to the birth of Leadferno, which number one, what the focus was is I saw over all these years of building hundreds of websites for businesses of all sizes, but primarily small businesses, is just how bad at conversion and the limited tools for conversion that most websites had.

It was just a contact page. Everything just needed to go through that contact page. And when I took a look at the evolution and how everyone was communicating and in seeing millions upon millions of reviews come through our system at GatherUp, I just saw how important communication was and just started to investigate how much text messaging could aid conversion. And those things is what led to sketching out the idea for Leadferno and getting that up and running to help businesses communicate better with their customers using primarily text messaging, but some other conversion techniques and tools as well. So let's go into exactly what Leadferno, how it works and what the purpose is. Does it work with CRMs or ERPs? Is it a follow-up system? Does it

create new leads? Is it for maintenance agreements? Let's go through the details of what Leadferno does. Yeah. So our main focus is conversion. So what we do is place two floating buttons on the website, right? If anyone's come across a website you're familiar with, like live chat, you'll see the help buttons down in the lower right corner. So ours basically go out there and it's letting the customer know that you can text with that business. Now, one of our differences when you click those buttons and you get the window that opens, not only do we offer text messaging, but you can place your other conversions there as well. So if you wanted to schedule a call or an appointment or meeting, you can link it to your Calendly, SavvyCal, whatever tool you have booking right

on your website. You can link it to your click to call. So if you're using CallRail or call tracking metrics, if you have an existing estimate form, form a newsletter sign up whatever you want that to be we just look at it we're putting these buttons on every page of your website let's put your top three four conversion entrances right there front and center for the user to try to get them to convert no matter what page of your website that they're on the second thing that we do is we power text messaging so we automatically bring two-way text messaging to the table. So you can start interacting with that prospect or your customers over text. And then we're omni-channel. So we bring in Facebook Messenger and Google's business messages all into the same inbox so you can interact with it. So between all of those things, you make it

easier for your customers to start asking you questions, to go from just being a lurker on the website to actually stating who they are and being a lead. And then we make that communication easier with a series of tools on the inbox side. So saved replies, you can save hundreds of common replies, links you'd send, questions you'd ask to make those conversations much easier. Automated replies for new leads that come in during hours, after hours, so you can set correct expectations. Scheduling messages for appointment reminders, follow-ups, review requests, then things like that.

And what we've really found is because it's text messaging, it's so much easier for a company to ramp up. You've probably have tested and used live chat. You get employees that have just this fear stricken in them when they get into a live chat software and you have to turn yourself live and you have to remember to turn it off when you go grab lunch and things like that. When you're using text messaging with it being asynchronous and they're already using text message in their personal lives, probably more than any other app on their phone.

The uptake is really easy. And instead of having like one or two live chat specialists, you can employ as many people to operate in text, take conversations, transfer conversations, and really increase efficiency for the business. What's the story about being able to converse with people? Yeah, I have a database of 600,000 people. I don't have an official opt-in, but as long as they are texting in, but can I retarget them a year later about a work that I did? Well, I know you're supposed to get two-way authorization, all this stuff. What's the deal with this? What worries you at night with this stuff? How do I do it legit? Yeah, not too much worries me when they're coming on their own, right?

They're the ones starting the conversation with what's there. I tell people, you know, if you're going to start texting someone out of the blue, you definitely want somewhere in your process where you've asked them for permission to use that as a communication channel. And most of the times,

if you're connecting with them on a one-on-one basis, like that's just fine. We definitely talk about text marketing. That's not a focus of ours, sending a text blast. That has a lot more intricacies and things that you really want to think about before you start blowing up someone's, you know, most likely their most personal channel with a surprise message out of the blue. Yep. Okay. So one-on-one seems to be fine. Yeah. Like even on our form, there's just a short, like, you know, by hitting submit here, you're agreeing to text message with us,

data rates and message rates apply. And that's really all that's needed. And there's been some legislature that's gone through as well, where people entering into that messaging, it's just treated much different than you go and buy a list or you dump all your customers in and you just decide to start blasting them. Yeah, I agree. Have you ever heard of send out cards? Yes. Yeah. So they've got this thing that you can send unlimited heartfelt cards. And just from that little lesson, if we think about that, a heartfelt specific card is so much more meaningful than just a blanket card. Yes. And I think the same works for text messages.

If I said, hey, Aaron, we were out there last May. Here's a few things we did. Here's a picture of your technician. We really appreciated the review you left. And it's copied. And it was something specific to you, you'd be like, whoa, it would just get such a better response than this spray and play type technique, right? Absolutely. I mean, in the companies that really nail this, those are the kind of things

they're doing, right? They find the right touch points and ways to continue the conversation, even when the customer doesn't have a need. And text messaging works so great for that, especially when it's done on a personal level. When you get into text blast, I've signed up for dozens over the years. I only have one that I've subscribed to for longer than a year that I still see value in. And it's Gary Vaynerchuk's wine text, right?

