14 - We Banned The Word LEADS | Samantha McGuinness

SPEAKER_03 0:23

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the GoTo Podcast for the in-home selling and trades world. Selling in the dwelling. I'm your host, Alan Langer, and today we are moving from the kitchen table to actually the home show table. We're actually going to talk about face-to-face marketing today and what you need to do to get those leads into the hands of your reps that sell them. And we've got Samantha McGuinness joining us today, who is an awesome expert at this. But before we get to Samantha, two quick notes. The first one, the website is sellinginthedwelling.com. I bring that up because I want you to go to the button on the top right that says Ask Alan. You click on that button, you send me a question. If I read the question in an upcoming episode, you will get a free Selling in the Dwelling t-shirt. And the second is my title sponsor, can't forget them, Paradigm Vendo. It's paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling. The best in-home software you can find in the industry. More on them coming up later. So Samantha McGuinness from Enabled, which is a great marketing, face-to-face marketing firm. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Thanks for having me, Alan. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

So you are in Miami. I am in Rhode Island. We're both on East Coast time, and we were chatting before this. And I'm very excited to get into this because we spent a lot of the last few episodes talking about, you know, selling, which is selling in the dwelling name of the podcast. But I also want this podcast to be helpful for every aspect of an home improvement business. And you're not going to have a home improvement business if you don't have leads. And the number one thing I've heard, probably the last couple years at least, is the leads suck. The leads are hard. The leads are getting more expensive. How am I going to get better leads? You talk to a salesperson, every lead in the world is the worst lead they've ever run.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

So you are That doesn't sound like a sales rep at all, by the way.

SPEAKER_03 2:11

No, never. No, the leads are always great for every sales rep, right? So you focus on, you name the company's enable, you focus on home shows, events, retail, a little bit of canvassing. So tell me about, well, first of all, how'd you get into this? And if you had to talk about something regarding what these home improvement contractors should be focusing on when it comes to this, what should it be?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yeah, so I can start with how I got into it. So I've been in the home improvement industry for a very long time. And I've always done face-to-face marketing. I just didn't always know that that's what I was doing. I come from super humble beginnings. So when I had a landscape construction company originally, we didn't really have the resources to do a ton of marketing. And as a result, we had to get face-to-face with our prospects. At the time, that was mostly commercial businesses, and it worked really well. It was also almost free to drive out to a location and connect with somebody in person or go to a trade show relative to other lead sources. And so I did that for a number of years. I was very fortunate to eventually land up at the Renewal by Anderson of Greater Toronto. When they first started out, there were no walls in the office. There were no employees really. I think they had two or three sales preps. They didn't know how to close at the time. They hired me. I was very fortunate to be able to work at RBA because I got to go to all the other locations across the US. They would fly me out to the New Jersey office, which shout out to them because they're incredible people over there. I don't know if I know you're from RBA originally as well. I don't know if you know those guys. They're an elite group of people. And I would go to the San Francisco office or St. Louis and I got to learn how everybody else was running their program. And I got to go back to Toronto and create my own. I took things that I like and changed things I didn't. I made a ton of mistakes, and I was able to build a very successful program from the ground up. So that's how I got started in in face-to-face marketing. That's where most people know me from.

SPEAKER_03 4:10

And your second question was Well, I guess I should elaborate on my second question because I'm assuming everybody knows in the audience what face-to-face marketing means, but maybe they don't. So what define what it actually means in the home improvement space. And I saw this on your website. You say that face-to-face marketing always and traditionally outperforms digital marketing almost, you know, almost every single time. So tell us what it is exactly, and then why does it outperform traditional types of advertising?

SPEAKER_02 4:42

Yes. So with our business, with what I do, face-to-face marketing and typically in the home improvement space, it means events, home shows, retail stores, canvassing. It means going out and meeting your ideal customer where they are. That could mean when, you know, in a home show setting, it could mean at a fair or festival. It could also mean creating your own events, which is something that we also coach on as well. It's actually curating your own events and having people come out and then you're booking the free and home consultation on the spot. You're qualifying heavily as well, though, with the way that we run our program. We're pretty meticulous in everything that we do. You know, when you say the term for face-to-face marketing in the home improvement space, people typically know that that's what it means. Outside of the home improvement industry, nobody has a clue what I do. Nobody could understand all my friends and everybody I know is in tech, and they can't even grasp what I do. But little do they know to your, you know, your second question was this form of marketing is the most cost-effective way to connect with homeowners. And it just is. If you take cost per lead issued, you take things like cost of marketing, these are metrics that we track very meticulously. Uh our costs are so much more profitable than any other lead source. You're not competing for appointments when you are at a farmer's market and your customer knows the company, they're not being tricked into clicking a link. That's not the truth. And that's, you know, we're we're what we do is very authentic. A lot of the time we actually catch people off guard. We could be at a dog show. It's a random example. And by the way, when I was at RBA, I did over 300 events a year. So you can imagine the weird stuff that I've done. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Dog shows are the least of the weird. But let's say you're at a dog show and you just so happen to be talking about the windows fogging up in the baby's room or the roof, something's happening with it, or whatever the case, the bathroom user placement, whatever it is. And then you go to this dog show and you're met with this high-energy, incredible human who's empathetic. And they're like, hey, how old your windows? Or how what's going on with your bathroom? They're like, I was just talking about this on the way out, and here you are. You know, they have this great experience. The person cares. They might pet the dog, they might, you know, greet your child and they qualify you. You set an appointment, they come out the next day or two days later, and you're so happy that you went to the dog show because you got more than you even thought you would. You got some new windows or a new bathroom, whatever the case. So it's uh it's a completely different type of marketing. When it's done correctly, it'll be your most profitable lead source beyond referrals. The only thing that we cannot compete with when it comes to profit is referrals.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

