Question: How should we track digital conversions?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

I like the question, because it actually assumes that we need to track digital conversions, so that’s the first really cool part about that question.

Digital conversions are easy to track. Google makes Google Analytics available [free] that can be installed as a baseline dashboard on all websites. It doesn’t matter if it’s a really basic website or it’s a Ferrari-style design. Google wants you to track the conversions; they’re interested in you spending more money. That’s their whole business model, so they’ve done a nice job of building that.

A more sophisticated web provider will probably have a customized dashboard, and that dashboard will probably go to further lengths to track, you know, cost per lead, and segregate where those leads are coming from. So for example, email marketing is a place that we have that’s a very separate type of a medium, even though it’s digital and it’s part of the database of the company; everything is linked back through the dashboard system so that a digital conversion on, say, an electronic drip campaign is tracked separately. So how many clicks? What was the click-through and conversion ratio? At some point hopefully we actually sell something to somebody, so we want to track that as well.

Social media, obviously, SEO – which is the organic searches – paid search, you might have Bing, you might have Google, you might be doing remarketing. With big data now, we’re able to track all of Wally’s web habits and history. So anything he does and touches we can grab ahold of that information through big data and ultimately feed him back a remarketed ad that represents keywords, if we were in that space.

I was in Philadelphia giving a keynote speech and I was joking around that when I turned 50, the AARP people had me on the database and, essentially, I started getting Viagra calls on my cellphone routinely. And I’m like, “I don’t understand why this is happening” – and of course it’s big data. They’re tracking that your birthdate is X, and as soon as I cross over that birthdate I start getting calls from pharmacies in Canada. And all you have to do is click on a website anywhere and that cookie is placed there. So the purpose of the conversions and tracking that is based on the idea of segmenting your digital space. Google will help you do that, but I think your provider needs to be the next level up, which is tracking those independently.

I’ll also suggest that currently there are some pretty cool innovations going on in lots of different technology spaces. One of them is the artificial intelligence tracking, call-scoring and identification system. So we’ve pretty much built our own, but it’s out there as well and different companies will market different products. But essentially if someone calls in, we’re recording that call but we’re also transcribing that call for keywords. We’ve told it the keywords such as “maintenance,” “service agreements,” “ESA” – you know if you call your club “ESA: energy service agreements.” Whatever the words that are installed in there, all of that is recorded, tracked against an algorithm that’s then built, and scored. So if the score of the call is 85 or greater we’d say, “Hey, that’s a nice call, we did a good job, we don’t really need to worry about that.”

But if the call was 84 or less, we would flag that, the script would get printed and sent to the owner or service manager of the business or multiple people, and there would be immediate opportunity to debrief on what happened on that call from a conversion point of view.

So, artificial intelligence on your call-tracking and call-recording system is something that a lot of companies don’t offer – it adds some cost to the technology – but if you’re spending money on marketing and you’re out there trying to create a lead, I think you want to know that if someone actually called you, that in fact it’s useful and worthwhile.

So I think that you not only should track your digital conversions, but you should track the elements or media where those conversions are from, you should score them on cost per lead, and I think you have a responsibility, as I do as a contractor, to look at the actual transactions that occurred and ask, “OK, what’s the measurement there?” Cost per conversion, cost per sale, cost per gross profit, so forth.

I could spend an entire day on answering that question and going into a lot more detail, but I think the general consensus from my point of view is definitely get into Google Analytics, definitely have your own customer dashboard if you can, definitely move forward and track those analytics. The future of the media is basically going to be 100% digital at some point, it’s just not that far away.

In 1999 Bill Gates predicted everyone would be walking around with a personal device, and within 8 years the iPhone was out and now pretty much that’s what we use in order to do most of our searches; about 65% of searches worldwide are being done through the mobile devices. That’s not going to change [from a negative standpoint], it’s only going to accelerate, and the big data systems that are out there are real. I literally can put information on your Instagram that quickly if I have access to your web/URL browser history, which I have if I place a cookie on it if you visited my site. So essentially I can tell you an awful lot demographically and psychographically about yourself.

So tracking the digital conversion, to me, is how you’re going to learn in your business how your money being spent is actually being useful as we move away from traditional media such as direct mail. It’s just not going to be that long before email marketing substitutes. If you have email addresses already I would be using the digital side of that instead of the paper side of it. A lot of companies don’t, even though they have it.

So the last element of this question would be to prepare better in your operational and marketing practices to become more digital. And what that’s going to do for all of us is give a lot more accountability to your money, more accountability to the agency you’d be doing business with, and just a lot more focus.

Pretty cool question.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

Planned maintenance is a great chance to have face time with the customer and remind them that your company stands behind your equipment. But it can also be a great opportunity to drive revenue when it may not be your busy season. How?

This week, Weldon Long welcomes resident IAQ expert Steve Mores, and the two trade strategies for adding IAQ offerings and accessories that the homeowner genuinely needs to your standard maintenance calls to boost revenue.

Plus, Weldon, Drew Cameron and Gary Elekes offer tactics for increasing closing rates. All that and more, on the latest episode of Cracking the Code!

How can you drive revenue during planned maintenance calls? By offering IAQ solutions that will benefit the customer in the long run.

In the latest “clip of the week” from Cracking the Code, IAQ expert Steve Mores joins Weldon Long to lay out the best strategies for bringing IAQ into the conversation — and increase your revenue while solving problems for your customer.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on February 25.

Question: What is a fair wage for each type of technician?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Technician pay is a common question; I think the answer to that is: A fair wage is based on what they are able to produce.

