Maximizing Marketing: Kevin LaSage's Data-Driven Strategies and the Impact of Digital Evolution on Home Service Contractors

Lost in the world of marketing as a home service contractor? Fear not! Kevin LaSage, founder of Searchlight, shares his insights on making data-driven decisions that maximize your marketing investments. He unveils how his platform ties digital marketing efforts to customer activity in a CRM, offering real-time optimization to any marketing strategy. Kevin also underscores the importance of transparency and the benefits of having all marketing channels unified on one platform.

We’ve all heard that change is the only constant, and in the realm of consumer behavior, this couldn't be truer. Discover why today's consumers are favoring chatbots, online forms, and schedulers over traditional phone calls as we explore this shift and its impact on business conversion rates. We emphasize how quick responses can make the difference between winning and losing a lead and why businesses need to adapt to the preferences of tech-savvy generations.

The world of home service is not exempt from the ongoing digital revolution. We delve into the effectiveness of Google Ads in customer acquisition and discuss the rising cost of these ads. Here, Kevin introduces us to the concept that not all leads are created equal, as 75% of website conversions do not lead to paying customers. The conversation transitions into how AI technology is transforming areas like plumbing and roofing and how Searchlight uses AI to enhance customer service. So buckle up and get ready for an enlightening journey through the world of data-driven marketing for home service contractors.

https://www.searchlightdigital.io/successful-life-podcast/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:57

Welcome to the Success for Life podcast. I'm your host, Corey Barrier, and I am here with my man, Kevin Laseh. What's up, dude? How are we doing? Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, dude, so I don't know you as well as I know Jonathan. But really quick, Kevin, I want you to just to kind of explain to everybody a little bit about Searchlight, who you are, how long you guys been around, if you don't mind. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2: 1:25

So Searchlight exists for one reason and we're designed specifically for the home services, but that's really to help contractors understand what marketing investments are actually driving revenue. And it sounds very easy, but the reality is 99% of agencies out there and contractors today are still defining success by cost per lead or cost per conversion. Or if you get on the phone with an agency, you're hearing things like Impression, share, cost per click and it's these digital metrics. But I've been doing digital marketing for over 15 years and my dad owns a small plumbing company.

Speaker 2: 2:01

I always tried to invest in his business, or get my dad to invest a little bit and grow, and he always said, kevin, until you can show me I spend X and I earn Y, I think it's all bullshit. So I really set out to create a very simple platform where we generated, we built all of our software in-house with US-based engineers, as I've worked with for years. But what we do at a very simple level is we connect your digital marketing channels. So you invest in SEO, you invest in paperclip, facebook, bing, lsa, google, business Profile all of these different channels online and then we map those channels to the customer activity in your CRM so I can tell you what channels are driving estimates, what's your customer acquisition cost per channel, what's your average ticket per channel?

Speaker 2: 2:53

And really, what I like to say is we can make these plumbers and these contractors data scientists with our data because now they can answer these very specific questions around how much new customer revenue did I earn from Facebook month to date? Right, Right, Historically, you just don't get any of that information out of Google Analytics and there hasn't been a company that really combines all of it into one platform to make the marketing measurement easy to understand.

Speaker 1: 3:24

Sure. So I've always thought, you know, I've always just look, I'm completely honest, I always feel like it's a black box, and what I mean is, like you know, they, a lot of companies will send information at the end of the month and either one it's too much information for people to dig through or it's just not very clear, so which makes me believe maybe they're not up to par. That's really what I have always thought, and so my question is if I'm a marketing agency look just two parts If I'm a marketing agency and I'm not doing things right, my guess is I don't want you guys around.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Well, actually, I think. I mean there's two folds to that One is like you're doing as good as the data you have provided right.

