VIC SUN: Foreign. Welcome to One Leg Up, where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience and how you can achieve zero marketing waste. I’m Vixen. I’m the mastermind here at One Leg. And today I have two very special guests joining me: Stephen White and Casey Reyes, and both are tech alchemists on our technology team. Casey and Steven, how are you guys doing today?
KC: I’m doing fantastic. How are you doing, Stephen?
STEVEN: I’m doing pretty good myself, Vic.
VIC SUN: All right, well, better than that. How’s your Friday? How’s things going on a Friday with both of you?
KC: You know what? It’s been an absolutely crazy week. Crazy good. There’s been constant flow of tasks coming in and a lot of new learning and jumping on new technologies to better suit who we currently have that we’re preparing for. And it’s been really, really challenging and exciting, but also exhausting. So I’m glad it’s Friday because I’m ready to take a nap after this.
VIC SUN: That sounds good. And I think your birds are telling is the same thing.
KC: Yeah, the birds always want to be involved.
VIC SUN: That’s right. That’s pretty cool. How about you, Steven?
STEVEN: Well, today is my fiance’s birthday, so I’m very excited about that. We’re gonna get some nice dinner. But aside from that, things have been good. Lots of projects have been moved along very quickly. I’m excited about these updates we’re doing. So it’s. It’s been very rewarding work to say the least.
VIC SUN: That’s excellent. You guys are commensurate professionals. So, you know, while we’re generally technology agnostic, a number of our home improvement clients use Lead Perfection as their CRM, their customer relationship management platform. And today we want to discuss some of those features. We often find, you know, our clients or the industry at large. Right. Overlooking and therefore missing some of these system efficiencies or tweaks or little Easter eggs. This little. These little hacks, right. That will help their technology platform really perform even better. Really getting the maximum amount of use as well as I would say, for their clients. Because it’s a client relationship management platform, right. To use Lead Perfection. So first, let’s chat about, in my opinion, probably one of the biggest features users are overlooking from within, Lead Perfection, and that is automated text messages, emails, you know, nudges, really, drip campaigns, retargeting, remarketing, however you want to call it. That is one of a powerful, powerful features that Lead Perfection has. So let’s start off with with, with you. Casey, can you tell us a little bit about it and what you’ve done that makes it customized, bespoke, more efficient and more effective?
KC: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things, besides a lot of people not even knowing that Lead Perfection can be utilized as a text message and email platform that I set up for them is the great thing. It’s great for tracking purposes. So say that you have one of those other email platforms that you’re bouncing around in between. Now you’re going to have to update a contact list. You’re going to have to keep that contact list up to date. But when these new leads come in, these new hot appointments come in, you’re going to have to jumble and try to get that updated for your email blast. Let’s say you got like 20 clients in one day. How are you going to keep that up? So the great thing about having it all in one area, like on a Lead Perfection is, is that text message, that email has something called tokens that pulls right from the lead itself. So you want to talk to Jill, you can have it say, hello, little name token. And right in that one section, everything could be customized because it’s pulling it directly from the actual lead itself. That’s what the brilliant thing is about, having it tied to your CRM. The other thing that’s great is you can put together a HTML template that you already have that’s completely customized to your company, or you can put together a plain text email, which is actually starting to become all the rage.
VIC SUN: Okay, well, so let’s unpack that a little bit and then we’ll get Stephen’s take on what he’s done differently, as well as some customization he’s done. And you talked about tokens and, you know, things like having a HubSpot for it. A lot of, you know, the listeners out there won’t understand those things. So maybe let’s unpack that a little bit and you know, explain really what is the advantage of doing this right for the, for the business owners who are not doing it right now and how they can do it easily if they’re not utilizing it.
KC: Right. So the biggest advantage is being able to have a email or text, mostly emails going out. That is the big, beautiful email that you think of when you think of customers sending, receiving information from companies, but also having the plain text aspect of it. And, you know, email companies are getting smart. Those Gmails, Those yahoos, the AOLs, all of those main email domains, they will block HTML because a lot of the people who Are utilizing HTML, Are people trying to sell you something? So having that plain text option that you can send out at the same time as an HTML email, that is you being able to communicate with your customer regardless of their. Their filters on their email. And that is the biggest complaint that people get. You know, you try to talk to your customer, you’re like, hey, we missed your appointment. What happened? They’re like, well, you didn’t say anything to me. It’s like, oh, well, did you check your spam folder? You don’t need to have that conversation. You know, just get them, talk to them. How you’re attempting to talk to them from the very beginning without having those issues being blocked. Your inboxes. Now the. Yeah, go ahead.
