How Concrete Contractors Fail At Handling Leads

Audio Transcript

tors. This is Danny Barrera with concrete marketing crew. We’re here live at your concrete success podcast where we bring you fresh information that’s relevant to help you grow your concrete business. Look if you’re a flat work or decorative concrete contractor, your marketer business owner partner and you want to learn how to succeed, how to how to grow your business online, tuning to our podcast every single week, we’re going to have fresh and new episodes and if you don’t know who we are, my name is Danny Barrera.

Again, with concrete marketing crew, you can check us out at concrete marketing crew dot com. And what we do is we help flat work and decorative concrete contractors double their leads with our proven concrete marketing plan. Now we work with concrete contractors all throughout the United States and what, what exactly is it that we do for them? We’re number one is we get and found online, right? If no one knows you know one flows you, number two is we make sure whoever finds you okay, gets attracted to do business with you.

And it’s encouraged to submit their contact information so that they can become a lead. Now, how does that happen? Exactly? Well, we have social media ads, google ads, you get found on the google maps, you get, you get clicks coming to your website and people find you trustworthy as a contractor and then we help you become the most trusted concrete contractor in your space by growing your reputation online. And if you need help with your social media or anything like that, just feel free to reach out to us.

But uh, here’s the thing, this, this whole episode is not about us, it’s about you. And let’s talk about why concrete contractors suck, really suck at dealing with leads. Uh, and you know, I was writing up this document actually, as my team, we have a quality assurance, Remember that goes through all the calls that come in for our clients and all the leads and just make sure that the leads are getting treated right way. Uh And uh here are four things that we found for things that we found in common with the contractors that are struggling with their leads.

Uh and this may happen as a byproduct of them not having the right processes, the right systems in place. But let’s let’s discuss about the four things that really stood out during this conversation, uh and he hears a major problem, right? You have the contractors that are very good concrete contractors that are very good at what they do, therefore they’re booked out and they don’t have enough manpower to handle more jobs, in which case, what are you doing to keep your pipeline fool? And what systems or processes or elements are you using to make sure that people go through your world and go through your experience of doing business with you uh and not have to rely on a phone call. Right?

So so if you if you work with concrete marketing crew, for example, you have a website which is not just a website, which is not just an online brochure, which is a lead management and the lead mechanism that helps you follow up and nurture all your leads. So the first thing that happens is uh someone comes into your world. One of the biggest problems we see is uh you know, contractors that let the phone ring more than three times. Gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that is unacceptable. That is unacceptable.

If you cannot pick up the phone and you’re out there working with your crew or your crews and you cannot get to the phone. Just get an assistant, get an assistant right? That that’s the easiest part. Uh the easiest way to deal with this situation. And if you cannot afford an assistant right now, One of the easiest things is to just get an answering service online. So we recommend to services to our contractors, number one is Jill’s office. And and by the way, I’m not getting paid by recommending them Jill’s office.

Another services answer connect and those services under $250 a month. You should be able to get set up were under 300, I should say per month. You should be able to start getting phone calls received and answered within the first three rings. Now when someone picks up the phone, uh, they will be trained to respond in the right way. So any contractor we find that is struggling with lead management right out of the gate by not answering the phone immediately. Um, we always set them up with one of those two options.

There are other options out there, which are very good. But what I do recommend is you get set up. Now here’s the thing if if you’re if you’re using any answering system, you got to make sure that the answering system communicate with you in a method that that that works for you. So 11 of the ways is you get an email notification when a when a call or or lead has been obtained number two, is that they have access to your calendar system, online booking system. So this way, if someone is interested in the project or quote, you set your calendar up where you have available times to do appointments or or estimates or or call backs per se.

And you have that call experience with your leads. So it’s very important. Now, we do also provide scripts uh to contractors and I’ll probably cover that in a different episode on how to properly answered the phone so that you can generate a lead and you can you can you can build a different experience for anyone interested in your concrete services. Right? So again, uh do not let the phone ring more than three times. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls, One of the biggest problems I see. Not only does it give you a bad reputation, but some people that really are interested in doing business with you or they are referrals, you know, don’t you don’t make your positive referrals look bad, but you’re not picking up the phone or getting back to people.

I know it is frustrating. I know you are the specialists. I know you have the answers, But at the end of the day just get an answering system in place and make sure you follow up with your leads within 24 business hours is what I do recommend. Um I do I do the same. So uh if anyone calls me up, so anyone sees me online, they want to talk to me. I tried to get back to them within 24 business hours. Uh and if they send me email, similar thing, 24 business hours is my policy.

Now, the second thing. Second problem. We we got here and again, someone went through uh and goes all the time every single week through all the call logs and all the email calls just to as a quality assurance measure for our clients. And listens to all the calls coming in and they make notes, they make notes whether the leads are good, whether the leads are not good, whether the leads have been treated the right way, whether the leads are coming in from the right service areas and the clients are responding to them.