Speaker 2: 4:19

So, if they're using Cosper Lead and Cosper Conversion and they're doing the best of their ability, that's great, right. But if the red flag comes up for me is the agencies that don't want transparency right, because even if we're not doing well with this data, we will figure out what might be off track, what's working well, what's not working well, and we can easily right those wrongs, right. So, like I'm not here, like no agency that we partnered with is ever sitting here saying we're the best and we do everything 100% right they're like wow, with this data, I can make better marketing decisions, I should be able to drive more revenue downstream for our partners and I'm not afraid of transparency. Right. If I figure out what's wrong, I'm gonna get it right. But until I know what's wrong, I can't fix it right. So I think that's really the focus here is data's not designed to always be green and uniforms and rainbows and a positive story, right. Sometimes data's red and there's something we have to fix, and until we have that data, we don't know what to fix.

Speaker 1: 5:21

All right, great. So how quickly can you? How quickly does the red, let's say as your example? How quickly does that pop up? Is that once every 30 days? We see kind of how it's. We see how the data is looking every 30 days. Is it real time? Is it every day? How does that work?

Speaker 2: 5:41

Yeah so all of our data updates every single night at midnight, so there's no manual inputs from the customer, from Searchlight or anyone involved. We have a direct API to every ad platform and that allows us to pull in the spend every single night of the previous day right. And then we have a direct API into your CRM. We work with all major CRMs and that allows us to see every night what marketing leads came in and then in the CRM, are these leads turning into estimates? Are these estimates getting sold? Are these estimates closing?

Speaker 2: 6:11

What channel is driving our highest average ticket? And again, just like it's not a month-to-month thing, it's real time, so we can make agile decisions mid-month, right. So if it's November 15th and I'm falling short of goal, I don't wanna dump money in what's getting me my lowest cost per click. I wanna dump money in what's driving the most revenue for my business, the lowest customer acquisition costs for the highest average ticket right. And it's very rare to have all of your marketing channels in one platform where, a click of a button, we can tell you exactly what's working and what's not working and where your money's best spent.

Speaker 1: 6:49

Okay, so that's from a marketing agency standpoint. So well, I guess you have to. As long as somebody's paying a marketing agency, you have to work with the agency to get the information right. If I'm ABC Plumbing Company or HVAC Company and I wanna bring you guys on directly, like I'm the owner, I wanna hire you directly. You're still gonna have to go through the person I'm paying to do my ads in order to get this data.

Speaker 2: 7:15

In some cases. Yeah, we can still get a lot of the data, because I can see the call tracking numbers that you have set up in service titan, for example, that map to your paid ads, right, so I can still see the performance coming in, but what I can't see is the spend. So that's you know. When I look at our API integrations with the ad platforms, that's really the most important piece is it gives us that spend dynamically, because every day we're spending a different amount, right?

Speaker 1: 7:39

Okay, yeah, that makes sense, so all right. So if I'm the business owner, I can hire you to walk me through. How much time am I gonna have to spend to find this information? I mean, I think that this information is probably the most crucial thing in marketing that I've ever heard of, and so I'm just curious, like how much time in effort, as the contractor, do I have to put into this to make it work?

Speaker 2: 8:10

Yeah, we make it as easy as possible. So, long story short after contracts are inked, there's an onboarding process that involves, you know, collecting the tenant ID on a service titan, for example right, and if you have your call tracking with service titan, we can connect all of that through the API. But if you're using XYZ agency for SEM, we will need to connect to that ad platform right, and we can do that through a read-only access. So we're not able to manage any of the accounts, but we're really getting the minimum level of access needed just to be able to pull in that spend.

Speaker 2: 8:42

So, long story short if you're on the CRMs we have integrated, I mean, you're talking about a week or two from signing a contract to getting this custom dashboard set up, and it doesn't just measure all ad channels. So we'll ask you are you on Facebook, are you on Bing, are you on Google, are you doing LSAs? But we're also gonna ask you what conversion tools do you have on your website? And this is extremely important because we're gonna map all the conversion channels as well. So we're not just talking about revenue through phone calls, we're talking about revenue through chat, through form submissions, through online schedulers and every single conversion path you have on your site. So now I can talk about the channel coming into the website and the conversion tool in which they engage in and I can show our customers that you're making 30 grand a month on forms or exactly what your average ticket is from your chat tool and we make it really easy to understand that customer journey and, again, what's working and what's not.

