Vic Sun: Hello, welcome to One Leg Up, where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience and, of course, how you can achieve zero marketing waste. I’m Vic Sun, the mastermind here at One Leg. Today, again, I have two of our special guests joining me: Steven White and KC Urias. Both are tech alchemists on our technology team. KC and Steven, how are you guys doing?
KC: Great, thanks for asking, Vic. Today is just… you know what’s crazy? I’m sitting here, and it’s just getting… even though it’s getting colder, the angle of the sun is warming up my little home office to the point where I have to run the AC in the winter. It’s really terrible.
Steven: I’m also doing good, and it’s just straight-up cold over here.
Vic Sun: I know what you mean. It’s like some animals that I observe… um, the whole day they just stay outside. Like, one of my dogs, you know, because they’re outside, right? But one of them, they just soak up the sun. It’s the whole day he’s sunbathing, and I’m like, what are you doing? And then I realized, maybe he’s sucking up all that energy, you know, because in the nighttime he’s trying to defend my, you know, my home, and he’s outside. He doesn’t have any jackets or anything. He has to recharge.
Steven: You have to. He’s using that solar battery collar you got him.
Vic Sun: Yeah, he’s out there, and he’s like, you know, he’s roaming. He’s a security guard, you know what I mean? But he has no clothes, so I’m thinking he’s probably doing that. But anyway, I’m glad that you both are doing well. Um, so, you know, a couple of things. You know, we do love to get into the weeds of all things technology. And, uh, you know, what we want to do right now as well as part of our new video series on lead perfection and all kinds of things that attach to lead perfection. And that’s because a number of our home improvement clients usually perfection, and we do think that lead perfection has an advantage, uh, over, you know, CRMs like MarketSharp and Improved 360. Although we have clients who use those as well. Um, and today we want to discuss some of, again, some of these features that, you know, we find, you know, often in industry at large, you know, our clients, uh, or people overlook them, and therefore they’re missing some of the system inefficiencies that will help their technology perform better. So let’s first chat about, you know, um, let’s go to, let’s go to to KC here. And KC, you know, if you want to chat about, you know, one of those things that I think is everybody uses them, uh, everybody needs them, but for some reason, a lot of people are overlooking on the ways to actually make it so that when you’re using this feature, in this case, reporting, right, there reports or the dashboard, you’re using it, you know, in in in its most maximum level. So you want to talk about that a little bit?
KC: Yeah, well, you already spoiled the surprise. I didn’t get to say that what I was talking about. Now, where… So yeah, I want to talk about reporting. Um, I’m finding out more and more that people are not utilizing the reporting because there’s so many options available in the reporting section of lead perfection that they get overwhelmed and they don’t know what to focus on. And so I wanted to first talk about the top five reports that you need to have in your life and how to best utilize these reports. So you can find these both under the marketing and sales area. One of them is called the marketing subsource report, so you can determine how well your campaigns are working for you. The next one is the sales report by sales reps, so you can determine, uh, your sales team’s goals, if they’re being met, and also what their stats are, essentially, like how many leads are they running, how many sales have they got, how many sales have they lost. There’s also the sales efficiency by source on that same vein, um, used to calculate closing rate and also used to calculate the efficiency of your efforts in that particular source where you’re participating. The next one is lead disposition detail. Basically, um, you’re using the dispositions, supposedly you’re using the dispositions as a way of marking your marketing campaigns, and this one will give you an idea of how well those campaigns worked out for you in a lot more detail. And the last one, very, very simple, just the sales log. And the sales log will just tell you, point in fact, how many sales did you get, and how many sales did you lose, how many were you able to retain, and where did they come from.
Vic Sun: Perfect. Okay, so let’s touch that a little bit. And if there are people on our audience that are using these particular reports, you know, what are some of the things that that you have finally, you have found, um, they they could do, since they’re not doing it, that makes the reports and the customization of these reports or the usage of these reports, um, so much more effective for their organization?
