How to Get the Qualified Customers Your Damage Restoration Business Needs

Hey guys, Jamie here from the restoration success show in this episode, I’m going to talk about solving the number one marketing challenge for damage restoration companies and this is a webinar. I did a few months back and really it’s about leveraging, automation and technology to convert more of the lead. You’re getting into booked jobs right then the day that’s what matters. We’re trying to get leads, we’re trying to get revenue. We’re trying to grow the company so tune in for this episode. I drop a lot of value in it and I’m sure you’ll be able to learn some strategies that you can implement right away in your restoration company to ramp things up and go to the next level. Here we go. Alright, everybody, thanks for joining me this afternoon today. We’re gonna be covering the biggest marketing challenge that we’re seeing facing damage restoration contractors and and honestly contractors in general of, you know, our specialty is, you know, damage, restoration, water, fire mold. A lot of our guys, you know, have construction arms, you know, remodel divisions, carpet, you know, carpet cleaning, but mainly, you know, water fire mold. Um, that’s what, you know, kind of what we do, what we’re going to talk about. But to be honest, what what I’m going to cover today, I’ve seen this, uh, help in, in any business. So, you know, if if you happen to be on here and that, you might not be a restoration company. Honestly, I’ve, I’ve seen this and have a lot of friends obviously on, on businesses and we always talk about what’s working best and where things are going, you know, it’s 2022 technology is here to stay. You know, there’s even a I getting involved in some of this stuff. That’s things are getting crazy. So alright, let’s dive into it. So you know, as we go through this, think about some of, you know, the specific challenges you’re having when it comes to marketing and sales. I mean I kind of treat marketing and sales different but at the end of the day um you know, the whole point of marketing is to drive sales. So you know, keep think about your particular business. Um As I go through this because you know, the whole point, hopefully I want to add value to you and help you think of ways that you know, you can ramp up this year. I mean it’s already Yeah, I can’t believe it, but it’s already freaking March. Um This year it’s definitely flying by. Um But so one of the problems is, you know, there’s a from a higher there could be a lot of different issues and problems in the business, right? But a lot of the problems that I hear when I talk to, you know, restoration companies pretty much daily at this point. Um you know, there’s not enough leads or you know, everybody says the lead sucks there’s low quality leads. Um I know you guys can relate to that. Um Or you know, there’s just the lead cost is getting way too high and there you’re not getting, you’re not seeing the R. O. I. On it, right? You might, you know, we’ve had some clients, they pay you know $1000 for plumbing referral, right? I mean even or 500 to a paper lead provider, I mean we’ve even had guys pay 7 50 some of these, you know Houston markets, Miami markets just kinda depending where you’re located, the paper lead costs are are definitely going up. So. And another issue we see is like nobody really knows what’s going on. You know how many how many leads are getting or if any of those leads are turning to revenue right? Because then the day and this is the way I look at when I talk to, you know, prospects or even our clients like uh because I have a construction background, you know, a lot of times we get fancy with all this automation, all this, but the other day uh you know S. C. O. P. B. C. And all this fancy stuff and automation, you want to get more leads and you’ll get more jobs right at the end of the day, that’s from a higher level and then you know on that, you know, what is your R. O. I. On your marketing spin, whether it’s online spin or offline spin, right? Some of you guys might do direct mail campaigns or whatever, but this is how I try to simplify it for everybody. Um if you know, and a lot of clients aren’t necessarily even tracking this whenever they come to us. I’m like, well you need to know if you’re putting in this, I like treating like a T. M. Machine, right? You put in a dollar, you want to get free back, right? Or four back or five back. I mean there’s a lot of, I mean you can take it to the next level, but if you put in a dollar and you get three back, I don’t understand why um why you would not do that. I was just having this conversation, one of our clients and their, their, you know, not that big, but they’re not, they’re not rinky dink either right there doing 16, 17 year. And and he and I was like, you know, we’re having this conversation and I was like, I don’t have to explain this to you because if you’re at 16 17, 17 million a year, you understand the game? And he’s like all day, he’s like spending money on marketing is not a problem because he he understands putting a dollar, you get four back, your money in the bank is not doing that. So that’s where, but the whole point when I’m gonna show you guys too is sometimes people don’t really know how to do that, right? So that’s what I’m trying to help you guys with today um is kind of understand that. So sorry I like I go on tangents on that stuff