Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

Leaky Leads: How to Sell More without Spending More

• Frank & Maven

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Most businesses think they have a “sales process.” Spoiler: they don’t. 

And it’s costing them thousands in wasted ad spend and lost customers.

In this episode, Brandon and Caleb dig into the real reason leads slip through the cracks and what you can do—without spending a single extra dollar—to plug the leaks. 

What you’ll hear:

  • The common mistakes almost every business makes
  • Why “weak leads” aren’t really weak
  • The simple shifts that make your marketing instantly more profitable

If you’ve ever wondered why your phones are ringing but sales still feel slow, this is the conversation you need to hear.

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Host: Brandon Welch
Co-Host: Caleb Agee
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

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Speaker 1:

welcome to the maven marketing podcast. Today is maven monday. I'm your host, brandon welch, and I'm here with caleb. Get out there ag.

Speaker 2:

Explain that shirt uh, what is up with?

Speaker 1:

that, um, it's just a trying to make me feel invincible, or?

Speaker 2:

we're we're recording on a yeah, I'm just yeah, we're recording on a Friday, so this is my athletic athleisure type wear, so it just has some encouraging things.

Speaker 1:

What did you run to work today, or what?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I jogged in. I'm wearing shorts today. You can't see that part of me. Who knows?

Speaker 1:

what's going on down there? Hey, this is the place where we answer your real-life marketing questions so you can grow your business, eliminate waste in advertising and achieve the big dream. And the big dream today all starts with your leads and how you are handling them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, let me ask you. Yeah, go for it. Let me ask you.

Speaker 1:

Ask me a question Out of all the people we've served, like just coming in here, over the hundreds of businesses, how many do you think have a chiseled out sales process from like website to it's? We're at the sales presentation and it's done.

Speaker 2:

How many actually have it. I'd be surprised if it was half. I mean, yeah, it's way less than half. It's less than that. That would be a generous I can think of three I can think of three that pop into my mind.

Speaker 1:

They're like they had it figured out, completely figured out. And here's the crazy thing they will come into our door either already spending multiple, multiple, six figures, some of them millions of dollars, or prepared to. And if I were to go out in the other room and hand my 12-year-old a stack of $100 bills that equals $10,000 and just told him to take it and do whatever he wanted with it, it would literally be that insane. Actually, my 12-year-old would probably do a better job, but I don't know, maybe not my eight-year-old, but we'll see. So we are throwing money that has already been spent literally to the wind, and we want to bring you some data today to clarify what I promise you is going on if you haven't spent time every week to babysit not babysit, but actually direct and tell your money and your leads where to go.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it seems like an obvious answer. But this handoff, this balance between the marketing and the sales process, when people become a lead, that's the moment where they shift from being a marketing prospect somewhere out in the world to being a sales prospect. Those two, that's a very cold way of looking at a human. But the sales part of that very often is where the leakage is. You might be getting a high volume, you might be getting high volume, you might be getting strong lead flow, but you're saying I got weak leads.

Speaker 1:

Will Leads aren't weak. We're going to challenge you. You're weak, you're weak. So, at least by the research, 65% of businesses do not have any sort of defined lead to sale process. It's just happening from people reach out and they say, oh yeah, well, let's set an appointment, let's try to get you somehow to the finish line. And so by just a little bit of care, just a little bit of intention on this, I promise you're going to make your advertising more profitable without spending an extra penny.

Speaker 1:

Matter of fact, you could probably reduce your budget and do these things, and do so much better.

Speaker 2:

A lot of you are taking these leads, putting them on a round robin, maybe in your CRM, handing them off to salespeople and saying, hey, go sell them. And then you're wondering on the back end why they ain't selling. We're going to give you some pointers as to why that might be.

Speaker 1:

So rule number one is the five-minute rule. We've talked about this before, you know. It's true, we're not the first ones to tell you it, but why do we keep just one day getting around to fixing this? Because, I would say, most of our listeners don't have a steady five-minute rule in their business. But did you know that you are 391% more likely to convert a sale if you call it within five minutes versus even 10 minutes later? Like five minutes is the cutoff 391% more likely. It's like almost 400%. And then also, businesses that reach out within five minutes are 100 times more likely to connect versus waiting an hour. So it goes up drastically after that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So you're sitting there on your phone or your computer. You fill out the form on the website. You become a lead. Well, you just think about. You're in that mindset right now, and if Brandon calls me within the next five minutes, I'm way more likely because I'm in that mindset to pick up and connect with them.