And you know, what you're talking about is so true because I train a lot. You you mentioned referrals, and I train a lot of reps on not only how to generate more referrals, but how to generate their own business. And it's amazing how many reps don't visit their job sites. Like, if I just sold a $50,000 window job, you know what? I'm going to that job site when it's being installed, and I'm walking around that neighborhood and knocking on doors, and every other rep would look at me like I had three heads. Like, what are you doing? You know, that's not your job. I'm like, yeah, I'm getting my own appointments. What are you talking about? And the the power of face-to-face, it to me, it's it's it's it's literally a no-brainer. Like nobody wakes up going to the boat show thinking I'm going to spend 40 grand on windows. But when you catch them off guard, it's like a pattern interrupt. It's like, oh, you know what? I kind of do need windows. I've been thinking about this for three or four years. Let me talk to these guys. And that's what it is. And you're right, there's no competition. You're there, you know, you're usually there by yourself because it's the Strawberry Festival or the Boat Show or the dog show or whatever. So it's really brilliant stuff. And I highly encourage contractors who are listening to this to really look into it because a lot of them I think are afraid to do it because they don't know how to do it. And they just rather, oh, it's easier to do Google ads and let me just do that and see see how it works.

SPEAKER_02 8:35

There's something really significant about being willing to work really hard and how much more successful you can become when you work really hard. The lazy way is always going to be more expensive.

unknown 8:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

In different ways. Maybe that means you're not making mistakes and then learning. That's expensive to me to a degree. And I think that for me, I I personally have never been in a position where I was fortunate enough to put my success in somebody else's hands. I always had to make it happen for myself. And because of that, yeah, I consider myself to be very blessed that I get to have made the mistakes I made and, you know, let other people know what those were and help other companies make a lot of money doing this stuff.

SPEAKER_03 9:15

Yeah. So do you think when you when you visit with companies, do they already have field marketing teams, or do they already have like a home show cadence or like doing it, or are they starting from scratch? Are you kind of in the middle with with who you're talking to?

SPEAKER_02 9:29

I'd say more times than not, they're doing home shows and maybe the state fair or the odd event within territory.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

However, when they work with us, so we we track everything. We track ROI, of course, we track appointment set, we track everything. There's a number of, you know, of KPIs that we track. And when they use our program, they're at a place where they want to find anywhere where homeowners can be because they can just replicate the exact system. And so usually for the most part, when a company comes to us, they are doing at least home shows. But sometimes not all of the home shows within territory, though, yet.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

Yeah, right, right. And the problem for me, I'll I'll speak from I've been in the business now for almost 30 years and I've seen the home shows, I've seen it all. And for me, from a prospect standpoint, prospects have their guard up way more at a home show. They're like they walk down the aisles with the with their blinders on because they don't want to, they don't want anybody to talk to them. And I always found that peculiar because you're at the home show to see fun things and like, oh, what can I get from my house? But God forbid anyone actually approaches me and talks to me. So that's where the pattern interrupt of going to a different event that they're not expecting that really is powerful, right? Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_02 10:41

I'm gonna give you a weird answer.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

Yeah, sure. And you can you can give me an answer that I could be totally wrong too. It's just my just what I think.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

So so when I I've worked a million home shows, one of the things that I think it makes really it makes people uncomfortable is people don't want to be sold to and they don't want to be captured in a sneaky way, like, hey, enter to win this, or you know, giving away this thing here. And I think that turns people off sometimes of having conversations with the vendors at shows. The way that we do it doesn't work like that. We're making eye contact and we're asking the customer a direct question that is qualifying them. So then we're in a very authentic moment with another human where they're not shying away from us. They're not like pretending they didn't hear us. It's it's really hard the way that we do it to pretend you didn't hear us.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

I gotta say, though, it it does happen sometimes where somebody might be like, no, I'm fine. And then they do this and they keep walking. That's their right to do whatever they want. They probably paid for the time to the show. You can, I don't know, roll around on the ground if you want to. That's up to you. But that said, the way that we work at home shows, it's it's not like that. You know, we're asking a question that's we're you know, we're qualifying them. And then if they need us, they'll continue the conversation and they stop. And if they don't, they just say, Oh, I I rent, or oh, I I'm building a new construction or whatever the case. And then they disqualify themselves. And that's a beautiful, authentication. Oh, great, but either way, that's perfect. Then awesome, have a great show. And we send them along the way and we open up ourselves to have other conversations with people. So what I see a lot of is is the the lineups at a booth to do something that has nothing to do with qualifying the homeowner. I think that people avoid some of that. I do, I avoid that. I don't want to enter to win anything. I I think people who own homes, a lot of the time, they maybe they don't want that as well. I could be wrong, but in my experience, we don't get that type of dynamic with homeowners.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

