this is a presentation of the natural stone Institute's natural stone University thank you for watching we would like to give a special thank you to our presenter Frank Chirino of quote countertops for presenting this topic thank you for the introduction Aaron thank you all for joining me today we have a lot to cover we're gonna cover some CRM in-home estimates the buyers journey we're gonna hit home on social media and some other fun stuff so that further ado let's jump right into it and how I like to start a lot of these webinars is I
always like to start with comparisons where we are as a business and where we want to be now I can show you this slide this is Kmart versus Walmart you guys should know them pretty well now while Walmart very early on focused on controlling costs by mastering supply chain innovative ways that included pioneering new sub product consumer behavior in sales performance tracking technology Kmart was really late to the game Kmart was late to recognize that such technology could be useful and never really bought totally into the concept and you see two companies that are very
similar that we're very large one making it and one does it so as we go through this think about where you want to be as a company and how you're being innovative on the front end of your business we have these robot technologies in the shop we have production management but we really haven't concentrated on the front end of the business the most important part is bringing sales into the business another example is the whole BlackBerry versus iPhone now with blackberry they had it all the technology in the palm of their hands right literally they
had text that email phone and they got past right and they got past quick they got complacent they weren't innovative Apple and even Google's Android they dominated the market doc Berry's decline really it's what happens when a tech giant fails to innovate in a consumer technology market that's evolving that breakneck speed so our industry is evolving not as quickly as the phones but you have to look at your business you can't run your sales and marketing you can't run your business the same way you did five years ago really not even one year ago because
the markets changing so fast my last one here is Blockbuster versus Netflix you guys all know Blockbuster I can even put lube reverses taxi here because I believe that the taxi company should have came up with her models right there in front of them Blockbuster had the Home Videos right and then Netflix came along this small company that was gonna mail DVDs to people so they didn't have to go to the store to get it they didn't get hit with late fees very convenient and when blockbuster saw Netflix like if you're a big company and
these smaller guys coming into the market or if you're a smaller guy coming into the market knowing that you can make a difference when Netflix evolved right they went from okay you can watch movies on TV then they went to every smart TV as Netflix on it now they're doing production for movies and TV shows the whole point of this is be Netflix not blockbuster don't get too comfortable on your ways and let's keep innovating and we want to make a sticky customer right you want to set that competitive advantage and create value in knowing
where your buyer is he's going to visit other companies and you want to be that one that they choose now let's dive into the buyers journey now the top stat there are 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a big purchase what did that tells me is that your website and your online presence is just as important if not more important than your showroom if you know your consumer just like all of us here you're gonna get on your phone you're gonna get on your computer when you want to buy something what do you
do you go online the industry has change the world has changed before we would have to go find our consumers with radio TV magazine you name it but now the consumers finding you and if you see they're the third one down 60% of consumers start their research online with a search engine that's Google that's being so we know where they're starting the buyer wants to remodel their kitchen they want new countertops they're gonna go online and they're going to start doing their research but they're going to start searching you don't do a lot of retail
another important stat here is 71% of the business researchers start their research with a generic search so whether you're doing wholesale or retail your big wholesaler your box store or your kitchen master contractors are seeing your website that's an appearance that's how you represent your business so let's make sure as we go through this we're going to cover a lot but just remember whether you're doing retail kitchen and back boxed or commercial they're all looking right everyone's online they're seeing you and I'm gonna show you a lot of places here this webinar that they will
see you the last point here 58% of buyers want to talk about pricing and their first sales call that'll become important a little bit later on your buyer knows right now we're looking at what stage your buyers in because the internet because they can do their research your buyers you know three quarters of the way there they've gone past awareness they're expressing symptoms of a problem or an opportunity whether it be they have old ceramic tile countertop it could be that there is a flood and now is their chance of insurance money let's just remodel
