Ep 167 - The Office Lever: Organic Outbound Marketing

Hello, good day, welcome back. It's Friday, it's our day and you are back on Electric preneur Secrets, the premium service electricians podcast, where we help you master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. I'm Clay Neumeier with me, as always, joseph, the sales bot, luke Canny as you can see below, clay Neumeier is not put there. The pleasant peasant is back from north of the border upward. There's snow in the mountains. At this point, joe, I had to look out the window to confirm that, as I said it. But, my brother, how are you doing today?

I am cold. It's weird. It's like New York always has this temperature where it feels like it just punches you in the nads out of nowhere, like it's rainy or it's cold or it's hot. So right now we're supposed to get 10 inches of rain in the next four hours.

Wow, yeah, you're in the floodplain here again.

Pretty much, yeah. So like, if I suddenly stopped talking on this podcast is because internet cut out, but we're going to power through it to the best of our ability. What about you, man? How you holding them?

Well, I just got this visual of you taking on water through the windows of the house and just filling up the office here.

So well, one thing that your boy is proud of is that when we had this house built and did all the landscaping excavation, we have everything pitched away. We have an awesome drainage system, so even in my subterranean layer I am not worried about water coming in.

In great landscapers in which you've placed some trust. So you know what I believe you. I think we're going to be all right. I'm doing well, man, we actually. We got a new vehicle last week, a new used vehicle. New for you With a rooftop tent and we're looking forward to getting back to forest. I love been nature this weekend. Much needed no screen time days where there's no cell service, and that's exactly where we're going. So pretty pumped up about that, man. Otherwise it's still Friday. There's still work to do. We got great stuff for you guys today. Listen in, watch and in. If you're live with us on electric printer secrets, the Facebook group engaging with us, please say hello, let us know how your week went, let us know what you're excited about going into the weekend and let us know if you hired someone to take over that office. Yeah Gosh, that's important stuff. And today's episode we're going to talk about the office leverage. You might not even be aware of that. You have, with that person in play, the organic and outbound marketing. We've even got a win to share, joe.

I know and I'm super proud of that win. Where should we start? You know what? It doesn't matter to me. Where I guess we start off is. We can talk about the win, but I think what we should start off is why we're even doing this. Why is it so important to have an office staff? We've all talked about it all week, but how can we use it to leverage leads today?

Yeah, yeah. And yesterday we really dove deep into, like, the mental equity piece and we call it mental equity millionaire, because I truly believe if you free up that mental equity and you're able to focus on the things that you do best, then you're going to be able to put bigger things in motion like this, like this topic. So I agree with you, that has been the topic of the week. We do believe this is the first higher secret that no one's told you before and again, we're not throwing band-aids on this. This is the real deal, guys. If you will delegate the things you're not great at, the things that are not your superpowers, you can allow that to be someone else's superpower where their strengths already lie and where they can be the lever for that growth in your business. Did I miss anything, joe?

No, I think you hit it on the head. I love it.

Okay. So we've got this tool that our clients get and it's pretty valuable and it's something that we put right up front. So in the first week of joining our program we do go through a little marketing roadmap, because we used to encounter this problem once in a while and that problem was well, it's great, I'm learning the sales, I'm attending the classes, but I've got nothing on the calendar, we've got no leads. We realized, well, okay, we got to teach people a thing or two about filling the pipeline and leveraging that pipeline so that when that happens, it's just back to the service leads now list. That's what I'm referring to today. And the win that you had this morning on a client call was someone who shared that they had encountered this very situation.

Yes, can I talk about that?

Please.

Okay, so we're not going to name names, but we had our client that we're working with today. We were doing a special session with him and he explained that there wasn't anything on the calendar. Top tier salesperson didn't have anything on the calendar. Things just started to slow down and it was like what would we do? So we actually started making outbound campaigns and started calling all the existing glades that he already had meaning I'm calling existing customers but where it really thrived was he called a pile of leads that didn't take action on an existing offer. He was like I have these people. They're low impact leads, but I got to get my door doing something. So he'd gone his foot in the door with memberships doing the inspections and saying like, all right, we're going to go and do inspection calls for our clients. From those inspections he generated 17,500.