Speaker 1:

There's some real math here that says if it just even doubled your likelihood of connecting with that lead, how many times does that have to be true for you to justify somebody to sit there all hours of the day answering that phone call?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or you could look at it this way Brandon mentioned those $100 leads which, all in, could be more, could be less, depending on your industry. Imagine putting a hundred dollar bill on the desk Every time you get a lead in and you, if they don't respond in five minutes, I would take a hundred dollar bill away from your team. You need to help them visualize this. There may be an activity that you can do and say, hey, that's a hundred dollars just for round numbers. Um, if we're not following up in five minutes, we just threw it in the trash can just light a hundred dollar bill on fire.

Speaker 1:

I think that would be a great lesson.

Speaker 2:

You see what you made me do Come to the bathroom. We're going to flush it down the toilet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you'll come with. Yeah, you see, yeah, so don't do that. Maybe do that, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

I would make.

Speaker 1:

I'd a little intense, but um but, uh, we don't want to be mean, but we do want to be very, very intent on saying like guys, just get over yourself. The five minute rule will save you so much wasted advertising.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think also you can work in some automations here to help you, uh, support your team and their ability to respond quickly. So this does not replace the human touch, because I think, I think a lot of people are leaning on these automations, maybe a little too much, but if you can have some sort of text message or email or both, or a call, and you are reaching out to somebody, and maybe in not creepy way but enough and quickly, you should be doing that and that could supplement maybe the immediate response from your team might be on a different call. You may not have the manpower to pick it up in five minutes. Well, hopefully they get a text as well.

Speaker 1:

Yes. Rule number two is the keep calling rule. Shortly after the five-minute rule, this is the most violated one, and everybody says the same thing. I don't want to bother them. One, um, and everybody says the same thing. I don't want to bother them. And did you know that, just by the world that you woke up in this morning, just by the nature of human overstimulation, that it is not only not bothering them, it is expected and average that a person still responds after seven or eight uh points of contact. Yeah, just just the, just to get them on the phone in the first place.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are a dozen. I'll just think in my personal life, a dozen little random things that I know I need to do but I have not gotten around to, and a few of them I've taken, maybe, an early step of action. I've called somebody about it or whatever. I still need to do those things and nobody's calling, Nobody's asking me to schedule, to set it up, to make it happen and they should be. If they would, it'd probably push me forward and they'd get that sale a little bit quicker.

Speaker 1:

That's right. Yep, yeah, there are a bunch of things I need now that people just haven't followed up with me on. Yeah, I've got money, I'm a buyer on the loose, and so what you need to be thinking about is how have I systematized that? That just always happens, no matter what. You could do it as simple as a legal pad that says here's all the prospects that came in today for your appointment center and cross them off when you've taken them to the next step. Until then, put them on your list for the next day. And we have an episode that was really about how to pace this out.

Speaker 1:

But people are like should I call? Should I email? Should I text? The answer is yes, you should call. You should leave a voicemail. You should then text. You should follow up next day or leave an email, follow up the next day, say, hey, did you get my email? I mean, there's a systematic thing to this, and I will say even more than that. We're going to talk about nurturing, not just calling and saying, hey, what do you want? How can we move this forward? It's like in the process, there's a tremendous amount to be done, even beyond that. If we're sending them things of value. They've raised their hand, they stuck their head on the ground for just a second and we're like that was our permission to add value to them. Yes, not our permission to get them in our door right now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that goes back to we didn't say this. But almost every time we say the word lead, we say a lead is a person with a need. This person has a need and I need you to get it through your head that your goal is not to, in this moment, it's not to sell them something.

Speaker 1:

That is the business outcome that we're trying to get. If it was, you would be annoying them.

