739,000 Leads Gone (And You Might Be Next)

When markets get tough, plumbing companies panic. Angie's List just lost 739,000 leads this year—while spending MORE money. In this episode, I break down the hard truth: cutting marketing in a downturn will destroy your business faster than anything else.

Here's what we cover:

• Why every competitor is fighting harder for the same leads

• The real places to optimize BEFORE you cut anything

• How to measure if your marketing is actually the problem (or if it's something else)

• The customer journey that separates winners from closures

• Why your pricing power depends on reputation—not discounts

The plumbers who thrive in downturns aren't cutting spend. They're optimizing their entire system:

→ Call tracking & CSR performance

→ Reviews & brand awareness campaigns

→ Customer experience from ad to estimate

→ Sales skills & closing rates

If you're feeling the pinch right now, listen to this before you make any cuts.

**Watch the full breakdown:**

https://youtu.be/q9kOKsHR6F4

Markets fluctuate. This is just a season. Know how your decisions impact your entire business.

**Free Plumbing Marketing Consult:**

www.mammothforplumbers.com/consult

Find more marketing resources for plumbing companies of all sizes at Mammoth Marketing. 
https://mammothforplumbers.com/

Find Tyler Williams on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/@tylervideos

Tyler Williams is the Owner of Mammoth Marketing an agency dedicated to helping plumbers (Clients or not!) grow their business through new customer connections.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, plumbers, let's talk about what you do when leads are down and costs are up because that is the environment that we are in. Both Angie's and Rotorooter have expressly said things aren't as easy as they used to be. We need to tell you what you need to be thinking about when this kind of environment exists. Let's go. 739,000 leads. That is how many leads Angie's did not get this year that they would have gotten last year. And here's the crazy part about this: they are not spending less and they got fewer leads. In fact, they're spending more and they got fewer leads. So that coupled along with the fact that Rotorooter said that, hey, organic is not performing as well as it used to for us. We are having to rely more and more on paid media in order to fill our quota for leads. So what does that really look like? That to me sounds like there is a dip in the market. And sadly, we're all along for the ride. Now, I will tell you and give you a little bit of hope. This isn't the first time that I have seen a market dip. I've been in marketing for 20 years. I've seen this quite a while now. So the trick is what actions you take now are going to help determine whether or not your company is going to stay solvent. Now, for a lot of you, there is a very real pull to say, you know what, one of my most expensive things in my business is other than my people is my marketing. And then you start eyeballing it. Now, I'm not alone in this. I've had the same thing happen to me, where I have gone, man, it's been low for a month or two here. Maybe I should cut my expenses. And what do I eyeball? Well, software subscriptions, things like that, all the fluff. But when the brass tax gets down to it, it goes, Well, how much am I spending on my marketing? And is there a way to spend less? Now, there might be a way to spend less, but that is assuming that your marketing is inefficient. And let's assume that you hired an awesome crew who knows how to market you, whether it's an agency or you got them internal, whatever. Let's assume that your marketing is actually performing to the best of its ability because the first thing that people think when the market goes soft is that it's the marketing's fault. Not always. A lot of times, the marketing's fine, it's doing exactly what it should, and you should know how to measure that, by the way. What they end up doing instead is they go, you know what, let's cut out some marketing expenses. What does this usually look like? This usually looks like, well, let's go and cut our spend down. We don't have as much money coming in, so we need to cut our spend. Now, here's the problem. You are looking for this person right here. And this person costs money to get. Now, in the face of a down economy or a harder economy of advertising, you are going to have to spend more for this person because all of your competitors are running into this person as well. And you're all trying to buy it. Now, if you cut your spend, what ends up happening is if you're trying to reach here on your level, well, if you cut your spend and it was a normal economy, maybe you'd dip down to here. But if the price has gone up on this person, you could dip down to here. And now you have cut yourself off quite a bit and you have a massive gap that you can't fill very easily. And that hurts worse than laying somebody off, to be honest. So here's the deal. When you get into a situation like this, you really need to be careful about cutting your marketing spend. It should not be the first thing that you look at. You should be looking at