Ep 286 - Replay - Best Electrician Hack: Following Up on Customers

Welcome back to Electripreneur Secrets. We are here to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver consistent, premium level service. Joseph, today we're talking about why you should follow up and why it's so important, and you guys just missed the inside edge, where we're live on our group talking for a few minutes on this already, but now I've hit record. This can be on the podcast too, and we were just discussing.

It's just as nice. Yeah, do it twice, just as nice. We were just discussing how important this is and how there's so much being left in the wake. And, if you think about, actually, we have a lot of statistics that support this. There's a lot of information. We're not just making this up. There's a ton of data, and while data sucks, it's boring, man does it help to make decisions that are informed? Oh my God. So can we talk a bit about the result that this one former client saw using your custom script, Joseph? Is that okay? Yeah, I'd love to Okay. So he was going from the average, maybe.

What zero one call he was doing. He was following up. He was doing a work from zero to two calls a month that he was actually closing the unsolved jobs. So a technician had gone out there and it physically quoted a job and the customer had declined it. And now he's got a stack of papers on his desk of these are all the unsolved calls, call them and going in blind. He was getting zero to two and I can't blame him. The fact that he got two without a process is impressive, right.

Yeah, and I gotta say, like how many of us have that stack Unsolved, right? We're no different. There's a ton of people that express interest all the time, but the timing's just not quite right or something else distracted us, right, cause no one's busy, are they? No one knows what there's actually busy in their day to day life. I think that's a really important piece to hit here.

There's a huge advantage just from giving people just another drip and statistically they say actually between five and 12 touches is when people buy. So we're actually already in a bit of an anomaly. I consider it it's in service electrical, because quite often we'll try to make the sale in the first two to three touches. It's also why I love CRM so much and the communications, all the extra little notifications hey, check out your hub. Hey, we've got this book for this date. Hey, that date came, I'll be there in 20 minutes. Reminder of your appointment today. So we're touching on people multiple times to try to get them more and more comfortable with our service.

I went on a bit of a tangent here. But just imagine, right, these people are busy. So you tell me, with that said, do you have a big stack of unsold clients, people that you really don't know what happened? All you know is you didn't get the job. And two, if you can agree that these people, maybe at least some of them, haven't even made a decision yet, especially if it's still within weeks, if you can agree with that, then this is gonna be valuable for you. So he was going from maybe none to one sold per month. Yeah, per month. And then what happened following that?

So what ended up happening was we designed the process and we introduced our process to him of the ways that we can best do a follow-up and he consistently started improving and he actually showed 200% increase within the first month and then, within the course of under a year, he ended up. So he went from zero to four. So, or one to four, or two to four, Either way he was showing massive improvement. But the thing is is that the big win was that within a year, he had gone up to selling consistently 18 calls per month. Wow. So he went from zero and he was consistent. It wasn't like you just had a hot month and that was it, Like he was consistently selling upwards of 18 per month. So he was showing an 1800% increase. And these were jobs that are just sitting there. He just had a process and he dialed it in what gets inspected gets managed, or what gets managed gets measured.

I love that. I love that. And now, as you say that I'm having a bit of a paradigm shift about all the comments I see on the Facebook wall of people saying you don't you just leave it, they don't want you, move on. That to me feels like a very personal thing, like if they don't like me, fine, but it's not really that most times, is it? Oh my God, can I touch on that?

Please. The reason why people do that and you really can't blame them at the end of the day is we touched about this a little earlier. But a lot of technicians we sell from the heart. We're emotional people, we love what we do, we love who we do it for and we believe that we're doing it the best and no one else can touch our quality. So you show up and you put your heart on there on a platter and you serve it to them and you're like this is me and they say no, and they say you're too much, we don't like you, and they go away.

That's a massive ego blow. It really hurts a lot of people to take it personally. So why would we want them or why can we expect them to come back after licking their wounds in the van to be willing to call back this customer and get more abuse? But if you have a process that can explain why your calling isn't the best interest of the customer and not that it's in the best interest of you, the customer has motivation to continually listen to the conversation. People will only take time out of their days if your conversation can help them either escape pain or run towards pleasure.