No, and I I think I I agree with you a thousand percent because it goes back to, you know, people, especially today now, you know, the consumers evolving, homeowners are evolving. Uh they don't want to meet with salespeople. I mean, I wrote a whole book about how people hate salespeople, never want to meet with them. And this is just an extension of it because they don't want to be sold to, they don't want to be, they want things to be on their terms. So opening up with an engaging question that's not, hey, sign up for this, or do you want to win free windows is brilliant. So I'm gonna I'm gonna put you on a spot here, Samantha. Let's role play. You're at a booth right now. I'm walking down. I got my I got my new wine dispenser that I just spent $150 on on the the previous aisle. I'm having a good time. I got a hot dog.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Are you drunk or no?

SPEAKER_03 13:23

No, I'm not drunk. Not yet. I didn't open the wine dispenser yet. I just bought it for home. And I'm walking by your booth. What are you gonna say to me?

SPEAKER_02 13:32

What's my what's my company? What's my product?

SPEAKER_03 13:35

Uh let's say you renew, let's say it's renewal by Anderson since you did a million.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Hey sir, how old are your windows and doors? That's honestly.

SPEAKER_03 13:41

Oh, my windows and doors? They're actually probably pretty old. They're probably like 40 years old.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Oh my gosh. Um, so what sort of issues are you having with them?

SPEAKER_03 13:48

Uh they're old, but they're okay. I mean, nothing I've ever thought about. But you know, I guess, you know, they are 40 years old.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Yeah, 40 years old, you probably have some condensation. What's your energy bill like? You you just want to do that.

SPEAKER_03 13:59

Oh, well, let's not talk about that.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

So we can continue on, but I already got you.

SPEAKER_03 14:05

Yeah, you already got me. So you already just you just started with a question. And and again, if I don't want to answer the question, I'm just gonna move on. I'm like, I'm all set, and then you just you're just good. But we go to the great, great stuff. And and I think contractors who are thinking about doing this or are actually doing it now, but maybe doing it wrong, really need to contact you because there's a right way to do this and there's a wrong way to do this. And I see a lot of times it's a lot of people are are doing it the wrong way. So, what are the biggest for companies that are doing it or trying to do it? Do you see any like common mistakes that they're making when they're doing shows?

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yeah, fire away.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Fire away.

SPEAKER_02 14:41

All right, you've worked a home show before as a sales rep. We recommend not having sales reps at the booth. I think sales reps should be selling in the home and doing what they're responsible for. I think everybody should play their unique role and exercise their God-given gifts. That's how what I believe. Everybody wins when everybody owns their role. So that's one thing. I also think we should be running appointments on Saturdays and Sundays. So the sales rep should be out in the field. A lot of companies are not running appointments on Sundays right now that I work with. And I'm like, please open up capacity because we need it with the amount of appointments we're setting with the department.

SPEAKER_03 15:13

But that's I love Sunday's appointments. I love them as a sales rep because when you get a Sunday appointment, those people are serious.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

100%. No, that I appreciate that. I think people need to hear that because that's also when people are available. You can't really catch me doing much on a weekday. I'm swamped. We're busy people. So to have somebody come out at 2 p.m. on a weekday for me wouldn't work. Those are that's a non-primetime spot. That's you know, the point where you try to fill up. The weekends are prime time spots. If you you know anything about setting, you know, selecting dates strategically in a call center or even at an event or a show, you go for the non-primetime first to try to fill those up. So that's that I think it's really important to have sales reps working when they're gonna make money and the customers need them. I think that's how we run a company properly. So I think having the sales rep staff staff the booth, anything that involves a trinket at a booth is a huge distraction, which people don't like when I say this because everybody's is really focused on that. They're like, oh, we have this cool keychain or this bottle opener and all this cool stuff. And I'm like, it has nothing to do with what you do as a business. And it does nothing good for the customer.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

It doesn't. The the candy and all the stuff. I saw somebody post the other day on LinkedIn and and they said, Oh, here's our display. It's this and this, and you need candy and all these things. I don't respond to those sort of things, but you don't need candy at your booth. In fact, you will crowd up your booth with people who are just looking for candy, not a roof or a bathroom. So I think those sort of gimmicks and stuff, we don't, we don't do any trinkets at the booth the way we run our program.

SPEAKER_03 16:54

Well, that's I think that's a huge one there because I think everyone feels the need that they have to have trinkets. And so many people go to home shows with their bags just to collect all the crap that you can give get for free. And they're not there, they're not serious at all for anything.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

Alan, I kid you not, I I go to home shows not as much as I used to, but I I still go in there. I see one lady all the time in South Florida. God love her. She has this bag and she's going to every single booth and she just takes chocolate. It's like Halloween for her every time there's a home show. And I'm like, we're giving this person diabetes at this point. So probably just the first to her. But that said, you know, that that sort of stuff. I think if we're talking home show specific, so not events, well, even events can this can apply too, but relying on the display at the booth is a big faux pas as well. The point of being at home shows and events is to connect with somebody in that manner I just kind of showed you and and figure out if they even need us, ask them questions. But going and bringing them to our door or our bathroom sample or whatever it is, it is really, it's like kind of selfish. It's not intended to be, but it's like, I let me brag about our product and show you this and X, Y, Z. Let's actually talk about the customers' issues with what they currently have. And so we have a really different approach when it comes to that as well. We have product at home shows at non-traditional events like street fairs, food festivals, the majority of the events that you'll do as a home improvement company, you don't need product there. So that's another thing. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 18:28