Speaker 1: 9:40

So great, great answer. So when you you mentioned the chat tool I'm curious with, we've built some chatbots through our AI Automations Group and so I'm curious how much traffic do you see through the chatbots? Because some of them most of them are not worth the crap, but ours, I believe, is really good.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Oh, yeah, of course I mean. The reality is, right now, 38% of revenue comes from outside of phone calls. So we have hundreds of accounts across the US using our platform so we can roll up all the data and we can see what channels our customers taking before actually buying something from your business. And I think when we did the study earlier this year around January, that number was 30%. So the takeaway here for everyone listening is consumers are more and more likely as time progresses to convert through non-call tracking channels, so you need to make sure that you have those other avenues of conversion set up on your site.

Speaker 2: 10:46

For the same reason why McDonald's has a drive-through and DoorDash and you can walk in and use a register or you can use their kiosk, they want any different type of person to be able to do business. And we're also busy right now I'll be at my son's game on someone's website scheduling an appointment for next week for my furnace or something. If that's easier for me, that's what I'm gonna do. So, yeah, it's extremely important, if you're doing revenue attribution today to make sure you're getting into the web events, and those are the chats, the forms, online schedulers and all of the revenue that's coming from outside of the phone call cause that's growing.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Yeah, I believe it, and it's not gonna slow down, like, in fact, my guess would be, phone numbers are going. There will be a shift for sure. I don't know how much longer it's gonna be before there's greater than 50%, or let me say less than 50% on the phones, because people don't wanna call, lots of people don't wanna pick up the phone.

Speaker 2: 11:45

The number one thing that sells in America is convenience. Right, right, I would say that. So if it's more convenient for me to fill out a form and have you call me back or hit chat cause that's right, what's there, then people are gonna go for that 100%.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Your business needs to be prepared cause flip side of this man as I see it all the time, where a chat comes in at Tuesday at noon saying, hey, I have a 6,000 square foot home and I need a whole new AC system, and the auto response goes down and says thank you for chatting with us, we'll be with you momentarily. And then three hours later the CSR responds and says hey, are you still available? And that person's gone Right. So speed to lead is something extremely important, whether it's the chats, the forms, and you gotta be training your CSR teams on how to manage these and how to get to these customers quickly, because those are missed opportunities. They might be one every five or 10 conversions. That's actually a real opportunity. But when I can prove to you your average ticket generated 80 grand this month with an average ticket of $4,500 like you're gonna wanna make sure you're getting every single one of those in Cause. Now I can add up, but it's costing your bottom line, right.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Yeah, so we've solved that. I'm not saying we're the first people, cause I'm sure we're not, but we've solved that problem, at least for one of our clients that you know, when a chat comes in, we've trained it on the company data to ask the right questions, to lead it straight to the book of call to book a technician to come out to the house or whatever, and it's integrated with either service titan or house call pro or whoever. And so I think that's vitally important. And, yeah, I'm surprised more people are not jumping on that, but I think people you know, like me I wouldn't use a chat bot personally because they all suck, but now the one that we've built is pretty dope.

Speaker 1: 13:40

And you mentioned speed to lead. I don't know, are you in the roofing space yet? Do you work with the roofers? Yes, yes. So we've built a software that, from the Facebook ad, let's say, or any ad for that matter it'll, once you fill out the lead form, in 30 seconds you'll have three estimates for your roof. 30 seconds. The reason that's important not because we've got this fancy roofing measurement software, but a speed delete.

Speaker 2: 14:17

Yeah, you're getting them through this one a little faster.

Speaker 1: 14:19

Hell yeah, dude. It takes the human element completely out of it and it's trained on that roofers, that individual roofers number. So when they get those estimates, they're right.

Speaker 2: 14:31

Yeah cool.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Yeah, it's pretty cool, dude, it's really cool.

Speaker 2: 14:36

The samples of clients we talked to last week. I mean this is a real thing that they were saying, hey, like we turn off local service ads messages because we're getting too many and our CSRs aren't trained on how to deal with messages and I'm like you know that's an uppercase, like their CSRs are trained on phones.