the whole kitchen whatever it may be and then they went to consideration they clearly defined okay we're going to do this and now they're seeking a solution and that's where you come into play they have their strategy now the research looking at this now on the left this is what your sales and marketing to concentrate on your front and your business is your website your social media and SEM that's how people are going to find you that's how you're going to generate sales now on the right you'll see what the consumer is looking for the
consumer has three questions they're gonna ask and your sales people your marketing company or brand architect whoever you're using you as a company need to know those three crucial crucial questions that every consumer wants to know when they're buying a countertop and that is what is it going to look like how much it's going to cost and when do I get it they want to know what it's going to be two thousand dollars what's absolute black and look like with cherry cabinets and how quick do I get it what a day is it two months
very important so there's two parts of the business on your end you're responsible for website social media SEM which is search engine marketing or SEO search engine optimization and you need to know what the consumer needs and want looking at the consumer a little deeper us as human beings we retain 80% of what we see and do 20% of what we read in ten what we hear so all that text they're seen on your website they're only retaining 20% of it people retain and they remember what they see and that's why we go back to
your marketing and your brand architects that's why they tell you your logo needs to be the same everywhere your color scheme is people are retaining that information that's why you see coca-cola on a coke truck you see them on Facebook then you see them with a big sign inside of the store then you see a month it's a stickier customer they're everywhere people retain what they see and that's why the social media end of it and the online presence is so important because you're gonna be and have an opportunity to be seen a hundred times
now when it was very hard to do that before so let's start with your website 81% of consumers remember they're gonna start on your website and when they get there you want to be able to navigate you want pictures as you know we retain eighty percent of what we see so having pictures is very very helpful having a live chat as you can see here on the bottom right hand corner if I asked everyone in this room how many people visited their website last week they probably wouldn't know the answer right off the bat at
least mostly but if I asked how many people visit your showroom you would tell me you know 10 15 20 maybe what if I told you a thousand people or two thousand people are on your website last week now it's very important to have tools on your website that are capturing customers information they're not walking in your door you know receptionist to take their name and number and how they heard about Jeff so Live Help will get their information contact us forms other lead capture tools on your website will help do exactly that when you're
looking at your website now for SEO for Google you want to make sure that your website is SEO friendly what that means is Google's searching and you want to pop up everywhere and the big thing is look on your website and make sure all your images are labeled how you're going to do that very easily is you'll right click on it you'll click save image as and the name of the image pop up right should say European countertops gray Expo kitchen countertops remodeling because someone looks for on Google for searching countertops in San Diego your
tagged in that is part of the search so you'll be organically ranked higher a lot of people you go to their website and right click on it all the images are named these weird a bunch of letters and numbers and that's not helping anyone so it's very important that we get that part taken care of on your website the next part which is very very important is is your website mobile-friendly now we're in the Internet age everybody's in the technology age everything's glued to their phones if you look from 2009 member we talked about how
the consumer is changing just look in less than 10 years that 0.7% there that's on the bottom it scales all the way up to fifty two point two percent that is the scale ability factor you see how that growth happens so that means more than half the people on your website or on their phone they're on your website from their phone so if your phone is not mobile-friendly and you've had five thousand visitors this month twenty five hundred of them weren't able to do anything and you just lost half so if you get anything from
this webinar the one thing I would say is make sure that you get on the phone after this webinar and make sure your website is mobile-friendly it is so important for your business looking at the stats here on the top some other good data to remember is 49% of b2b researchers use their mobile devices for product research again that's why it's important to have your website mobile ready big one 48% of emails are opened on a smartphone so your emails you're sending out people when you're doing email marketing which we'll cover a little later very
important that it's not a lot of tags it's easy to read they're gonna be on their phone tree Nick what I'm going to show you is how to check if your website is mobile-friendly if you're using Google Chrome if you don't have it it's free to download you're going to go to three little dots here in the right corner you're going to go to more tools and you're going to click here on developer tools from there you'll click on this little button here that has little iPad on a phone on it and you'll see here