Speaker 2:

Yes, If you have it in your head that I'm trying to sell them or I'm trying to get them to set an appointment so that I can sell them something, then you have the wrong mindset and you will actually self-defeat because you will be bothering them. You will feel like a pushy salesperson. But if you know they have a need of the service that I provide or the product that I provide and I need to give them the opportunity to fulfill that need, then you have no problem calling them every single day until they tell you to stop.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and this doesn't have to be some Wolf of Wall Street high pressure thing. It like just a tiny bit of focus on hey, what's the last time we called our leads from a week ago? Even would be a good start. And we have a client who we've worked with for years has hundreds of leads in a month and their business has done really, really well. They've grown.

Speaker 1:

We've talked about this and they like things were a little softer for them and we were just like cool, uh, just to just to make sure, are we following up with all the leads we've already generated? It was like middle of the summer, when things are always soft, Right, and it's like, well, no, you know, we, we left them a voicemail. Yeah, and they even have a CRM that told them that. But use the CRM for what it's good for and automate your prompts to follow up. So I mentioned that. Seven to eight touch points, that's like HubSpot data. That's pretty reliable, like research a lot of people cite. But beyond that, that's just to get a hold of them. The average is 28 and a half points of contact before you get them from initially raising their hand to the sale.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they say simple transactions maybe are on the low side of hand to the sale. Yeah, they say simple transactions. Maybe are on the low side of that, more complex. Yeah, it's higher. That's the average, that's the middle If you have a complex product or a complex purchase. It's north of 30, probably in the 35 range.

Speaker 2:

So, think about that. How confusing or complicated is your product. You need to expect to have to contact them 30 times. Yes, think about that. How confusing or complicated is your product? You need to expect to have to contact them 30 times.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and so companies that are good at nurturing get a 50% less cost per acquisition versus those who do not.

Speaker 1:

If you took your advertising budget and literally cut it in half and said, well, I only have to spend that to get the same amount of customers. If all I have to do in between is a little bit of training and intentionality and follow up and, by the way, this is not permission for you to go just beat your people over the head saying follow the process, or why aren't you doing this? No, do not do that. You want to encourage a culture of winning, a culture of like hey, this is the good that happens when we do this, not you're bad and you haven't been doing it because this is right for celebration. You guys can do so much more with watching the numbers go up and celebrating that, and I would suggest sharing that reward of the hard work. Yeah, that alone won't motivate it. But what I'm saying is you just spent half of what you spent on marketing last year and you had the same amount of customers. How would that feel that?

Speaker 2:

would feel great that would feel really good. Yeah, I'd be happy for you to spend half, or you know, as an agency, you could just keep it the same and double your business. Right? That's right, seems, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases on top of that. So not only are they going to close more often, they're going to spend more money with you because they trust you. They've seen the value in your tenacity. People actually do appreciate follow-up and professionalism. People appreciate people who are talking to them, about them, about what matters to them, and this is what you're doing. It's not going to your very sweet, very kind, very organized office manager and saying call more and bother these people. Don't do that. Help. Tell your entire organization guys, these are people that need our help. They're crying out, they're drowning and they're asking for a life raft and it's like what if we aren't the ones that show up for them?

Speaker 1:

What if somebody else, some other jerk in an empty suit, is the one showing up for them, what happens then? And if your company values are solid and if what you believe and the ways you do your work is?

Speaker 2:

solid and how you change the world and how you change the world is solid.

Speaker 1:

That's a hop and a skip going like no-transcript. Your compassion to follow up with these leads like they are people about to get taken advantage of or lost in some other person's business, business.

Speaker 2:

They're going to have a lesser experience because they didn't go with you and you owe it to them to give them the best experience, which hopefully you believe is through you so that becomes the foundation of your courage and your tenacity to follow up with leads like they ought to be followed up with.

Speaker 1:

And all we've got to do from there. So point two is keep calling. But point three is the script problem. If you are just calling for the sake of calling and saying you know you filled out a form on our website, how can we help you?

Speaker 2:

I'm just following up on the form you filled out on my website. Missed opportunity. Wrong answer Because hopefully your website.

Speaker 1:

Missed opportunity.

Speaker 2:

Wrong answer.