Wow, that's not a small amount, from nothing to 17.5.

Correct. So where the wind lied was that. A lot of us believe that the only leads with intention are the ones directly in front of us, when often it's the people that haven't been answered in the past. They gave you their number somehow. They showed somehow that they had faith in you to want to talk to them. The only person that's going to say no is them. If they don't want to say no, there's no reason for you to stop calling.

No reason to assume it if I could say that.

Exactly Right. Some of us are like oh, you know, I don't want that right now. Okay, I'll talk to you later. We hang up and we never touch that call. So something that we can say is I'm happy to help. I understand where you're coming from before we get off this college. Have one last question, if you'd be so kind Is this a not now project, or is this a not ever project? The reason being is I don't want to be a pest to you and I only want to be in contact if you feel like this is something that's going to benefit you. So just so I know not to follow up with that reason. Is it that you're never going to want to do this again, or it's just not right now?

100% Great question. I want to give like a special thank you and a congratulations and an applause all at once, because this guy, this great client, just followed the play and sometimes we can just we complicate things to the point of like ridiculousness. I've done it too, joe's done it too. We've all been there to this place where our ego tends to get in the way of our actions. And I don't mean ego like oh, you're an arrogant prick, I mean like sometimes your ego actually is about scarcity too. Sometimes your ego protects itself Right, and that's usually the stuff that gets in the way. And what I've seen out of this client and their team, that has not been an issue. So big congratulations to them and it's just a massive, massive win for electricians everywhere. Really, I agree because we get to share that with everyone who listens to this episode and that is so valuable. If we can get people to understand the value of that follow-up Because, as you brought into light there, and assuming that no, it's one of the most dangerous things we can do Now. That said, have you ever heard? Time kills all deals.

Yeah, I was gonna say, so did emails, but yeah.

So do emails. Nice that. Okay, we're gonna coin that there's. There's something coming around, a meme with time and emails kill all deals. But please, I saw you put your hand up. Jump on in, joe.

Yeah, no, what I was just gonna say was that this is one of the reasons where people say, oh, I can't hire a CSR, I can't hire an office manager, because it's an expense that I can't take on. I want to shift the focus and say, like, alright, let's say that you're on a job right now, but you don't have work for Monday. What do you do, right? You could either not do the job you're on right now and delay cash that's coming in, or you can delegate this outbound to someone else. Now we have outbound scripts, we have outbound processes. All you got to do is just sit someone and run the play. But the benefit is is all they need is one sale just once. A thousand dollars, five hundred dollars, six hundred doesn't matter how the signs of it is, but in this opportunity it was thousands of dollars gained, yep. So in that situation, if they made a seventeen thousand dollars sale, we might have now paid for this person's position and then some for a period of time.

Yeah, I mean for a lot of office managers, I mean that's almost half their salary If it works that way. It was a simple attribution, but but exactly, it becomes an investment. I may have said this before, but one of my great business mentors, keith Cunningham, said this and he said it so well, as One of his managers of one is of his many businesses came forward to him and he asked at the monthly report, why Are the expenses higher and the profits lower for this period in this business? And that manager had said, well, it's the cost, the rising cost, of doing business. And he said, mm-hmm, that's not good enough. There are no costs of doing business, there were just investments. Did these additional investments get new clients or did they help us keep clients? Those are the only reasonable rises to those expenses. That's intense, and so this perspective shift is a huge decision-maker help and bends with us. Hey, ben, nice to see you again, brother Ben, it's a huge, huge piece to this perspective shift that I feel is required to really Appreciate what an office manager, csr and the people in that office position can really help you do the leverage that they give you. There's another court I want to bring in here and I think it's important to recognize If you're at a hiring freeze, if you're just stuck in general. I tried hiring this position. It didn't go well. Last time I tried this, yeah, it just didn't work out Well. I can't see how, whatever's in the way, we've got to stop that, because what's important to realize is that your greatest success will come from the leverage of others, as in other people. You have to find people, find ways, build systems and promote Average people coming into becoming superstars under your umbrella, so that you have that Stickiness, so that you've got these levers. Otherwise, you will always be what you are, which is overworked, underpaid, overwhelmed. Your family's feeling it. You're going home. You can't shut it off. They want more of you. You're giving less. This old dog won't hunt Joe. Am I striking the pain points strong enough here? No, you are in a lot of big ways and I'm sure there are some people out there that were listening and like, well, expenses come from other things.