this will pop up you'll be able to click and see what your website looks like on a galaxy on a pixel on all versions of iPhones and I so very quickly you can go on here and you can check to see how good your website is on mobile and you should check all devices easy trek takes two minutes to check make sure your marketing and your website guys are doing that for you now let's jump ahead to another important part if 58% of consumers are calling about price and we're in the Amazon world where people
want instant gratification and your websites open 24 hours a day seven days a week and they wanted a how much someone's gonna cost it I feel it's very important to have your prices somehow on your website whether it's an online coding software whether it's starting at fifteen hundred dollars or it's you know Group A starting at $39 a square foot however you want to do it putting your pricing on your website has some lots of benefits it builds trust with the consumer you're open about your pricing you're upfront you're not hiding anything they can establish
a price range of how much it's going to cost low end being a thousand high n being ten thousand a big unaffordability beliefs people have a big misconception they can't afford it especially with granite being how affordable it is now that they can't afford it efficiency with your sales staff with your whole entire team when customers have expectations met they're not coming in buying a 40 inch 48 inch vanity and wanting to know why they have to buy the whole slab so you're setting expectations on minimums and pricey branding the branding part of it is
that you're gonna let the world know your consumers know whether you're the low cost leader or you're the perceived value and that's what your branding your pricing and what you're trying to do as a company that's what pricing shows when it comes to discounting I've seen it hundreds of times people put on their website 10% off your next kitchen remodel people don't know what 10% off is off of what right or freesync or $200 off by putting your pricing they can see that 10% off a two thousand dollar kitchen it's $200 which they should get
moving for the promotion ends last couple things you're going to honor their time because they're going to be 10 o'clock at night 4:00 in the morning 11 o'clock at night they're on your website they want answers and of course the information gap is there as well now two main disputes that get about putting pricing on your website is that competition you're afraid your competition will find out how much you charge bad news your competition already knows and I'm guarantee you they know your pricing you know theirs they can very easily just set out a promo
will match or beat anyone's price and your can the customers will just show them all the bids so your competitor is gonna know but what better than let them set their price you know your margins right you know how much you you can make on it you know what you can charge you want to keep those guys that come in 20 percent under you there it's okay if they're five percent under you cuz you'll create enough value where you're a better buy for that five personal and then you got your price shoppers and if these
guys are shopping on price alone they're they're probably not your ideal client if they shop based only on price they will leave you when they find something cheaper so put your price on your website let them see the price you're in the discussion and if they're truly only shopping on price it wouldn't matter if you told them on the phone or on your website and there's big companies out there box or show their price homeadvisor is another example they're putting price ranges would it be nice if you put your pricing out there instead of consumers
just seeing it off as someone else's so that kind of wraps up the pricing on the website and the website I want to dive now into the importance of social media marketing when we look at the importance of social media marketing there's a bunch of points to be made you know it's going to improve your brand awareness because you're on so many platforms and everyone sees you your brand awareness is out there people see what your company is all about they see your employees they see whatever nonprofits you're part of whatever fundraisers you're doing or
promotions you really send up you're proving your brand awareness it's very cost effective and I'll show you an example later this webinar of how cost-effective it is to actually advertise online instead of getting a billboard on the freeway you get engaged with your consumers with your customers you can have little specials you can ask contemporary modern which kitchen do you approve all kinds of fun stuff where you can actually reach out to customers on a personal basis and that'll improve your brand loyalty and you get followers that way and stick your customer marketplace awareness or
brand Authority big one you're going to increase your traffic being on all these platforms and enhance your SEO rate it's a Graham yep all those google sees at all Google that'll help you actually organically rank higher and when we talk about social need we always talk about Facebook first and foremost why is because 72 percent of adult Internet users are on Facebook and that's our clients our adults not children so if 72 percent of adult Internet users are on Facebook and you know people are online doing their research before buying there's no reason why you