but it’s important to understand. Um And another thing is like there’s there’s a million different options in a million different directions. Um You can go as far as your marketing and you’re not really sure what the best route is and I mean there and there’s you know there’s s C. O. Google ads. Home Advisor thumbtack. You know do you have a website or not? I mean hopefully you know It’s 2022. Hopefully you do and if you don’t let’s definitely reach out to me you need to fix that because again people are definitely migrating more and more to the Internet and that’s not going anywhere. Um but you know some of you guys might be familiar with these some of you may not I mean obviously there’s a lot more than this but this is kind of a you know some of the more um relevant ones that uh you know we help clients with and I taught the restoration companies about you know on a day to day basis and I don’t know if you were on my webinar. You know if you haven’t seen it it’s probably I think it should be on youtube. Um You know I kind of talked about a comprehensive marketing plan and then you know as the year goes on we’re gonna be breaking um different pieces of this graphic and I’m gonna do like a specialized topic right? Like S. T. O. P. P. C. Um you know, paper lead, you know, we’re gonna keep going deep diving into different uh methods. But there’s this is kind of like things that we keep an eye on and help our clients with because there’s many different lead channels that you can do. Um And and and ask the restoration companies for whatever reason to this is more like the um the smaller end, like if if you’re if you’re under a million or two million a year is usually this is where I see the problem with. Um but most, you know, most of the guys five million up, they kind of they’ve already gone through this pain point and they understand, but you want multiple lead channels going because you guys know there’s ebbs and flows and restoration for sure. You might get five jobs a week from, you know, your buddy blocked bob the plumber, but then the internet might be quiet that week, right? But then the following week you might get 10 jobs from the internet, but then bob doesn’t have any leads to give you. So that’s why we always um help coach and help our clients like look, you want as many pillars going as you can because again if you put in a dollar and getting four back like why not have um if you do it properly, why not have as many as you can set up um, to help the ebbs and flows, right? You know, storm might come through so you might get busy, but then, you know, a drought might hit and you know, there’s not that many floods. So I just always like to harp on that. But another challenge that we’ve seen and noticed that we’re helping our clients with and I want to show you guys this so you can maybe talk to your team or your company, you know, um, you can help fix this and your and your businesses, let’s say you’re getting leads. But we track all the leads for our clients and what we were noticing is a lot and everybody tells me like, oh man. Yeah, well close every single job. Well we track all the calls in there and we still see miss calls or um, slow response times to get back to clients and, and I’ll show you guys some statistics on why that’s bad in a minute. But um, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. Um, I see in our tracking with our clients and then today we wanna help our guys make more money. Right? So that’s why we, we dove into this and we, um, we realized that it was a problem, right? And so 50 60% are, are not converting and, and this depends on your services to write like a lot of people if you do emergency water damage. Like obviously that’s going to be a higher conversion rate. Um some of you might do, you know, odor removal mode removal remodel like some of that’s going to convert a little lower right? But you know 50 60% leave unconverted, 90% of web forms to convert because those are just, you know, especially on the smaller if you’re still smaller and you’re still, you know, answering the phone and going to the job sites yourself, you might not check your email till you get home that night or whatever and then you know, four hours have gone by um you know that that person is already called three of the restoration companies and you better believe that one of them got out there that day to lock in the job, right? Um so those are some big problems we’re seeing and and so here’s why like leaves are not followed up within 15 minutes go cold. The average customer must be followed up 5 to 7 times before big booking. Um and again this might be, we gotta kind of separating the emergency water jobs from the mold removal from the, the remodel and you know, all that kind of excuse the numbers but this, these are just the average is so keep that in mind. Um and a lot of, and this is a big thing we’re seeing a lot of people just don’t want to pick up the phone and call anybody anymore, right? They want to, especially like the younger generations like they just want to text or DM somebody and then communicate that way, so us as business owners would be wise if we were on top of that and thinking about that, and and then how do we tie that into our business moving forward? We can’t just ignore it and, you know, say, well we got the, you know, they’re gonna have to call us. Well, some people just for whatever reason, that’s why you kind