I mean material cost more, labor cost more. It's like, yeah, no, we get that. But I also want to address the fact of what Clay's trying to say, in that if an investment makes you money by helping you help your clients or helping you keep your clients, then it's not an expense. And if you think about it, your office staff, by definition, then is never an expense. It's only an investment because as you train them, that's the face of your company. You're going to have to pay for the investment because, as you train them, that's the face of your company. Like if I can make a really unusual reference here, like we've said that, we said that the office is the smile of the company, right? Yep, training them to no different than brushing your teeth. Would you brush your teeth every day to make sure your smile is sharp?

100%, so there's no Cheerios stuck in there when I go to talk to the client exactly so.

The fact is is that if your team is constantly brushed up, wouldn't it make sense that they can shine better and serve better?

Yeah.

So that time is an investment that'll actually get your customers to say, yes, this is an experience that I want. Yeah, you may be a little bit more, but it's consistent and I like it and it's friendly and I feel wanted and welcomed here. You know what I'll call SLE. They're a good company. Yeah, so that's one of those effectors.

I just did not want to pass that without touching on it last week when we gave away that the value and price objection handle and really like a deep rooted Strategy not just the surface level band-aid as we keep saying, but a deep rooted strategy and you talked about something as part of your Response at the surface level was because of the before, during and after value that we provide here at service Super electrical or whatever your electrical business name is, mm-hmm. I just want to point out that that before, during and after are all impacted by this person In this position that we're talking about this week, mm-hmm, right before is in the brighter day call process, which, by the way, we have linked to the value piece, the first higher secrets value piece that we're giving away this week. Want to grab that? Jump on Facebook and put your hand up for it, or jump on our website at service loop electrical Dot-com and reach out to us there, either through the, the chatbot that's on there, or through one of the contact forms that you'll find there. Through that, that becomes the before, though Someone's answering the phone with a smile. Like Joe mentioned, mm-hmm discussing At least beginning to introduce the idea of a first-class membership part of your. Irresistible offer as a premium service provider and even making an offer, a Leveraged offer, for that membership on that call, not to mention just building rapport with that person for the first time with your business, sounds important, right.

It's absolutely crucial because I can imagine the best companies in the world with, let's say, I have the finest trained technicians, we run nothing but gold wire, everything is a mint. But then when they call your office it's the same 1995 generic hold music and all your customers are used to hearing. Is your experience a higher than normal call volume? I Don't care how good your texts are, if I got a weight, I'm calling someone else. So it's that first stage and it's also so easily defendable. Do you mind if we touch a little bit on the before, during and after? because I feel like that was worth touching on yeah, keep going so a lot of times people say well, how do I handle objections when they argue about price? We touched on that last week, but it also ties directly into what we're doing today, when, if you have a well-trained, well oiled front office, that's a value adder, mm-hmm, and it's also something your client directly experiences, right. So whereas they may not see your quality until after they hire you, they most certainly would have had to experience your customer service, provided they called your office. So when someone goes and says, well, why are you so much more like, well, our goals serve you before, during and after. And as an example, one of the benefits is when you called our office, how many times did it ring before he answered? It's like barely at all. I get it. We could have had a, we could have hired someone right at a high school who wasn't a customer service professional, or we could have hired or we could have gotten a robot service. Make you wait on hold. Was it wrong of us want to give you better service, even a cost more?

not at all.

So how would you like to proceed?