should not have a facebook business page it's free it's easy to claim it's free to create one and you look at some people seventy percent of people log in daily 43% of those log in several times a day so as they're scrolling in you pop up right you just have a good content you so easy to add video as you can see you get more engagement with images versus thousand video I think it is up there now so you can do ones on your phone people picking out slabs it's so easy to do so convenient
to actually get your facebook going I highly recommend it you've got 1.13 billion daily active users it's a must and you know 74 percent of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes so going back to pay I don't do a lot of retail but your wholesale people are going to see you on Facebook they're gonna go to your page if you don't have one they will notice that or it's not put together it's not your appearance how you look to your consumers or businesses to your customers now what's great about Facebook is they have
things that you can add like a shop now button as you see here with a big yellow arrows you can add a shop now button people can shop on your Facebook page just like your website and how to add that button you just log in as the admin you'd go here to your shop now and go edit button it gives you all kinds of options you can have customers book appointments contact us form you could put a shop now button that ghost your website very easy to use takes 30 seconds to do very easy to
have that shot Now button or use that button whatever button you want on there another big thing is pinning to the top of your post but people are all on your Facebook page if you have the little Facebook icon on your website as you should once your your facebook picture live people are gonna go on your page and you want to make sure you control that first post that they see so pick a good call-to-action post that is very engaging that can actually captures the customers information you're gonna click on the three little dots there
and you're gonna go pins at the top and what that does is every time people visit your Facebook page and you can pick the first post at the top always soap in a post rotate it through you just don't want people in it on your page and having some random content pieces that you'd rather be able to target exactly what they want to see they'll see your reviews your followers and then we'll take it one step further and we'll look at Facebook advertising and when we talked about it being so cost efficient it's not that
expensive to do this is a real ad which targeted women 34 to 50 in two locations nine interest being home improvement kitchen remodeling kitchen design countertops granite and ran it for seven days for a hundred dollars reached five thousand people so and it 172 engagement clicks so for a hundred dollars it's very very easy to actually go out there and be seen on Facebook and look at this as a billboard you think well I don't shop on Facebook it's about brand awareness they see you here and they see an image which eighty percent they retain
and they're constantly seeing you so when they're scrolling they see that sponsor to have is he that sponsor dad when they're ready to go there to remember you because they retain what they see and you got the instant gratification now people are always about instant gratification with the way technology and electronics are so you get those spur-of-the-moment hey let's do it I saw this ad let's jump on it if you can do video that would be even better the king of all right is Google Ads we can all agree that Google Ads are king because
60 connect people on Google they get the most searches by far than anyone they when you're doing Google Ads the one thing I like about Facebook versus Google is that there's an image and people retain the image you got to do both I do recommend you get a marketing company or start small I don't want you guys all to start going out and spending money on advertising and not knowing what's getting a return on investment what's not so you know start gradual or hire a company to come in and help you but when you do
the Google AdWords make sure you're still going to be up here with three other people make sure your tagline don't be generic remember we want to be innovative we want to be and most of you all of you on this webinar all 40 of you you are the Netflix not the blockbuster you are taking your time and milla day to make your business better so I applaud you for that so you're right in line with what we're talking about in looking at Google Ads you need something that difference needs you know free custom quote been
in business for years whatever it may be just remember if you're gonna do it know it's only worth doing it if you're gonna do it right so make sure make sure make sure you have a tagline over 50 slabs in stock you know save 10% on online quote design here whatever it may be you want to make sure it's here we're going to jump into now we talked about marketing there's a lot of marketing that you can do that is free so Google has something called Google my business and anybody here hasn't claimed their Google
page it's free you should do that immediately as well you'll go to google.com forward slash business if you haven't claimed your business you just go here and manage now they'll ask you for your business information they'll mail you a postcard with a verification code that said that's your address that's your business and you're ready to go if you already have a Google business you would just sign in what's nice about this is the Google my business is this profile here if I search your business and you see this pop up here on your right that's