of want to have everything covered that way. People that for her to call, Well, you gotta easily visible phone number, they can click the call right? Or somebody wants to text message, you got that on your site or landing page, they can do that. If somebody wants to email submit that you have, that’s why you kind of have everything covered because everybody has different, you know, shopping or buying preferences. So, you know, here’s a solution we found that seems to be working pretty well, um is leveraging automation to automatically handle some of this follow up on the leads for you because the biggest thing we’ve seen is uh and even if some, you know, some of the larger companies that have a dedicated mark marketing person, the office things, they’re busy, they’re on the phone, um you know, they’re talking to the text about problems or whatever, they’re, you know, they’re just busy, they don’t necessarily have time to stay on top of every lead as much as it should be. So that’s where technology and automation can really be powerful um and you can also set follow up processes in place to where and I’m gonna go more in depth in this minute. But let’s say like, you know, Debbie needs a mold removal quote and then, you know, she emails in and then gets a text message saying, hey Debbie, thanks for reaching out abc restoration. Like did you want somebody to come out and look at your moles, question mark or whatever? Well let’s say Debbie doesn’t respond for whatever reason, There’s ways to set it up to where guess what, 30 minutes later. Hey Debbie just just circling back here. Did you want to chat about your mold issue and then you can just build out this to keep going and going and I’ll go a little bit more than this. But it’s it’s super powerful. Just I just want this to put put this on your radar things to think about that you can implement in your business? Um we’re testing it and it can be super powerful. So you know, why does all this fancy stuff matter? Like why is this important? So again, what, why does any of this matter at the end of the day? It’s about the money, right? You want to make more money. It’s marketing and sales is what What it ties into. So let’s say you’re getting 50 leads a month, you’re converting 60%, you’re, you know, you’re doing. So, so in your follow ups and all that, so that’s 30 jobs for the month and you know, we’re just doing an average, you know, water mitigation job across the country. You know, I say it’s about $3000. You know, some of you might be like, well it’s 2500 and some of you might be like, well ours is closer to 45 5, like again, three is the average, so that’s 90 grand a month in revenue. So what if you have the all this automation stuff in place for you and that bumped you? Um I think it’s 33% increase, which I mean that’s that’s probably being extremely conservative. It bumps up to 80% now you got 10 more jobs that month, so you’ve got 40 so that puts you at 100 and 20 grand for that month. So that’s $30,000 revenue that people don’t even know they’re losing um just by implementing some of this. So I just want to put this slide in here because again, it’s sometimes it’s like, you know, Jamie’s talking about automation and chatbots and stuff, I don’t know why that matters, like this is why this is what everything we do is about these numbers right here trying to get these up. So and again it makes every lead more valuable um that comes through the door and that’s what that’s what you want at the end of the day, right? So you know, I know pushing through this kind of hard so just think about like, you know, take a step back, think about your particular business situation, like you might be able to take this back to your team and talk to your team about it, like how can you implement it? Um And some of you might not even have known that uh there’s there’s some of these automated follow ups that you can implement, right? So you know, take notes, I want you guys to be able to walk away and get something done with this. This webinar is what I’m saying that. So, so we’re gonna dive into a little bit more of the details and some of the specifics that you can do uh to actually get this set up in your company, right? And the first one being, how are we going to engage with our customers? And I kind of already touched on this. But these statistics blow my mind. But honestly, when you think about it, it doesn’t it doesn’t seem that unheard of, 98% of text messages are opened, 95% responded, opened and responded within three minutes of being delivered and five times more likely to text somebody then call somebody back and all that. And I’d say just think about your own life. Like I believe it like it’s everybody reads their text messages. And so I mean within three minutes like that that kind of depends on the person. Um But you better believe it they’re reading and so sometimes these are just two quick text or whatever so a lot of us I think we think about all that in our personal life or whatever, but I can promise you because we’re doing this and testing it um with our clients like even in the in the real world, in the business world like it’s just easier like if somebody’s, you know, they’re busy and they can’t quite hop on the phone but they can say hey yeah come to my house tomorrow two PM for an estimate that works. Boom. They text you text them back um okay, confirm, see you then or whatever. Right? So I only