Where they send you a daily wine deal. And the beauty is you just reply with the number of bottles that you want to buy. They already have your payment info on file. So you just type six and they're like, great, we're shipping it. You don't have to enter in your card, do the checkout, anything else. So that's the one for me out of tons of retail ones that I've signed up for that don't get deleted after I get the deal or the discount or anything else. And it's because it's a sizable savings when i go into it so i tell people if you're going to do text marketing blast like you

better be delivering some real value or you'll just wear out your welcome super fast and it'll do the opposite of what you want it to do i agree i agree because have you ever heard of a barter group or like an organization there There's like iTrade, there's different things. I get like 20 texts a day and they got me on these automatic things. And it's like, come on guys. John Haddad had a question. He said, we're selling a SaaS solution for employer and higher education. In your experience for the HE space, text message is effective or not? Yeah, John, great question. Here's always a way I look at it and it totally fits. If you can make hundreds to thousands of dollars off of answering questions, two-way text messaging is a great idea. So in higher education, right? And my oldest of four kids is headed off

to college this year. When you consider some of the initial things you might have questions on, on when do you have, you you have open house or campus visits? How can we get a tour? Things like that. Being able to get one-to-one connection with somebody to answer those questions and point you in the right direction to get you into your recruiting process is absolutely the right way to go with it. At the end of the day, text messaging is such an easy way to start a conversation and so

low volume, just as you referred to Tommy, if you start playing phone tag with someone like that's the most painful thing in the world. Like I don't want to listen to my voicemail. I want to call somewhere else back, get a phone tree, press three different numbers, leave a voicemail for someone, wait for them to call me back. Then when they call back, I don't know what the number is. I'm already doing something else. I can't take the call. It just ends up ridiculous. Yeah, I agree. I like the idea of Calendly. I actually messaged one of my guys. I said, hey, brother, I want you to reach out to every client with this exact script. It was something like, hey, this is Josh. I work closely with the owner here at A1 Garage Door Service. I have the authorization to basically do whatever I need

to do to earn your business. I'm really, really looking forward to about 15 minutes of your time. I want to do this on your convenience. So if you could break out 15 minutes, the sooner the better. Let's see what we can do. And then there's the Calendly. I think it's so important to get those going now. I am building some auto sequences into my system because I want to hit every client right away. And I want to make sure that we're jumping on the phone after my guy walked out of the house because now it's out of our control. I think that text messaging, I don't care about voicemail blasts. They do bypass some laws and some legislation,

but I think email still works. Of course it still works. I think USPS still works if it's done correctly. You know, I just got these new things that I'm going to be sending out. They're the video. Have you ever seen one of these where you open it up? It's called a video postcard.

Yeah. So what's this? Anyways, I think just the problem that we have right now, Aaron, is that we're on information overload. We know we should be doing Google. We know we should be doing reviews. We should probably be doing text messaging. You need a follow-up system.

You need a great ERP. You need a great CRM. You need to be doing the, you know. It's like, oh my gosh, holy cow. And I know people listen to the podcast sometimes, they're like, where do I start? How simple is this to kind of plug and play? I mean, how much work and training goes into this if I wanted to just use this on my website? Yeah. For us, we see the average 10 minutes, you're up and running. So it's a very simple process. You're dropping in one line of code or putting in a WordPress plugin for those buttons to appear.

Make a small number of customizations to reflect your branding and the conversion channels that you want to put out there. And then, like I said, using it, whether you use, right, we have both a desktop app and mobile apps. So either way, it's going to feel just like texting or using Facebook Messenger for you. I mean, we really worked, you know, most of these tools, you're replicating that same type of experience.

You're not making people learn a whole new way to converse. Really, the only things are figuring out kind of these power user features of like what we call shortcuts, the saved replies, and the auto replies, the things that your personal text messaging app doesn't have. And I think to your other point, Tommy, and that's why we look at it, just options are so important for consumers nowadays because we all have preferences in how we like to do business. Even if you only take the first question via text message, and after that, you're like, great, can we call you? Or great, can we set up an appointment? That's totally cool. Whatever works best for your business and your sales process. But on the front end, giving customers

a choice, like what do you want to do? Do you want to fill out a form? Do you want to contact us? Do you want to text us? Do you want to call us? You choose because you have options. And the companies that are the easiest to work with, those are the ones that people talk about and refer to someone else and rave about. It's not the ones that like, well, they only take cash and the guy only answers his phone after 6 p.m. And if you can get them booked, you're lucky. Those aren't the ones that continue to expand it and grow and find efficiency. So I used to go to this thing called Affiliate Summit.

And then there was another one I go to, LeedsCon. And I feel like a lot of the booths, some of it was built on AI. Some of it was built on having VAs do it from another country, like 600 bucks a month, where it was all auto-respond. They'd have to find the comment or say, let me get back to you on that. What's a good email? But they'd have these really cheap to respond. And I haven't gone to these things in a few years. But where do you think you really wanted to make the difference? On the UI? Was it the simplicity? Was it in the home service space? Where were you like, I see a need for this? Yep.

One was, like I said, just making the next step of converting a customer easy as possible for that end user, for the consumer that's on the site, right? Like in building and also like at conferences, doing live reviews of small business websites over and over again, the whole purpose of your website is to start a conversation or to get a lead

and how bad people were displaying their call to actions or they had a form that was broken or 20 questions on their form because they wanted the lead to be really mature. And the person's like, I'm not filling that out. I'm not telling you all that info just to get a quote for new windows. So that was definitely the first area of simplicity for the consumer. Because if you win there, then everyone can definitely win with it. When you bring up the things around live chat, at this stage of the game, I'm not for it. I've bring up the things around live chat, at this stage of the game,

I'm not for it. I've yet to have a great live chat experience. What I see is glorified navigation. The customer is asking a question that is solved somewhere on your website, and you're trying to put them to the right page on your website automatically, or you're trying to nurture them enough before you connect them to someone. Now, we all know as consumers, what we want is to talk to someone who can actually help us. So it's only really like buying time for a business. And if you're just buying time and you're kind of putting things in the way, it's almost placating them a little bit where it's just like, oh, this is cute.