KC: Uh, one of the really, really easy things that they can adjust literally today, um, that they just don’t know about is there’s a button that you can click on to schedule these reports to be pushed out to your email or to other people’s selected emails and have people succeed on them every single day. So every morning, instead of going into lead perfection and manually running these reports and then sending them out to people, anybody can go in there and have that report automatically show up in your inbox. So at a quick look, you get all that information that you need. The second part I wanted to go over just very, very lightly, and, uh, Vic is the expert at this part of it, um, is the report customization. You have a lot of stuff that’s out of the box when it comes to reports, but there are customizations that you can do to add or decrease how many items are being showed per report and customize it specifically for your business, what you want to see.
Vic Sun: Okay, well, thank you for that, KC. I think I think it’s simply because I I’m surrounded by people who are as inquisitive as you and Steven and, of course, our clients. And and the most often the questions that are usually asked is, well, how do I get better, right? And how do I get better? How do I improve? And a lot of that really is, in in my point of view, it it’s you, reports can tell you a story, but if if you do not customize the reports, it it’s a pretty boring story. Maybe it’s a story that doesn’t have, you know, something that’s exciting. Maybe it’s too short of a story. If you really want it to be a really nice story that has all the bells and whistles that kind of get me engaged and tell you where you’re going, you’re kind of looking forward to it, then it has to write the right information. And so the one tip that I would give to our lead perfection users, CRM users, whether it’s, you know, it’s it’s lead perfection, something else, although, you know, I have quite an affinity for early perfection because of the way it’s set up, is having goals versus actuals. And in in in for years and years and years, you know, that’s that’s kind of the one thing that I I almost look for right away because it’s almost non-existent in many of the companies. You know, they they have these goals in mind, but they don’t seem to put it in their reports. They go and say, well, let me pull this report of what happened for this month. And then you go and ask, what was your goal? How close were you to it? And I think you can bypass that by simply adding it there. So on on on sales logs or on sales efficiency reports only perfection, you know, simply programming it so that you could have on one column what the goal was, and then maybe having a percentage column tells you how close you are and how far you are from your goal or what that percentage is, especially if you’re running these day-to-day, weekly, or monthly, you know what I mean? And you can kind of see that. So that’s always, you know, something that I look forward to, having a goal and having the actuals, which is what the report comes out of the box. It tells you actually, you know, the actual, the current numbers, but having goal right next to it kind of tells you how far, uh, or how close, or maybe you’ve exceeded that. And I think that’s always an important part of the process of determining, you know, whether or not you can achieve some of these goals. And then the other part of that is once you start having those, having those reports, right, kind of aggregated over a period of time, so that you have a report that tells you how many months or how many weeks you’ve met the goal, exceeded the goal, or not, or not met it. And that tells you your trends and your patterns. That’s just as important because if you look at, you know, these reports over a period of time, and let’s say you’re saying, well, my goal each month is to to do, you know, two million, two and a half million, three million, and then four million, and you go in perpetuity increasing it by half a million, I would be interested into in terms of, you know, asking, well, how many of the 12 months in the year did you actually meet those goals? If you met those goals once, then I would say, well, you’re probably dreaming, right? Probably it’s probably something wrong with your plan because you only hit it once, one out of 12, right? So that’s really important as well, I think. Um, and the other concept I think is comparison, a relational, uh, reporting, you know, from from your data. A lot of the times people use these reports on lead perfection where it tells them where they are, um, but not in relation to something. So, for example, if you’re looking at your leads, right, your lease dispositions or your marketing subsource reporting, and you don’t have trend lines or patterns in terms of the reports where you go and say, look, I I want to be able to tell in the last six weeks whether my raw counts of leads went up or down, what that percentage would be versus where I’m trending in the next three, four weeks, I think you’re really missing out. And and this is when you start getting surprised. You know, suddenly your lead, your lead counts drop, and then you’re just like, what happened? But really, if you look at the reports, like you’ve been trending on a downward, you’ve been on a downward trend for the last eight weeks, you should have figured this out by now, but then you get you’re caught unaware. So I think the comparison reports, you know, uh, goals versus actuals, trending, you know, these trend patterns, and and comparative reports, these all need to be programmed properly, you know, from within your reporting system to really max up, you know, your ability to do the reports. Um, and now I do want to go and take it to Steven. Steven, I know you’re itching. What is, you know, that one thing with lead perfection, a feature, um, you know, a a particular, you know, uh, thing in only perfection that you feel you’d want to share with the team or with the audience today? Yeah, that they should be using?