explain this but it’s it’s super powerful so you just need to think about how you can implement the text messaging into your business. Um And then again I touched on this, you want to follow up quickly and why you know 15 minutes ago buys is cool. It’s probably less than that honestly on emergency water jobs like it’s it’s if you don’t answer that phone or text them back within like three minutes like they’re calling pyro clean sir Pro abc restoration. Uh They’re gonna stay on the horn if it’s emergency job until somebody answers the phone. Um and the follow up is five minutes uh follow up within five minutes is 21 times more effective than after 30. And yeah, like five minutes is like the sweet spots and every minute there after the conversion rate is just gonna drop and drop and drop. Um And I mean that’s what with callbacks to like, I know sometimes you guys get busy or whatever, but it’s just imperative that you’re the first one to talk to the person and then the first one of the most even more important thing is to get is to get out there right, either your dispatch of tech or whatever you need to do. Um But yeah, just look at this now, I mean the odds are converting elite dropped 80% after the five minutes And then 50% of leads go to the vendor that first responds and not even add on to that, that first one that responds and then gets to the job will convert even better. So that’s point number two point number three is, you know, apparently can’t spell um as you want to leverage automation. So again, this is where it’s almost like having an employee instead of, well there’s somebody kind of has to oversee it right, you can’t just set this stuff and forget it forever, but but it’s also like having a 40 $50,000 a year employee doing this stuff mainly for you in your office and that is where it’s super powerful. Um And I feel like we’re just kind of on the forefront of this. Well, obviously all right, we got a whole, you know, metaverse and all this crazy stuff going on these days, but so technology is gonna be coming more and more, it tends to lag, you know, in the, in the construction, the world we’re in, but it but it’s coming um and so here’s, you know, an ideal outcome is alright, so that I showed you guys the problem, so what what needs to happen to fix it is what if every league can get an email and a text messaging within 30 seconds saying, hey sorry, we missed your call, I’ll call you back within three minutes, I was on the line or whatever, right? Um and then you can also have the automation sequences built out. I mean really, as long as you, as long as you want to go um you don’t want to be, you know, psycho on this and and you know texting somebody 42 times about, you know, a water damage quote, but you do have to follow up because, you know, people have, people are just life, life gets busy, things come up, so little automation is in place to help you with, that follow up is never gonna hurt. So this is just a higher level um overview of what it could look like, right? Like, so let’s say somebody does an email form fill on your website and then we’ll just follow this path up here, like they can get a text and an email saying, hey, you know, Debbie, we got your inquiry about the mold removal. Um, we’ll give you a call within, you know, three minutes or whatever. Right? And then you can get a notification saying, hey, somebody just email on your website, somebody in the office needs to call them or you can also to, this is where it gets slick. You can set it to where, when that comes in it can ring you and say, hey new lead came in, press one to connect. And then when you press one it can dial Debbie because we remember you grab their phone number from the web form, it can dial Debbie and then connect you guys on the call there within like a minute. So that way it turns an email lead into a phone call and again, then the day, even with the text messaging, usually all that, you guys need to talk to him on the phone to get the details of the job, you know, is an insurance claim, is it not insurance claim, blah, blah, blah. Right. Um, so that’s where it can be super powerful. But let’s say nothing happens there. Well that’s where we’ll guess what and you can, you can, these durations, I’m giving you, these can be catered to the, to your business, but let’s say 30 minutes later you text Debbie again and, and again, a lot of you guys might use dash or house call pro or whatever for your booking system fine. But there’s systems also that like ours, for example has a booking system within it if you wanted to use it. But either way you guys have booking systems, well, um, you can text her and say, hey, well here’s a link to our calendar. Please book a date and time that works with you, you know, and that doesn’t always work right? But so you could do, let’s say she doesn’t respond to that. Well, guess what, an hour later. Hey Debbie, we see you haven’t booked a call yet. Just following up here. You still want to get that mold off your kitchen wall or whatever. So you can, you can set these to keep tagging her on and on and on. And again, you don’t don’t don’t, you don’t want to be psycho about it. But again, a little follow up would never hurt. And especially if this is running in the background, if you’re a smaller company and you’re doing a lot of this on your own. Still, this is going on in the background while you’re on the job, taking care of