Speaker 2: 14:53

But I see it all the time where we map the data, lsa gets connected and I'm like, wait a minute, guys. It looks like we've got 30 LSA messages but not any of them made in the CRM. The customers will say LSA has messages I didn't even know, we've never. We didn't respond to one, right. So, like the reality, like I think one of the key things to take away is I've talked to like trainers, sales team, like everything, and it's not just training on the phone, right, if it's 38% of revenue coming through those other channels, how can we optimize that? Right, and all of a sudden, there's a whole new world out there of turning more a new lead channel on and making sure that we're providing that good customer experience. We're getting back to them fast, right, and at that point I mean the opportunity is there, right.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Look, I would argue that even you could even run that as a convenience option, because anybody that's younger than me I'm 45, like my wife, 39, she would 100% rather sit on a chat bot than she would pick up the phone and call. And most people her age and below that are very similar, especially younger.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Gosh, and those are the audience buying houses now too right and getting into the market. So we're always adapting to the different types of people buying models.

Speaker 1: 16:22

Yeah, so yeah, 100%. Well, next time you run across somebody that's not answering their messages, we got a solution for them, All right. So let me shift gears for a quick second. I'm wondering what you're seeing. This is kind of a personal question because, well, I see a lot of people talking about how Google, their Google spend, or their Google ads are either not converting not converting, sorry. Their Google ads are either going way up in price or they're seeing a massive drop in. I'm trying to think of how I read this. I just read it today. Do you know anything about what's going on with the Google ads and the price of them? Have you seen a difference in that?

Speaker 2: 17:12

Yeah, of course. I mean, especially when Google is increasing the cost of keywords. And then you look at the competition getting in the market too, right, we're not the first ones to start bidding on heating or roofing terms in our market, I promise you, and what we see with our data, I mean it's very clear. It's, yes, paper clicks an expensive channel, right, and you have to make sure you're spending that money wisely and you're bidding on the right keywords and there's a whole strategy behind that. But nine out of 10 times it's our highest customer acquisition costs when they're spending in all these different areas. But then I look at all the revenue coming in from it when you're doing it well, and there's no way you're turning off that channel, right. So if I could summarize 15 years of digital marketing and all of our data, for me it's like, hey, my first dollar in a marketing budget might not be paper click and it wouldn't be a good idea. There's other areas I can put that money in, where I'm going to yield a larger return for my dollar, a bigger bang for my buck. But once those channels Google my business, the SEO, all of that stuff is you fill that bucket. It's time to start looking at what other lead channels can still drive new paying customers. Right and that's the beauty of Searchlight is we can prove to you literally with three clicks. I could show you how much new customer revenue you've generated month to date from your paper click. And it just makes it very easy If that's your goal with paper click, to be bidding on someone searching for HVAC company near me, right Versure name. So you're getting those new customers. They come to your website, they convert and we can measure all of that and then we can start optimizing our campaigns and our strategy off what's driving actual paying customers.

Speaker 2: 18:51

Because here's a scary fact for you, man. It's a fact that we have the data to back it up 75% of all website conversions calls, chats, forms, online schedulers, et cetera never lead to a paying customer 75%. So flip that number and only 25% of the conversions you're getting on your website are leading the paying customers. And the reality is people are still getting a 10X return on their investment off of that 25%. And here's why. Here's why People are going to search your name on Google. They're going to click your Google Business Profile and they're going to call in and ask you if you're hiring or you want to buy any Girl Scout cookies, or literally right. They might click a branded paid ad and come in and ask all these dumb questions complaining about a tech driving too fast. Very few website conversions are customers, are real customer opportunity, right, real bookable opportunity. So we have to figure out as an industry, as market, as marketers, what channels drive paying customers and how do we optimize to that. 25%.

Speaker 1: 20:02

And I guess it's probably different in different areas, right, I would imagine I'm talking nationwide averages. That's unbelievable. I mean it makes sense. I mean I'm sure I've clicked on somebody's paid ad and not thinking that you know, just not thinking, and for whatever it is Because we're measuring SEO, like I have your Google Business Profile in here, right, so like I can see all of it.