Steven: Well, still still in line with, uh, with reporting, you want to make sure reports are accurate. And what I’ve noticed that, and this is something that’s kind of on the on the ground level, uh, something that an owner sometimes overlooks, especially if you’re looking at leads and you’re looking at these reports and you’re missing, oh, wow, this this campaign seems to be doing really well, we’ve got a ton of leads from this campaign. And what you may not realize is that there’s a simple user error involved with leads versus contact records. And and this, uh, this error I’ve seen happen time and time again is the is duplicates. And and duplicates can mean a couple different things. Uh, one of the ways that this can materialize is by duplicating a lead record, which is on top of the contact record. You see underneath, there’s a few options, lead one, lead two, lead three. One came in three years ago, they never did the project, they looked out again, but this time they came in because they want to do a kitchen or they want to do windows or they want to do some door. And and the the source changes every time. What I’ve seen happen, and this this is challenging if, um, if somebody is a new user and maybe they don’t understand that the issue with what the the task that they’re actu, it’s usually an accident, uh, they’ll go in and they’ll click this little plus button here and say, I want to add another lead because this new lead came into the inbound queue, I just gave them a call, and it shows me this new source, or maybe it’s the same source. And the difficulty there is if they’re clicking that button and they’re saying, I want to make a new lead, your report’s going to show that two leads came in for that month from that same source, or maybe the same lead came in from two different places, and it’s artificially docking your lead count and saying, wow, this the conversion of this campaign is not as good as you thought because we had 20 leads come in. Come to find out, we had a situation, we saw five of the same exact person, and that’s going to definitely ruin your numbers. If you say, well, five new leads came in, I only converted one of them, when in fact, all five were the one person, it’s going to show, well, that was actually 100% conversion, but you thought that it was only 20% conversion. And you could you could fudge the numbers any way you want, but the problem is if you have inaccurate reporting where people are committing and and creating new lead forms where there shouldn’t be, or they don’t know the difference between, and I’ll show this here, uh, a contact record versus a lead, because it matters. We’re keeping one contact record per person. Anything you want to add there, Vic?
Vic Sun: No, I agree with you. You know, you can have the most sophisticated reporting systems in and in intentions, but if your data is not clean, or if the, you know, the the data that you’re using has as inaccurate information, you know, and then you’re you’re counting the inaccuracies, uh, they’re inaccurate information, then then you’re not going to get the best, uh, results in terms of, you know, what it is that you’re trying to do in terms of understanding your, you know, what you’re doing, the results, the performance. Um, I think if I were to add something there, it’s really, you know, that really resonates, I think, with me when it regards to the people because, you know, people make the mistakes in doing those things. Um, and so what I’ll add there is maybe further reporting, and we talk about analytics. Um, I’d like to see a lot more companies, and we’ve done this in the past, you know, where we were one of the first companies that have act that actually did the lead scoring, right, where you took a look at, you know, resources and actual contact records, you know, from where they came from, you know, you you you kind of upload demo, you know, uh, demographic information, census information, right, places for that way you start scoring them based on that. And then the other, the flip side is your staff, right, especially in the call center, who, I mean, I think you were talking mostly about a call center who processes, you know, these the the leads, right? They process these leads and they go ahead and enter this information, and sometimes they create duplicates. I think that that should be part of their reporting, you know, is is what do they convert on, how long they, how long they stay on the phone, how many times they they leave a message, or how how long they they they convert with a client, what type, what source, you know, there’s all kinds of ways to kind of figure out, you know, um, through regression analysis or, you know, just figuring out what those variables are that affect their performance. And I think that really at the end of the day, when you focus on people and you focus your reporting on there, you begin to understand who your staff are, you begin to understand what they’re good at, and then you start enhancing it as opposed to simply looking at the numbers and saying, well, we’ve got x amount of leads and this is what’s converted. I think people, the people element should be reported on or analyzed, um, and I just don’t see a lot of that, you know, nowadays. And so maybe I’ll throw it to you guys, what do you think is happening when call center managers, uh, and business owners, you know, start creating these reports or start using these reports, you know, what’s causing them not to focus on on the elements or the important things that we feel are the ones they should be caring about, or at least the things that actually make a difference?