them. And then you can kind of step into the automation and see where, where it’s at with Debbie at that point. And again, I mean there’s all kinds of different structures. I mean you can, you can layer in the call connect feature that I mentioned. Um the email, the text message, you can do voice mail drops to like, let’s say Debbie did book a call for Tuesday at two p.m. Well you could drop her a voicemail 30 minutes later, say, hey Debbie just wanted to call and say thank you for booking the appointment. We’ll see you next Tuesday at two p.m. We’re looking forward to helping you uh, you know, remodel your kitchen or get your motor move or whatever, right? But you can drop voicemails in there where you don’t have to actually call them. But you can leave that into her cell phone, voice mail inbox to let her know, hey, I got it. Your appointment’s confirmed are looking forward to helping you. So I don’t know, it’s, it’s super powerful and a lot of companies aren’t leveraging this. And I mean, it’s it can be a game changer. So, you know, just thinking about like, all right, well, you think, I mean, maybe some of you guys already have all this built out and you know, it’s rock and roll. And also because you’re, I mean you’re staying at staying ahead of the game and uh and on top of it. So, and again, let’s talk real world, like why does this matter? Let’s say In this example, let’s just say there’s, you know, 50 leads a month. This one’s only converted at 50 25 jobs times 3075. So let’s say, you know, you’re working with your marketing company and and everything combined, right? Your direct mail pieces, your marketing company, your ad spend whatever is five grand, right? So your your R. O. I. B. 15 15 X. That’s that’s not too shabby. I can promise you your your money sitting in your savings account is not earning that. Um So that’s just an example. But what if you leverage some of this And it bumped that 50 percent to 75%. That bumps you to 38 jobs times 3000. Right? We’re just using averages. This doesn’t even include the put back and the rebuilding some of that that you guys might do because then as you know, you can you can three x. Four X. Your average uh revenue ticket just from doing that alone. But again, we’re using averages here. So that bumps you 214 grand for that month. And that takes your, you know, and everything being, you know, when you test things to do split test and all that, everything has to be uh consistent. You know, and you only change one variable, right? That’s actually how you figure out what actually has an impact and improving on your marketing campaign and what does it? So remember our five grand is still five grand right? Everything will remain constant there. But it took your 75 grand, 214. So it took your 15 R. O. I. Which is honestly like if you’re getting that keep on keep on rolling with it. Right? But but then the day, you know our jobs as as marketers and business owners is always looking for ways to improve, right? You want to move the needle forward. So taking a 15 to a 23 X. R. A. Y. Um that’s I’ve seen worse things. Right? So again that’s why this is powerful. You know, I’m trying not to go to technical and down the weeds and all this like um because you can kind of get but this is what matters right at the end of the day, if you’re like if you’re not an owner and you’re you know representing your marketing uh you know coordinator for a restoration company and you and you get all this stuff built out and you and you show the owner hey this is where we were before we built this out. Like you know, I’m imagining they’re gonna keep you around for getting a 15 XR But then you’re like, hey I got some of this stuff built out now we’re um we’re getting a 23 X. R. And ride span, I can promise you they’re going to keep you around. Um and if not, you know, reach out to us and we’ll we’ll bring on board for sure. Um if you can get that so that’s again that’s why it’s important and again this this is the type of stuff that we do all day every day. I mean this is just some of our reviews from some of our restoration guys that that it works, right? We’re not I’m not here talking theory like this is this is not like something I’ve been thinking about. This is like what we’re doing um currently and where the things are going. And this is just again, this isn’t all theory. These are just some reviews. Like, here’s a text message from one of our clients, like $25,000 met $70,000 rebuild. So almost $100,000 job. And you know, here’s a few more $15,000 hotel job, $12,000 job. Um you know, and just again, I just like showing this, this isn’t me making this stuff up. We’re doing this stuff all day every day for our clients. Um Alright, so let’s get a little bit more granular. So what you need to do to get some of this rolling in your business? Well, you know, you need to get on your website and your landing pages. I mean, you’ve got to have, you know, good click to call uh buttons. You gotta have a text message feature on your landing pages. And you also want to have the chat box. And ours in particular is a is a chat. The text again, we want to funnel everything in text messages, Right? So we kind of have a a chat bot, that’s text messaging platforms. You want to get all those in place because you have to have the starting point, right? And then, you know, another piece of that is you want to have um ours are smart forms or whatever, but you