Stop Leads from Slipping — How to Use AI to Capture & Qualify Every Inquiry

In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, we sit down with Bryan Shankman, co-founder & CEO of LeadTruffle, an AI-powered platform built specifically for home-service contractors to capture every lead, respond instantly, and route qualified jobs into your CRM. Bryan walks through the origin story, how LeadTruffle works (website widgets, missed-call text-back, AI qualification), contractor use-cases that doubled bookings, and a practical playbook for any contractor looking to lock down lead flow and never lose another call.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:10

Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. A podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let's get started.

Meredith Medlin: 0:30

Welcome back to another episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, show where we help home improvement contractors grow smarter, faster, and more profitably. I'm Meredith Medlin.

Caitlyn Noble: 0:41

And I'm Caitlin Noble. Today we're diving into a topic that every contractor, remodeler, roofer, or specialty trade person cares about. Lead response and lead qualification. I know we care about it at our agency a lot. You know, that critical moment when a homeowner reaches out, and either you win the job or lose it. So we have a special guest with us today.

Meredith Medlin: 1:03

We do. Joining us today, someone who has built a tool specifically to solve that problem. We're excited to welcome Brian. He is the co-founder and CEO of Lead Truffle, a platform designed to help contractors respond instantly, qualify leads automatically, and book more jobs without adding more staff. So Brian, yeah, welcome to the show.

Bryan Shankman: 1:25

Thank you. Yeah, great summary there. We gotta get you on staff here at Lead Truffle. You nailed the uh the 101 there. But yeah, no, that's that's us. Thank you for having me, guys. It's uh always good to meet you know other people in the space. So happy to kind of go wherever you want, share the story of Lead Truffle. But to to your outline there, really our biggest focus is a term that I just end up saying a million times a day, which is speed to lead. You know, really just making sure that you know there's no shortage typically of home service providers in every any given market. If you're using something like a Yelp or an LSA, or even most consumers are clicking through Google Business Profiles, you're unlikely to be the only grout cleaning, carpet cleaning, roofing, you name it, window cleaning service that they're gonna contact. So a really sort of easy, low-hanging fruit way to stand out is just be the quickest one to reply. Are you gonna win every single job? No, it's still gonna come down to quality of service and pricing, but it's sort of a solved problem. This idea of a lead coming to your business, filling out a web form and not hearing from you for 72 hours. That's a fast path to uh a poor, low-quality business. So really focusing on speed delete, that's that's our number one focus here.

Caitlyn Noble: 2:30

100%. And I mean, um, but we'll probably get into this later, but that's something so important right now with AI and that even just that uh reputation that you have on the internet. Like somebody's gonna call you and then or because they want a business, but then you don't hear back from 72 hours. Like, that's just terrible. So um for listeners who haven't heard of Lee Truffle, which one first and foremost, we have kind of a crazy fun name as well. We're like we love the name. Like, I mean listening. Tell us about the backstory.

Bryan Shankman: 3:02

Oh man, well, it's funny because it's actually not like my favorite name. Like, I've I've actually done so many businesses over the you know past 10-15 years. From I mean, you name it. I've always whether it had I used to have jobs in tech and you know, normal day jobs, I always was doing a little something on the side, it's just the entrepreneurial spirit that I have, and I had so many cute, clever, perfect names, and the businesses went nowhere. And now, probably the name I like the least of all the things I've done is by far the most successful. It's sort of funny, like you can torment yourself over picking the perfect name. Um, and now the thing that the name is like eh, it's actually doing the best. So lead truffle came out of uh my co-founder and I launching this business at the start of this year, sort of a long story. We'd working on another product. We launched lead truffle, and uh we knew we were focusing on leads and speed to lead. And so the idea of like a truffle pig kind of goes and routes through the ground to find the quality truffles. We thought that you know we're kind of doing the same thing there. Um, another big reason we picked the name is that there was nothing else called lead truffle. So if you Google lead truffle or space lead space truffle, we're gonna dominate the entire front page of Google, whereas there's you know big competitors in the space like Hatch for is one company people may have heard of. If you Google Hatch, there's like a a light that I have in my daughter's room that's like a baby model.

Caitlyn Noble: 4:22

That's what we use, yeah.