your Google business so it's gonna have your Google reviews hours operation time photos you can actually post just like Facebook on Google when you log into your Google business you can be able to see a bunch of free data now we talk about metrics and a lot of you in your shop you're measuring how many square feet you do how many kitchen you've done or you're measuring your revenue and your payroll your overheads but we're not measuring on the front end how many people on our website how many people click on our images this shows
it for free you're looking at real performance you're seeing how many people viewed your photos you're seeing how many people looked at your post you're seeing how many views you got whether it be on maps or Google itself it shows you for free how customers reached your business what area of town they're coming from when they if they visited your website and requested directions if they called you where they saw your listings whether it's on maps or search and even shows you photo views and phone calls what we do with this data is so important
you look at your phone calls and this company at 76 in one day but the big number I look at it so they got three calls here on a Saturday or four calls on a Saturday so that means people are calling on Saturday people probably coming in on Saturday it's just more info reaching back to the business like hey maybe I should open half day on Saturday or by appointment only or something it's all statistics that you can see how your performance is doing and this is free there's no signing up and pain it's 100%
free from Google so you constantly upload photos this is gonna help you rank higher up on Google so people search countertops you want me on that first page and you don't want to pay a hefty dollar to do it so you have to do tricks like this you have to manage your Google business you have to upload photos you have to label the photos on your website and stay on course with all this now some of the other platforms we have Yelp another one claim your business for free Angie's List all of these home buy
they're free to claim your business and if you look at what the consumers are here you're looking at an average monthly mobile web unique visitors 70 million another 74 million in desktop 144 million so people are on Yelp and Yelp is got a lot of searches so they're on Google too so when someone searches your company Joe Smith counter tops your Yelp page might actually rank higher than your personal website so please claim your yell Paige upload photos put your information in here you never know who's going to be on your profile if you're trying
to get land a big job or I'm a consumer and I use Yelp for everything and I see your Yelp page and it's not claimed and there's one star and there's nothing on it it sends a bad message same thing with the YP the real yellow pages they get 60 million people visiting each month and it's free to claim your business so you've got to get out there and claim your Google business Yelp YP house upload photos make sure all information is the same make sure the description of your customer has a lot of keywords
like countertops the city that you're gonna be servicing and that sort of stuff so it's very important it's free claim claim claim your business and on all these sites Google Yelp Facebook they all have reviews reviews reviews reviews and a lot of people I talk to they all talk about I don't need a market I don't need do any marketing because everything's word-of-mouth everything's by referral referral is very powerful it's going to be number one right the difference is now your referrals are coming online so before when someone is upset they tell ten people when
they're happy that it's all three now when they're upset they tell ten thousand people so what they're doing is they're going on your profile whether your Yelp is claimed or not they can go out and put a review on your Yelp page or your Google page so there's software out there where you can actually control the reviews they have review software where you put a link and you send the review and you send the survey to your customers yourself so when they're doing a survey or score they're doing it on yours and you can choose
which ones you want to post to your online platform and which ones you want to stay in house now on the bad reviews it's not personal its business you're gonna have customers that aren't happy don't look at it is all bad right we're gonna fail often small fails and what these bad reviews do is they help you as a business what these bad reviews do is they tell you what you're doing wrong where you can't see whether it's a customer that sales person didn't call them back in 24 hours it took a week to get
a bid when they walk in the showroom no one helped them from 20 minutes you can take that back to your company and to benefit you make it right for the future so you use that as a tool to help you should always unless it's a hundred and ten percent accurate you should dispute all of them you know if it's a bad review there's no problem you always dispute it there's a good chance that we'll take it down if it's not you know keep notes you can show them what happened I try to get them