KC: I think part of it can be a fear of the truth, honestly, uh, because something that comes along with really, really detailed reporting is also you can determine, um, you know, how your staff operates at a completely different level. You’re seeing them from the outside, you know them from the outside, but now you can track what they’re doing on the inside as well because anytime anybody creates something new in like a lead perfection system, all of that is going to be documented. So if April created, um, a duplicate, just like how Steven was talking about, if April created a duplicate, that’s going to show on there. And so I that that whole reporting process and getting organized does come with a certain level of, okay, we need to step back a little bit and make sure that everybody is trained on how to properly analyze these reports because from the other side of it, the reports can use to check people or to check where information is frequently not entered into the system. And we had somebody just recently who was saying, I can’t, uh, use my reports because my reports aren’t accurate. And I was like, actually, that’s how you should be using your reports. You should be using your reports to find where the mistake is happening. If that number’s not accurate, then that’s where you need to go in the back of your system and change it to make it accurate.
Vic Sun: That’s a good point. And Steven, did you have anything to add to that?
Steven: I think that’s, yeah, I was going to agree, that is a really great point. I was trying to, I’m trying to figure out what what would cause a an owner to, what would cause somebody who’s who’s going to rely on these reports to make really important decisions. And if if they’re afraid to look at their report because maybe they have, I mean, over the years you developed a relationship with some of your workers, this person’s been with us a really long time, and they look at the reports and you find out that they’re not as great as you thought, it’s sometimes it’s a harsh truth. And I’ve seen that happen before, you know, when we were working in, uh, call centers ourselves, I had instances where looking at a report really opened my eyes to some of the issues. But I mean, it’s important as well because this this is going to help you to create those, um, that feedback for that for that user or that caller so that they can improve themselves. If you find out that they’re having an issue, let’s say during a phone call, they’re always hanging up at the very start, and the reports showing, wow, this person is not doing so good, you know, right at the start, maybe you want to work on it, and you want to try to improve the way that they’re talking at the beginning, or or you want to try to improve it so that, um, you know, they can, and this is maybe going into maybe like more of a five nine type thing, but I think that there’s a lot of benefit to understanding where where is the process falling apart. And that way you can try to improve on that on the weakest link of the process so that you can get to the next hurdle. And as you kind of report and you get more information, you improve and you move forward, you’re just going to find the next hurdle to jump over. And I think it’s just going to lead to, well, a more successful process.