Bryan Shankman: 4:24

So there's like 10 other things called Hatch, they're like the fifth, and that don't get me wrong, they're a great huge business, but they're like the fifth option on Google. So it was very pragmatic. And my co-founder, who's an engineer, was very firm on like we need to pick something that no one else is really using, and then just within a couple months, we were able to dominate the first page of Google. So there is some symbolic meaning to it, but it was also very pragmatic in in the sense that we could easily rank for that term on Google.

Meredith Medlin: 4:49

Right, right. And you know, it's a name that not a lot of other people may have when you're searching. I think your tool does a lot of things that a lot of other tools don't. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the features? Yeah, what does it do?

Bryan Shankman: 5:04

Yeah, so I think you know what we do is probably pretty applicable to any small business, whether you use software or AI to do it or not. And it really comes down to this idea that you're doing all these things for marketing, you're doing billboards, you're paying for social media ads, you're getting referrals word of mouth, and finally, finally, finally, a customer gets to your literal or metaphorical front door and they contact you through a web form or a web chat, or they call you, and then you don't respond and you don't pick up the phone. And so much work that went into finally getting that person to contact you just goes out the window. I think a lot of business owners, myself included, we get stuck in this idea of like, I need more leads, I need more leads. And like that's probably true in a lot of cases, but also there's a lot of value in just better closing the ones that you're already getting. And so for our software, yeah, it's mostly focused on you know using AI email, AI voice, and AI SMS. So those are the three core channels. And then we plug into most of the core lead sources that a home service business is going to care about, namely their websites. We have some you know, widgets and forms for the website, uh, their phone, we have AI voice that can pick up the phone. And then a big focus for us over the past, I'll say six months or so are what we call the lead aggregators. So things like Yelp, Thumbtack, Google LSA is more of an ads platform, but um basically those places where you're paying for leads. And in particular, it's really important to stand out there with speed delete. So, yeah, basically, in a nutshell, we help home services businesses put speed delete on autopilot and go from initial inquiry to book job.

Caitlyn Noble: 6:33

It's so important. Um, I mean, I mean, we just beg our clients because to your point, I mean, they're spending money with us, and we're spending their money to run ads, etc., to build their website, to manage their SEO, etc. And like if they're not going to do anything with the lead instantly, then it's a lose-lose situation. Right.

Bryan Shankman: 6:52

And and I think if you we were having this conversation for sure, like 10 years ago, but even maybe five years ago, your options for automating this, they were there, but they were sort of rigid. It's like, oh, you can set up an autoresponder on email or text. Yeah, you could have like a phone tree, and they're like okay, or I mean, the best thing to do, which I still think there's like a lot of value in this today, is like have a person responsible for these things, these you know, instant lead qualifications. Um, but thanks to this newfangled thing that you may have heard of called AI, uh, you yeah, you can do this in in a much uh deeper fashion where like the phone call actually sounds pretty good and it's interactive and it's a really kind of quick back and forth over text. You know, what do you need? Where do you need it? You know, when are you looking to get this job done? And then, you know, potentially booking that job in as well. So yeah, there's just a new, there's new conditions on the field where you can use AI to do some of this stuff, whereas in the past you would have had either kind of crappy automated options or need to pay a lot of money for an employee.

Meredith Medlin: 7:47

Right. And so, you know, you're getting these leads speedily, you're getting them quickly, but you know, how do you qualify them? How do you how do you make sure that they are the right kind of customer?

Bryan Shankman: 8:00

Yeah, and that's again what's nice about AI is you can tell, you know, of course it sort of comes down to a couple of key components. And I don't know if your listeners or you guys, how you know fluent everyone is in AI, but I'll just kind of give you the basic understandings. You have something called an LLM, which is a large language model, which is like if you go talk to ChatGPT right now on a web browser, you're interacting with OpenAI's LLM. And if you go ask any LLM, like what three questions that I ask a lead for my window washing business, it's gonna give you a pretty good reply. It'll tell you, you know, figure out how many windows they have, what where they're located to make sure they're in your service area and when they want the job done. Like the LLM already has a really nice base level of knowledge you would need. Um, but we add layers on top of that. So we have something called a system prompt where we basically tell the LLM, hey, you're gonna be interacting with new leads for a home services business. Your job is to qualify certain information that the business provides you, and then you know, determine the best next step from there. So that's the first layer is the system prompt. And then in our app, we have something called an AI knowledge base where we scrape the customers' websites, we understand who they are, their products or services, their pricing. And then the final layer on that is what's called the prompt, which is like the very specific instructions, and that's where the business can get really detailed as to okay, if uh, you know, we have a carpet cleaning company, they need to know the square footage, the material of the carpet. And so to answer your question, we have the AI knowledge base and the prompt in our system that those two together end up creating like really clear instructions for the AI as to what to ask and what to do on the uh during the conversation.

