The LFG Show
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The LFG Show
The Call Center Doctor Jason Shouldice 🩺📞
Hey, LFG Fam! 💥 Ready to GO BIG with call center power that drives RESULTS? Whether you’re in roofing, solar, finance, e-commerce—or any industry—Jason Shouldice and his team have the skills to scale your business fast. His call centers bring conversion rates that hit different. 📈 Don’t miss out—call Jason at 702-760-1985 and see how he can help GOAT your business today! 🐐
10X Your Call Center w/ AI 🤖 https://allriseai.com/?via=LFGSHOW
Welcome back to The LFG Show, where it’s all about #NoMoneyNoHoney! 💸 Today’s guest is a true GOAT 🐐 in the call center game, Jason Shouldice! From roofing to retail to finance, Jason knows how to transform call centers into gold mines. 💰 His insights on lead management, virtual staffing, and scaling strategies will have you rethinking your business game. Are you ready to get GOATED? 🏆 Let’s dive in!
Jason drops pure gems 💎 on why efficient call centers are like the Yukon Gold Rush—valuable, powerful, and worth every bit of investment. He breaks down how moving from unpredictable markets to solid sectors can create stability, but adds that his call center techniques are universal and can transform ANY industry. 💼💥
Jason’s advice on virtual staffing 🌎—from Argentina to Colombia—is a game-changer for affordable, scalable growth. Plus, he explains why voice calls outperform digital communication, building stronger connections with clients. 🔥 This human touch approach fosters deep customer trust and loyalty that email and text can’t replicate. ❤️
The call center world has come a long way, and Jason dives into how predictive dialers 📞, CRM integration 📊, and AI 🤖 are revolutionizing the space. He shares stories of businesses that achieved insane exits thanks to call center strategy, emphasizing the importance of branding, killer training, and clear onboarding.
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, make sure to subscribe to The LFG Show and follow us on LinkedIn for more GOAT-ed strategies! 💪 And of course, we gotta give love to our amazing sponsor, Ringba! 🏆 Their cutting-edge call-tracking technology is putting businesses on the map. 📍 Get ahead with Ringba, and remember— #GetGoated! 🐐
Get ready to level your shit up with the LFG show. We travel the globe to bring you heavy hitters from all walks of life. We've been talking some serious business, from the best digital marketers, government contracting experts to top athletic and celebrity doctors We've got it all covered. We're talking to guys with cash in for billions with a B, and the best thing is we're just getting started. So hold on tight. We're about to crank who've cashed in for billions with a B, and the best thing is we're just getting started. So hold on tight. We're about to crank it up a notch. Get ready for next level networking and masterminds within the LFG community. Scare money, don't make no money, or honey. Hit the subscribe button, drop a like, leave a comment and let's fucking go guys, it just doesn't stop with the heavy hitter rotation.
Speaker 3:We got somebody that's very well known in the call center industry and a lot of roofing and solar companies. I'm glad to bring them into our audience. A lot of our audience are media buyers here, so I'm not sure they know what you do or that you have these services available. But, guys, as media buyers, as people that generate leads, you might have the best fucking lead in the world. But guess what? If the call center doesn't know what the hell they're doing, they're not dialing properly. That lead turns to shit. Doesn't make any sense, right? So the point of the story is that we've got Jason Shodice here. This guy's an expert at building and scaling high-performing call centers. I've referred a lot of clients to him, Very, very happy with him. But Jason man, it's a fucking pleasure having you.
Speaker 4:What's going on? Thanks for having me. What's going on audience? How are you guys today here at RoofCon 2024 here in beautiful sunny Orlando, florida?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and shout out to Hunter Ballou he let us use this whole area.
Speaker 4:Thank you, Hunter. Wherever you are right now, he's out there somewhere.
Speaker 2:We'll probably get him on the show tomorrow.
Speaker 3:But, guys, if a lot of you guys some of you are doing home improvement, some of you aren't some of you have done solar, man. It's a big market. You know. We started off in solar in 2016. I think we sold $50 million worth of solarase right to all the big players. Solar had a contraction, which I'm sure you saw, oh yeah, and we tried roofing a year and a half ago. We couldn't crack it and we cracked it in May, man, and now we're doing great. We're happy with it, our buyers are happy. So the same template we used for solar, we're trying to use here with roofing and home improvement, man. So I mean, I, we will. We both come from the cost of the world. We've both been doing solar home improvement, man. So I mean, where do you want to begin, man?