Vic Sun: I agree. And and I think I’ve spoken this is another podcast and something else, another another webinar that I was invited in about, you know, using the money ball approach, right? And really that starts off with looking at statistics, data, and analytics. And and a lot of people are don’t really know in this industry how to to look at numbers. I I worked for somebody many years ago, and and the first thing he told me is he’s like, you know, for the call center, this is what we need to do, we need to hold them accountable to 25 an hour, and this is the conversion they they have. And right off the bat, I’m like, you’ve never managed to call center, have you? You don’t have a clue why, you know, what makes a successful phone call because you’re holding people accountable to this crazy number that you have no evidence that that’s the number to make itself efficient. And so when I look deeper, everybody in the call center was hitting or exceeding the 25 an hour, but when you when you listened in, they were just like dialing and hanging up, and they were just trying to get their dials up, you know what I mean? Because they know the supervisor or the manager was looking for that, which is really stupid. Um, and and of course, you you train behavior based on expectations, right? So, you know, he was basically training his team to to to to perform bad behavior, right? And I think really this and for lead perfection, you’ve got reports in here like the cherry picker analysis, you’ve got reports where, you know, uh, call statistics by setter or by by agent, and you can you can customize that to death where you can do it or call for source per cue per person. And and that’s really what I think, you know, I’d like to see in this industry is is it more focused, uh, focus driven on the customer experience both internally and externally. Like if you start looking at your cues and you put people on them, and you know, even if you don’t have a five nine platform or a dialer, you know, you can pick some of this information up from the perfection itself because lead perfection actually has a timer from how long you you you you enter a lead or when you start looking at it. I don’t know if you know people know that, but you know, um, I’ve used it for over a decade, so I know some of these small little things that people don’t. But there is, there’s a counter, there’s it counts a time, you know, from whence you you you you you started to handle, you know, that lead, and it tells you, right, if a cherry picker analysis will tell you how fast an agent is going from lead to lead or maybe moving on from call to call. Um, and that just really tells you about the behavior. And and I think you followed the breadcrumbs to to how to make the improvement, right? I mean, obviously, I wouldn’t use this to penalize people right away. I I I’d probably look at their behavior and then come up with ways to go and say, well, look, based on this, I think maybe what we need to do is put this particular person on a different key, on a different types of calls, you know, um, and you know, you know how managers are in call centers and in marketing groups, they tend to pigeonhole people based on what they think this person should be good at versus, well, this person is good at this, enhance that, right? And then they force the issue, they go and treat everybody the same way. Well, you’re you’re an outbound caller, so you should only do outbound calls. And then you put that person on inbound one day, and they’re like doing it or killing it, and you’re like, well, no, cause you’re an outbound caller, you know, again, stupid stuff like that really irritates me. But it’s it’s one of those joys as well where you go and look, if if you know how to do it, reports can be, I would say it excites me when I look at report statistics and analytics because I think before you start adding things on to your program or coming up with really, really, you know, crazy things, you should understand your system, you should understand your people, right? And and really those are the moneyball side of things where you look at the elements that affect the behavior that affect, you know, the the outcome, uh, and those things could be talk times, right? Uh, how fast somebody moves from lead to lead, uh, how fast you’re able to go and and, um, um, convert on a particular lead into an appointment, you know, how long it takes for someone to be able to confirm an appointment, you know, um, if it’s if you’re if you’re looking at it from the sales end of things, you know, looking at when the disposition is rendered so that now you can go and say, well, look, um, we’re always asking people for 60 to 90 minutes, and it looks like the average amount of time they spend in the home is about three hours. Now, I’m sure you don’t want to tell people you’re going to be staying there for three hours, but maybe that’ll help in terms of scheduling your appointments, you know what I mean? And instead of scheduling the appointments two hours in between, now you go, well, maybe we should give them four hours because it takes them three and then another hour to detox and drive to their next appointment. But I think again, the reporting systems, um, on lead perfection, um, is so robust, but I think what’s missing is, you know, the creativity and, of course, the know-how of a a lot of people in being able to harness the potential of a reporting system that can perform, you know, some form of analytics for you, some sort of automation. Uh, in this case, he had mentioned, you know, pushing those to you. Uh, the last thing I’m going to, I’m going to say about this as well is when the science of timing, right? Um, a lot of companies kind of like sending, you know, uh, these reports, you just, you know, get one daily report, a weekly report, and a monthly. I think you should time them. You should figure out what part of the day you’re most likely to to look at them, review them, and then do something to actually, you know, um, improve upon your system as opposed to just, you know, saying, well, I’m going to just send this at 9:00 AM, I’m going to send it to three, and I’m going to send this at 8:00 PM at night. I think that’s just a very narrow view of, and again, this is the reason why you have systems like the perfection because you can customize when these reports will actually populate per user, per person, per report. Um, but again, we often see people just go, yeah, just send it for whatever time as long as we get it. But, you know, they don’t, and then you get 10 reports in a day, and you never even watch any of them, right? Steven [Laughter] what’s the point? It’s just wasting time, it’s wasting energy, it’s just more waste as you say you hate, right?