I've never heard that before, really. So you don't need to show how nice the windows are, the wind, the roof shingles, none of none of that.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

You don't need to. If you're working a home show, you should have a beautiful display because you need to present your, you have to put your best foot forward. We're dressed the way we are for a reason. We didn't just come here rolling out of bed. We there's an intention behind the way we're presenting ourselves, especially at our booth that we paid five, 10,000, $20,000 for sometimes. But the difference between a customer saying, Oh, can you show me this versus us saying, here, let me show you this, that there's a difference there. That's I think when I when I left RBI, I probably had a team of like 40 people, maybe more at the time. I would say 90% of the appointments that we set, we never even walked customer the customer over to an appointment. Sorry, to to the product, to the window sample, the door sample, whatever it may be. We we're never doing that unless they ask. But we're not there to brag about our product or talk about talk about our warranty or sell them on us. We're there to find out if they need us and then sell the value of the free and home consultation. But we can't sell the value of the free and home consultation if we don't know what's going on with them. They might not even benefit from the appointment. So if they're not going to benefit from the appointment, send them along your way.

SPEAKER_03 19:47

Right, right. Because you obviously you want to set your job is not only to set appointments, your job is probably to set quality appointments, not just any appointment, I would assume. That that's you know, that that's what drives sales reps crazy and sales managers crazy, is they complain about the leads all the time because all marketing is just throwing casting this giant net and they're just sucking up all the leads they can, and half of them aren't qualified. So I think you're touching on a point where is incredibly important. It's more about the quality of the leads you get from a show rather than just how many, correct?

SPEAKER_02 20:17

We actually banned the word leads at enabled. Readable that word. We don't we don't use the word leads. It may come up in conversation with you just because it's it's something that everybody uses, but internally at my company and at the face-to-face marketing network, we don't use the word leads. It's appointment or call to set.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

That's all we love that.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

And and by the way, the ratio when we're working home shows and events, retail stores as well, the ratio between call to sets to appointments is 90% a set qualified appointment. We know three pain points. We know where in the home the products are, where they're the worst. We probably know the dog's name, probably know a lot of stuff that's gonna fuel the sales rep, which you as a sales rep, you probably like that because you can build rapport really easily. You're not gonna go in there looking like a doofus, not knowing anything. You have a little bit of an understanding as to what's going on with the homeowner, it helps the sales rep a lot. So we work hand in hand with sales and we want sales to sell, obviously. Yes. And if you have a great product and a great company, we should sell because that's good for the homeowner. If you're terrible, don't sell. I I don't even want to work with you. But but if you're really good, let's get more customers for you. So that said, definitely qualified appointments all day. We have a requirement to set an appointment. If if we don't have certain criteria met, the team is not allowed to set the appointment.

SPEAKER_03 21:39

That's amazing. This is this is really great eye-opening stuff because I think a lot of contractors make the mistakes you're talking about. I've seen it myself. I I've worked for companies that that have done it. I I I I remember um when I was working in the field, uh, this one company, they started to do home shows and they were just terrible at it. They would they would work an entire four. Day weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and and get eight leads and we're excited about it for the whole four days.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Eight appointments or eight appointments. Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_03 22:08

Well, the first thing they did was here's another thing. I'll I'll say this because it's just experience. Set the appointment at the home show. Don't just take the name and then try to set it later. They were starting to do that. So I talked them into at least trying to set it at the home show. But then they were just they were sitting on on the chair on their phones, like that, and waiting for people to walk up to them. So um anyway, there's so much there's so much here that I think can be fixed with contractors doing this, and and you you obviously are the place to go to do that. Hey dwellers, quick break. Hey, did you know that the closing percentages for in-home sales has been dropping consistently over the last 10 years? It's really crazy, and there's a lot of reasons for it, but one of them is reps have so much to do in the house because there's so many different platforms that you're jumping back and forth all the time. Well, my title sponsor, Paradigm Vendo, takes care of that. In one digital platform, you can go from initial appointment right to final sale and signatures by visiting just their platform. It's amazing. You gotta check them out. It's paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling, P-A-R-A-D-I-G-M Vendo.com forward slash dwelling, because your reps need to give the homeowners a great experience in the house, and jumping around doesn't do that. Visit paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling and take care of the experience your reps are giving in the house. Hey sales professionals, are you proud of your profession? Are you proud of being in sales? Well, you know what? You really should be, and it's time to start showing it. And that's why I created my new merchandise shop, the sevensecretshop.net. It's the the number sevensecretshop.net, and there you can find great hats, t-shirts, beanies, water bottles, phone covers, all kinds of really fun merchandise with great sayings like I love sales or sales rocks, or even for your kids, my dad is a sales rock star, my mom is a sales superstar. Visit the sevensecretshop.net with the number seven, and you can pick out anything you want to show your love of what you do for a living. The sevensecretshop.net, visit it today. Now I want to switch gears for a second from home shows to you said retail and events. Talk about if I'm a contractor, what do you mean by retail, Samantha, and events? Like, is an event a home show or tell me what you're talking about?