VIC SUN: No, okay. I mean, I got it. I think it makes sense that especially nowadays, you know, you remove the clutter and sometimes it’s not about being efficient and saying, well, here’s a template that looks so nice with all the bells and whistles, because HTML, it sounds like, does get blocked more than plain text. And so, you know, a lot of companies don’t know that. And so one of the things that we’ve done is we do AB testing, you know, for many of our clients. And what you’ve done for some of your clients has been, well, we’ll do both, but, you know, we’ll make sure that we’ve got plain text that’s easy to be delivered or at least, you know, has a tendency for higher delivery rates. So I guess my question to, to you both, and I don’t know if you want to take this case here, Stephen, is how do you make that engaging? Like, how do you make that? Because people who said, okay, I’ve not used that before now look into it. And if they start using the templates, they still may not be effective. They still may not end up getting the results that they want. So how do you make those emails and text messages effective?
KC: Yes, what we’ve done is a lot of ad a, B testing when it comes to plain text emails. Now you can bold as many fonts as you want, you can put as many colors and bullet points in those plain text emails as you want. But what you’re missing out on is having the links that take the customer to that more dynamic experience.
VIC SUN: So, and how many links, how many links in general do you recommend?
KC: You just, you just want one. One call to action. That’s the main, most effective way to communicate.
VIC SUN: And how long should the email be? Like five paragraphs maybe?
KC: Yeah, of course, five paragraphs. You’re going to read a whole five paragraph email. No, no, no, no, no. So the average user, I would say, probably will get through three full sentences before they begin to lose interest in what you’re talking about. So one to three to four sentences at most. And if it’s a text message, one sentence, one sentence, that’s very impactful and.
VIC SUN: It sounds like, so, you know, less is more. Now let’s, let’s take it to the very, you know. Okay, so that all seems like easy to accomplish. What is the difficulty in writing these emails? Like, you know, because a lot of companies out there, they don’t have copywriters like we do, and professional, you know, writers who go into conversation, conversational architects, basically. So what do you recommend? If they don’t have that in house, it’s really tough.
KC: And you want to find somebody like what we have going on here at One Leg that has had all of that testing under their experience, which we already know what’s effective. And so you want to be able to take people who have done that research before you even talk to them and work with people like that. So that way it’s just a very, very quick. Okay, I already know that people respond to this type of wording. Plug and play, get it going on the road.
VIC SUN: Okay, and we’ll come back to that. Because I think part of the thing as well that needs to be clear is that even with that there’s, you know, you still do have to customize based on the company and there’s a bespoke way that you attach their culture and the messaging based on the ideal customer profile as well as the user journey. How about you, Stephen? Like, what have you seen from within Lead Perfection that people just go, you know, you just, you’ve seen it a few times in the last couple of months and you’re surprised. Wow, they’re not using it. They should be.
STEVEN: I would say one of the biggest things within Lead Perfection is customizing a user experience based on where their lead source is from. It’s, it’s, you know, they try to do this one size fits all. Let me just call everybody as much as I can. And at the end of the day, there’s people that, you know, the low buying intent leads that just get more and more upset. There’s a high buying intent leads that are getting missed. So if you’re sitting there and you think there’s a one size fits all solution, you’re doing it wrong.
VIC SUN: You know, you touched something there and you happen to be a five, nine, Expert. Now I know this is, this podcast, you know, it’s very specific to Lead Perfection. But 5 9, one of the biggest dialers in the United States, in the world, you know, they have a direct integration with Lead Perfection. And I know many of the home improvement companies that we have as clients as well as prospects that we’ve spoken to do use 5 9. So you talked about dialing and calling there. Can you touch a little bit about, you know, I don’t, you know, maybe not explain the whole system. I know you can do that but, but maybe what’s, what’s one or two things that you’ve seen, you know, going in and continuing off from your, from your, from your previous thought there of how do you customize that experience, you know, using the Lead Perfection 5:9 dialer. Because I know that’s a very complex system.