KC: Oh, and the last, the last thing I wanted to bring up about reporting is, um, the great thing about being able to separate using that internal reporting through, uh, reporting export area, um, to get all the whole detail picture using the report generator on lead perfection is such a great way to give your team updates rather than saying, oh, did I hit my marks? Did I get to this place? Oh, well, I think I had 30 demos, so I thought I was doing pretty good. That is such an easy tool to print out and give your sales team especially and say, look, here are your numbers, it’s got your name on the top, these are your stats. And so they can set their own goals too.
Vic Sun: Yeah, and I know with lead perfection, you can also customize the dashboard per user, um, and it really gives you a lot of freedom. And that came out in the new version, I think, two years ago, and you’re still continuing to develop that. And and I and I really think that’s one of the things that are often overlooked, the dashboard. You know, I’d like to see companies, you know, instead of kind of waiting until the end of the month to celebrate their sales, you know, celebrate it daily when you hit a particular goal. Again, the caveat is you have a goal versus actual, um, you know, fields, columns, rows, you know, the data that’s being reported on so you know how close you are from those things. And and I think I’ve learned this from from authors like James Clear, for example, is making it super simple and super digestible is that if you’re going to put together like, you know, monthly goals, um, you’re going to have to wait until the end of the month, and that may not be as motivating as if you did daily ones where you go and say, well, look, what we really want from from salespeople, if they’re going and running two appointments a day, is to have two demos, and don’t focus too much on the sale because then they they focus more on actually providing really great presentations and and demos to clients as opposed to like, well, at the end of the month, I gotta get x amount of sales. And now it’s like they’re having to wait the whole month, whereas if you look at the smallest number, it’s just this daily number, get your two issued appointments and get two demos today, you know, and then you celebrate that. You know, the perfection has the chat feature, and it’s almost like a text feature, the notification, and anyone can go and say, hey, you just hit your two demos, yay, and everybody’s chiming in. I think that’s a really good motivational way, um, that that, you know, you can use the reporting to tell you when to start behaving, you know, in terms of motivating your staff, inspiring them, or talking about it as opposed to just making it like a passive thing because we we all know that reports aren’t sexy, they’re not, you know, a lot of the times they’re just like, it’s a report, it’s a piece of document, um, but it’s really what you do with it. I think that’s that’s going to matter. Um, so, you know, like both of you guys said, that’s that’s a lot with regards to reports, analytics, and dashboards. It’s not really the sexiest, you know, feature of lead perfection. I certainly think that the numbers can be very, very interesting, but it’s how you utilize it. Uh, and so for those of you in the audience or the people who are listening or watching in our podcast, you know, don’t dismay, you’re not the only people who, you know, kind of overlook these things in in with lead perfection, um, in their reporting systems. But that’s it for today. You know, we hope you’ve enjoyed our chat and learned a couple of things. You know, as always, you know, we’re here at One Leg, we believe in, you know, poor marketing pollutes the planet and that business is, you know, full of tired, outdated, and indistinct, unremarkable, and underperforming marketing. You know, that sucks. But what sucks even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing of all, the customer, both internally and outside. And so we’re in a mission on behalf of our clients as customers to change that. To learn more, go to zeromarketingwaste.com where you can subscribe to our blog and this very podcast. You can find us and follow us everywhere by looking for Mingo the Flamingo, our our mascot, and the One Leg, O N E L E G handle, wherever you socialize online. We look forward to seeing you next week. Take care. See you soon.