So the second issue that this person found is that this comes from the form submissions, right? Not necessarily from the phone calls from the form submissions on the website. Form submissions on the website. Now, here’s the funny thing is a lot of forms that gets submitted. Uh, if you don’t have the right mechanisms in place on your website are probably going to be spam are gonna be annoying needs from SEOs’, and marketers and people trying to sell you into the marketing services. That’s probably what you don’t respond to them.

Maybe, maybe you might have hit the spam flag right there on those forms of missions and you’re not getting those leads coming to the inbox. The real leads from real prospects coming to you. But I can tell you if you have the right mechanism and your website is set up with the right type of forms, you should be able to filter out the spam versus not, not spam. So, uh, the second problem we found here is contractor is not responding to the forms that they get at all, like not responding and then all of the sudden a week passes by and the person calls up.

Uh, and here it is. Hey, I submitted um, uh, an estimate request a week ago and I never heard back. Right. So we hear a lot of those conversations. So, uh, you know, concrete contractor is not responding to form submissions, in which case, what we recommend is check your the form that you’re using, the form mechanism that you’re using uh and ensure that you have the right mechanisms to weed out the spam as well as as ensure that your qualifying the leads as best as you can before hand.

So, uh the other thing is that if your form system does not have or provide automation, uh you know, there’s a lot of things that you can do with technology and what we do is we have a system called the contractors apex and the contractors apex is a lead management system for our our clients. And what this does is as soon as the lead comes in, the second step is that lead gets an automatic notification and lets them know, hey, we’ve received your information and you will hear back from our concrete contractors within 24 hours to discuss your project on the meantime, here are some of our recent projects and you can check out some of our google reviews.

Now that response, that automatic response has elevated our contractors and help them close more deals just by the fact that now that person that is motivated to do business with them, you know, now they feel like, okay, This person is a professional, they’re going to go back to me and uh, you know, when they get the call back in 24 hours, guess what? Right now now they start to do business in a different way. So so again having some form of automation and acknowledgement right out of the gate.

Um, and we recommend having that email as well as a text message and also you getting notified as a contractor. You’re getting notified every time Elite comes in. Now here’s the thing. You can get notified right away right? As well as get notified in a specific amount of time. So you can set a reminder and set the automation so that you can get reminded within 24 hours within 20 hours to follow up with said prospect. And again, that is part of what we have here at the concrete marketing crew are contractors, apex is what we call our system and it works amazingly works wonders it access the crm for a lot of our clients.

So problem number three is concrete contractors do not have a system to schedule an appointment. They do not have the systems, they have a good handy dandy paper and pen and there are under trucks and I can tell you if you’re not leveraging technology right now, my friends, if you’re not leveraging technology okay, you’re not leveraging sanity. Technology can be very distracting, but at the same token, it can be very liberating. It can help you manage your entire life and and by. But you know, by this fact of you actually having the right systems in place, the right automation and the right calendar booking systems, you can liberate yourself and you can add less stress for everyone because everyone should be able to just look at their phones, look at their calendars and know what’s happening without you having to do any work.

So, again, uh this is one of the things concrete contractors that do not have uh an appointment system or calendar system or something that helps them keep track or or or schedule, uh the leads and the calls that they’re coming in into an appointment into a calendar system. Uh you know, we’ve seen that being a pitfall and this is why this is why homeowners or, or architects or even other contractors contacting concrete contractors. You know, they, they really get annoyed by the fact that they don’t get a call back, that, you know, there is a lack of follow up, lack of attention, etcetera, lack of reminders, right?

And all those things start uh, start start destroying the trust that they have in doing business with you. And I can tell you as well as an agency owner myself, like we’ve had that problem, we’ve had that problem where there’s an overflow of leads. Uh, and sometimes we’ve dropped the ball where, hey, you know, we’re not getting back to the leads that have come in, uh, someone has requested appointment even if they’re not qualified to do business with us or we’re not the right fit. You know, this is that something that I, I constantly have to train ourselves assistance to do is to make sure that they follow up and give the acknowledgement to the lead, even if they’re not the right fit.

And the reason why this is so important is because this is going to help you build a good reputation. So again, having this type of automated system will help you avoid those cracks and those pitfalls where now whenever a call comes in, you see if you have an answering system and answering service, they can actually schedule that specific prospect into your calendar for a call back. Or they can schedule them so that you can go out uh to do an appointment or or a quote, uh an estimate right.

Um And if you’re the one doing it, then you can actually do it right from your phone. And better yet, if you have the smart forms, just like the ones our clients have, we can integrate uh, the scheduling system right within the form system. So any time someone goes into your website, submit their information, they can choose to schedule an appointment and that will be sink according to your calendar. Nothing else. Right. So if you’re not available tomorrow and you’re available into the day after or two days after, well, that’s exactly what the calendar the availability is gonna show.