almost every other thing. One of the best places to be looking at is not your marketing first, but and this is why it's really important to track, measure, know your numbers. What you really need to be thinking about before you cut marketing is is there anything in my sales process that could get better, that could get me more money from each customer, or could get me more customers, or both. Both is great, right? So you got to remember that marketing comes in here. This is the big M, right? Woo! Right? So then the person has a journey that they go down. So then they're gonna talk to your CSR, and then hopefully they get an estimate, right? And they're like, oh, cool, all right. Well, and that estimate is really a booking, right? Diagnostic. And then they're gonna actually have the work done. This is a wrench, uh, maybe. Yep, good, good job, Tyler. And after the wrench, well, that's when you get paid. All right, this is a journey. Now, there are places that you can leak money all along the journey, which is why the journey is so great and why you need to know your numbers. So, right here with the marketing, there's also stuff in befront of the marketing. And yes, if you are finding that leads are going up, your marketing agency or your team need to be going in and going, all right, well, let's see what's going on here. Is this normal? Or has something gone wrong with the marketing campaigns? I don't want to tell you, like, hey, don't worry about the marketing, it's probably fine. No, you do need to go in and measure it. And if you're working with a good crew or you got good people on your team, they'll be able to tell you, like, you know what, we're seeing that the actual volume of interest around our market is fine, which means it is the marketing's fault. Okay. Or they're gonna tell you, listen, demand is dropping and we can see it. So based on the stats that we have, we have to find other ways to make this whole system work more efficiently. And there's only so much you're gonna be able to squeeze of this. But here's the deal. I can't tell you how many of you don't even get to the CSR, you miss the call. Great, you fix that problem, you're gonna fix a lot. Because we recently had a client who missed like 10% of their calls. And we're like, listen, man, you're not gonna make any money off of anything we do unless you can fix that. But guess what? We had the call tracking data, so we could actually tell them that that was the problem. Now, then you got another one. You got your CSR. Okay, what if your CSR doesn't actually book very well? Now, again, call tracking. If you haven't been listening to this, these people, like, if you haven't been listening to them in order to understand how well they are actually performing, then you need to go and listen before you cut anything along the line, right? It's your responsibility to know is this a finely tuned team? And if you are not sure if you don't have regular training, if you don't do regular role play, well, then they're probably not, to be perfectly frank, and you can implement those things and you can make more money in a down economy without cutting anything or anyone important. So maybe this is where you need to put your work. Okay, cool. Then you get into all right, you're gonna get to an estimate, like they're gonna get to the job site, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a little bit of loss that happens there. But then it becomes down to the estimate, and that might be a little bit of price shopping. Okay, so we've all dealt with it. Tire kickers, price shoppers, whatever. Price conscious buyers. All right. When it comes to this, what do you think influences this? Tell you what. One of the biggest influences on whether or not you get a yes on price, it's going to very simply be how much you're known, how much you're trusted. And guess where that gets built? That does not get built in here because this is such a short time. Some of it does if you're CSR, if they're really gangbusters, yeah, cool, it'll help a lot. But a lot of this gets built from the marketing that happens way over here. So if you aren't saying to the community, listen, we're a five-star plumber, if you aren't taking your reviews from Google and actually advertising them on meta and YouTube and displays and banners and uh oh freaking uh billboard signs and things like that, they're not going to know. If you aren't doing door knocking, if you're not doing the brand awareness and the boots on the ground and the work, then you're not going to be able to influence this at this point, most of the time, other than lower your prices, which is also the last thing you want to do right now because leads have gotten more expensive. So you need the money to pay for them. So you're not looking to take your pricing down, you're looking to take your reputation up way over here. So get all those reviews, amplify those reviews, be a good community player, be the kind of plumber people really want to hire. Now, so, and if you want more on that, like look at my past videos. There's a whole bunch on YouTube where I talk through some of those campaigns that helped build that. So then, okay, let's