SPEAKER_02 24:34

An event, so we consider these three separate lead sources. Home show is a lead source, and events is a separate source. That would include things like farmers markets, street fairs, food festivals, the dog show I mentioned earlier. That's events. And then retail stores could be anything from Ace Hardware to local grocery store type retail stores.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

I got you.

SPEAKER_02 24:58

And then you could go as bigger as to going Lowe's, Home Depot, Costco, things like that. Gotcha. And my clients do all of the above. I work with several companies who do Costco and Lowe's and Home Depot. And then, you know, some of the smaller businesses do the smaller retail stores. I actually prefer the smaller retail stores simply for the fact that there's no Rev share model incorporated in that partnership. I don't want to pay a company based off revenue. That can hike up your cost of marketing. So a lot of the companies that I know that are in the bigger box type of stores, they might pay a 10 to 11% Rev share out to the store, which is really difficult for us because with us, retail should hit you at a 12% cost of marketing max. By the way, that's that's not fluffing any numbers. That includes your manager's salary. If they go out to lunch, it includes that. It includes every display. We don't fudge our numbers at all. You know, with events, your cost of marketing should land around 10%, home shows around 9%. So as a result of that, those are sort of the the three main sources that we help companies with. And the order always goes like get into every single home show within territory first. And then you know, you have your department running. And as you're doing that, you're getting into at least an event every weekend and simultaneously building out a team to work those shows as well. And typically it takes about a year until they're what ready for retail. Just because, again, it's a little slightly less profitable than the other two sources.

SPEAKER_03 26:27

And it's and it's a it's a little different as well. I I like the local ones better because it's local. It's like you if the guy you know is going to Ace Hardware, he probably knows where he goes there, he or she goes there every weekend, and it's like it's much more familiar. So there's probably a little more built-in trust at the at the person sitting there because the store allowed them to sit there. So I think that's a that's a good thing to look at.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

And you can rotate stores as well. So you want to you essentially want to look at your best towns, so where you sell the the most, the highest job size, analyze a zip code in that area, and then you want to rotate stores. So hopefully you can find a retail store that might have three different locations. Maybe each weekend you're going to a different one and rotating it. So you're not hitting the same people over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_03 27:09

Right. And you're saying if you really want to do this right, you need an events slash or home show map or whatever you call them. You need someone managing these people and doing all these events. You can't be doing this yourself as the owner.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

That's probably you you do. There's a budget constraint. I do recommend that an owner still build this up the right way. And then, especially when a company comes contacts us and they say, hey, we're not ready for a manager yet, we can't afford another salary. That's fine. When you work with us, you get your return same weekend, you do an event right away. You're you're profitable already. And then when people see the results from our program, they go, Oh, now we're ready for the manager. Pretty much like the next week. Because they, if you just did 150K in revenue that you weren't anticipating from a two-day show, that can justify a salary. And you actually are less profitable not having a person in place to build up the department as long as your cost of marketing is in line. Where people go wrong is continuing to do the wrong thing over and growing upon the wrong thing. So if you have like a 20% cost of marketing, there's something wrong. When you're if you're doing events and shows and your cost of marketing, your department's 20%, that's terrible. That's not good. No offense. But it's not good. And there's there's areas for improvement here that we can work on.

SPEAKER_03 28:28

So what would cause a company to get to a 20% cost of marketing? What would be the reasons why they would hit those high numbers?

SPEAKER_02 28:37

There's a lot of reasons. Give me a couple of the main reason would be not having the right process at the event or the show or the right person working the event or the show. That would be my number one reason. And the way that we coach, because we coach managers, that's what our face-to-face marketing network is. We provide the managers with the support and the systems that they need. First, I want to take the blame for everything. I want to take it on the department. Like, what can we control? I never want to blame sales. I always want to look at our results first. So usually if your cost of marketing is 20%, there is an issue with methodology and likely the person or the even the way that the comp the person is compensated who's working the events and the shows, if they're not compensated correctly, they're not going to work the way that we want them to. So we tie compensation based off the result that we want. And I'm not going to give away our comp plan, but I have a feeling you might ask me. But that said, you know, we that could be number one thing. Another big factor, and I'm sure you probably know this too, Alan, is something like capacity. A lot of the time when a company goes to work with us, they get a ton of appointments that they weren't planning, they weren't planning for or ready for on the sales side. So they might not have enough sales reps to run the amount of leads that their appointments that they're getting. The issue with that is that that will bring out your days to issue. And that KPI that we track, the date from when the appointment is set on to when it actually results as an appointment, as you know, a demo or a sale, we want to keep that three days or below. When that gets higher than that, the likelihood of selling becomes significantly reduced. And so when we think about things like that, like there are some elements to obviously sales that need to be improved on if we're if we have a 20% cost of marketing. It could be that the sales team isn't closing. The interesting thing that I noticed too as a manager, if I may, is that I would do deep dives into specific sales reps close rate on non-traditional appointments. So things like events, which make up the bulk of your appointments. If you think about I was doing 300 events a year as a manager, maybe 30 of those were non-traditional or were home shows. The rest would have been non-traditional events. We did a deep dive and we would notice things like maybe one particular sales rep could close traditional appointments. So online, whatever, PPC, direct mail, you know, TV, whatever it may be. Maybe he's closing those a 25%, but he's for some reason running tons of events appointments and he's closing those at like 40. Let's look at those numbers and see what and assign appointments strategically. That's another thing I think companies do a better job of is analyzing trends. And then you can make a big deal of that to the sales rep. Like, hey, you are the events superstar. Look at your close rate and show them. Look at your close rate on events compared to this. You're gonna we're gonna keep feeding you those. They're gonna be even more excited to go to those non-traditional lead sources and close even higher on those. Watch, guarantee. They're gonna think that you know, there's this special guy. They're getting this special treatment for these special appointments. And by the way, sales chefs should be closing events appointments higher than any other lead source anyway.