Caitlyn Noble: 9:31

That's great. I mean, and I know you know this industry obviously super protective over you know, making sure that interaction with the customer is so um positive. Positive, yeah, correct.

Bryan Shankman: 9:43

Yeah, it's very sensitive. Yeah, it's you want to do it right for sure.

Caitlyn Noble: 9:46

So, I mean, you know, you guys are pulling all that together, which is amazing. Such a time saver. Uh I'm assuming like the your clients then can go and like make sure the questions and so forth, like what you guys are getting answered, are accurate and valid.

Bryan Shankman: 9:59

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, we um yeah, it's a super, you know, it's it's a web app, like your clients probably use Jobber, House Call Pro or Service Titan, same thing. You log into Lead Truffle and yeah, all of the prompts right there, you can modify at any time, and there's a full inbox where you can see the whole history of the conversation. And over time, if the AI is, you know, asking questions you don't want it to ask or it's missing certain things, then you can add to the instructions, aka the prompt, what to do. Um, and then we do have, you know, this is a broader thing. People listening to this may be like, oh, Brian's trying to take everyone's jobs with AI. Like, I actually think the best way to use this stuff is in combination, in collaboration with the real human. So more about having a human in the loop. And so, like, just a very clear example we had recently is we have a Yelp integration, and it was like Sunday at 8:30 p.m. Someone came in and had a couple questions about gutter cleaning. The AI fired back and had a very instant conversation. It was basically like, you know, Hank, thanks for all the information. Someone from the team will reach out shortly, and then at 8 a.m. the next day, a real human came in and took over that conversation. And so it's like, yeah, really, you know, you can use the AI to like fill in the after hours, fill in the off times if you're getting super busy, but still having a human to then maybe call that lead or take over the conversation, I think is is really the best way to use it. People still want to talk to people, but you can use the AI to kind of fill in the gaps around that.

Caitlyn Noble: 11:15

That's that's amazing. Right. Um, you mentioned something just a minute ago too about CRMs. Um do you guys integrate with CRMs? It sounds like you do, or at least through Zapier or something.

Bryan Shankman: 11:28

Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, integrations are a big piece of what we do. Our company is about a year old, so pretty much everyone we talk to that's ready to use an AI speed delete tool already has a CRM. And so we've talked about should we become a CRM? Should we build like, you know, there's sort of a lot of overlap there, but no, for sure, we have direct integrations with Jabber House Call Pro. Service Titan, for anyone that knows, is very hard to integrate with. They like our sort of a walled garden. So I have this crazy like 17-step zap, but nonetheless, we get the customer and location and opportunity in there, and then yeah, other small, more niche CRMs. We have a couple moving companies on smart moving workies, and then yeah, of course, have a zapier app for all the other CRMs we don't directly integrate with.

Caitlyn Noble: 12:11

That's wonderful. Okay, good. That's so so important. Right, you're exactly right. If somebody's looking to use a tool like this, like the CRM is gonna be critical.

Bryan Shankman: 12:19

Definitely, definitely. Yeah.

Caitlyn Noble: 12:20

You told the story, which I'm like so obsessed because like Yelp, of course, is coming back. Um, you know, in that story in terms of being able to interact out after hours and then somebody picking this back up in real time, you know, during working hours. Do you have any other like success stories you want to share? I'm sure you do.

Bryan Shankman: 12:39

Yeah, I mean, we have a ton of testimonials on our website, which you know, we can put maybe in the show notes. So anyone that's interested, you can go check that out. But I think most of our successes come down to like cost per lead is a big one for the agencies we work with, right? The amount that they're spending versus the ratio of that to them paid, you know, jobs or opportunities. And like we've heard 20, 30, 40 percent decrease in in cost per lead, and then just the ability for smaller operators to do more. You know, if you're a small shop, two, three people, the overhead of hiring someone onshore, or the overhead of even hiring someone offshore, like a VA situation, that can be a ton of money, you know, for these small businesses. So really giving them the ability to do more with less, I think has been a huge win for us.

Caitlyn Noble: 13:20

That's amazing. We hear the cost per lead all the time, which I get. I totally get.