STEVEN: It is. And some of the challenges and you know, this is funny, like one of the first things I do when we hear from a new client is you want to find out how does their company handle things. Give them a quick call very quickly. Since this is your first interaction with this client, you’re gonna find out how they’re handling a person calling in. Usually, I’d say 70 to 80% of the time our first call is met with a very outdated phone recording system. Usually lands in. Maybe it’s even been someone’s cell phone, which is just mind boggling. I don’t know how a company can handle that. But just an outdated system that leaves a person calling in. If, if their information is valuable to a person calling in, it should be very valuable. Sometimes it’s just lost, you know, they don’t capture it and at that point, I mean, forget the rest of the process. But let’s say they do have something in place and it’s just, you know, leave a message or hopefully somebody answers. If it’s on hours, if it’s off hours, it’s leave a message. And the message is in someone’s office, in the back office where John has to come in on, you know, Monday morning and he listens to the seven voicemails and maybe he forgets something in the process. Then that information’s lost as well. It’s just haphazardly done and I think it’s overlooked.
VIC SUN: Okay, so it sounds like you’re saying, well, 59 may be able to do this. I’m deducing that from what you’re saying. So if companies are simply having Lead Perfection and then they may have just an outdated way of doing things. Maybe their PBX system simply sends the caller to a voicemail if no agents pick up or no agents are available.
VIC SUN: Or if it’s not, forward to a cell phone. So how would you use 59 if you’re already using that, for example, to be able to go and make sure that you maximize the customer experience? Again, this is, we, we focus a lot of customer experience. How do you use that with 5 9?
STEVEN: Absolutely. So one of the, one of the big things with 5:9 is they have this really amazing possibility to improve. It’s called an IVR. It’s an interactive voice recording system. So it’s essentially just a way for a person to talk to a person without talking to a person. You know, you call into any, any business, you’ll hear, press 1 to do this, press to, you know, that’s that, that’s what essentially is, let’s say like the carpet leading to, or you’re walking up to the home or you’re walking into the business. The first thing they see is your. Is your big beautiful sign that says, hi, welcome to our company. This is that in the voice recording world. And what I find time and time again is that it’s overlooked and ways that you can improve that to improve the overall user experience. Just very simply, you can have somebody in your office, someone from your company, have that very personal recording that leaves kind of. It makes it so that their first interaction is a good one and in doing so kind of sets a stage for the next step, which is essentially talking to one of your callers or an office manager who would turn that into hopefully an appointment and then to a sale. If you are leaving, if you think that the first interaction isn’t worth improving, then at the end of the day you’re losing out on that first impression with your clients.
VIC SUN: Right. And again, it’s important for people to know that, you know, with 5:9 it sounds like you are able to utilize recordings. You can customize recordings. Give me an example of a project that you’ve done where you know, you’ve, you know, you just give us three things that you did that you find most companies don’t do even when they use five nine and Lead Perfection.
STEVEN: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we did as a person calls in, let’s say they call in and they get cold feet. Maybe the IVR has a recording that they don’t, they don’t like, or they heard something they didn’t like and they end up hanging up that person’s information. It’s surprising Five9 has the ability to make it so that you still capture that person’s information even if they hang up right away. A lot of people aren’t using that ability. It’s just a person calls in, they looked you up on Google or they saw your ad or they got your information somehow and they end up hanging up and you don’t value that person’s information. That’s lost opportunity to say the least. That’s one way where I made it so somebody calling in, we’re able to capture their information and then follow up on that person’s information. Just to say one example. Another example is using some of our professional voice actors and also improving the voice recording, making it so that a person calling in gets a few nice tidbits about the company. You know, we’ve been in business for 37 years. We’ve got, you know, we’re a family owned company, you name it. These kind of, kind of soothing words that a person likes to hear that improves that first interaction so that they know that they’re talking to a reputable company that has experience, that has done maybe many jobs over time. These are just a couple examples things that make it so when they first have the interaction with somebody, it just improves, it makes them feel a little better about and a little more open as they start to have that conversation, you know, they are calling in, they are interested and these people calling in, they’re trying to find out a bit more about your company if they’re making that call. So why not give them the basics of your company to make the job of the caller a little easier and then hopefully that makes the job a salesperson easier. So as along the way it just helps them down the path to get to that, that final sale point.