Speaker 2: 20:26

So like I can see your SEO drives a ton of conversions. But downstream I can see, are we generating revenue? And is that revenue new customer revenue, right? Or is the SEO traffic we're getting just people searching our name? Or is our SEO doing so well that we're ranking first or second for heating company near me, Right? And all of a sudden, the clients that we were I mean our partners are having like the most traction. Like meet on the bone type monthly performance review calls because we can highlight what revenues we're getting or what zip codes we're getting new customer revenue from across all of our channels.

Speaker 2: 21:26

And maybe we should bid more here or pull this ad down here and spend more here, because impression shares low, but this campaign is really killing it. And all of a sudden, like we're driving a custom strategy, data driven, right. So you're getting on the phone with an agency and you're like, how do we fix this? How do I get new customer revenue from here? And they're like, well, here's what I would do. An ad words, here's what we can do here. And now you like as the contractor you're in control of, like having that positive conversation with your partners, and it's their job now to say here's how we can generate more revenue from these areas and here's the channels we should use. And we'll take from here and put it here, because this isn't working in, this is right. So it's a totally different conversation with your part, with your digital partners.

Speaker 1: 22:11

So all right. So, if you know, all right. So I'm just going to ask a hard question how much, like? How much money do you all charge? It's got to be a good amount to have this kind of data, because this is I don't. I don't know if I've ever heard of anybody that that has anything like this.

Speaker 2: 22:29

It's very rare. I mean the software we built. We had to do a lot of like data inventing to make this work, especially to make it work as efficiently as we have. So we can offer this at a retail price for a single location at 499 a month, and that's going to map all of your ad channels to all of your customer revenue and give you this, this platform that updates daily for you to measure exactly what works and what does that All?

Speaker 1: 22:51

right. So what kind of that's? First of, I'm really shocked that that's how much it is. I think that's a ridiculously low number, but here's the reality core and real quick.

Speaker 2: 23:00

I just want to tell you like the other options you have right.

Speaker 2: 23:03

Because I've been down this road and I've seen large PE groups go down this road too is you can invest in the engineering team like million dollars a year. You can invest in the data warehousing. You can invest in all of this time, money and effort and then still get it wrong. Yeah, so with this you you're getting guaranteed accuracy, because we built this platform listening to customers. Sure, so it's like some outside investment where this worked in some banking industry and they want to test it in HVAC. We just partnered with key partners and agile, move this, do this, pull this and do this, and we just listen, right.

Speaker 1: 23:43

So yeah, it's like what we.

Speaker 2: 23:44

I think we have solved a very expensive problem for a very small amount per month.

Speaker 1: 23:50

So I'm just curious, like what's the ROI on 500 bucks a month? What are you seeing Like?

Speaker 2: 23:58

I see most of our partners get the return on their investment for the year on their first onboarding call.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Yeah, I'd said it on Facebook the other day. When we onboard an account, they learn more about their marketing performance on that one hour call than they have all year long. I get all these aha moments. I always guess this. Now I have the data to back it up. Holy shit. All these aha moments. I could go on and on with examples, but we've got PE groups that are using this data every single day. It's in their boardroom meetings. It's what they're driving their business forward with. Again, we just listen to them and we're always going to focus solely on home services. That's all we're doing. You look at our platform. It speaks your language.

Speaker 1: 24:48

Yeah, all right. So I asked you about Google and you said yeah, I'm seeing prices are going up. I think prices are going up on everything, without a doubt. So let's just say you're a $5 to $10 million company. I know it's a little bit of a big gap there, but let's say you're a $10 million company Based on what you're seeing, would Google be one of the price and that 25%? Yes.

Speaker 2: 25:19

Okay, the thing is you just got to do it right. That sounds so easy with everything in life, right, but key things you want to make sure is that you're not just dumping a bunch of money into a broad match or branded campaigns. I don't want to go into detail on all of this, but after 15 years of digital marketing, you know you can make a digital report with focusing on these high-level metrics. Say just about any damn thing you want, right, sure.

Speaker 1: 25:44

I like to say money doesn't lie Right.

Speaker 2: 25:47

So that's like. The beauty of this report is like we're going to know if it works or if it doesn't. It's really that easy.

Speaker 1: 25:54

Yeah, that is pretty incredible, dude. So the marketing agencies work hand in hand with you. So really after that onboarding call, a contractor really doesn't get that much, not really involved after that with you.