Speaker 1:

Because hopefully your website language is promising something Either the ad they clicked on or the ad that they knew about in the world, or the pain that you claimed you could fix for them. That should be self-evident by how they reached out to you. If they were on your website and they came from the page about gutter service. Don't call and say you know, it's Lindsay from Hooter Scooter Roofing and I'd like to you know how can I set your appointment. It's like oh, this is the conversation. I hear you're having some problems with your gutters. Tell me more about that. That is altogether different. You've validated that. You started a conversation rather than trying to be an inconvenience and force them into a commitment.

Speaker 2:

I almost feel uncomfortable Just my personal thing. I feel uncomfortable when I call somebody and I feel the need to explain my situation. Hey, I noticed it rained really hard the other day I'm using the gutter example and it was just pouring over the side of my thing. I think I have some junk in.

Speaker 2:

But there's this weird thing when somebody answers the phone or they're following up with me and they're just like, hey, how can I help you? Or I'm just following up, I feel like I'm inconveniencing them by giving them the four minute explanation, whereas they should be like, oh, yeah, and they should be validating my explanation. They should be like, oh, yeah, and they should be validating my explanation. They should be giving me the time of day. Yeah, make sure you're connecting with that and you're you're allowing them to speak. You should be asking good questions instead of telling good answers. That goes back to how to make, how to win friends and influence people the old great conversationalist. He said I didn't say much of anything. I spoke less than anything. All I did was ask good questions.

Speaker 1:

So go check it out now. We should try some good questions. Yes, how are you meeting your people where they are? How are you encouraging your staff to see that this is helping them, not bothering them? How are you celebrating Not just the moment you get the sale or the appointment, but the moment that you knew you had permission to make a difference? That is what good lead nurturing and good lead culture should be about. And so look at the clues, look at where they came from on the website. If you're getting the form fills from the website without a little indication of where that form came from, what page? Get with your nerd and fix that. Yes, because you can just start the conversation. I hear you're having XYZ, or maybe the form itself.

Speaker 2:

It has some checkboxes you need. What do you need? Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

But then let's talk about from that first compassionate connection to how do you hand that off to your salesperson. Are you just setting blank appointments on your salesperson's calendar and then having them walk in blind? Because if so, you are mishandling that person's time, that person's perception of what needs to be done, and you're really not holding up to your mission as a company. I'll promise you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's point. Number four is the handoff problem we're talking about from the setter. The person who has diligently now that we've talked about it diligently followed up with every lead and nurtured them properly and you guys have your systems to nurture them properly but this is arguably one of the biggest fall-offs is. That person had a wonderful conversation. Let's go back to me and my gutters. I just talked about how awful my gutters are full of leaves and nuts and there's a bird's nest in there and I need somebody to come clean it out. Well, she just heard that whole story from me. If she doesn't write down what happened then, when the salesperson comes to my house and they try to sell me gutter cleaning and they ask me now what's going on, I feel like I just had to tell you the whole story again yeah, and if that guy calls hey, it's, this is bob from gus's gutters.

Speaker 1:

You know, uh, tell me about what your? I like your fake business names. Yeah, it's good, uh, gus's gutters. Uh, you know. You know, I heard you needed some help. It's like no, hey, I heard heard you got some tweety birds in your gutters. You know, I heard you needed some help. It's like no, hey, I heard you got some Tweety birds in your gutters, right, yeah, it's like, when can I come over and get those out for you? That's validating. That's off to the races.

Speaker 1:

So I don't know why we chose the gutter business, but get out of the gutter and into your business right and what we want to do is increase that cohesiveness from all of the touch points of your company, from your website to your first person they talk to, to the person that follows up, and then, like the holy grail, would be the automations in between the texts that say we'll be out today, you know, or we'll be out whenever we talk to on the phone and the email, just confirming and then afterwards saying how was Gus?

Speaker 2:

How did Gus?

Speaker 1:

do for you, right, yeah? And so, guys, we're looking at things that are all common sense. There's a pile of statistical validation that these are problems in almost every business.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And they're probably a problem in your business and we want you to win so bad. We want to work the marketing. We don't make excuses. We want to find every inefficiency to shore up for our clients and for you and for our mastermind students. But if you don't treat that well, with the sanctity that it is, that a human being asked to connect with you, to give you money in exchange for the thing you are supposedly the best in the world at, then it's your fault that your marketing is unprofitable.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, what I would challenge you to do right now is go sit down, write out from birth to death, the beginning to the end of your sales process, and maybe there's a couple versions of this, but you can maybe make it generalized enough that it's flexible to the different entry points that they would come in. You need to write out every step in that process and then what?