We have a help guide on this, or we have an article on this. Will this answer it? And things like that. And then I see chats that maybe the bot will answer one or two questions and then end the chat. And then the really difficult thing with live chat for business, we talked about having enough people trained, but just being online. So if you're going and you're having a service do it, that service is really just trying to book something. And so if someone's coming to you and they have just a couple of questions to gauge your expertise or feel like if they're a good fit, that conversation is likely

going to fail. They're going to realize I'm not really getting attention right now. I'm just kind of getting a filibuster to get me to making an appointment or booking me into this service. And so with text messaging, you have more people that can do it. You have a greater area to reply to. And with live chat, we actually did a survey of 2000 consumers. 57% said they leave a website when they get the agent not available. So it's like, what a leaky bucket that is. It's somebody who's like, yeah, I'd love to talk right now. Then they open it and it says, oh, sorry, we're not available, but leave your email and we'll get back to you. And you're like,

listen, I hit live chat because I don't want to email you. So I'm out of here. I'll go find the next search result and see if I can get help there. You know, this is making a lot more sense the more we talk about it because you're not solving the text messaging everything. So let me give you a selfish scenario, which is mine. We get a lot of visitors on a daily basis basis and I'm sure this thing would blow up. It would be great, like in a good way. I'm really mentally moving down the stages of how to get here. So I'm going to go through some kind of just Q&A with you for, like I said, selfish reasons. So if you check out a1grouch.com and you kind of check out the website. It's one of the highest ranked websites in home service. And we get lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of

visitors. So I got about 40 call center representatives. And right now we're booking about 12,000 calls a month. I pay them under performance pay. So every time they book a phone call and their booking rate's above 90%, they make money. Now, if I could get them all on this live chat, how would I do this with 40 agents? Would I just pick three of them that handle text messaging and still could take the phone calls? How would you set that up in a way that keeps them motivated? I'd pay them on every call they book through the system. So the reporting and what it hit all three of them at the same time. So let's just use a small call center. Let's say I got 10 CSRs. And let's say I just wanted a couple of my top agents that are very good that said, I'm really good with text messages. I can handle this even if I'm on a call.

Like, how would you set that up? Yeah. So a couple of things to keep in mind, just what we've seen, like industry statistics, is service representatives can handle anywhere from six to 10 text conversations at a time compared to one phone call. So when you look at what you can have in flight and that asynchronous back and forth, the consumer is getting a notification when you reply, very used to that, and they can do it at any time at anywhere, you're just able to progress a lot more conversations. So the volume can definitely increase. We've seen, especially in the legal industry, which is very mature in digital marketing and online leads and call centers

and things like that, especially in the personal injury side, we've seen them actually remove their phone number from the header and the above the fold call to actions to try to drive more text conversations because it allows them to handle more that's there. So I would look at plugging in like, yeah, figure out your volume. What do we need to correctly staff this? Two, three, four. And again, the uptake is pretty easy for getting them trained up and what they can do. The trickier parts are figuring out like, what are some of these saved replies that we want to do that'll cut down on typing keystrokes and things like that. There's a lot of responses, FAQs, videos. Yep. Yep. And just kind of putting those into play and you're off and running and then you'll be able to see and track what is the lead volume? How's it coming in? We allow you to track to a closed conversion.

So you can be able to see how many of those messages converted to a win. And then you alluded to much earlier. Yeah, we integrate with CRMs. So we have both a Zapier app. So you can use Zapier to connect to the CRM you're using. And then we have an API as well. If someone wants to get a little more intricate with what they're doing. It's pretty cool because I love the software companies that

just choose to, we're just going to focus on one thing. And we drive a lot of leads and we pick up a lot of leads from being most majority from 90% plus from Google. And then we also have the GMB where they'll hit the website. We also have LSAs where they'll go to the website. We also have organic and now PPC, go to the website. We also have organic. And now PPC, generally, we're using landing pages that are separate from our main site. But our website just gets a ton of traffic. And we're continuing to add search engine domination, like more links, better articles. We're adding videos, infographics, city pages. And then we just build a buyer's guide and as these things come out and

we become more national i should say because right now we're in 19 states as we're in 40 states we start buying long-tailed keywords and really make those into appointments you get this economy of scale especially when you start setting up tools like these, right? Yep, absolutely. And just to your point, right? If you're doing digital marketing, you're doing content marketing and you're creating blog posts and landing pages and localized pages and all these things. Again, you can put these buttons on every page.

So you're not dealing with, did we plug in a form or not? Do we need to funnel it back to this form? You know, all of those different aspects. And then our reporting will tell you which pages are converting the most. So you're able to see, oh, it's this blog post on garage door spring repair. That's the one that's really driving more conversions and leads for us. So you're not only able to get easy conversion methods on there,

you're able to track what they're doing as well, which is helpful, especially when you're doing content marketing. You can see what's going on with it. We give you a funnel report that tells you like how many button impressions, how many times they were clicked to open, and then how many text conversations were submitted. And from what pages? Yes, from the exact page. So you're able to see how each exact page is performing. So you can pull up and see that your highest converting page is your about page or your homepage. And that's where you're going to be able to maybe test some things. I'm sure to say one of the things when we use schedule engine, we had five pages. People would

click through when we switched it to the conversion rate double because people didn't want to keep going through this five. It's crazy. it's like i was talking earlier to a buddy of mine and he's like you know why amazon kills it because they spent billions of dollars figuring out all my information's in here i know when it's going to get delivered i click two buttons and i just spent 500 bucks but it's coming to my house in two days yep so i think if the ui could fix a person's problem we're just not patient anymore, human beings. We're just like, just book it. That's why scheduling is kind of cool too. So you could take, book now, they would go into our booking systems. And I love the fact that I can hook this up to service tight on their API. What have companies seen with your tool? Is there any factual,

I know that with different industries, it's really hard to say this overarching deal, but are people seeing an average amount of leads picked up that they would have lost? Is there any type of data that you've been... I know it's only been since 2021, but... Yep. What we typically see on average is that on the low end, the increase in conversion percentage is 15% to 20% on the low end. The biggest variety we see, if somebody's churning out a lot of leads, right?