Speaker 2: 26:07

Oh no, they have access to the dashboard, just like the agency. They're in there, they're like they can do. We don't hide anything from anyone, right? Especially if it's the contractor paying for the bill, whether through the agency or not. We want the agency to have access and I want the contractor to have access when they have that monthly performance review call. I want Searchlight Data pulled up so that we're actually talking about how to improve dollars next month, not a lower cost per click, right, yes? So yeah, the contractors get in there.

Speaker 2: 26:36

And the beauty is you don't have to be a digital marketing expert with a degree in data science for this stuff, man. It's literally just shows you how much money you have in open estimates, how much money has been sold so that where they've accepted the estimate and it's just scheduled for the near future, and how much revenue has been closed and invoiced. And then you can break that out by business unit, by new versus existing customer. So I see all the time online some little brag. Hey, we got a $10 average cost per lead. And someone will comment and be like are those leads installed or are they service or maintenance? And I'm laughing at my you know, because I'm just like man. You're two clicks away from answering all those questions.

Speaker 1: 27:13

Right.

Speaker 2: 27:15

So, yeah, it arms the contractor, don't get that wrong. I want to make that very clear that they now can ask better questions and be in more of a control with their digital partners, because they understand the ship now.

Speaker 1: 27:29

Well, and that's the whole name of the game, right? So the transparency is. That's the whole core, one of the you know, the core reasons that you're doing this 100%.

Speaker 2: 27:39

Yeah, yeah, I mean, my family owns a plumbing. My dad owns a small plumbing business and my wife's aunt married this like really proactive HVAC owner and he's one of the best operators I've seen in the country. Shout out to Ken Verne at Call to V out of Connecticut, but I met this guy and he had like a room in his house painted green for commercials and I didn't know guys like this existed in home services and at this time I was running digital marketing for large automotive companies and doing a ton with analytics and I got like naturally pulled into this industry to help. Right, I started helping my dad and helping my uncle, if you will like actually understand this and then things scaled from there and like the search light is here organically because I started helping family and now I just want to help any contractor make better marketing decisions and agencies help them make better decisions and drive more money for their partners too. It's a win-win for everyone.

Speaker 1: 28:33

Yeah. So what's the biggest hurdle that you had? I'll be asked kind of a sales question what's the biggest hurdle? I mean you explain this really well. I get what you're saying. So do you have much of a hurdle when you're meeting with contractors? Like, what kind of pushback do you get on this? I wouldn't imagine very much.

Speaker 2: 28:51

The only the pushback is are you integrated with this platform? And that's really the only question that we have to answer, and I say this out of respect for all the contractors we're bringing on, but 90% of the demos that we have end with a thank you. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. Thank you for bringing this to market. I've been looking for this for years. I onboarded an agency this morning and the CEO said to me he's like I've been looking for this for years. I excitedly I already told my whole company about it. I hope you don't mind, we can't wait to get in Because, again, that's an agency. Excited about transparency, because he knows he's going to be better with this.

Speaker 2: 29:32

And that him being better means he's going to provide more value to his contractors. It's not like he profits more money or he's like getting more out the back. No, he wants better performance for his partners and I respect that all day long.

Speaker 1: 29:44

Yeah, absolutely. This is really incredible. So the onboarding process and you may have said this and I may just have forgot what you said that takes about an hour or longer.

Speaker 2: 29:57

No, we have an hour onboarding call where we collect the data. Once the data is collected, we're about a week or two from standing up at Dashboard. So I mean, in some cases, if you're on service, tighten in. We've got all this stuff ready to go. Once we're onboarding and you're looking at a couple of days, we're ready to go, we're ready to go?

Speaker 2: 30:14

I mean the Dashboard, the platform's up, you've got access and you're immediately finding that aha moment. I knew this. Now I can change that. I'm going to do this and make a plan for a better next year and this year strong, whatever it might be. And I love nothing more than seeing those moments on those onboarding calls Once the Dashboard stood up and we do some training. It's awesome.