With the job with this option a lot of work together, right, so yes, and then I wanted again touching on the before, during and after. There's the aftermath to which is what our client really did, which was really something we should be doing anyway. We shouldn't actually wait till our leads dry up. We should be following up with every opportunity, every single time, never assuming the no, always keeping in touch, and that just takes more time than you're going to be able to do as a business owner. Please jump on in, joe.

I didn't want to break your flow, but there was a specific number that came to mind of a time that's good to track for those opportunities.

Let's hit it.

So I've heard two different theories and I'm okay with either one because I've tried them both. Yeah, the first is three days after. So in other words, let's say you have an opportunity and they said, no, you're not calling the next day. That seems a little desperate. But three days later, with hey, I know we had come out, we had offered you a bunch of. So there's different solutions. I just wanted to see, with a little bit of time, what your thoughts on them or if you had any additional questions that I can answer for you, not asking for the sale, but saying were there any additional questions that I had or were there anything that wasn't clarified to enough of a detail? The second number is two weeks. So it's three days and then two weeks. The reason why we say two weeks is at that point, if they were getting estimates, they should have had a decent amount of experience. But where it really thrives is where the competition isn't on point, because more than likely they get quotes or request quotes, but they don't actually come in. They met with someone two days after you were there, but they still haven't received a quote yet. Or the person rescheduled on the twice and they haven't even met them yet. So if you call two weeks later and say hey, clay, I know it's been a little bit since last we talked, as we were previously saying, we want to serve you before, during and after, even though you didn't get a chance to work with us yet, I want to see where you served at a level that you felt comfortable with by someone else at this point. Oh, you weren't. It still hasn't gotten done. Well, would it be wrong of us to want to open the door and see if we can work out something together? Okay, great, when can we come out and help you with that?

Really easy call, super effective. It's like the mayor campaign very passive, by the way, no pressure again which follows our entire process. Speaking of which, if you guys haven't noticed, all of this stuff as we go week to week seems pretty congruent. We're able to deep dive into these details because our inside track, the program, the coaching program that we have that helps all of our clients build their businesses and grow so much in their premium service endeavors it's all through a specific strategic roadmap and all articulated so that this all flows off the tip of our tongues, but it's also right there in this package. So if you feel like you need help, you go ahead and reach out to us. Facebook's one of the best places, but again on the website. That said, joe, we don't have a ton more time, but there's a big piece I want to add into this and it's this organic marketing piece which again feeds into the big machine, feeds into the big before, during and after Really speaking of before in client attraction and even client repeats. People that you've sold options to before but have unsold options already laid out. Would it be wrong of us to approach that again, knowing exactly what their needs, desires and problems are? It wouldn't be wrong, not at all. Crazy, right. So here's a little free tip that you guys could take use on, and I'll even call it an action item for you as you get this person in play or if you delegate this to a marketing agency. Have you ever heard of a drip campaign, joe?

Yes, I have. I think it's actually awesome.

We talked about how time kills all deals. One of the deals that kills is where you have a blank space between their initial awareness of you and your offer and the next touch point with you. This is really bad to not fill that space with more touch points, because there's a lot of science around how many touch points it takes for many of the clients or prospects that are out there to actually buy with you. And those touch points today would be quoted somewhere between 20 and 50 even for some buyers. There's very few that are buying today and many, many, many like 50% of your potential clients are buying in the future. They're not there yet. So shouldn't we have some value drips to help them get there becomes the question. I would agree. And who better than an office manager? Or again, if you're going third party, that's fine, but not you. You don't have time it's probably not getting done effectively but to make an email campaign that's going to send a weekly little promotional offer or some sort of value drip to those prospects that haven't bought everything you have to offer, that haven't taken you up on the highest level. I know what people are saying and thinking no one checks their emails anymore. That's what we call a generalization. Generalizations kill clarity. In our group, we definitely have clients that are sending email drip campaigns and causing further sales from them. Is it 100% effective? Of course not. Is it 50% effective? Of course not. But even if it was 10% effective, if you send an email and it brings you a client, is it worth it?