SPEAKER_03 31:50

Couldn't agree more. And you're making you're bringing up a point that I'm thinking in my head right now because I think this is very important from a sales management standpoint, is you gotta convince your, you gotta, you gotta get your reps off the oh my God, it's a it's an event, it's a home show lead or it's a strawberry festival lead. This sucks. Well, you look at what I'm going. They have this salespeople have the worst mindsets in the history of the world. There's just there's terrible mindsets. Actually, been proven, Forbes said, salespeople have this, um this is a quick offshoot. The two worst mindsets in business, number one, are middle management. The middle people in middle management have the worst mindsets of anyone in business, and second are salespeople. So, and and it's because they think everything, you know, the world's against them, I can't sell. So if you can convince your reps, hey, these these leads are really good. Look at Joe and look at Mary, they're selling them. So you that's number one, you gotta you gotta get this mindset of the reps that these are really high quality leads. Um, when I worked, I was actually really good at closing canvassing leads. For some reason, I just was. And everybody that got a canvassing lead was like, oh my God, I gotta run a canvassing lead tonight. I'll be home early. You know, there's the mindset right there.

SPEAKER_02 32:59

So they can never run one of my appointments. As soon as I when I was a manager, I would hear things like that. This is me on calling the president. Get him off the lead. Exactly. I don't want him on the lead. You can't run the lead. And it's not, it's not even just for me selfishly because I'm paid off profitability of my department. I need it to be profitable, but it's a disservice to the customer, it's a disservice to the sales rep. They're not gonna make money. You gotta manage your perception, people. Everybody has you have to manage your perception. If you think something's not going to work, it's not going to work. So I would ban reps from running my appointments. If I heard we did um, we did a really, it was a little bit ghetto flea market in Toronto. I remember somebody once said, Oh, it's a, I'm not gonna say the flea market's name, no offense to them, but oh, it's a it's a whatever flea market appointment. And I said, Oh, you can't run the lead. I'm sorry. You gotta get it, they're taking you off. You can stay home tonight. And that wasn't even my call. I just, I knew it was the best, it was best interest for the company. Why are we sending sales reps who are shooting themselves in the foot? It's not good for anybody. Nobody wins like that. And I think we need to show, to your point, we need to show the proof is in to me. I always say the proof is in the profit. If somebody can close certain leads, then show everybody that. But also it is a privilege to have a qualified appointment on your schedule as a sales rep. It is a it is a blessing. And if if you I think that if the attitude is looking is frowning upon that, maybe you should be in an industry where you're farming your own appointments and responsible for that yourself. Because if you can't see how much of a privilege that is, I don't know what to tell you. The other point, that'll just the last thing I can say on this, unless you have anything more, is that the reason why I say you should be closing events appointments higher than any other lead source is if somebody is going to stop and set an appointment at an ice cream festival or a dog show or whatever it may be. We know they're three pain point. They've gone through our process. I can't speak to anybody else's process, but our process is the most qualified appointment you're going to have. They've set aside the they talked to somebody to the, you know, their kid might be screaming to go over to the jumping castle or whatever the case. And they still do all of this with us and they've set the date and time on the spot. This means a lot. This is so much different than somebody who's calling in or clicking an ad or seeing your you on the TV or whatever it may be. This is a whole different process. And stats actually show that events, appointments close higher than home shows, higher than any other lead source if it's done correctly.

SPEAKER_03 35:28

That's that's tremendous. I'm gonna I'm gonna bring up something. It just popped in my head. It's definitely in the same world, but I want to get your thoughts on this. What about showrooms? I get so many contractors, so I don't want to spend money on a showroom, they're a waste of time. I completely disagree. I encourage contractors to have a nice showroom. And but it goes for me, it goes beyond just having a showroom. I'll give you a quick story, Samantha. My very first in-home job, God, I I'll date myself 30-something years ago. I was selling sunrooms. I sold sunrooms in New Jersey. The owner there, it was a small, small company, just two sales rests, me and this other guy, but he had this really big warehouse space behind his office, and he built six or seven showroom uh uh sunrooms back there. And every other Sunday he would have an open house. And he the only mistake he was making was, and I'm telling you, 50, 60, 70 people would show up because he would put an A in the paper. It was that back then you put an A in the paper. They'd show up. Now he was live, warm bodies coming in saying, wow, I want to see sunrooms. And then all he would do is take the names and say, I'll call you later. And when I got there, I'm like, no, we got to set the appointment now. Once we started doing that, it was this 90% close because they were walking around the sunroom. So my point is not only have a showroom, but you can actually do so much more if you have a showroom. Do you deal with custom contractors who who want to have showrooms or or talk about that stuff?