That's really it. I love that and I love what you touched on with the personal piece, especially as this relates to growing your business. This is why having a process in place and one that you've mastered personally, so that you can teach someone else to take it and grow it for you, is so important. Because even if we got that all-star player, even if we attracted them which they're gonna be attracted by a process and realistic expectations, by the way even if we got them, if we weren't dialed in in that process, if we didn't have that figured out, we weren't able to lead them through it consistently likely they would fall into what we call professional autonomy, Not quite knowing where all the pieces fit, and they could be frustrated by that and begin to pull away. Next thing you know they're going somewhere else. So this process, follow-up I mean, don't just listen to what we say, watch what we do. I'm not gonna pull up our screen and all our KPI, but I'm telling you there is a most definitely an eight-step follow-up process that we've got listed right now for our stuff and you should have something in place too if you wanna capture these 18 leads a month that this one electrician in this example did, is consistently doing.

I gotta ask one more question on that. For our viewers, listeners, now Just trying to picture what 18 calls a month is worth. What's your average ticket? That's actually a very important thing to question. What's your lifetime customer value? Keep in mind these are not one-time customers necessarily. Right, we start to get to know our lifetime customer value. On average, it's average ticket plus a multiplier effect. Holy cow, this is powerful stuff. And it's sitting there in a stack, likely, or on your CRM. Just it's in the wind.

Breaks my heart man, it really does, because in addition to that, if we can just really dig in more into it, we should have already freaking paid for these leads. You not only paid for the lead, you paid your technician to go out there and physically try to close it, and you probably paid for any sort of design or follow-up if you had to do another presentation afterwards. So theoretically you paid for three touches of connection and you're not going to try and follow up on it for free.

And that cost per acquisition is not light these days.

It's not. I mean, everyone's complaining about leads.

So why are?

you throwing away that money?

Exactly, and a lot of people would say, well, maybe 50, 60, 70 bucks a lead. Maybe we're thinking more shallow and we're just looking at what we're paying for Google LSA per lead. But you've said a number before, joseph. In your business, you guys took a much deeper approach and I think you arrived at hundreds of dollars per lead.

It was $200 to $500 per lead was the eventual metric that you would track, because it's not just the clicked link Like okay, I had to build the website, you had to pay someone to do it, you had to track it, you had to monitor it, the office had to be responsible for it. Someone had to take this job on, which means someone was being paid to do it. And when you factor in all those hours and all those infrastructural costs, you look at it and say, wow, my home advisor cost me what it's like. It only cost you 50 bucks. But you had to pay your time to look at the messages and you had to pay your office to call them and you had to pay the office to track them, pay the technician to go to them. It adds up real fast.

I agree it's crazy. It's crazy, and who wouldn't miss that? I mean, really, most of us are just trying to keep this thing on the rails right. We've got enough hats that we're wearing. That's why Joseph and I are here for you guys five days a week to help you with this.

These go up to the podcast, guys. You can get that link on the main page in the about section as well, If you're listening. You can also join us on the Facebook group, our community of electric pernurs, and we're here five days a week, like I said, to help you with this stuff, and nothing I mean nothing grinds my gears. I don't want to say worse, but more than seeing information that's put out in a generalist fashion, because generalizations kill clarity. I've seen the same thing with the door hangers, and we came and we did an episode on how to make 30K from a single customer with a door hanger campaign. It really happened. Now we're here with this follow up how to get 18 customers a month back from a simple follow up. How long would this process take to run, joseph?

Basically, if you took five minutes in this engagement with a customer you're taking a while If you think about it. If you wanted to say, in the best to worst case scenario, if you had between five to 15 minutes per call, you've got a talker, you've got someone who's really talking to you. Can you spare 15 minutes per customer to get a job?

And it's a process, literally. So this thing's dialed into a script. It wouldn't need to be you who does it. Give it to your CSR, it's the perfect tool for them to follow up and then you're truly, truly embracing an entire journey for your customers when they come in, or prospects at this point, from the front door right to the review, repeat referral or, if none of the above yet, that follow up process to try to lock them in again and maybe just move them that extra little bit Right, just get that little bit of clarity and talk through it one more time. That might get you back to the sales call, into another average ticket, into another lifetime customer value.

Can I speak this in magic here?

Go ahead.

So the thing that some people don't recognize is that you actually touched on and is one of the reasons why I love working with you the customer's experience. That's really what you have to consider, but there's also a bit of psychology that comes into this. If the customer tells you no, or they've said we're thinking about it, we'll get back through something that communicates not now. Right, you could say OK, is it safe to say that this is just a not now, or is it a never project?