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, if I were to have 100 emails sent, but those 100 emails brought me $10,000 and I wouldn't have got them otherwise, I see that as a win Because, if you think about it, if I needed to mine for new leads with my pay per click or with my Google, CSA LSA yeah, the biggest issue that we're gonna run into is it's just gonna cost more and more and more. But at least now it's in your corner and by you constantly exposing them, they get to have that connection maintained and you never know what email it was. That's gonna make them say you know what that's it. But now you also have the data that you could use, so it's helpful.

Retargeting, retargeting then. Now to add another layer, I said I had a little secret for you. Here's this free value piece that you can use, take action on in those email drips. Go ahead and put a little line in there about visiting you on your Facebook page to get more useful home electrical tips from your team. And then make sure that on your Facebook and on your social media you're doing those drips there too and doing consistent posts. And make sure to be a person engaged with people personally, because people do business with who they know, like and trust. And make sure to give a tip or two away each week to help homeowners for free, just like we do for you, because value is what connects with people these days. It's what gives you another dimension in your marketing, and that dimension is trust. And if you did that and you were able to continually be in front of the people who aren't done buying from you yet, what are the chances they will buy from you more?

I mean, why wouldn't they? They're going to keep the cycle because as long as you've served them well your consistent experience you become a safe bet, and people are willing to pay more for a safe bet.

And then the final icing on the cake is to recognize that you're not just advertising, you're not just marketing to potential clients or bettering clients in that relationship with you, you're also marketing to potential staff and you're attracting people to your brand. And the more you show up and look like a premium provider and someone who cares about people, helping people realize their potential, helping homeowners realize their better quality life, you'll have more electricians lined up to work with you as well. And that is the power we wanted to get into today with the leverage of having this office manager, csr, that three-dimensional effect on your company. And we got a couple of comments. Ben says external and internal customers Absolutely, man, that's a great way to look at it. And Austin Matthews, checking in from Disney World Animal Kingdom Lodge. Thanks, brother, for showing up for this. Even when you're with your family on vacation, make sure to enjoy. Woo, joe, we're running out of time. I gave a big action item. Do you have an all star, maybe separate or to tag onto that, or should we come up with one? I think I can. All right, I think I can Take it away.

Okay. So a lot of times we worry about not having the leads immediately, right, and then, when the time comes for us to try and find something, it ends up feeling like a scramble. So what I'm going to suggest today are steps that you can take that you can assign as a KPI that makes it so that it's less scary in the future, love it. So after you've worked with your client right, say, your CSR is now taking the call and it either goes, yay or nay. They've got on the calendar. They didn't. Any client that you got their information that didn't make it to the calendar. I want you to add it to a list. The reason being is that when there comes a time when you don't have calls, you have a list of people that weren't served by you and, if nothing else, you can follow up to see if they had their needs met Bare minimum. Hey, I know you called us a couple weeks ago and you were talking about having a renovation done. I know we weren't able to help you with that. I just wanted to make sure he was taking care of to the standard you felt comfortable with. At the very least. Hey, I show that I care. B, I wasn't served. Well, would you still be interested in getting that and taking care of? Yeah, no one gets back to me, come on by. Okay, now I've got my opportunity for a leave. So, instead of having to force someone to dig backwards, if they just write a couple of them down, that list will organically grow and you'll be able to tap into that in the future.

Love it, joe, big time. That was a huge finish to a Friday and another great week on Electricpreneurs Secrets, the Electricians podcast, episode 167. We managed to overcome the 25,000 downloads feat this week. Joe, super pumped about that, want to thank all of our listeners and you know what. We're just proud to be able to show up and help electricians like no one's done before. We deserved this a while ago. It's about time we have this. So thanks for showing up, thanks for showing up for yourself and us, and keep on doing so and maybe think about consider taking action on building your business up by hiring this office position, if you haven't yet. Thank you, joe. I hope you have a great weekend, brother.

That's it All the same to you, my friend, and everyone listening Wish you all the best Cheers.