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Usually companies don't come to me for this, but I have experience with this because I've worked as an you know employee in a really incredible business. We would have, I mean, we weren't very our showroom was not very popular. However, we what we did was the displays that I designed for events and shows, which we invest over time, you we invested a lot into because we were, you know, we did home shows as soon as I started and we did very well. One of the home shows we do over a million in revenue from. And that said, you know, we would just we would design the displays to go in the home shows, but they would be on they would be on wheels, but you could situate them and then they would stay in the showroom. So this the displays essentially served both purposes. I do think it is important to have a showroom, something for customers to come into. I think the thing about home improvement, it is a personal business. We're not just clicking and ordering something like it's Amazon. These people are gonna be in your house, your children are there, your dogs there, whatever. They're gonna see you in your home. You might be cooking while they're installing the windows or whatever it may be. And I think people want to know who they're gonna be potentially doing business with. So people will still actually go out to home to the showrooms. One thing I will say is that you should have a process for that, though. Don't make it, don't make it weird. Don't let people come into your showroom and and you're like fighting in the back, or if it's a mess, you know, or your your office is a complete disaster. Like have a process. Hey, this person gets greeted. We have a competition. This person gets greeted within five seconds of walking in the door. That's how I would structure it for my business. Everybody gets greeted, everybody's offered a tea or something like that, and and you're walking through what's going on, how you can help them. Maybe you introduce them to the president. I don't know what you're doing, but you should make people feel very invited there, and the environment should be inviting as well if you're gonna do that.

SPEAKER_03 38:44

And one of the companies I've seen that are really grabbing this with open arms is Pella. They're all of their new locations have really amazing showrooms, like slide out walls and like they're going way, you know, like going over the top with it. But it's amazing because people walk in and they're like, Why would I buy windows anywhere else? This is beautiful. Like so, if you can afford it and you can do it, you have to you you hone your home show strategies and your event strategies, have some sort of home show, have some sort of showroom.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

So it's not anything extra to do the showroom if you're doing home shows and you have displays, though. It's it's not an extra event necessarily. You just need the space, that's all.

SPEAKER_03 39:17

And you need the people there greeting. You're right. Because if they're if if someone walks in and there's they're walking around and no one's there to say hello, then you're you're it's not gonna have any effect at all.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

So I think a little bit of that is actually though, just organic culture. I think when you have high standards for the culture that you maintain in your company, it's natural to greet somebody when you walk through the door. That should be a requirement of anybody working in your company, I think, that they're that person who is going to make others feel comfortable in the office that pays them. That if that person doesn't walk in the door, maybe they don't have a job. So I think when we maintain, again, managing our perception and being grateful for everything, being grateful for the person who walks in the door, like, hey, how can I help you? That that sort of culture is what you would want. I wouldn't want any, I wouldn't want an accountant or an admin or anybody working for me if they were gonna ignore somebody who walks in the door or not be extremely courteous to them. I wouldn't want that person on my team doing any function.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Hey, sellers, let me ask you something. Your sales rep walks into a home and pulls up a presentation. Is it dynamic? Is it interactive? Is it built to wow the customer? Or is it simply another PDF from two years ago that looks like everybody else's? Here's the thing. In today's in-home selling world, your presentation is part of the sale, and that's exactly why I want to tell you about our good friends over at Engage, the sponsor for the Ask Allen segment. See Engage, which is I-n-g-a-g-e.io, is the industry's leading interactive sales presentation software built specifically for in-home sales teams. We're talking dynamic, engaging, professional presentations that make your reps look like the obvious choice the moment they open their iPads. And the results speak for themselves. So many companies are increased closing percentages, increased customer satisfaction scores. I can go on and on, but you need to check out Engage if you want to really create unbelievable presentations in the home. It's ing-a-g-e.io, engage.io, because your presentation is everything. Visit them today. Well, Samantha, it is time. You heard the angels sing in the background. It's time for the Ask Alan segment. And I got this question a couple weeks ago, and I knew you were coming on, so I waited specifically for you. And it's from a gentleman in Albuquerque named Peter. He says he owns a small home improvement company, doesn't say what the actual product is, but he asked, if I could only choose one of the following, should I spend my marketing dollars on home shows or on a canvassing team? So that's an interesting thing. We didn't even talk about canvassing. If it's actually home shows, how many home shows should I start with? And what are the things I should consider? So you mentioned quite a few of the things he considered, but how would you answer Peter's question? If he calls you up and said, Hey, what should I do here? What would you tell him?