VIC SUN: That makes sense. And you know, part of that, the, you know, we kind of moved a lot to the dialer because I know this is a major piece, you know, for companies that use 5 9. It is quite complex using it. You know, even large companies that we’ve, you know, acquired as clients as well as prospects, you know, we’ve seen them not utilizing it the way that they should or at least they’re not utilizing, you know, the platform to its maximum potential. Because for the lack of understanding, one of the things that I liked about what you said was, you know, using the IVR and IVR is more than just an interactive voice response. It can actually, what you said, it can capture people who’ve hung up. You can tie that down for text Messages. And for those companies who are truly serious about customer experience, you know, you can actually create, you know, interactions with, where you can go and project and say, well, look, the average amount of times that you’re going to be waiting is here. Would you like us to call you back? Right? And then you basically just stop having that person wait on the phone. They hang up, they verify before they hang up, you have them verify, you know, the phone number and the information, and then they go ahead and get a phone call right when an available agent becomes available. These are rules that you guys have both worked on. But of course, you know, we’re talking about it here because we want to let people out there know there is hope. You know, it’s just there, it just maybe you don’t have the people who know how to utilize that properly. And then the one thing that I’d like to share is just this little tidbit. So in South Korea they, you know, they, they’ve done these studies on, on, on traffic lights. And so what they, this actually started in South Korea where they had a countdown so that when people, you know, when you see the red light, it tells you it’s counting down to when it’s going to start to turn green. And, and, and, and collision fatalities went down by almost 60 or something, 70%. There’s a study online that you can look at. And again, this is quite significant. And what they found was people’s anxiety and, you know, frustrations, their feelings when they’re waiting. You know, it dramatically dropped. They became at ease because you have, you gave them an expectation like, okay, it’s, I’m 15 seconds away from it, you know what I mean? As opposed to just like, when is this thing going to. And it’s the same thing for IVRs. You know, you can do that, you can set the expectation for people. You know, I happen to, you know, get referrals a lot from one of our partners in a medical field. And you know, there’s this one call center that I was referred to yesterday. And then when we went through it, it was like when we discovered their system, they were using 5, 9. It was like 15 to 18 minute wait times. And I was just like, wow, why don’t you just tell your clients and we’ll call you back and you give them the expectation. And they literally looked at me, you know, in the zoom, they were like, we can do that. Yes, you can do that. You can tell you don’t have to have them wait. And this is medical, right people, I mean, when they call in. It’s. It is a matter of life and death, right? Sometimes. And it can’t just happen. So that’s why they’re staying on the phone. And so customer experience, that’s really, I think, a big deal, including in home improvement, where potentially, you know, they’re calling, they’re waiting, and, you know, they don’t like your ivr, so you’re covering pretty much everything. But really, this is focused on customer experience. So I want to. I want to go back to both of you guys, and maybe we go and ask Casey. You know, this time is. I want to go back to the text and the emails. You know, you know, just what’s one thing that you’ve seen or two things that you’ve seen coming? Because, okay, now you’ve got the tech set up and the email, some automation from within, Lead Perfection, you know, to your clients, et cetera. I’m still not getting the results. Okay, okay, okay. Casey, I’ve done everything you asked me to do. I’ve got a template going out, HTML, plain text. I’m sending it out to everyone. Still not getting a good response. You know, people have asked us that, you know, my rehash campaign is emails and texts, and nobody responds right after we demo, like, they just don’t respond to it. And we send 17 of them in a month. What’s wrong with that? Like, how have you been able to fix that?
KC: I mean, if you’re only seven, sending about 17 of them in a month, you’re. You’re targeting a very, very small audience. You don’t need to be tapping new leads all the time with text message and email. That’s the brilliant thing about them, is even if somebody hasn’t talked to you in a while, or maybe it’s somebody that’s brand spanking new, that you haven’t even had a chance to engage yet. You can set up those text messages and emails specific to how the person is in the project. So maybe it’s somebody that you’ve already talked to before, and you have an email and a text message put together that specifically says, hey, I heard that you had a great experience. Do you have anybody else that you know who’s interested in these projects? Give us a call and we can make it worth your while. Not necessarily saying it like that, but something in a way that is enticing to reach out to those people that you haven’t talked to for a while, or those initial response people where maybe you met them at a fair, you talked to them Face to face already. And you already have that email or that text message set up that says, hey, I know you talked to rep name here that it automatically pulls from the record. I’m just following up about that. So what was your experience with the company so far? Do you have any questions? The key is always, always, always personalization based on when that person has already interacted with your company and where they’ve interacted with your company and how you’re phrasing things. You want to make them want to talk to you and so you want to offer as much support as possible. Good.