High traffic site, getting hundreds of leads a month, that's where we see the lower end, right? Like 10, 15% is where they might be. For someone that has enough traffic and just not getting a ton of leads, maybe 5, 10, 15, those are the ones that will see 2x or 3x their leads by putting that out there. And optimizing those call to actions, right? Where we saw the one, you know, schedule appointment online, things like that. Just being marketing that you're super friendly to ask questions of and that text is that option. Those things that we really see pick up when they introduce things. We definitely see a lift when they offer scheduling right on there, where the customer can just pick their own time for

a 15-minute slot or a 30-minute slot or a home appointment, that goes a long way. I just listened to your episode 262, where you did all your Q&As and a lot was around efficiency. And it totally just, it was like hitting home with me with the questions people were asking. Because so much of this, all you have to do is flip your mind to think like a consumer instead of a business owner. And it all comes down to how easy do you make it to work with you? So when you put all the power in their hand to start the conversation in the channel, they want to, to schedule something, which what works on their schedule instead of, oh, these are the two times we can do for you.

And it happens to be when you have one of your kids sports games, or you're going to be out of town. And it's super frustrating. It's like, we have so many tools now and it's just putting them together the right way so that you can put all that power in the consumer's hands. So they feel like, man, these guys couldn't be easier to work with. They're on top of what they're doing. And then if you take it further and you use text messaging to communicate when you're going to be there and following up and making sure everything's okay and all of that, then you're just sealing the deal for a great review and for them to be referring their neighbors and friends. Absolutely. I mean, I'll tell you what, I don't answer my phone anymore unless I know who it is. I don't have the time to take the chance. I mean, now you've got these huge, massive spam filters

that say high risk. And I'm'm just like if i don't know it i've got an out of response says please text me i want to know who you are what you want and a lot of times i'll afford that to somebody that i'll deal with it but if you said hey listen i'm your landscaper i'm actually the guy that came out i'm his boss he gave you an estimate i think there's something i can do for you here based on the fact and i'm the type of guy when i do something for somebody i don't do something for free i'm not let's make a deal i'll say listen if you tell us we did a great job on next door yelp and google if you feel that way obviously your time's important to us i'll save you an extra hundred

dollars on today's work on this new system we're going to install, whatever it is. But I always try to do something, or listen, I noticed that your rails look good on your garage, or I can leave those out, I can save you another $200 there. Let's talk about some financing that we can possibly do. I call it a promotionary offer that we have. So text messaging works the best for that as well, but that's later in the funnel. That's actually at the end of it, when you're about to close. You're just missing stuff right up front. You don't even realize it No, and I think it's true. And I think You know, how are you driving leads to your website is the one of the questions that I would ask and I think I've got

An e-commerce site. Does this work really well for e-commerce sites? Yeah. I mean, that might be the one area where live chat works better just because you can instantly engage in that conversation. Now you can do text in complete real time as well, right? So if you're going to be on top of it and you're answering texts within seconds and minutes, then absolutely, that can be the way to go with it. I like the idea, because mine's a garage door e-commerce site, garage door parts. So I would like to say text a pro instead of text.

And then I've got hundreds of technicians. So I just put two technicians that love to text that make a certain fee every time they close a deal. Yep. And we'll think, so you're texting with them and then you're like, great, send me a photo of that part. Can I see can i see a serial number like if you need to do those oh yeah yeah i'll help you get through it because one of the crappy things about chat is you're stuck in that chat window right like we've all had these live chat experiences where yeah you're just stuck there

it's like yeah yeah i can't leave because they said they're coming back to the chat or they told me to hold on a minute. Meanwhile, I got something to do. Like texting just gives you complete flexibility to move around and do what you need to do. You know, I feel like the reason I hate chat is because it always happens with either like an Amazon type company or it happens with the PayPal or it happens with the municipality government ran crap and they're never good. They never answer my questions. It's automated. They got to get me to the level two level two. I got to catch back up. What I always tell people, you know what an IVR is. Yep. So IVR press one, press two, press three. Our menu options have changed. That works great when you're the cable company. Because guess what?