Speaker 4:Well, you know, start at the beginning and I agree with your sentiments. I haven't been in solar quite as long as you, have been in it for four years and definitely saw a huge market shift a couple of years ago and we also started to heavily invest in roofing. We saw it as a much more stable industry than solar and solar it's always the same old thing Finance companies not paying and solar is going bankrupt. Roofing is a very tangible product that every home needs and it's almost guaranteed every 20 years you're going to need your roof replaced. So a lot of people see roofing as something that they really need, versus solar, which is kind of more of a luxury, almost novelty. So I'm with you exactly Roofing's been great to us. We still do that son of solar. I know you still do those solar, but definitely enjoy what we're doing in the roofing segment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know, I'd say, with that being said, I feel like the, the home improvement side is more like old money versus new money. Like the solar was a new money, people weren't handling this stuff right. They became like excelling heirs. And it's easy, you know you make. If you make a hundred sales in solar, that's like three million a month. You get to a thousand, 10x that right, and I've seen that happen. So you start spending all this money and then what happens is you pay out your sales people, then there's clawbacks, so like damn, you're stuck. So and plus the financing dried up, all the working capital dried up. So, whereas roofing and home improvement this has been around for decades and decades and decades, these guys already have nine figures in the bank. Some have 10 figures in the bank, so you're less likely to have issues when you're working with those companies Exactly, and correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 4:In solar I don't think they're putting mechanics liens on homes like they are with roofing, so you're almost guaranteed to get paid with roofing right. With solar, I mean, somebody defaults on their payment. The finance company's out the money and that's how for those of you watching, most of you probably already realize that's how most solar deals are done. Their finance, yeah, 100%.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so another thing I want to talk about. Obviously we're talking about home improvement, solar leads, right. All these companies, in order for them to grow, all these big companies that are in solar. You know, the SunPro got bought out by ADT. You talk about the SunRuns, the Freedoms. You talk about all these big players, the Anderson Windows and Windows. They all buy leads, right. They all need leads to keep their salespeople fed. The issue a lot of those companies have is that at one point, their call center sucked. They're buying all these leads, they're not calling right away, and that's where you come into play, right?
Speaker 4:So can you?
Speaker 3:explain how do you help them grow their call centers.
Speaker 4:Sure, the challenge with leads. So I've led some pretty big sales teams over the years. I started off owning a marketing agency and then I built a call center about 10 years ago for that marketing agency. So one of the biggest challenges is when you're generating a high volume of leads, a lot of them go to the wayside. Right, have you ever seen Yukon Gold Rush? Yeah, so you know that they have this hopper system. Right, you load the dirt in the hopper and the hopper separates the gold from the dirt. But the challenge is, if the hopper's not tuned properly, a lot of the gold just falls right out the back and falls into the tailings pile. Same idea with leads. So companies are spending hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars per year generating these leads, but they're not monetizing them properly. So that's where we come in.
Speaker 4:So we build a call center not only to generate new business whether that's outbound cold calling but also monetizing your existing business, whether that's a lead channel from PPC leads, whether that's door-knocking leads, whether that's your database so we're able to take all of your leads and do a true two-way integration with your CRM, no matter where that lead is. So a lot of the times, if a sales rep is well-fed. Let's say they're getting 10 appointments, 15 appointments a week. You know after a year they'll have 50 to 100 potential deals. But the challenge with sales reps is they're only focusing on their hottest deals right. So now about 80% of their deals are falling to the wayside. Having a call center and setting rules saying that if this lead isn't touched by a salesperson after two weeks and it's in a hot lead funnel now, your call center could take over and aggressively follow up with that lead.
Speaker 4:Now another great thing about call centers is after the sale's done. To ensure you know if we're talking in a roofing context, to ensure the actual roof gets installed, it's really important to follow up with the customer after the sales process is done, after the contract is signed. You know if we're working on an insurance claim, there's a lot of steps that need to happen before the go-ahead is done for that roof. So having a call center synced to your CRM, no matter where they are in the pre-sales or post-sales process, all of that's automated. Now the great news is to put that into numerical format. Almost every company that we work with when we build a call center is able to convert 30% or more of their leads into deals. Throughout all the slippage that's happening across companies We've seen it time and time again Companies doing $2 million a year to enterprise-level companies doing $30, $40, even $50 million a year. There's so much slippage that happens and that's where a call center comes in.
Speaker 3:There is a new endeavor called roofs. In the box it's just man from day one. It's taken off when.