Bryan Shankman: 13:26

And yeah, we really try and frame it up for folks as like, you know, hey, you're gonna be paying us a couple hundred bucks a month. And if this is working correctly, then you'll be making a couple hundred more, if not a couple thousand more in some cases, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on the leads we're driving you. So, you know, we kind of earn our supper in that sense. For most people, the ROI is there, otherwise, they you know, every every month we're on the cutting line, like, all right, are these guys and their software driving more revenue than we're paying them? And for the most part, the answer is yes.

Caitlyn Noble: 13:56

No, that's that's great. Um, so I mean, for the small, you know, guys who are listening or maybe who are just starting to scale, um, and they have a smaller volume of leads, you know, is this something they should go ahead and start thinking about? You know, or is it is it one size fits all, basically?

Bryan Shankman: 14:16

Is this yeah, I you know, I think there's certainly like, you know, I think where we don't work is like the person who's getting a couple leads a week.

Caitlyn Noble: 14:25

Sure.

Bryan Shankman: 14:26

Like if you're if you're listening and you're a new business and you get a couple leads per week, like you I in my opinion, you should just be personally texting, calling, and emailing that person.

Meredith Medlin: 14:35

Of course.

Bryan Shankman: 14:36

Like you're gonna learn so much about your market, about what people buy, why they don't like there's I am an entrepreneur myself and I still talk to every new customer that comes in the door. And like, but of course, we use AI and places to fill that process out. But like I would say, yeah, if you're a new small business, I I think there's so much you can do with your own time and manpower. Uh, really, where we work best is when you know companies are like small but mighty, you know, five, 10 employees, a couple hundred leads are coming in per per week or month. Um, that's where we start to see a lot more of the value compared to, yeah, if you're you know just starting out or a handful of leads, I always recommend just like hey, tackle that yourself, you're gonna learn so much.

Meredith Medlin: 15:16

Right. And you know, no matter what size company it is that is using lead truffle, they come in. What kind of KPIs? Like, what are they looking for when they're using League Truffle and kind of what can they expect?

Bryan Shankman: 15:30

Yeah, the main thing for us is you know, invoices paid. Like at the end of the day, right? Like we want to see how many leads that came through LeadTruffle resulted in dollars in your bank account. That's really the ultimate, you know, promise and offer. Everything else is sort of a leading indicator against that. Um, but in terms of like the things leading up to that moment, it's yeah, response time, number of leads coming in, number of leads booked to jobs, um, the hot the value of those jobs, kind of the whole funnel through initial touch to paid invoice. Um, and yeah, again, the goal is that you're paying us a couple hundred dollars a month, depending what plan you're on, and you're seeing that we're getting, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in paid invoices over time, and ideally at a fraction of the cost in to compare uh to you picking up the phone or an employer or whoever.

Caitlyn Noble: 16:17

100%. Um, okay, so I'm sure you know people are listening, like, this is great. What does the onboarding process look like timeline-wise? Yeah.

Bryan Shankman: 16:24

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's been something that we've sort of played with over time. Um in the beginning, it was more self-service as we call it in the SaaS world, where it's kind of like, here's a bunch of help articles, and you kind of do this yourself. But what we realize is like most people, and in particular, most home service business owners, you know, they are busy and they don't necessarily want to spend a bunch of time twiddling and turning knobs and dials into SaaS product. So we have a much more high-touch hands-on onboarding process at this point in time. We do an onboarding call. I and my team then personally go in and do a lot of the setup. We connect the zaps. So I'd say for the most part, like the initial setup, just getting like the account setups, like the day that you sign up, but then making sure your CRM is connected, all the lead sources are connected. Yeah, the prompts are working the way you are the way you want. Like, I'd say anywhere from like seven to ten days, like until everything's like done, done, and we have this checklist that we share and go back and forth on. So um initial setup's pretty easy, but you know, we we've sort of made the decision to work with uh companies who are like invested in doing the setup together and helping them with it, and then ultimately them being in a good spot. Um, so yeah, it's a it's a pretty hands-on onboarding process at this point.

Caitlyn Noble: 17:37

It sounds like us too. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, um, that's fantastic. Okay, quick rapid fire lightning round before we let to go. Stretch it out, get it out. Meredith, you want to do the first one?

Meredith Medlin: 17:50

Yeah, so what is one quick change that a contractor can make right now this week to speed up their response process if they're not using an AI tool?