You own the cable in that market. It doesn't work good when you have a choice and you're just calling somebody that can get out there. Press one if you want to book a new. So the only IVR that I've seen actually works really well is, hey, listen, we've been getting a lot of spammy calls lately. Press any button just to tell us that you're a human yeah and that actually worked it was just and people didn't get annoyed they start laughing like oh my god i get a lot of spammy calls too yeah but ivrs don't work really

great on the demand type home service yeah the one thing where you kind of pointed out right you're asking the caller to know how to get somewhere right they're having to self-select where they're trying to get. Now, with like a business text messaging app, what we do is we allow conversations to be transferred. So just as you outlined before, you have somebody fielding the inbound and starting to get the initial information. They can then transfer that to any other user on the platform. And that user gets the full conversation, what's been said, who said it, any history

and background. You can even see previous conversations they might have had if they're a repeat customer. So it makes it really easy at the end of the day to get that customer to the person on your team that can best help them. So if you're a smaller org and you only have a few guys and a few trucks, somebody takes it in the office and then they're able to say, great, I'm going to transfer you over to Greg. Now they send it over to Greg. He has it on his app. He can ask questions, figure out when he can get to them, what can go on, what he might advise them to do in the meantime until he gets there. So being able to fluidly move those around is just one more reason to use a business messaging

app instead of your own text messaging app. What about a weighted round robin? Like I've got the ace in the hole that I want to take this if they're available, then I want it to hit different people. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Like I do that with my call center with a VoIP system. I basically say this person is so much better than I got this person, this person. So to literally, if they're on a call, it doesn't hit them, it skips them. Yep. We have had that feature requested. It's on our roadmap, but not in the next couple of months. But it'll eventually hit our platform.

It's a random question. And it would take me a couple of months to get the data to see who's the best at this anyway. Yep. So one of the questions I get a lot is AI chatbots. Personally, what it is, is really it's regression testing. It's going back and saying, and this is a similar question, we answered this. AI is actually, it's not true AI. I haven't seen anything. Google's put out some stuff that is truly AI, but I think a lot of times it's just more over time they've come up with the right answer. What is your thought on

bots? Yeah, I just don't love them. Most of the time, the experiences are choppy and not really getting to where you want to, especially for small businesses, because you're not likely sitting on a bunch of content anyway, and you have a hard time already purposing that into something. So you're not even getting it to your webpage over years and years upon being in business and having a webpage out there. But now you're going to start creating it and getting it into these AI bots and being able to answer more questions. I really look at it, your site's job is to start to build trust, get them interested and show them that you're easy to work with. Then offer the easiest channels for them to be able to

solve it. Now, if you wanted to say, do you want to talk to a bot over a human? Then I can see that we haven't succeeded yet. We've tried to get some customers who we see a lot of people converting from chat to our tool. And we've tried to get some like, no, leave your chat there. Let's use it as an option within our menu and see what happens. But they're usually like, no, I'm fed up with it. I don't like it. I don't like how we manage it. And so I haven't gotten any of them to stick around on it yet to see how do people choose if they have those two as options. But at the end of the day, get people to the right person on your team that can help them. They're going to move them the fastest through your process and get them to an outcome you want. And it's going to make them the happiest. So I heard this thing with grant cardone where he's answering phone calls

he's literally calling up a gym and the gym is he's saying hey how much for personal training and the guy's like you would need to come in and get a consultation before we just give that out and he's like you can't even help me and he looks at the credit goes that's bullshit he's like you should be able to give me something so So I really thought a lot about that. When I'm messaging in and I'm like, it's a lot easier than even a phone call. A phone call is easier than in person. So a text is easier than a phone call. A phone call is easier than in person.

But I'm texting and saying, hey, listen, Aaron, how much did you come out here to take a look at my garage door? I think I got a broken spring. Now I'm texting them. We'd like to come and make an educated look. i don't want to give you a quote over the phone because we're not a bait and switch company how do you recommend doing those because it's so much more sincere when there's voice on the phone oh my gosh aaron i'm so sorry to hear about your broken spring are you sure it's a broken spring and you can't get that empathy on a text it's just like all they're hearing is we need to come out and look at it.

And then you're like, OK, see you later. But then also, does that automatically expel that? See, if you hang up, you're not getting that callback. Can I just say, I'll tell you what, if we're in your neighborhood, what are your cross streets? Maybe I can wave the trip charge and just whatever. Can you keep that going? Like, tell me a little bit about your thought process on that.

Yeah, so a lot of that comes down to the art of communication. And some people are naturally good at this. Others need to be trained on it. But it's like, how can you be able to add some emotion to that interaction and add that personalization? And some of the words you just used, Tommy, you use things that are emotion words like empathy, like, sorry, that's super frustrating. Understanding the customer as an expectation. Here's how fast we think that we can get to you. Here's what we'd like to do.

And you can always say like, you know, always tricky to diagnose these over text. Can you send me a couple of photos? And if that doesn't work, can I give you a call? So outlining them options for how you can automate it. So those will be the, I could have like 10. I don't want a hundred. I don't problem is I want some easy ones to find. Yep. How easy is it to find them in your UI?

Like, do I go to a category like rebuttal or what's that kind of a range? Yeah. So one, when you create that saved shortcut, you can give it a keyword name. So it could be like Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q photo. You can name it whatever naming convention that you want. And the second is you can just do a keyword search for a word that you know is in that message, whether it's the keyword title or anything in that message. So either one of those will show you the ones that are matches for that and bring it up. There's two types of shortcuts. So one is a team shortcut. Any user

in the account can grab that shortcut. So that would be general things like specific links to visit or how to pay or hours, whatever that might be. And then each user can set up their own personal shortcuts to again, reflect their personal communication, their job role, what they handle the most that might be there. So we have customers that have hundreds of them. And just based on their naming convention or doing a quick search, it allows them to quickly pull it up over and over. So it would mean a lot to me if I knew I was dealing with a professional. No matter what I want, I want to talk to someone that knows what they're talking about more than just.