taken down the other thing is it's not about the five star so much it's about not getting these two stars and what's worked for us is when I was that European for twenty years is we would call the customer at the end of the night after install or worst case the next morning and we'd say hi mrs. Smith thank you for your countertop purchase how are things going and you be sincere to them and they tell you they've been to you so you're not you're talking about the clip is what I say you're getting that
person to not just go out there and start blasting ones all over social media one stars so what you've done is you talk them out of doing that one two three stars because those hurt they bring down your average significantly so it's very important that you call your customers after install and now keep them off the one star and what's nice is if they're happy then you can get that five star that's when you ask mrs. Smith you mind giving us a review if they say anything about the Installer or the salesperson ask them to
put that in the review we're in an age where it's hard to find good help good labor good solid people are I believe you treat your employees great and they'll treat your your customers greater so what better way instead of just bonus is a raising show value and make people feel good about themselves sharing a company-wide email that said hey Russell went above and beyond and how good that makes Russell feel so you're building culture and knacks dollars gonna try harder to get more reviews for you so these are testimonials so if you don't have
a testimonial on your website testimonial page that's what these are so a five-star review is basically a testimonial for a customer you take that you share it on your social media you share it on Facebook cuz people want to ask their friends and family they want a referral they want to know where should I go I don't know where it go that's why these review sites are exist so very important that you share these five stars not only with your company but with the world so post the most awesome neat wall always respond on reviews
whether it's a five-star one-star sincerely thank them for the five-star or apologize try to make right the one-star it says a lot about the business so let's jump into email it's really important looking at your email a lot of people do this very generic email template where it's just your signature aligning your email is your name title phone number this is prime real estate all your communication 90% of communication nowadays via email correct and on a mobile phone so it's more than ever to make sure that your email signature line is clickable it think maybe
it's a quote maybe the testimonial right here that every customer sees for every salesperson that's sending out an email proposal it says testimonial right here testimonial weak testimonial the day of the month whatever may be your logo should be clickable once you put your logo in you just highlight it and you click hyperlink and it will let you turn it into a hyperlink so you can add videos here you can add a clickable to your website a quote whatever maybe this is prime real estate that needs to be not generic this is your chance to
stand apart you're sending emails out to customers what makes you different right in line with email let's talk about email marketing a lot of people don't know email marketing as a return on investment thirty eight hundred percent I mean we all are invested the average returns they're eight dollars and as as scary as that may sound a lot of us ninety percent of the people I work with do you know do any email marketing there's tons of free companies like MailChimp or Constant Contact where you can upload all your leads Salesforce is another one these
CRM s where you can actually email your customers these are the ones that you've been trying to get ahold of every customer whether they're sold or not I should go into a buck and you market it to them maybe you didn't get that job and you have a special going on you'll email nice email with a call to action to your customers that didn't buy yet and maybe get them to push them over the edge if your email is not optimized for mobile which big 80% of users will delete it so again make sure it's
mobile friendly if you can add videos you'll crease your click rates by 300% you can buy the email list that people remodeling buying new homes you can buy lists set up campaigns and you can market very inexpensive and you get a very high return on your investment at a 38 to 1 you have to be doing it now we're gonna jump into add-ons to the sale in recurring revenue a lot of businesses in your sales and marketing they're just trying to grow the business grow grow grow you know we did 5 million this year unless
we gotta do 6 million then we got to do 7 million we got to get to 10 million in five year whatever maybe and when as they're growing at this rate their overhead it's raising their overtimes raising and what we really have to look at on top of that is growing your profit margin add-ons to the sale so if we know as you can see from the nkb a slide here sixty-seven percent of consumers that remodel their kitchen get new countertops but the one I want to look at is sinks and faucets so fifty-nine percent
and 56 percent almost in line here with countertops now a sinker faucet so if you know a customer's gonna buy a countertop from you and you know they're gonna buy a sink why would you not offer that sink you might only make $200 on that kitchen but if you sold a sink you have such a high margin you might make a hundred arms on the sink sale you just had a fifty percent increase in your net profit the very important on add-ons the sales how do we grow our average ticket instead of our average kitchen