Speaker 1: 30:37

No, I'm just curious. You guys started this company, or really, I guess you launched back in January. So what kind is that right January? Yep, what kind of growth have you seen, let's just say from January? I mean, you guys are growing pretty rapidly, I imagine.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Yeah, I mean at this point we're partnered with over 25, maybe 30 digital agencies and private equity backed groups in the space, all the way down to your three to five truck guys, and I love those guys too, because they're really protective of that marketing spend and they might spend three, four grand a month and they need that to have a positive return. So now they can proactively and like data-drivenly build their marketing business right or build their business through marketing. So, yeah, man, this year has been phenomenal for us. The companies that I looked up to while we were thinking about building Searchlight in early days and putting into the work a lot of them are now partnered with us, so it's a phenomenal feeling.

Speaker 2: 31:42

I just love nothing more than giving back to the industry. That gave me and my family so much too. I got a lot of respect for plumbers and contractors because I cleaned copper fittings with my dad on the job site in the middle of winter in Connecticut, right, and he would drag me out there, and it just pisses me off to find out that there's people out there trying to rip off contractors with a brown bag lunch, and there's the hardest working people I know and I just want to arm them with data to make better decisions and honestly, like if you're in the business, to take advantage of them. I hope they sign up with us and I hope that we can uncover the problems and, for the agencies that are here for the right reasons, I look forward to partnering with you and helping you guys build better strategy.

Speaker 1: 32:26

But I feel the exact same way about the coaching side of this industry because I see and it rapes me because guys that they 100% know there's. I can tell you from my standpoint, because I consult with these companies you are not going to make changes in a week, right. You can't go in, fly in and meet with a company for a week and expect to make significant change in the sales team, in their numbers. It's physically impossible. But I see contractors paying 30, 40, $50,000 for those services and it drives me insane and I often wonder is it that there's just this is what I think. I just think they don't know. There's other options out there because there's a few big players that are in the space. You know, just like in marketing and I think it's almost like by association, they continue getting hired and I think people just don't know. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: 33:44

I follow where you're coming from. Yeah, I think the cool thing with our data too is we can start to measure sales training impacts too. Right, because I can start to see like something that we've talked about we're not doing now, but like we can easily pull in CSR or technician data and map that to revenue and talk about how well they're doing across. You might have a guy doing really well with phones or really well with forums or chats, and we can bring that story to life. So you'll see me always relating back to data, right, as much as I'm like.

Speaker 2: 34:17

I like to think like I'm a visionary or marketing guy, but I'm always relying back on like show me the proof. And I'm a sales guy at heart too. You know, years past I was a sales trainer in automotive and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is there's a lot of opportunity to improve the way your CSRs are talking to your customers. I don't care the platform, I hear them all the time. I listen to the calls, I cringe. Some companies do really well, but, yeah, csrs are your first impression for your business. So I'm always so amazed that you know, I think there's an opportunity to really reward them a little bit better. From what I've seen.

Speaker 1: 35:01

It is the most craziest shit I've ever heard to think and this is a lot of people that you are spending 10, 15, $20,000 a month and your CSRs are doing I wouldn't even say a half ass job.

Speaker 2: 35:21

Yeah, I will say respect, because some of them are phenomenal. I've seen both and I don't want to say it's anything bad. I would say that there's a learning opportunity available, I guess, in industry, and this isn't just phone services, trust me. Experience I've had in automotive too, like managing the customers through the phones and that customer experience and actually aiding them in what questions they're looking for, asking for the business, not just letting them jump off the phone.

Speaker 2: 35:50

All of these key little things are what surface to search light because we're measuring revenue. So I would get motivated and be like guys, you've got to train your CSRs because I'm listed to some of these calls coming in and this guy called in. This could have been a $12,000 job but we missed it and I want to help you make that more money downstream and this dashboard will measure it. And all of a sudden, you're like revenue motivated as a partner, not just low cost per click motivated. It just changes the whole relationship between partners, vendors, everything like that. So, yeah, I just think there's a big opportunity there and some groups we work with do phenomenal.