Speaker 2:I first started getting into the roofing industry, what was happening was my fixed costs were always there, and so for me I was looking at how can we, kind of one, save on these costs? And then, two, how do I not lay people off during down times? But also maybe even the ability to pocket more money during the slow season or even the peak season. Since we've done this before, like with our lead gen companies where we have virtual staffing from Argentina or Colombia, I'm like why don't we do the same thing in the construction business? Now, once we figured it out, we reduced their fixed costs by 70%, and so now during the downtime they have real, seasoned, veteran type of players, but during the uptime they pocket. 70% of their operational costs are now going back in their pocket, and then, when it's time to scale, you have the backend prepared, already ready to go to help them. Like lift off, depending on what state you're in, you're averaging about 12.5% on what you pay out on taxes, insurance, like all the different insurances that you have to pay out, right, so, yeah, you don't have to pay out unemployment, you don't have to pay out bike insurance, medicare, social Security, the things that business owners have to eat.
Speaker 2:Roofs to Box is not just limited to roof your home improvement companies. You can use it for any services, right? You can use it for IT. We use them internally for data sales, for hygiene, for analytics. It doesn't even matter what the vertical is. It's like business in a box at the end of the day. Pretty much, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, you said a lot. The slippage is a big thing. You said something I didn't even think about and I feel like this is where 95% of call centers aren't taking advantage of the post-sale Yep Everyone wants to get the sale, and you see that in solar.
Speaker 3:Get the sale, sign the contract, and that's one reason a lot of these companies went out of business, because they still have a power home and they were selling. There was like, oh, you can talk about that for days, but there was a lot of BS that happened focused on sales, sales, sales, sales. They see, oh, why am I going to follow up? The deal is done. We follow up good customer service to give you a good review, and guess what? Then you get referrals, referrals exactly Now that one instead of having one and done.
Speaker 3:That one and done could turn into one and then sell.
Speaker 4:Oh, I've seen countless single deals turn into 10 plus deals.
Speaker 4:It's incredible, right?
Speaker 4:And as you said, that's where a lot of people don't even realize what a call center could do, because typically in a home services configuration whether it's roofing, solar windows, siding after that sale's done, you have a project manager who's manually going into the CRM and calling people kind of haphazardly.
Speaker 4:With a call center, let's say that you know we've signed a contract to sell a new roof and we need to schedule an installation date. You know, if I call somebody right now, then nine times out of 10, they're not going to answer, right? So, having a call center paired to the CRM, the project manager presses one button. Let's say you have 200 jobs that need to be dealt with in some way or another, no matter where they are in that stage. Now the CRM is synced to the call center, the project manager has access to all that information and, as you said, way higher reviews, way higher referral, way higher customer satisfaction and a way higher realization rate of the job actually happening, because, especially in solar, as an example, right, we're having a 70 or 30% cancellation rate. You're only realizing-.
Speaker 3:I've seen someone's high as 50%. Yeah, I've seen someone's high as 50%.
Speaker 2:I've seen it even worse.
Speaker 4:The industry average is only a 70% realization rate. So a lot of people don't realize. If they have that call center aspect, that's how you can realize 80%, 85%, sometimes even 90%, plus the referrals, plus the reviews, right when a lot of people are missing. And not only that being able to see, you know and hear from the customers as it's happening and getting that feedback. How is my company performing? Right, I'm going to get real-time feedback. Oh, the customer is unhappy about the site inspection. The customer isn't happy about the inspector, the customer is unhappy about the salesperson. So having that call center is really going to allow you to really touch your customers so much more than sending a text or having an email sent to them. Right, communication, you know, by a voice is the number one way to do business and if you can't see somebody in person, a phone call is the next way to do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know what it comes down to as a business owner. It comes out to trying to get an edge in one way or another. Right, you come to these shows, you're hoping to make a contact, to give you a little edge, maybe get a new deal or whatever. You know you try different ad angles to try to get an edge. See what hurts, I mean what hits and what doesn't hit, what connects, what converts. The call center could give you the biggest edge and I'll tell you what I've been man the first call center I really saw like blow up and where I really learned all my shit was in 2005 in a student loan consolidation company.
Speaker 4:Yeah, damn Back when you're dialing rotary phones.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, I'll tell you a funny story, bro I was the first person they put on a predictive dialer.
Speaker 2:No, way Before we were. I don't even know how we were dialing I used to be a bomb broker.