being 3000 maybe we can get it to 3,100 3,200 and that's where the competitive advantage comes in maybe you throw the sink in for free for promotion and build it into the price whatever maybe you know consumers need a sink and a faucet you can get it on Amazon Prime and it can deliver 24 hours and mark it up and you'll make sure you got it with sinks efficiency of your template Department knowing this think they're going to use the Cavs already done for the faucet lay out the sink add-ons machines they know the size
of the sink it makes it very efficient if the customer uses your sink and there's only three room you must feel you have the double-double and then you have the 60/40 S on either end another way you can announce the sale they have products like protection plans Crandall protection plans stone care products you know the customer is going to be cleaning the countertop with something so if you know the customer is going to be cleaning their countertops you can offer a cleaner whether it be you know any cleaning product out there but that's recruiting revenue
maybe you get another twenty thirty dollars every month from that customer not just that to that lower kitchen never see him again so the add-on to the sale and the recurring revenue is a nice way to build your business be innovative grow your profit and you'll be able to reinvest that in marketing and all that good stuff I call it the accessory sale when you buy an iPhone they ask you for you know you need to get a case or it's gonna break you need to get the new Bluetooth headphones you need to get the
glass protector you need the extra long cable for our business as a countertop business the why aren't we offering these options why we should get away from these here's your kitchen countertop you need your sink do you need a faucet how are you going to maintain this countertop maybe a 15-year sealer or an upgrade with edge detail you want to push the average ticket so when you get that customer fine and they're committed what else can you add to that sale the market and then we talked about how the countertop consumer is changing and that
being true and that being said it's not just online a lot of people a lot of company you see with HVAC you see it with bathroom and full kitchen remodeling tons in home estimates and that's why I added it to this presentation is it's so important to see where the industry's going and now that brings mobile because the technologies on their phone in their computer in their hand they can go to a customer's house and sell them right there in the home what's funny about that is that the consumer thinks they got home-field advantage but
really you are at the advantage here there's some WorkSafe there somewhere comfortable and they're ready to make a decision we've done in-home estimates and when I ran my countertop company for many years as we did the for the box store so here are some tips if you're gonna do in-home estimates which I recommend that you need to know the first and foremost the most important part about a no estimates is that you make sure both decision-makers are home if you and you scheduled appointment in the whites there or just the husband's there you're already losing
because what's going to happen is you might pitch it great and have a great pitch unfortunately she is not the wife or the husband is not gonna be able to pitch it as good as you can to the significant other and you wanted to pull the trigger you want to give that decision made and part of that on top of that is get as much information prior to your appointment so when you're making that appointment asking if they looked at any colors asking what color the cabinet is ask what products they like so you come
in there knowing you'll have a sample are you looking for contemporary modern bring a green bring if they have cherry cabinets bring a cabinet sample with the granite sample a sink faucet whenever you know what their layouts going to be they might want to upgrade their edge detail or their they don't know the difference between a bulldozer edge bring the samples you bring the quartz products all the different whites whatever it may be now appearance is everything and it's unfortunate but we make our assumptions immediately 90 percent of times appearance so we need your employees
show up to the customers home they should have company shirt or button-up shirt clean shave nice looking you're coming into someone's home look presentable you're representing your business make sure those in-home estimates the people that are doing in-home estimates are available in evenings weekends and mornings remember you want both decision-makers home so make an appointment seven eight o'clock at night might be the best time for them for the consumer the last part is make sure you have the tools if you're gonna do it do it right make sure that I was at the farmers market
and they were taking payments by credit card on their phone they have little plug in swipers and you can just swipe your card and we're gonna take it home with CRM let's say the best for last and you've seen Salesforce everyone's Salesforce or HubSpot and all these CRM which stands for custom customer relationship management and looking at customer relationship management it's a way to centralize your sales and marketing efforts you are gonna be able to see all the jobs are coming through your company every job you quoted and bid you need to see your we'll