So that can be fixed very easily. Definitely embrace that sooner than later. Problem number four, problem. Number four, what concrete contractors suck with leads that we’ve seen is not having a systematic sales approach is key. My friends. You want to put food on the table, You want to be consistent? You want to be profitable? You want to add an extra seven figures. I can tell you, you make some tweaks to your cells approach, you make some tweaks, tweaks to your lead generation, you make some tweaks to the, to the uh lead experience.

And I can tell you, you will win more jobs, you can sell at higher prices if you have the right cell system and the right cells approach right? And you know, I’m not talking about you being or sounding like a used car sales person, but at the end of the day is providing an experience to the person that’s requesting the driveway replacement. Now, imagine this uh, you know, provide an experience to someone that wants to resurface their pool deck or, or do their garage floors, whatever the case is, you want to provide that experience.

So what is the systematic sales approach? Well, the systematic sex sells approach. Um, the first one is, is that the answering off the specific phone. So, uh, from the first time that someone picks up the phone, your job is to build the trust with the prospect. And how do you build trust? Is you have to be certain if you are certain, and your reception is is certain about what is it that you do and what you offer? Let me tell you that’s going to build trust on the other end.

It’s almost like put yourself in in in, uh, you know, in the shoes of a person, right, that’s calling in, and they have a question about a specific service that you offer. And if, you know, you don’t have the answers right, on the spot, and you don’t know how to deal with that specific conversation and you end up giving the wrong answer or not sounding certain, you know, that that’s going to kill a deal for you. So, not having a systematic sales approach, it’s having the right answer is the right time.

So if you don’t know, you know, if the reception is does not know the answer is very simple. Absolutely. We can definitely help you with that. What I can do is schedule a call back with our one of our estimators or one of our contractors that they can get back to you and answer any questions you have regarding your patio, right? So that is a systematic cells approaches right there. No one had to answer the phone with positivity, right? Positivity is super important today saying age and again, you don’t want to sound like you use car sales person, but you want to be positive.

And what do I mean by that? You know if you’re answering the phone saying hello versus saying thank you for calling abc concrete contract or how can we help you today? Big difference. big difference. One sounds professional. One does not. One sounds like they got their act together. The other one doesn’t. Yes, I’m calling because you know I found your website online and I want to quote for my patio. Awesome. Excellent. Thank you for calling in. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today or who am I speaking with today?

Awesome. We’re talking about capturing the lead and guiding that person, right? We guide that person through the process and once they give you their information. Excellent. Look, here’s the way that we work with homeowners. Uh, and, and then you walk them through the process. Right? What is your process of doing business with you? Is it number one, is, is doing a phone consultation and then scheduling an appointment? Is betting that that specifically. Is it them submitting certain information on the website. Right. So all those little details do matter.

We have contractors that what they do, even from people on the phone, they still have the prospect submit their information via the website so that they can have it captured into the crm right out of the gate. So that’s one thing that, you know, even even through that process, it’s a systematic sales approach. It’s the same thing that gets used over and over and over again and produces a specific result. So again, look, this conversation has been quite boring, quite frankly, you know, because we’re talking about what concrete contractors suck Uh, with leads.

And, and again, the four things that we discussed is number one, the phone ring rings more than three times. Look, if you’re letting that phone ring more than three times you are losing deals. Another problem that we’ve discussed here is not responding to the forms that are getting submitted on your website, man, come on. It’s 20, Someone should be, uh, just you’re paying attention to that, Whether it’s you, whether you have an answering service that’s calling the leads back and nowadays, if you don’t have the chat option available, that is something that can be easily integrated into your website and you can actually chat with prospects from your phone or you can submit that information so someone can take care of that lead. Right?

So number three is uh, most, most concrete contractors do not have a system to schedule appointments Other than a paper and a pen. And I know that’s probably has worked for most of you guys for the longest time. But I can tell you there is nothing better than embracing technology. It’s 2021. My friends May five, last but not least. Number four problem we see is concrete contractors do not have a systematic sales approach. Your your cells is an experience. Your cells is really, really how you start to dance with your prospects.

You start to bring him into your world and letting them know why they should choose to hire you. Even if they have to wait three months, four months, six months, eight months out. Doesn’t matter. Why should they wait to do business with you and pay you at a premium price versus having to do their driveway right now by someone else that uh that is uh less competent that you are. So anyways, my friends, thank you so much for listening in and tuning into today’s episode. Okay. Where we talked about why concrete contractors sack with fleas And what we talked about is some real deal stuff.

Look, here’s the bottom line. If you need help with your online marketing, go ahead and visit concrete marketing crew dot com. Uh, and download our free Internet marketing guide for concrete contractors. Just put your name and email in there and you’re going to get the immediate download. And what this is going to walk you through is exactly what we help concrete contractors do, uh, and generate leads online for their concrete business. Uh, and until next time. Thank you again for tuning in. This is Danny Barrera. Concrete marketing crew.

Have great rest of your day. Bye for now.