Speaker 3:We had to just dial a manual 300 calls a day or else you couldn't fucking leave. That's how serious it was. But when I went to this place I was the one that dialed the quickest. I would do like $500 a day right and I had good conversion.
Speaker 4:Wow, $500 a day. That's impressive. So my sales reps I have to push them to make $200 a day, Not inside the call center when they're dialing me from the CRM.
Speaker 3:That's impressive. Yeah, that was my tops and I always did over $300. One day I was kind of like I was on a mission to beat this other guy, but the bottom line is that they put me and another guy on a predictive dial and I was pissed. I'm like this isn't going to dial faster than me.
Speaker 2:You can't compete right.
Speaker 3:So that's how it shows you how fucking old I am, 2005,. And man, it was great because now my production tripled. On the predictive dialer, right, but the point is we're always looking for an edge right. So the dialer gave the edge. But the reason we did so well in student loan consolidation we had a good dialer, good cadence, good tech, great call center manager, great morale and a great product.
Speaker 2:It all came together.
Speaker 3:So the point is you got all the ingredients. So everyone that I've seen be successful, from that company over to solar companies, even the health I helped build a call center in the health surgical side to like roofing to energy they all had a good call center. That gives you the edge and that's how those companies have gone from, you know, doing 10 million a year in revenue to 500 million to get it bought out for a billion dollars. Sure, you know, would you agree? I think that's the secret is that call center. You get that piece done. So it was off to the freaking races.
Speaker 4:I actually just met with a client in Jersey. I won't say their name, but they just did a $50 million exit just from their call center. The call center was driving 90% of the business growth and then the result of that, they were getting the leads excuse me, the referrals but the call center drove all of their growth. Yeah, right. So you know, in the home services industry a lot of companies are built with door knocking. Right they have teams with door knocking Challenge with that is is a revolving door. So you know, you set up 10 guys at the start of the month to go door knocking. You might have two or three at the end of the month. With a call center you're able to reach several more people than on the doors. Right On the doors you're knocking, knocking, knocking, might talk with 20, 30, 40 people a day. You sit in a seat inside a call center and dial for about seven hours. You're going to speak with two, maybe even 300 people, right. So the amount of exposure.
Speaker 4:And, as you said, you know a lot of companies might come here. They're looking for a magic bullet, but it's already right in front of them, right? A lot of companies. They come to us and they want more opportunities. But once we do a deep dive into how they're managing their leads, how the leads are coming in, response times, cadence in terms of follow-ups, you know how things are rotting. Usually all they need is actually already inside their CRM.
Speaker 4:So why not take that, unlock all those extra opportunities, see if you can even handle those opportunities right, because the odds are your sales team can't even handle those. And then look at creating a call center to create more outbound opportunities, or pair it with PPC leads, or pair it with your company and buy leads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But most people don't realize the goldmine they already have. But their sales reps aren't trained well enough. Not the company's fault, by any chance they don't know any better right? Sales reps aren't trained well enough. They get blinders for the hottest deals. So why not send all of that to the call center and have that handle it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you made me think of a good example. We have a client in solar who they had the suspicion that their reps weren't dialing the records. Well, they paid someone, they bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of real-time leads. They weren't hitting their KPI goals. So we said, give us those. 30-day, 60-day, give those to us, we'll call them, we'll revitalize those leads. So we did a deal with them. They paid us on an hourly. They gave us a performance basis man they got. They said they had a hundred thousand records. It wound up being like twenty thousand is what it wasn't a huge amount right, you wouldn't believe we got.
Speaker 3:They got 12 sales off of that, which turned into like four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand revenue and like the roi for them with those was incredible, sure, but that that's, that's the proof in the pudding as to what you're saying. Those leads were dormant. They were sitting there and they keep buying more and more and more leads. Meanwhile you have half a million sitting there and it took us like a week to generate that for them.
Speaker 4:And you know, I've seen, I've seen lists that we've we've beaten all to hell. I mean we've called them 50, 60 times and we're still setting appointments because maybe somebody's on vacation for two or three weeks you know, maybe you know they lost their phone.
Speaker 4:I mean, there's so many different scenarios, but you don't have the ability to dial leads 50 times without having a call center. It'll just never happen, right. So it's amazing how much you can actually take, how much blood you can actually take out of the stones. It's wild, yeah it really is.
Speaker 4:But you'll never have it with the tech. The challenge is there's so many great CRMs out there, right? Salesforce, acculink, jobnimbus you know these are all great CRMs. The number one thing, though, is people need to be able to dial leads rapidly. That's what all these CRMs are missing, so we have our own contact center solution that integrates with all the leading CRMs. We have yet to encounter a CRM we can integrate with and that basically takes your CRM, supercharges it.