say your pricing's good. Let's say the estimate isn't the problem. I'm not getting immediate nose there. Okay, cool. Then it comes down to your technician. Does he offer a great experience? And you would hope so. Honestly, I think most of you, this is not your biggest problem. I don't think you lose a lot of oomph here. I think that for the most part, if you can get this to here, then you're probably gonna do pretty good and you'll make more money on the back end. All right, now you can see how much the customer experience and the customer journey is going to influence the price and then the money you get in the door. And if you don't have all of this stuff on the front end tuned really well from your advertising that builds your presence to your Google Business listing being easy to understand, right? To your website being a good experience, to the way that your text show up at the front door. Do they show up all disheveled? Do they show up with a dirty shirt? Do they show up smiling? Do they show up clean shaven? Do they show up well? Do they talk well? How is the entire customer experience? Of course, the phone call is part of it as well, because the better and more tuned that customer experience is, the more you can get the yes on price. And the marketing and the sales work together to make that happen. Now, remember, we're talking about a down economy, which means, or a tougher economy. I don't think it's gonna last forever, by the way. I think this is just blips, and this happens. Like markets do this. Cool, we're in a we're in a this part right now. So then what you end up needing to remember. Let's see, I had a point here. Trying to remember it. Ah, okay. I might have to cut this part out because I'm trying to remember exactly what I can't remember. Something about the beginning of this. Man, you think I'd talked about this before a lot on consults. And I do. By the way, we offer free consults at Mammoth for Plumbers. Go to Mammoth for Plumbers.com. And if you qualify, cool, you're gonna get a free consult. If you're a drywall guy, that consult will cost you a million dollars. Thank you. Sorry. Them's the brakes. So, anyway, what I want you to remember is that when you start looking at what to cut in order to make your numbers work, you also need to be looking at what we can do better to make our numbers work. For me, an agency, it's all about retention, which comes down to the customer experience as well, right? For you, it's all gonna be about closing the deal from the marketing all the way to the sales. And so keep in mind that if you need your company to operate here and you cut marketing, you're gonna get fewer leads. And again, if you get fewer leads in a down economy, you're cutting an even greater gap. Now, that is because those customers that you want so bad, they still exist. They are out there, which means there is room for you to be there. But the hard part is you've got all those other plumbers coming in, like we covered before. And so that means that the value of that person to your business has gone up. It's driven up all the online auctions, all the advertising, and now you're just fighting harder. And so before you start cutting, take a look at what you can amplify and take a look at what you can get better so that way you don't have to cut as far or you don't have to cut at all, which is honestly what we're all hoping, right? So, with that in mind, you also really do need to be considering what is more important, my business getting in front of customers, or do I actually have to make some really tough decisions about the people that I have? And that's that's rough. Like nobody wants to do that. I get it, it's an emotional roller coaster, but it is business. But when you cut your the availability to get customers, you're going so far back. It's like you can never claw out of the hole that you're digging while trying to just make somebody happy and avoid a tough conversation. This is how marketing and business dovetail together. I hope this was helpful. I know it might sound a little doom and gloomy, but it's true. And I just I've been talking to a lot of people as we do our consults, and I want to make sure that this is known because a lot of people you end up making that knee-jerk reaction and go like, oh my God, let's see what feels superfluous to my business, and there's always going to be stuff, you know, like maybe you don't need to buy donuts every Friday, stuff like that. But the other things are important and lifebloods to your business. I have made this mistake. I have made this mistake, watched our margins get real tight, and then gone, you know what? I think I didn't eat my own dog food and I need to eat it and I need to get forward. And guess what? Things improved, right? So keep in mind markets fluctuate. There's going, this is only a season. You're gonna have awesome times where you're gonna be rolling forward because you're awesome because you're listening to me, that's why, right? And you're gonna have tough times where you're gonna make tough decisions and you gotta know how your decisions impact your entire business. You have a good one, and uh, we'll see you on the next one.