The goal is that if you can even have a tentative appointment, a placeholder appointment, something on the calendar for, let's say, a week to two weeks from now, the customer is proven to be less likely to even consider getting estimates and getting other quotes. Because as long as you can position yourself as someone who's able to solve their problem and you're on the calendar to solve that problem, the dissonance has gone away or it's drastically reduced in the customer's mind. So their pain has reduced, which means their desire to need to spend time taking off of work and calling other competitors or giving up their weekends or being willing to mine for online quotes goes down. So by the time you do happen to come back, a lot of times they'll be like yeah well, we didn't get an estimate, but we like what you said, so we're just going to go with you. And then you're like, oh well, if I didn't book that placeholder appointment, what would have happened?

Yeah, and then who are they going to tell about it? No one.

I can't tell anyone about this.

But if they have a fantastic experience.

Ah, that's a good one so in our service loop DM little drawing that we use to illustrate how we see business and how we see the buyer's journey. We recognize right away that the second or third step of every buyer's journey is communication, and what that means is that every single customer refers. It's up to us to decide how they're going to refer. They're going to say something bad? They're going to say nothing at all, get quiet when they're asked, or they actually going to pass us on and say, wow, service, super electrical. These guys rocked my world, like even when I didn't make a decision. They followed up, gave me more value and helped me through and finish the deal Now it's done.

Right, that's not pushy. For most people it's still a great experience. In fact it's better because we touched again, built more, built more, built more rapport, built more trust and made the sale and got their wishes filled.

Essentially, you know, you also touched on something else as well that I love. He said you don't have to be pushy, and that's the thing that I think so many people are worried about. So if you're listening to us right now and you're like I don't like scripting because it's going to make me sound pushy, they already told me no Like, can I. Can I give a little bit of value drip about this script and kind of give some ideas of why it's not going to be pushy? Oh yeah, we're going to give this away anyway. Oh, I can't wait.

So, for anyone who's listening to it, there are certain things that you lead with and the thing is is that this script, as well as any script that you're doing outbound, has to be in the customer's best interest. To want to give you their time, Because, if you think about it, you don't know what they're doing right now. It's two o'clock for you, it's noon for you. Whatever time it is for you, you yourself don't know what they're doing. They could be working, they could be the bathroom who cares? But the thing is, is that they're going to answer. Thanks, sir. When they answer, you want to say is Hi Clay? This is Joe, the customer service manager here at Service Web Electrical. What are you doing today? I'm just following up to make sure you got everything you paid for on your most recent visit from John. Do you have a couple of minutes just to make sure you got everything you paid for?

What if I said no?

If you said no, you don't have a couple of minutes, that's fine. Well, when we had better time a day for me to reach out to you.

Yeah, I'm either going to come up with a time or be resistant again. That's okay. But if he says yes, let's go back to the yes now.

Sure, if he says, well, that's fine, you want to give me time, I would say, well, thank you so much for your time. Always come with a place of gratitude, if you don't, let me asking what do you think about the level of service that Clay provided to you?

It was really good. I'm just not really sure I know what I want yet.

Well, that's okay. Believe it or not, I consider that fantastic because that's the reason why I'm giving you a call, if you don't mind. What did you think about the level of service that Clay gave you? I know you said you weren't really sure, but did you look under the credit card?

Service was good, but I just couldn't get clear on it. I wasn't sure if it was right at this time.

Okay. Well, firstly, would you mind if I Clay know the nice things you said about him in service? Of course, Okay, Awesome. Well, I'd love to give you a little more clarity. The thing is, I noticed I'm looking here at the notes and it looks like the reason why Clay visited your home was because you didn't have power to your master bedroom. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right.

Okay. Well, I really see in the visit that Clay had a concern with how the ceiling fan was currently wired in the master bedroom. Now, the reason why he had offered doing a renovation to you was because we had recognized the home was still on an original, outdated wiring system. Now, if you don't mind me asking, what was the reason you chose not to have that addressed?

At the time. We just have an extension cord run and we're making it work for now, but it just became a bit of a timing and a price thing, honestly.

And that makes complete sense, and I wouldn't blame you for wanting to do things involving timing and price. Those are two major concerns. The thing is is that we really do feel like this would actually help enhance the safety and the reliability of the home and the family. So, just so we know how to better communicate this in the future, what would have motivated you to get taken care of?

I think maybe if it was more what I expected as a price, I thought maybe it would just be something like flipping a breaker that I didn't understand.

