The Wrong Pathway With Your Electrical Customers | 147

Ever quoted an electrical job and never heard back?

Most electricians are getting wrong without even knowing it, and it's costing you jobs you'll never see on a report. It's not your pricing. It's not your follow up. It's something quieter than that, and once you spot it, you can't unsee it. 

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Transcript

Would you like that by phone, text, or email, sir? Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

I want to rewind you back to two years ago when Tesla was in its prime. Tesla was the go-to brand. Everybody was getting Tesla vehicles, everybody was getting Tesla chargers, and it was a great time. I was getting maybe on average about three leads a day. Now we fast forward two years later and we're still getting a trickle of Tesla leads, but it's nothing like it used to be. BYD has come on the scene as probably the biggest competitor, but you've got so many other brands out there like Zeekr, which I only heard about the other day when I was doing a charger for them. Geely. There's so many of them out there.

But what I want to speak about on today's podcast is the methods of communication that you receive and that you continue with. So when I was doing the EV chargers, the leads that came in for them, it was streamlined and it was extremely systemised, and it meant I could quote the jobs in, I'm not joking, under five minutes. The main contact was done online. When I was quoting those jobs, it was done online. And to be honest, mostly it was, yes, they had to get their quotation, but the follow-up sequence and stuff was done via email.

I was speaking to somebody the other day about this, and I spoke to them about the methods of communication. It's quite weird, and you'll notice this in your own electrical business, if you have an electrical business, that some people are texters, some people are emailers, and some people are callers.

The wrong thing to do really is if somebody calls up, you then start an emailing sequence after they call up. So it might be emailing about their quotation, it might be sending the quote, it might be following up on the quote via email. If they contact you via email, you've got green ticks all the way because that's their preferred method of contact. If they text you, then they've got to flick across to email. It might be a little bit of friction, but you're still kind of on the same pathway.

The differences really are, from what I've seen through experience, callers are very immediate response kind of people. They don't take any time to muck around. Basically, they're calling you up because they want a direct answer. They want to book something in. They want to get a quote rolling ASAP. Very impatient kind of people.

Then you've got the people that are sending out emails. They're more risk-averse kind of people, like a bit of a paper trail, and they just want it all documented. Particular people. To be honest, my kind of people. I would be leaning fully towards email people that send enquiries and stuff like that. That ticks my box, and I am on that level.

Now you've got texters. Texters, to me, generally are tyre kickers that are just looking for a price. Maybe they're serious, but on the flip side of that, they can just be extremely busy people. They're like, "I can't be bothered calling up, I'm too busy at work. I'll just text the mobile number of this electrician from the website, hopefully get a text back and we can get the ball rolling." That kind of person that sends you the text message is going to be the kind of person that wants a quick answer.

With the beauty of software, if you use ServiceM8, you can literally send a text message. You can link your quote into that as well, so you can just embed a link and send them the link if you want to fully go through text messages. A good way around this as well, if they are a texter, is to move them across into your job management software. So if they initially reach out to you from text message, you can essentially text them back from your mobile or whatever they've texted you on. It might be a software, a VoIP system that you're using on your computer, and you can move them across into your ServiceM8 or your job management software of choice. Because you're still retaining that communication method in their preferred method. You're texting them when they're texting you, but instead of it going to your private phone, which I find extremely annoying when electrical clients message me about stuff, I move it across to my job management software. You want a boundary from your work and your personal life. Again, you can have a second phone for this if you wish. If you're like, "I'm sweet with texting," that's cool. I'm happy to do that.

If they do reach out via text, most of the time you're better off retaining that entire conversation via text message. If somebody emails, you stick to email. If somebody calls you up, obviously you're going to have to put a quote together somehow and get it to them. What I would be doing in that instance is with the people that call you up for a quotation, they're a caller kind of guy. When they call up, you grab all their details, extremely vital. You get the NAPE. N-A-P-E. Name, address, phone number, email, in full. In full. Then what you can do is put their quote together, send it off, and what you should be doing to the callers is calling them up maybe a day later, checking in to see if they received it. You can still hit them with the email follow-up sequences that I teach my members how to build, but ideally caller people want to receive a call about the quotation. It shows you're following their level of communication as well.

Working with electricians, I'm probably too honest. I have expressed to my members that I have lost work because I don't follow this pathway. The reason I am giving this away and telling it to you and putting it into your brain is if you've got a fear of losing any leads. Whereas at the stage of business I'm at, my lead flow isn't the issue. Keeping up with the work is the issue. So if somebody's not playing my game, I don't really care. For example, if someone calls up, I'm going to follow up with email. I don't like to lie to people. I don't like to tell people to do this and do that if I'm not doing it myself. I'm advising you of pathways that's going to get you more work because you're following the client's pathway as well, if that makes sense.

The reason this came about as well was on one of the calls with the members, somebody asked me about forms and stuff like that, how are you getting so many converted when it came to the EVs. And what it was, was if you think about it, yes, it may not be their pathway of choice, but if somebody has purchased a Tesla, they've literally gone online and added their car to a shopping cart and then bought it. The majority of people that I've quoted that call up with a Tesla quote, fair enough, some of them didn't go ahead, but the majority of people did continue the online sequence because they are used to it. As part of the EV charger system with Tesla, they've bought their car online. They're used to online things in that sense, so that's why it was pretty frictionless when I was sending out quotes for electric vehicle chargers.

Now, if you were to flip this on its head and it was something, let's say for instance, an induction cooktop or general electrical work, and you sent them out either a form or they had to reply via email with photos and stuff like that, it can be a lot more friction involved. As I said, it's because they were used to buying their vehicle online that made it easier and it made a little bit of sense for them to get a quote.

If it was PowerPoints, installing data points, or whatever they request, it can have consequences if you don't follow their modality. People have preferences. If I was to think about myself, I'm more of a texter.

What kind of a person are you? What methods of communication do you like? Now have a look at the jobs that you've quoted and you haven't got. Go back through them and see, is there anything like, "Shit, that guy actually called up and I continued the whole sequence via email. That person texted, but then I ended up calling them, and maybe that's intrusive to that person."

There's a thing in sales called mirroring, and it's when you speak to a client, maybe face-to-face, and you basically replicate the body language they use. If they've got their hands on their hips, maybe you put your hands on your hips. If they've got their arms crossed, that might be quite a defensive pose, maybe you cross your arms as well, so you disarm the situation. If they're speaking very quickly, you then speak quicker as well to meet them. If they slow down, maybe you need to slow down to meet them as well. This essentially is mirroring for the method of communication that comes in. So if they're calling, texting, emailing, you should be following that pathway, and this will get you more leads converted.

Chat to you next week.