So a lot of times when I get on the phone and I'm like, what I'll do is I'll be like, Aaron, what's going on with your garage? I think I got a broken spring. I'll be like, OK, are they oil tempered zinc galvanized springs? Is it a wood overlay door? Do you know the radius of your track? And I'll just make it sound because I you'll be like, well, I don't really know. Is it a Wayne Dalton master system? And I just go into all these questions and they're like i'm like you know the doorways you know it's a double spring system do you know if the cables got ruined in the process do you know i don't want to come out there and be something different completely than what i'm saying to answer your question just 200 would be a mistake because then if i come out there it's different then that's not

fair so if you send me some pictures also, though, what I want to look at is your panels have cracks in it. How does your bottom rubber look like? Was your opener ruined in the process? I don't think you want to take that apart and tell me it's really best to get someone out there, but I love the fact that I can communicate with somebody that knows what

they're talking about. Like if I'm talking to a, someone that does trying to think of a harborist is it trees i want a picture of the tree and give as many details as possible can you do videos through it too not yet hopefully someday well videos yeah no it'll come i'm sure that'll come but the pictures help enough. Yep. Yeah, totally. The one thing I don't want to do is try to diagnose everything over the phone and be sending out, but some people are going to want to send a picture. And what's really cool is a lot of times we're having these virtual quotes or people are like, listen, I just want a quote. Don't even bother coming out here.

Let me know what I need to do for you. And I think this tool would work great for that. Yeah. Well, as I alluded to, our whole goal is to start a conversation, where you take it, what channel it needs to go to based on your type of business, what you're comfortable with. That's all up to you. Now, what we see is once people get comfortable with like, great, first question, first reply is over text. And then I turn it to a phone call, or I try to book an appointment. But as we see, as they move along and they get comfortable, then they realize, oh, wow, if I do these follow-ups in the pre-sales process, it increases what we close. If I ask for a few photos of something, it makes us more knowledgeable

when we walk into it. If I'm giving people a heads up on when we're showing up, they really appreciate it and they really realize we have our act together. I get more reviews when I send them our Google link through a text message or just ask, are there any neighbors that you know of that might need our service? Or as you alluded to earlier, a year after you completed that landscape project, you're like, hey, a year ago today, we wrapped up your project. Here's a photo of it. Do you have any new projects that you're thinking about? Hope you're well. So there's a lot of great one on one where you can continue. And that's where I point out, I wrote a well. So there's a lot of great one-on-one where you can continue. And that's where I point out,

I wrote a, I don't know, kind of a soapbox post a couple of weeks ago on our blog where it's like, texting is a connection and like live chat is just a session. And especially with where we're at right now, possible recession looming, things being a little harder, like you need those connections with your customers

and you need to find ways to be connected in order to keep your business flowing in the right direction. And when you have personalized service like that and great communication, you're just raising your odds to try to recession-proof your business. I agree. And what I like about this whole thing is that it tells you the landing pages. And the more you're getting pages, the more you want to make sure every picture, the content is the best content. It's edited properly. You've got infographics. So now instead of working on everything, you're like, this page gets 80% the homepage. Let's really optimize this. Let's compare the first quarter that it wasn't optimized the second quarter and then we'll actually start like that kind of data to me is just it's super important and then

also i want to know if there's a way to categorize like what people were calling about the most so that way i could have some of that information or maybe that that picture like if someone was messaging it seemed like 80 of the, maybe it's a landing page about what kind of garage doors do you offer? Do you got any before and afters? I might want to put before and afters on that page. You know, I think that you could get really wise over time if you pay attention to these things.

Yeah. We don't have categories yet, but it's on our short-term roadmap. So that is coming. You're great at identifying things, Tommy. You obviously have your head around this the same way that we do. I mean, there's just so much that can be done with it. And it's just getting to the point of building it all as we go along and seeing how people are using it and what can make them smarter and more efficient with the outcomes. Well, it's funny because I know the founder pretty well of Schedule Engine and they sold recently to ServiceTitan. And basically,

they called up and they said, would you be interested in a tool that automatically gets your guys scheduled? And I said, yeah, I guess that's fine. I said, you want me to tell you how to make a badass? I said, I want a schedule engine link with its own link for every one of my technicians and my staff.

I also want affiliates. I also want influencers. I also want a link for my vendors. I also want affiliates. I also want influencers. I also want to link for my vendors. I also want to link for customers that want to link. So I could create all these different, and then I could have attribution. Well, they built that and all of a sudden it 10 times them, you know, because it was like, he's like, that's not even that hard. I can build that in a couple of weeks. It's not that hard of development. And I said, well, now you got attribution dialed in for your whole company and you can run it all through service time. So I love thinking about these tools

and I love thinking about technology because the more that I think about it, the more that I implement it, it's really hard to keep up with technology. Technology doesn't sleep. It doesn't take off weekends. It doesn't take smoke breaks. It works all the time. And as long as you've got great people, I do like a person behind it though. I like to know that things are going on and it's not a bot. So one of the things that we looked at with service tech that was pretty cool is when you deposit money, we've got this whole checks and balances thing. Well, it auto batches everything now. So we're able to change an employee's whole structure because her full job was just

to make sure of the matching principle and reconciliation stuff. So we figured all that out and saved the whole employee. We were able to redo the things. So with stuff like this, you look at how do you automate this to a certain degree where you can auto-respond to certain things and just follow up with people. Not auto-respond. One of the things I hate about a bot is it automatically says hey how are you today the minute you know it'll pop up after 30 seconds and i'll say oh really then it'll take forever for the person to come on yeah i feel like with