Bryan Shankman: 18:00

Oh I mean, the most obvious thing is just be a responsive individual. You know what I mean?

Meredith Medlin: 18:08

Like your phone.

Bryan Shankman: 18:10

And it's kind of hard to like change that in a person. You know, it's like like I pride myself on my responsiveness. Um just become a responsive person. Yeah, I don't know.

Meredith Medlin: 18:21

Uh I guess it's hard if you're on just go in there, come on.

Bryan Shankman: 18:25

Yeah, yeah. Just be responsive, just pick up the phone, respond to that text. I get it's hard if your hands are tied and you're literally like doing repairs on an HVAC system, you can't really pick up the phone. Um so yeah, just just personally be responsive. And then if that's not possible, there are some like very low-hanging fruit automations you can turn on with you know auto-reply on email and just like some basic things. So um that's always a good good thing to look at as well.

Caitlyn Noble: 18:50

Yep. That's actually that's a great, yeah. We have um clients like who will get like automatic form, you know, responses that are just like, hey, received, right?

Meredith Medlin: 18:59

We'll be in touch. Or if it's an email form, set up a zap so that it sends you a text message on your phone so you can quickly get up there kind of deal. Exactly fancy.

Caitlyn Noble: 19:12

Not lead truffle, but you know, yeah. If you had to sum up lead truffle in one sentence, what would you say?

Bryan Shankman: 19:20

Never let another lead go cold.

Caitlyn Noble: 19:23

Ooh, that was good. That was good. I want some truffles. Um this is the most important one of all. Yes.

Meredith Medlin: 19:33

So where can all of our listeners who want to learn more, who wanna book a demo call with you, or just go ahead and pull the trigger on Lead Truffle. Where should they go?

Bryan Shankman: 19:43

Oh, yeah, just go to our website, leadtruffle.com. Um, everything you need will be there. And if you ever want to read there's a you can sign up, you can book a demo, you can interact with LeadTruffle on the Lead Truffle website. So the website's definitely the home base, but if anyone wants to contact Tag me directly. It's Brian, B R Y A N at Leachruffle.com.

Caitlyn Noble: 20:04

Perfect. I know we've both interacted as well. It's it's I mean it's a very slick tool.

Meredith Medlin: 20:10

Yeah. Very intuitive. Um, I can imagine all the different use cases for it. I even listened to, I know you guys have a beta product. Um, do you want to talk about the AI voice real quick? Okay.

Bryan Shankman: 20:20

Yeah, it's fine. I gotta update that video because uh that it's uh I just watched that video today because one of my uh one of my friends is watching it. Uh that that product's been kind of available now for like four or five months. So um yeah, no, AI voice answering is fully available, tons of customers using it. And yeah, basically, AI can pick up your phones. My recommendation is to use it for missed calls and after hours, meaning you know, you should try and pick up your phone if you can. If not, you can then send it to us, and it's fully customizable. It sounds pretty dang good. It's like a very, very advanced yeah, it's like a very, very advanced voicemail. It can have an interaction with the person, tease out some information, send a text follow-up after. So yeah, AI voice is is been live. Um and uh yeah, it's it's great. It's a great solution for you know, if you're strapped, you don't have a call center, it's a great way to fill in the gaps.

Caitlyn Noble: 21:09

That's awesome. Um this has been so insightful. We love sharing tools with our audience. Um that is just to your point gonna help lower cost per lead in general and just enhance experience. You know, whether you're using our services or not as an agency, this is a service that's going to make your business better. Absolutely. Um, so yeah, stop missing leads and calls. You know, you're gonna lose jobs because of slow response time. So lead truffle is a really great solution, and you should definitely check it out. One more time, your website, and we'll have everything in the show notes.

Bryan Shankman: 21:43

Yeah, yeah, no, it's leadtruffle.com, and you can email me Brian B R Y A N at LeadTruffle.com.

Meredith Medlin: 21:49

Amazing. Beautiful. Well, thank you, Brian. Loved having you on the podcast, and thank you, listeners, for tuning in for another episode of digital marketing for contractors. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, share the episode with a contractor who needs it, and also go check out Lead Truffle.

Speaker: 22:08

So thanks for having me.

Caitlyn Noble: 22:10

Thanks, Brian. We appreciate it.

Speaker: 22:13

Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit Fatcat Strategies.com