Speaker 1: 36:29

Yeah, it's funny because when I go to, it's almost like there's a disconnect. Again, I'm not talking shit about anybody, but at the end of the day, if you're not, you should be so focused on that CSR team. This is a huge pain point of mine. You should be so focused on that CSR team that you're either having somebody like me and outside consultant come in and help you or having somebody in-house working with these people every day. Having people call in what role play Like dude. It will change the entire landscape of your business. If you have that, it will also keep you on the sidelines. If you don't, and you're just going to keep spending more and more and more marketing dollars for no good reason.

Speaker 2: 37:19

Yeah, I would probably say one of the biggest takeaways from marketing, if you're looking to immediately improve, would be to train your CSRs. First thing is listen to your phone calls.

Speaker 1: 37:29

Which they don't.

Speaker 2: 37:30

If you listen to your calls, you'll be, amazed.

Speaker 2: 37:33

That's step one of admitting there's a problem and then say, wow, how do we get better from here? That's one of the first ways, like we said, all of this uncovered. Your SEM, your paid ads have call tracking, they have call listening or they should at least Ask for that report, if you don't already have it and listen to the calls coming in, that you're paying X amount per call and just do a simple study out of 10 calls, how many were real bookable opportunities? Then think about that at scale across all your other channels and across all your other conversion tools. You're going to realize that kind of saying earlier is a small percent that are actually real bookable opportunities and that means every opportunity matters. So that's why I would say training your CSRs, or making sure that that's an ongoing process and they're being rewarded properly and they're motivated to come to work, is probably the biggest thing you can do for your business.

Speaker 1: 38:26

I 100% agree, and paying an hourly wage is not motivating in my opinion. That would be a lot of money an hour for sure, Right, and they're typically the lowest paid.

Speaker 2: 38:40

But I love is reward them Right. Like how do we build in some equity programs, give some crazy commissions? Like these are people that are going to make or break your business over time. 100%, yeah, I agree. And then you see a sorry rep there and it comes in excited and it's like all right, we're not letting anyone go. Today I'm going to make sure we hit this off and get my outbound calls done and they're like I want to see my bonus at the end of the year get to X because the company is going to get to Y. Like you had to be motivated like that man. You're on a different level than most.

Speaker 1: 39:11

You're right. Yeah, you're 100% right. Super, super, super important stuff, all right. So, kevin, where can people find you? Where can they find Searchlight? Can you let everybody know where those two places are?

Speaker 2: 39:31

Yeah, searchlightdigitalio is our website. It's got a lot of information there, or you can? I mean there's a form to fill out a call number there. I'm the one responding to all of those. So if you go to that website and reach out, I'd love to talk to anyone in the space. We're partnered with agencies, contractors, tech providers, and my goal is really to just get this data in the hands of as many contractors as possible. Like you can see, we're not trying to charge some crazy rate and, like you know, make all of this profitability blah, blah, blah. Our focus is like let's take care of the customer right now and we'll figure out that stuff later. Right, and all of those things should fall into place if we have those priorities straight.

Speaker 1: 40:13

That's right, and so it's not just plumbing and HVAC, the home services. There's, I think, 12 areas that home services breaks down into roofing and HVAC. Oh yeah, anybody that falls in that category, right.

Speaker 2: 40:28

That's correct. Yeah, all we need is you to have a CRM and some sort of digital spend. I need you to be entering your estimates and your sole jobs or closed jobs somewhere. I can't be on a post-it note, right, and then I can pull it in.

Speaker 1: 40:42

Right, yeah, well, kevin, dude, I really appreciate this man. This has been super helpful and I believe you guys are going to do great. I think what you've built here is just I mean, it's really mind blowing. I'll be honest, it's really mind blowing, and I've seen some mind blowing shit being built with AI. This is pretty impressive. So I hope that, of course, I'll put all those links in the show notes, but I hope people reach out because, man, it can solve so many problems, so many problems.

Speaker 2: 41:16

Every day. I appreciate that man. And just so everyone knows, we're at about 0.5% 1% of our roadmap right now, so we're just getting started. So I look forward to anyone reaching out and always happy to help.

Speaker 1: 41:28

Thank you, brother, I appreciate you.

Speaker 2: 41:29

Thank you, man, you're welcome.

Speaker 1: 41:32

Thank you.