want to have form fills on your uh on your website and your landing page and all that too because again, right, Some people want to call, some people want a chat bot, some people wanna text, some people wanna email in. So if you have all those covered and then you want to funnel them into like, let’s say, you know what you want all those funneling into some software to house all of your leads and let’s say, alright, so those leads come through here and then this is where we start dinging them right with um the emails and calls everything like you can email and text Debbie and then if you know they respond then you can send her a link to your calendar if you want to handle that. And then this can kind of be catered specifically to how you’d like to handle it honestly. But let’s say you want to just put the booking link to the calendar in there or you can text her that and then she doesn’t click it. Guess what? You can, you can text her again. Text her again. I mean again, don’t go psycho with it. But the follow up um but if she doesn’t respond and you can hit her again like, hey, just wanted to follow up like that molds probably hazardous to your health, probably take care of it. I mean I’m kind of joking, you don’t wanna, you know, you can, you can cater your messaging how you want but the good thing is you want all this just going and going and going until something happens. Um she either says leave me alone or you get the job on the counter and you get out there. That’s that’s the kind of the point of it. And again let’s say, you know, she does click the link and end up on your booking calendar. Then you can have a text message and an email confirmation to Debbie, hey thanks for booking your appointment um for Tuesday at two p.m. We’ll see you then looking forward to it or whatever and you know this is just a uh a web form you know example to where you know you can be notified that hey you gotta leave but they haven’t booked an appointment yet so people can always step into this to like a lot of our clients will have somebody, you know their marketing person or you know sometimes the owner, I mean there’s a lot of different scenarios but somebody will be in charge of kind of like man, you know watching all this and then they have time they might just call call the person or mainly text the person like sometimes if you need to step in and kind of keep things moving forward if you have time and again, I’m not gonna heart, this is just kind of another layout, an example of how it can look. You know, again it all starts in traffic and leads. You want to capture all that on your website, landing pages, you know, google business profile, you know, every you want all that stuff funneling into one place is normally what works best. Right? So let’s say we have all that built out here and then, you know, it turns into a lead and then you wanna start all the automation and follow ups. Um you know, if you’re using your own, you know, dash whatever, like I said, your own uh booking calendar, you can use that and sink it all together and then you just wanna get them on the calendar here, right? And if they don’t, and that’s where you come down here and you can have the triggers and everything set up to automatically follow up. So this is kind of be, I mean specific to the campaign obviously, right? But I’m trying to show you guys a higher level, so you understand the whole flow, so you can go build it out um and I already touched on this, but you know, if you have all these, I mean this is only four, right? There’s a lot of other ones, but you can kind of have all these, you want all these funneling in the one location. So that way it’ll be easier for you guys to manage. You don’t have to go, um you know, log into your google ads account and then log into your google business profile account and then, you know, go check, you go check and yelp, see what’s happening there. You want all this stuff funneled into one area. Um So where you can leverage these these automation um and remember why why does this matter? It’s all in these numbers, you want to follow up with them as quickly as possible. Whoever responds first gets the job. I don’t have to, you know, you guys know that especially in restoration, it’s you gotta answer the phone and get out there. But the text messaging feature to I think a lot of companies aren’t necessarily thinking about leveraging that in their business. Everybody text message, their friends and families, um and spouses or whatever, right, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever, whatever the case may be. But I think leveraging this in the business world too, is, I mean it’s it’s already gone that direction, but it’s only going that way more and more. So, you know, again, this is about making more money at the end of the day, I think, you know, I’ve showed you guys kind of the framework, there’s a lot of different ways you guys can go, um you know, build this out with the landing pages, there’s email automation software, there’s text messaging software and this is why it’s important you want to take that well. First of all, you want to get that, you know, that 5, 10, 15 X R O. I. And then, you know, you always want to optimize and improve right as in any business business owner, a marketing person Should hopefully be trying to accomplish. And then, you know, you want to take that 15 to try to get 23 and up in the up and beyond. So