VIC SUN: And Stephen, what do you think you’ve added to the text or the email that has made the ones that you guys have been creating so much more engaging or just people can’t help but click or open them.
STEVEN: Ways to improve the text so that it just becomes irresistible to respond? You can do it with a simple few words. If you start to kind of pull on the strings of loss aversion, you can improve someone’s response. You can also, if you decide to add a link to that that has a friendly message from maybe it’s from the owner of the company explaining, maybe we didn’t do everything we could the first time around. Give us another shot. Maybe we can earn your business. And I think that if it’s a genuine, if it’s a person that looks at that video and sees that we’re being genuine and we would like to have a conversation with them, at the very least, they’re going to call back and say, maybe I’m not interested anymore, but they’re going to call back. And when they call back, with the right training, any call center agent could set. You have a person you have on the phone.
KC: And something that Stephen actually set up is he had a thing that was right in the header of the email that says, I am so sorry that we messed up and we lost your business. And people would call back and say, oh, you don’t need to apologize. You didn’t mess up. It’s just, you know, I was busy with so and so and you wouldn’t believe how much that would pull in.
VIC SUN: Oh, well, I believe it because I’ve seen it. And I think that not talking to you. Yeah, I know. I think it’s unintuitive stuff that, that what I’m getting at is, is what you’ve talked about, which I really like. You know, sometimes adding those, the verbiage that’s really very engaging to people. I know I’ve seen text messages that you guys have created where it says, you know, we goofed up on a project. And then when we propose it, owners are just like, no, that’s not the right appropriate professional language. And our contention is, well, neither is the ones that you send 10,000 times. It’s only had like two people come back and respond, right? Because that’s waste, right? I mean, I’d rather have somebody say, that’s a little odd. But then you’ve got like 170 people respond and go, no, you didn’t goof up because, you know, that’s the, that’s like regular verbiage language that people use every day. And when you say, well, we didn’t earn your business, I apologize, and you assume that you didn’t do everything that you can. That humility comes across to people as, you know what, you’re the only company that’s doing that. And again, that’s differentiation, right? So I think, you know, to wrap this up, I think part of what at least, you know, our audience and the people who are listening, you know, customization and bespoke and personalization. Casey touched on this and adding these very important, simple products. Simple is hard to achieve, but they’re simple in the sense that, you know, I think most people can add a link to an email or a text, right? It might take a little bit more of, you know, technical savvy to be able to create a short link or an attachment and just a link on a word. You know, those things you may need to, to connect with companies like us or other people in your team. And then it’s. The video piece is. I like that with Stephen. You know, video is really the thing that makes everything so engaging nowadays. People almost demand it, right? So if you, if you look at an email in a text and it’s as words, and if it’s coming from a company, you’re more likely and your people are more compelled to engage that if there’s a video to watch, right? Because people are like, I want to look at this, I want to watch this. And again, short is sweet. And kind of do the recap here. Even on videos, you don’t need five minute explainers. You know, you need 15, 30 seconds. Production value goes a long way. But, you know, if you have a company guiding you there and, and saying, look, film it this way, and this is the words you use. We’ve done that many times for our clients. Then you come up with the right effect, right? The desired effect, the emotional quotient is included in that. So I think there’s so much more we can talk about. I think this deserves maybe another episode. Maybe two other episodes. I know we’ve been asked by a lot of Lead Perfection users, hatch users as well as 59 to do this for a long time. And now I kind of think we should be doing this once a week. So I appreciate both of you guys getting on this, you know, episode. I look forward to, you know, having you guys again. That’s it for us for today. We hope you’ve enjoyed our chat and learned a couple of things. As always. You know, we here at One Leg believe like poor marketing, it pollutes the planet. And that business is full of tired, outdated, indistinct, unremarkable and underperforming marketing. That sucks. But what sucks even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing of all, the customer. We’re on a mission on behalf of our clients as customers to change that. To learn more, go to zero marketing waste.com where you can subscribe to our blog and this very podcast. You can always find us and follow us by looking at for the Flamingo Bingo and the Onele handle wherever you socialize online. See you soon. Thanks everybody.