Speaker 4:So that's something that CRMs are missing is having a really good contact center inside of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love it. I would say it's a contact sport. You made a good analysis of the door knocking. You're really knocking so many doors right Physically.
Speaker 1:And it burns you out.
Speaker 3:It burns you out. I did it one time where my aunt had me knock on doors for an election. It's tough. That was hard, man. That was the hardest thing I ever did. You're nervous, were gifted at it, but you burn out right Sure. When you have the call center, it's still revolving over, but not as much as it is. It doesn't move as fast and if you have the right management team, then you could keep people incentivized. And if you're working the leads properly and they're getting paid properly, like they should because they're talking to enough people, it's going to be the best of all worlds.
Speaker 4:Well, and you know, one of the things that we do is we incentivize people very well compared with what an agent might normally make. How do we do that? We leverage near shore talent right. So we used to go look at Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. We used to hire tons of people from there, Really great, hardworking people. The challenge is that the average American consumer receives 20 to 30 unsolicited phone calls a week. So when the average consumer is picking up the phone and is listening to somebody with a very thick foreign accent and they could tell very clearly this person isn't from here, right?
Speaker 4:So at that point they just hang up. So you're losing a lot of conversion. So we recently switched everything over to Mexico and wow, you know, half the agents lived here in the U? S for 20, 30 years. They understand the customs, the colloquialisms, you know the sayings, you know these subtle things which you and I can communicate and laugh about, but people from overseas can't. And I know you use Nearshore as well.
Speaker 3:You're called a Columbia right? Yeah, it works, man. Mexico I've always had good experience in Mexico, for the most part, and the thing is that you're right, there's a lot. They're familiar with American culture and a lot. You mentioned the colloquialism. They may have lived in California. They know the Dodgers. The Dodgers are in the World Series. They're playing California, so it just helps seal the deal a little bit better, but I have noticed that too. Very hardworking. I'm a big fan of Latin America.
Speaker 4:It's a sleeping giant.
Speaker 3:It's waking up right now.
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:It's what's going on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think a lot of companies don't have the experience outsourcing just because they're naive, they've just never heard about it, never had the opportunity. Almost every company so we take 50 sales calls a week selling our services. Almost every company that we speak with has never used a Nearshore existent. You know, whether it's call center, accounting, project manager, programmer. They've never used it. And what companies don't realize is that there's so much talent, not only on a Nearshore but but global level, where you could pay one third to one fifth of what you pay somebody here locally and you'll have somebody of equal, if not better, talent. So I think a lot of companies are missing out on that being able to use near shore or even offshore agents. I mean, we still hire people from overseas. That being said, why focus on overseas when you have a hundred million people in Mexico and several hundred million people in Latin America?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, they work hard. They're hungry man.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we could talk about this stuff for days. I want to shift a little bit, though. Let's talk about how did you actually get into this world, Because I feel like call centers. I know a lot of people have been successful. We've got the music coming on.
Speaker 4:I feel like we're in a call center.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, but what I was going to say is that Less drugs though, yeah, but anyway, the call center is almost like a rite of passage.
Speaker 3:Sure, Anyone that's been in sales I mean maybe it's either door knocking or it's being in the call center, you know, picking up the phone and I out but they stuck with it, they figured out and they all became like a top seller and then by doing that, they got that entrepreneurial spirit Like, yeah, I want to do this shit on my own man.
Speaker 4:So I want, I'm curious if you had a similar experience or like what's been your whole history, you know?
Speaker 3:what's funny is I actually started working in a call center when I was 16. Wow, yeah, so you said 2005. I started when I was 23.
Speaker 4:I'm dating myself now. 16 was 26 years ago, so whenever the heck that was 1998. Wow. So yeah, I was doing inbound calls, doing tech support, so I did that for several years and then I decided that selling weed was more lucrative. So that was, you know, early 20s.
Speaker 3:This is in Canada.
Speaker 4:This is in Canada exactly, don't have any more weed, but anyway.
Speaker 3:When that was legal, when that was legal, exactly, it killed the market. Yeah, that's what happened.
Speaker 4:It's legal now in New York. It's legal now everywhere except for Florida.
Speaker 3:Doesn't make sense. I don't know.
Speaker 4:So, anyway, you know, I was an affiliate marketer, and that's how we first met each other. I think we've known each other for like 15 years. How long ago were you first going to the affiliate summits?