be able to see when the customers being called back how many times have been called back the communication are they it only takes one salesperson not to call customer back forget about a customer because they have so many they're working on and that customer giving you a bad review so on the CRM it's a really nice centralized place you needed to run your sales and marketing if you do retail it's not about what jobs you sold this is almost one floor I'm the one who didn't sell so this tells you how many jobs you did
not sell this way you can react you can change your ways you can say okay we're at 10% of our budget I keep seeing 10% of our budget we need to look at our pricing or we keep losing to this same competitor let's do some research on them and why we're losing jobs and you can see most people go for the low-hanging fruit you'll see on your pipeline where a salesperson calls a consumer and it's the low-hanging fruit right they left a message once and moved on through the easy ones you want them to call
minimum of five contacts email text phone whatever it may be five contacts in a perfect world you want to know whether you got the job or not and why and that's they're keeping them organized looking at your quotes your jobs lost in which object at for CRM system it's a central place most companies that I work with say most high percentage that do a lot of retail sales that have a CRM they have a person that takes the lead one or a call center that contacts the customer within two hours we're hoping in 15 minutes
after two hours your odds of closing drop by 50% so this is a good way to make sure your customers getting contacted quickly that changes the game you want to make sure you're contacting customers quickly you want to see the communication you want to see which sales person is doing the best how many days open your jobs are really what you're doing as company now that's it for CRM any questions from anyone here thank you Frank that was very in-depth one of the first questions I cam popped up into my head you went through a
lot of different web-based opportunities is there a clearing house where you can find all the online sites things like Yelp or yellow book where your company can be online that you need to check great question Aaron well there's some sites like Y P the X Y P we work with them they have something called YP presence and for a very small monthly fee they will claim your business on like 97 platforms so I recommend looking at that and a simple Google search on the main ones I can tell you House Angie's list's Yelp YP you
know obviously Facebook and Instagram Pinterest all those good ones another question I had if somebody was starting out with a lot of the online work and metrics were maybe four or five metrics that you would start with and look at as probably the most important as you're starting to measure your online the usage and online reach great questioner so when you're looking at metrics of what you want to look at your return on investment you want to look at how many clicks you're getting how many views you're getting so you'll see how many views you
got 5,000 visitors of those 5,000 visitors what's your click-through rate another metric is looking at your bounce rate and you want to see how quick people are bouncing off so people bounce rate would be 50 percent is someone goes on your website and they leave right away so they didn't see what they were looking for or they didn't like your site or wasn't mobile-friendly so the bounce rate is gonna be very important to look at your click-through rate how many visitors you got then really you want to look at your spend on each platform and
what's your return on investment so you can get a dollar amount of what your cost per click is and what percentage of revenues on average do people spend when using the Internet what I've seen in it every business is different the average is about 5% on marketing and a high volume of that should be most of that should be on internet marking so I would say 3 to 5 percent of revenue is your marketing spent on average and Nancy brought up a question about LinkedIn is that a viable sales resource absolutely I'm glad you asked
Nancy because we only have 45 minutes I didn't go too much into LinkedIn LinkedIn is great for b2b so if you're trying to get into builder work or a kitchen and bath you can go onto LinkedIn then I'll use it I'll find who the buyers the charge of purchasing for that and you can look right at the title the person and send them a message I got one of our biggest counts of our software company by reaching out so on at LinkedIn introducing myself and saying I don't know if you're the right person cute direct
me to the right person so LinkedIn is an asset for the b2b you also as an owner as a business owner you should have a LinkedIn filled out especially done for people that are looking you up as the owner of the business but I would use LinkedIn for b2b not so much on the retail end of it can you get the same type of data from LinkedIn as you come from Google so on LinkedIn especially if you're doing LinkedIn ads so you can do in male sponsored ads on LinkedIn a little more expensive than a
Google or Facebook and you can target a particular business owners or managers or VP or whatever it'll give you the metrics it'll show you how many clicks you got how much those clicks cost you how many people viewed it they'll have all those metrics most sites and I showed you guys Yelp there right now you can log into your Yelp page and you can see how many people visited your Yelp page how many people clicked on your website from Yelp both these platforms will have metrics and data there this was a presentation of the natural
stone Institute's natural stone University thank you for watching