I don’t think there’s a specific number you should attach to it. There’s probably a base wage you should establish for each position. Call that Maintenance Tech 1, Maintenance Tech 2, Maintenance Tech 3, Maintenance Tech 4; Service Tech 1 through 4. So you might have a floor against that, but I think what you want to establish is a runway for the technician based on productivity, and how they’re producing gross profit dollars per hour for the company, for the service department.

So I don’t think there should be a cap on that. The longer the employee has been with the company sometimes, oftentimes, what we do is say, “Well you’ve been with the company for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years,” whatever it’s been, “therefore you deserve something.” A newer person comes in who might be very productive and they’re not able to earn because that is the culture of the business.

I think you want to flip that around, as well. You certainly want to incent people from the standpoint of improving their term with the company and, if they’ve done well, you want to increase that lowest base wage, and maybe even some benefits: status, mentoring relationships, things along those lines. But I don’t think you should penalize people because they’re newer with the company if they’re performers.

So I think what you want is a combination of a floor with some kind of productivity system, and I think that’s the approach.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

Are your prices too high? Maybe. But it’s even more likely that they’re too low. And that’s the best way to work hard and still fail to make a profit.

This week, Weldon Long welcomes Gary Elekes to explain the proper way to set a service labor rate — and how to establish a higher price that’s justified and supported by your brand promise. Plus, Gary and Weldon talk about marketing and brand ideas to help your company stand out from a crowded marketplace.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

In the January 2019 Snapshot Survey, we asked contractors all about paid time-off. Here’s one survey question and its results from the summary report, which is now available in its entirety to EGIA members.

Question: Does your company offer full-time employees paid time-off (PTO), not including paid holidays?

Perks and benefits vary from job to job, industry to industry, but one of the most common across all employers is paid time-off (PTO). According to the contractors who took our survey, its prevalence definitely extends to the home services industry, where 87% of companies offer full-time employees PTO against 13% that do not.

While the amount of PTO offered to employees varied widely by company (as seen in the next question), one thing that was relatively consistent was the practice of increasing PTO proportionate to employees’ years of service: 77% of companies offer more PTO to longer-tenured workers, according to respondents.

Login to access the full research report on paid time-off.

For a deep dive into human resources, service management operations, financial structure, and other related concepts, access training materials, recommendations and education pieces in the Contracting Best Practices Library, available in your EGIA Member Dashboard.

Fifty percent of HVAC systems being installed in homes aren’t being properly sized, and so aren’t being properly installed. Fifty percent. This according to Consumer Reports and the US Department of Energy.

This is one example of the kind of third-party validation you can point to to explain to customers some of the things that are more important than simply price. Weldon Long offers a role play, in the latest “clip of the week” from Cracking the Code.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on February 18.

Question: What’s the best way to build in a service agreement with a new install?

Weldon Long, New York Times Bestselling Author:

I think this question is as simple as it seems. Certainly, I would recommend building in two or three years or so of the extended service agreement with the sale of that new install. It’s going to be a very, very small percentage, obviously, of a $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 system – add in a few hundred bucks.

But you want to maintain that relationship with the homeowner. And there won’t be a whole lot of maintenance, obviously, in the first few years other than just keeping it clean. But what it does is presents an opportunity to look for other problems, potentially, that you can solve for your homeowners.

We were just talking about ductwork and attic insulation. I’ve got a client I’m working with now that just decided last year—last October, November – that they wanted to make attic insulation and ductwork a major priority this year, because they’re extremely profitable high-margin services. And so we set some pretty ambitions benchmarks: $175,000 in attic insulation and $200,000 in ductwork. January was the first month, we went out there with this initiative and we hit it! So that’s an additional, you know, almost $400,000 revenue just by really making that a priority.

So the service agreements really give you the opportunity to do that. Ideally, in a perfect world, our sales advisors are selling that with the system. The reality is sometimes that’s overlooked. Unfortunately, sometimes comfort advisors are intimidated to try to go for an additional $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, $10,000 for ductwork and attic insulation when they’re selling a $20,000 system already. That’s unfortunate but sometimes it happens. But the good news is that if you have your service techs in there afterwards, they can look for those opportunities and turn those leads back to the sales department.

So I would simply just build it in. Add a few hundred dollars – whatever it is, depending on the nature of your service agreement – and I wouldn’t even mention it, except to say that: “By the way, with this new investment, we’re going to cover you for the next three years or five years (or whatever it is). We’ll be out twice a year to inspect the furnace or inspect the air conditioning system.”

I have another client that, they do plumbing, so they include at no charge a free plumbing inspection with that every year as well. So they get their plumbing inspectors – what they call PSI techs: plumbing service inspection techs – in the house once a year to look for water heaters, water treatment problems, that sort of thing.

So the real opportunity is to get some type of service agreement so we can get back in front of the homeowner on a regular basis. Just build it in to the agreement and tell the homeowner this system includes three years of bumper-to-bumper service. I think the question is that simple, and I think the answer is that simple as well.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

Price is always at the forefront of customers’ minds. But when you deliver superior service — and you do, right? — you won’t always beat the cheap guy on price. So how can you minimize the price objection in the customer’s eyes? Third-party validation.

This week, Weldon Long explains how to use that third-party validation by pointing to established, trusted sources that can help remind the customer of some of the things that are much more important than price. Plus, Drew Cameron joins the show to continue his conversation on building the “dream team” that will ensure your organization’s success.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

Having guarantees that your company will stand behind can build trust and ease the sense of risk that your customer may have in mind. But how can you deliver those guarantees during the sales presentation?

In the latest “clip of the week” from Cracking the Code, Weldon Long role plays how to offer those guarantees to the homeowner — and grow your closing rate as a result.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on February 11.