Speaker 2:

happens. What is happening and then what happens. What is happening, yeah, all the way through, so that you have acknowledged okay, then if you have in-home sales consultations, then salesperson comes to house and they have a conversation about this. They need to cover these main things. Make this. It's not a script that you're building, you're personalizing, because we just talked about making that a real thing. You're personalizing your follow-up calls from your appointments. You're you're in home sales conversations. These are all um principle based. They're not script based. They're not. There's maybe bullet points on a on a conversation. If you don't have this written out from beginning to end, you need to go do that and you need to share it with your team, like this week.

Speaker 2:

Yes, right now the whole team, not even one group and the other group. You need both groups to see exactly what's going on. Your appointment setters if that's a whole different department, if you have a call center following up on leads, whatever that looks like for you, if it's whoever sits at the front desk, they just pick up the phone. They need to be aware of the whole process through sales and sales needs to be aware of the whole process before it gets to them? Yes, and your marketing team should also be aware of the whole process too, they should care about that as well.

Speaker 2:

How?

Speaker 1:

are you going to have that conversation, is not guys? What's our followup? What's a? Show me how many times you followed up this customer. Do not do that. It's less than it should be and you're going to be frustrated. You're going to go and say I got a message from above, from a place called the Maven Marketing Podcast. You're just going to say I heard this and it made me wonder. Are we treating the people that interact with our business with the highest amount of intentionality as possible? And bring back your mission. Bring back this is why we do what we do. This is who we're serving and draw the picture of that customer and say we're lucky that we got her across the finish line, but there are thousands more of her.

Speaker 1:

That are just begging for us to do a really good job between them kind of sort of needing something and being bashful and raising their hand and us giving the full confidence that not only are we the best ones to help them, we will do it with the utmost respect and purpose possible.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then from there you go take the avatar and say how does she get from here to here to a happy life? That is marketing at its finest, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Make that process, as I think you can make it really idealistic. But then come back to what's the first step we're going to take. I think it would be dangerous for you to say we're going to go from zero to a hundred this week because your team is not ready for that necessarily. I want you to challenge them. You're going to make it Add one more touch point a week. Add one more a week and see what happens. That would be a great-. Or let's circle back to last month's leads and start calling. That's the kind of simple thing that will pay exponential dividends on the marketing dollars you've already paid.

Speaker 2:

You've already paid for them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's the good and bad news. Yeah, this only say this only rescues money you've already spent.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we keep we say dividends, this is literally the. The dividend check they're handing you is is your leads, and if you don't reinvest those, it's a good analogy right, there it's wise, then you, which is calling them, or sending them a box of chocolate covered cherries, I don't care.

Speaker 1:

There's something in between that you can be doing to warm and show these people that you love them. That's right, and you want to help them, so all right. So quick recap the five-minute rule you're too slow at following up. We all know that. The keep calling rule call them more often than you think you should. 30 is not too many, it's probably average. There's the nurture rule Keep adding value every step. It's not just how can we sell you something, it's how can we help you right. And then the last rule is the handoff to the salesperson. Keep that communication and that intel on that customer cohesive. You are going to win. We can't wait to see you win. That is why we're here, so you can win. We just get unreasonably excited about the things you are doing in small business America. We actually believe that is the thing that will change the world for the better because, you are the heart of the owner, right in front of your small group of people.

Speaker 1:

You're not a corporation. You can affect change. You can make your communities better. You can make your kids and your team's kids' lives better. You have the power to do that as a small business owner, and when we get to help you do that just a little bit more, our tank is overflowed. That's why we're here, that's why I have a company, that's why all these people outside this camera work and do the work they do, and that's why we show up here every week to answer real life marketing questions and we'll be back here every Monday doing that. Because marketers who cannot teach you why are just a fancy lie.

Speaker 1:

Have a great week.