text messages you just say it is true this is a real person you're talking to emily blah blah blah blah and i will answer any question you could ask me what the weather is like. I'm in, you know what I mean? Like Aaron, what would you say to me over text to let me know you're a real human? I'm curious. Yeah. I mean, the best thing, just as you said, introducing yourself or just even saying like a real member of our team is going to be grabbing this. Here's the expectation on our reply. So like our system has two different auto replies. You set the hours that you want to be open or after hours. So if someone texts you at midnight, 1am, they're going to get an auto reply that says, Hey, we've received your message. We're not answering texts until 8am. If you're something that has like 24 hour emergency,

then you'd state like, if this is an emergency, call this number. Or if you want to schedule something, here's the link. So I just really look at it like, get that initial touchpoint with them through that auto reply. Let them know that they're going to be taken care of, that it was received. And then give them a clear expectation on when that's going to happen. I can't believe, getting back to contact forms, just the other day, I get this, I think it's called the home mag that I get mailed to my house. Yep, I know the home mag, uh-huh. Yep. So there were 25 businesses in the home mag.

And so I just use this as like a cold outreach for my product, right? So I went to all their sites and I filled out their contact forms, not as a customer, but just saying, hey, I got your mag. I have something. You're investing money in marketing. Let me help convert your advertising, your website front and center and take a look at my product. And so I sent those off. Guess how many auto replies I got from the forum saying, hey, we received it. Good news. And here's when we're going to reach out to you.

None. Four. Four. Four out of 25, right? And these are businesses that have their act together enough to run an ad, do marketing, have professional photos, all these things, right? And it was just like, what a black hole, right? And so many of us as consumers, we have that all the time where it's like we filled it out and your significant other will be like, hey, did you get a hold of whatever about this problem? Yeah, I filled out something yesterday. I still haven't heard back from him. The last stat I saw is the average reply time to a digital lead

is 17 hours. Oh, no, I get it. The more that I've actually kind of talked through this with you, I just understand a lot more. And what I love the most about something like this, now here's something, my brain goes 80 million directions because obviously I have the e-commerce site. I have a garage door company. I have a garage door training company, which is garage door freedom. So I'm able to kind of look and then we have a lot of other businesses out, but I'm like, you throw this on every single person's website and you throw an affiliate link on a landing page that saves them 10 percent how many calls do you think companies get worldwide that they say i'm calling for parts i don't need you guys to come here well i'm a part store too yep now half the time that people get the parts they're like i

don't want to install these anymore i don't know what i'm doing so then the company gets the call back so you could use this tool on everybody's site pretty much they sign up for this and they say send them your affiliate link roger nation.com forward slash and then the name of your company it's a discount code that they'll land on save 10 by going here and then i'll pay you on top of that i like that because i'm like how could i get almost a free lead source? And this is exactly what we can do. Well, you didn't look at shipping the part and putting a small little card in there that says, does this look like too much to handle to put in? Oh yeah.

Text this number and we'll come install it for you. So you can do it that way too. And that's exactly right. That's exactly some of the things we're looking at doing. So let me ask you this. So some of the things I ask always at the end here is somebody wants to get ahold of you, ask you questions, possibly get a demo of the tool. What's the best way to do that? Yeah. Go to leadferno.com. You'll magically see those two floating buttons in the bottom right corner.

You can start texting with us. It might be me, someone else on our team. You can book a demo, a 30-minute demo right from there. All we do is teach you about the tool. We have a two-week free trial, so you can get it set up and up and running. We can help you with that. And then you can try it out and see how it works for you within a couple of weeks. And we convert it a pretty high percentage because it's easy and people get bought in. And then is there any books in your life, like the E-Myth and How to Win Friends and Influence People? Any books that have stood out to you? Usually I ask the people on the podcast, the hosts. Yeah. There's three books that stood out. So I've read a bunch, the typicals, you know, Made to Stick, things like that. There's one that I really love. It's a small, short read and it's run your business like Amazon, even a lemonade stand can do it.

And it really just focuses on the principles that Amazon put into place on like how they use reviews. What's his name? Data Turk. He's running a new company called Data Turk. So it's this short read and it just is all about find the core principles of what can make your business great and differentiate it. Right. I think that's one thing we've touched on this in a number of ways. Like, man. Service is hard to differentiate. Product is hard to differentiate. But brand and reputation like those are the differentiators. So when you treat people better, when you communicate better, when you follow up better, all these things, that becomes your brand and your reputation. And when people go to read your online reviews and they read that in spades and your neighbors have great things to say or your

coworkers, whatever else, and you become someone where your competitors are like, what are they doing? When your competitors start to follow what you're doing because your reputation is seeped that far, that's when you're completely crushing. And that's what businesses need to think about in today's day and age is how do I differentiate? It's no different than us. I mean, Tommy, you named tools that we compete against, podium, high level, things like that. And we chose, we're going to make it easier to convert. You can do more than just text. We're going to like the way our window looks better. It's going to be easier to use. You pick your differentiators and that's what you go to bat with and keep going on and on with. You said this works through the website. Does this work with Messenger too, did you mention?