SPEAKER_02 42:13

I'm gonna give you another weird answer. I would stop referring to myself as having a small company. Doesn't matter if it is small. I would never say that. That's my first, my first love it.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

I love it. Peter, pay attention. There's a good one for you right off the bat.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

Yeah, like I said earlier, we have a some banned words at my company in like small or I'll try or anything like that. We don't, we're not touching that sort of language at all. And words are and I and it sounds is I know it's funny, but words hold a lot of weight and they mean a lot. And so I just want to answer the question though. I would get into, I would do the the next home show. I would make sure that you have the right process. And if you aren't in a position where you can hire people, then you should make sure that you're following the right process. You'll generate enough revenue from that as long as you're doing things the right way to decide now it's time to get into every single home show after that. You know, you want to make sure that you're in a good booth location. You don't have to do a huge booth, but make sure that you're in a position where you can talk to people. You're not in a position where the aisles are so wide that you can't engage with the people walking by. You want to make sure you have a corner booth that you're in a situation where the the foot traffic flows. And a little tidbit is you can connect with the home show producer to ask them, hey, where does foot traffic flow at this booth? Because you might get a floor plan and not get a good idea as to how that foot traffic flows, even just by looking. You can't always assume this booth is the best. So I'd make sure I'm getting a really good location at a home show. I would invest into that and have a methodology to qualify and set appointments. Also, you need to make sure that your sales team can close, just generally, not necessarily home shows or events appointments, but you need a sales team or a salesperson that knows how to. To close business. If you don't have a sales team that can close, I don't I think you need to you need somebody who's solid you can rely on in order to market to do in you gotta start there.

SPEAKER_03 44:09

If you can have all the marketing leads in the world, it could be greatest leads in the world. If you don't have good salespeople or even a sales process, it doesn't matter. You're just you're just wasting money. So that that's an amazing answer. I never even thought about the location part. I mean, that's just something that that's you know, you're you're this is your wheelhouse, so you think about that stuff. But I I'm gonna answer the canvassing part of his question because for me, here here's an easy answer, Peter. First of all, get your home show and your vent things down. Get that where it's humming, it's running, you're making money before you even think about starting an entire canvassing department. Canvassing departments, you need a manager, you need licensing, you need vehicles. It's a whole thing. It can be incredibly profitable. But here's what I would say: if you've got a sales team, you got free canvassers right there. When they sell a job, you you need to make it mandatory that they visit every single installation. Not if you have time. When you have an installation going, you go with that installation because guess what? You're not only surprising the homeowner, they're not expecting the salesperson. Now that person can walk around to the five or ten houses around there and say, hey, we're putting in windows down at Charlie Moore's house or Bill Jones's house. What I would do, I would do that almost every time I had an install, and I would simply knock on the door, and this is how I would frame it. Instead of saying, hey, do you need windows? Because people don't want to talk to you if you're trying to sell them. I would say, listen, we're doing a job down the street. Sometimes debris falls, flies away from boxes. If anything runs in, you know, winds up in your yard. Here's my card, give you a call, give me a call, we'll take care of it. And that's all I would do. And I can't tell you how many times, two, three, a month later, someone would say, Hey, that job came out really nice. Can you come over and look at my window? So I I would utilize your sales reps as your canvassers because they should be visiting jobs anyway, because it's the homeowner's not expecting and it's a pattern interrupt. They're like, wow, what are you doing here? I didn't expect to see you. And then you'll get a referral, then they can canvas is a whole is a whole can of worms that you can open up, good can of worms. So that's how I would answer that.

SPEAKER_02 46:07

I love that. And if I can just add to, I think that if I had a home improvement business, everybody who runs an appointment is doing five rounds. Going to knock doors, just even running an appointment, not even an install. If you run an appointment, whether you sell it or you don't, you should be going and knocking doors four, five, six doors around the home that you went to.

SPEAKER_03 46:28

100%. Great stuff. We're aligned on that. So, well, we are running out of time, Samantha, but I can't thank you enough. This has been awesome. And I hope this has been helpful for all the contractors listening and even the sales reps on how to handle these appointments, because these are the best appointments you're going to get, guys. Don't think that they're, oh God, I'm running another, you know, strawberry festival. These are the ones that the event person took time, they qualified them. So run them with great intention. Don't have a bad mindset on it because I guarantee you you'll start making more money. And to the contractors, man, call Samantha to that point. How do they find you, Samantha, if they need your help?

SPEAKER_02 47:03

So we have two websites. Our membership program where we coach managers and give them the support and the online learning system access is face to face marketing network.com. And we also offer recruiting service for the manager role as well. You can contact us about that. We have our other website is enabledremodeler.com. So you can contact us for either service or support that whatever you need.

SPEAKER_03 47:25

So enabledremodeler.com and then face-to-face. What was that one?

SPEAKER_02 47:29

Marketing Network.com.

SPEAKER_03 47:30

Face to face marketing network.com. Awesome. Well, please visit Samantha. She's awesome. You can just tell from this 40 minutes or so that we spent together. She knows what she's doing. She'll help your your business grow through really, I think, the most important marketing you can do. And look at that. It's not going to cost you as much as your PPC or Google ads that you're running right now. So, Samantha, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And thank you, everyone, for joining me on this episode of Selling in the Dwelling. Don't forget to visit the website, sellingintwelling.com. Send me a question, just like Peter. He's getting a free t-shirt as soon as I am done here with Samantha. And visit paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling, our title sponsor. Thanks again, everyone. We'll see you next time on Selling in the Dwelling. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 48:15

Selling in the Dwelling.