Well, I was going to say I know when we came out we provided a range of choices from premium to economy. But what if we did this? Would you be open to having one of our quality control specialists come out? He'll reevaluate the project, as well as the pricing, and see what we can do to accommodate that for you.

Yeah, that sounds fair.

Okay, so that's perfect. So let's just do this. Let's do a quick review. So when on the calendar would be the best day for you? When would be the best time that I could come out? Are there certain days of the week or times that were best for you and your family?

Yeah, friday, friday afternoon, if you could. I know that's near the weekend, but Friday afternoons are best for us.

Well, you're the reason for my service, not interruption to it. So I can't blame you. If you want to take Friday afternoon, I'd be happy to provide that service for you. So what we'll do is we'll have you on the calendar on Friday in the afternoon where our certified electrician is going to come out and he's going to address us and help brighten your day. We're just going to call the day before to confirm the appointment, so you know you're getting great service, and we'll also send you a call or text when we know we're on our way. Do you have any questions at all on this point?

No thanks for your time Looking forward to it.

Not a problem. Well, Clay, on behalf of the entire team here at Service Obletrical, just thank you for the opportunity to try and help you with this. I really look forward to helping you brighten your day. Have an amazing day, Clay.

Thanks, man. So in doing that, guys, we just ran the whole play. Joseph knows this thing front to back. He helped design it, of course, but that only took a few minutes, even with some resistance that I presented Three, four minutes tops right. The other thing I think that's really important to point out is the no is not a rejection. It's still a data point. We're learning, as you said earlier, I believe we're learning and collecting data about what's working for us and what isn't.

Correct, because it's either going to be two directions that go here, and that's why the process works so well. It's either do they have time or do they not have time. So yes or no. If you have time, thank you. If you don't have time, when can I come? If they say that they like the service, great. Let me thank you for saying those nice things. If they don't like the service, that's also great, because then I get the opportunity to learn of what we did wrong and I have the opportunity to correct it to a customer that I truly do care about and that consistently presented itself through the script.

Totally Okay, guys, we're running low on time here. I want to get right to the actions. As always, we want to give you something actionable. Why? Because we know that if you go and take action and turn this into big wins, you're going to turn around and tell us about it and that's what feeds this whole need. Right here, we want to help you guys succeed. So sharing that having you win is a win for us. So please do. And action item one I'd like to suggest is to take what you heard here today. Just take that knowledge and just recognize that it was a simple customer service outreach and a follow up to each call, and start doing that for yourself. Start doing that for the pile that you have just from this week. Just start. You don't have to go too far back, but we just have to start. I can't remember. I got a quote here. But you don't have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.

So if you don't like the way we did it, do it your way, that's fine, but take that customer service-centric approach. Find out what went well, what didn't go great, and find out if they've purchased yet, because you're going to have gold to mine in that group. All star action. I'm going to start this off by saying you can get this script from us guys. If you typed all star in the chat on our live Facebook post right now or during the replay, we'll send you this unsold follow up script for both email, call and voicemail. We've got two different scripts to cover all three situations. That will result in an increase in sales, hopefully at your average ticket price. So taking action on that would be a massive win for you guys. I do feel that James says all star. Thank you very much, sir. Did you have anything to add to that, joseph?

I would say I want to add to the all star action. So it's great that they're going to request it and I'm glad that they're doing all that. But I'd say, even taking it further is we all know, no matter how efficient you are, there are calls that have been unsold. None of us are at 100% conversion and if you are, you're probably lying. So the thought is saying you know what? Any job that you don't sell, simply write it down on your post call self diagnostic form and simply write it as unsold. Because if you're tracking those forms anyway every single month when you do your project review, you'll also be able to look at and say, ah, if you're unsold calls, let me look at them and then you can compare how the whole call went and you can start seeing themes of why you lost it as well as how you can guess we get your foot back in the door. That is the all star action for this.

I love that Great action Okay.

Anything else.

Joseph.

No, I feel like we definitely hit this. I feel like I can. I could talk about this all day, though, so you're going to have to put a muzzle on me.

All right, here we go Hard. Stop, then, because this was a longer one. We've been here at about 25 minutes, 20 minutes ish. Guys, thank you for joining us Lutripreneur Secrets. We're here every day, five days a week, rather, to help you succeed, helping you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver consistent, premium level service. I'm Clay this is Joseph, and we can't wait to see you again tomorrow. Take care, guys. Cheers.