Yeah. So the customer contacts you through their Facebook or their Messenger app, you read and reply out of Leadferno. And the same for Google's business messages, which turns on a chat button in your Google business profile. So now you have website, call, chat, directions as your options right from the search field. And again, you get to reply out of our tool. So instead of replying out of three separate ones, you get to use just ours. And then you can use the same replies. You can use all those same efficiency features in our app. So we're seeing a lot of that the Google Business Messages integration just released. So we're seeing a lot of businesses add that because before they're like, I don't want one more thing to check,

right? Like that time is always a problem. Learning new tools is a problem. Just learn ours and you can interact with multiple. This is probably something that's not on the radar right now, but there are a lot of places, whether you're going to Living Social Group, Bond, Angie, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack. Is there any possibilities down the line to be able to pull in more of those? It's just like, all they do is hit an inbox

and sit there to die. What I find is the small companies are really good at like Thumbtack or they're really good at HomeAdvisor. They live on that platform. And typically these places like you to live on their platform. They don't like to get you off their site. How does that work? It comes down to them being open to it, right? Like, are they willing to integrate and let some of those things happen? I think more and more over time, we'll see more of these companies opening those things up, consumer demand

and mostly the businesses that use it, right? It's like, this is great. I like it. But I remember to check this once or twice a week. And if you integrated with these tools I'm already using, you'd make my life a little bit easier. And it's already proven it can happen when Facebook's willing to let it happen. Google's willing to let, like, those are the ones that want to monopolize what they're doing. And they realize we're going to reach far more people by making this easier for the respondents and for the businesses than we are by making them only use our interface and only use our tool set. That's the way it's going. iPhone's always been a pain in the ass to do that. Apple's always been, you got to use iTunes. They've been really not as open as other companies.

What I'd like to do, Aaron, is after we finish, I want to talk to you for a minute, but I'll give you the mic here to kind of close us out. Maybe there's something we didn't talk about. Maybe there's a point of action that somebody should be taking, but I want to turn it over to you to get us closed out here. All right. Well, hopefully in our conversation, Tommy, I've driven the point home enough that making it easy to work with you is what it's all about. And that's what really Leadferno is about. So if you want to learn more about our tool, go to leadferno.com, book yourself a demo, sign up for the trial. Once you sign up, reach out. If you need help getting the buttons installed or want to tour around it, it doesn't matter to

us. We're here to help. We pride ourselves on customer service, not just being a shitty tech company. We want to bring the personal, not just being a shitty tech company. We want to bring the personal side to it as well. Let's see if we can help you out and help your business for the better. I guess one last question is if I was going to sign up for my website and I'm just your average home service company, approximately how much am I looking at?

Yeah, our base monthly fee is $150 a month and that includes 10 users. The next level up includes up to 25 users, 225. With that one too, the other nice thing is you can port your existing landline. So say you've been around five years, 10 years, 15 years, you have a landline, we can enable to host messaging and you can text from that same number. So that makes it really easy on your service vehicles to say call or text and have your number displayed. You probably already have call in the number, just add or text

in vinyl on your truck. And then you can make that happen with it. So most usually we can just look up your number to see if hosted messaging is enabled for that number. And then we can make it so you just have one number. You know, if I'm in 28 markets, people tend to want to text message back to a local number. How much do you see that come into play? Very little now at all. Like when we create an account, we automatically provision you an 800 number so you can start texting instantly. We get numbers from anything.

One thing we're just releasing is after you submit, we give them an add to contacts button. We want to get you in their phone. That way, right when your auto reply is already going to say what business you're texting from, we want to get in there to be a known contact. So when they get that text message, they already see that it's coming from A1 and they know who they're dealing with right away on that. I like that. Another big thing for us is, and I'll close with this, is we don't like our lines getting tied up. I like that. Another big thing for us is, and I'll close with this, is we don't like our lines getting tied up. We like new customers versus someone calling to check up where their garage door is or any other lines. So what we'd probably want to do is set a

different number for any type of increase or any type to where it's just more of a helpline. Where's my stuff? Where's this? Where's my invoice? Because if you had more of a helpline versus a new appointment line, you could really get a lot less phone calls. And for me, less people on the phone and capacity. We have a bad problem right now that the phone's just Mondays and Tuesdays. Sometimes we get six, 7% unanswered because we just can't get to it at the top. And I think messaging really helps. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And you can tackle that in our product even. So we provision shared inboxes by a profile. That's also what you pay for. So that 150 gets you a shared inbox. You can create additional ones. You can separate service and sales, or you can separate locations when you

have physical locations and the users are very different and things like that. And you want to display different lead boxes on different pages. So there's a lot of different options that you can use to segment based on that kind of stuff with whatever the context is for the business or maybe for the consumer. This is killer. Well, listen, I appreciate you, Aaronaron i love this stuff because you know we talk to accountants we talk to marketing we talked a lot of things and what i love is the variety we talk to best-selling authors and the fact is this is something that's useful that's not talked about very often and i love the fact that i can listen to you and adopt these products and

i probably adopt way too many products but we get to use them and we get really good at them. So I appreciate you doing this today, Aaron. Yeah, no, my pleasure. I love the way that you cover this stuff. I've listened to multiple of your episodes and small businesses should be thankful they have you as a channel to learn this stuff and break it down in a way that people can consume it. That's such an important piece. And it's why I love working with small businesses, right? It's like, how do you take it from being rocket science and break it down to something you can actually use and implement? And then it's fun to see how people benefit from it.

Well, yeah. So I want to talk to you after this to see how we can get into more small businesses because I think we could be really, if we use it and we bring it into home service freedom and some of the users on the Facebook groups, I want to just prove it out because I never recommend anything I don't use. So thank you for doing this today.

And thanks for listening, guys. I appreciate you. 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 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 uh we're just 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.