Speaker 3:Oh, no, I started like in 2016. Oh, you're a newcomer.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, oh, I was in the back in the day, back back back in the day. You know Darren Blatt back in the day.
Speaker 3:Affiliate balls.
Speaker 4:Going to the affiliate balls I think I started in 2010.
Speaker 3:Okay, Affiliate marketing. It probably wasn't even affiliate. I think it was something else Ad tech.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was before Commission Junction in probably 1999.
Speaker 4:That's crazy. So yeah, I grew up all around all that. I started a bunch of marketing agencies and I had a really good marketing agency and we had over 100 clients and we were generating several hundred paid leads a day. But we had a very big challenge because we were in the real estate space. So the average length of time from lead to successful transaction was 12 to 18 months Wow.
Speaker 4:So the challenge working with the real estate agents is they didn't know how to work leads and 90% of people don't. In general, it's industry agnostic. So we were forced to create a call center to keep people paying our monthly retainer. We had to basically force them to get results. So that was the first time I actually owned and operated a call center. This is many years after I worked in the call centers. We saw tremendous success with that company. We sold it four years ago.
Speaker 4:Then I did a lot of consulting in the marketing agency space and I had a few colleagues say hey, can you help in our call center? Hey, can you build us a call center? Fast forward to today. We've built almost 250 call centers, around 130 in roofing and solar and over 100 in pretty much every home service you can imagine, we work with law firms but a lot of marketing agencies as well. So that's kind of how we started. So it was interesting. Solar is one of our biggest call center segment.
Speaker 4:It was interesting coming from the real estate space where it was an average transaction time of 12 to 18 months, versus solar, where you could set an appointment and go close it that day and maybe not get all your money in a week but at least get several thousand dollars. That was kind of a mind shift that happened for us. It's like wow, there are other things other than real estate that can actually pay you very quickly. And I think roofing people are very, very blessed to be in roofing because the turnaround time for the final project completion is much faster than solar. Right, so you could turn around your money. If you invest a dollar today, you can get three, four dollars back in 30 to 60 days. I mean, tell me a stock that can do that on command. Sure, we've had a few NVIDIAs and some fun stuff happened right, but yeah, it's been an interesting shift.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the call center doctors right.
Speaker 4:That's our company. Cc Docs.
Speaker 3:Where did that whole name come from? Tell us about that, sure.
Speaker 4:So I was originally the call center doctor, right, and after a year we grew very rapidly. We have around 140 employees now, so I wanted something after about a year which was much bigger than the call center doctor. No-transcript, we need something. You know, that doesn't revolve around my face, right. So rather than being the call center doctor, we became the call center doctors, and that's how I was born. I always wanted something kind of catchy right.
Speaker 3:Well, I was born, I always wanted something kind of catchy, right? Well it is. That makes it go into the next. I don't know where your guys are at, but you stand out, sure, and the way you dress, right. It's funny, because I didn't know you were here and I think I saw you last year too, but I was back there somewhere. And then I see these guys and they were dressed really well. Sure, they Louis Vuitton.
Speaker 3:She was sharp dressed guys, but they got like paper on. Like I love Mexico, yeah, Roofing Lee, stuff, like that. I'm like, bro, are you guys with Jason Shulis? We are, where is he? But that's the first time I saw you on one of the shows. That's how you were branded, man.
Speaker 4:But at the end of the day it stands out right now we could have missed each other because I need, I don't think that would happen.
Speaker 3:Come on, sometimes I go to new jersey and I hear you yelling outside my window. That's true, but anyway, you get what I'm saying. Like, the point is that that helped at least collapse time frames. Yeah, it's what it did, because I then I called, then you came by and like, hey, let's, let's do a, let's do a quick interview, let's do a podcast. Sure, but that's the, that's the key of branding and standing out, because how many people are in this crowd here? Thousands, oh, absolutely. And your two guys stand out for sure, man, absolutely.
Speaker 4:Well, I think that you know, one of the biggest things with marketing is not being afraid to do something different, right? And the challenge with most people is, I think we all have an ego and pride and I think that's, you know, one of our biggest killers, right? So if you truly don't care what anyone says, if you're wearing a bunch of stickers all over you, then you're invincible, right? The reality is is when we put our stickers on, so we adorn ourselves stickers head to toe, we'll get 30 leads in an hour. Five guys, we'll probably get more leads than 80% of the vendors here who've paid for boosts, right? Simply because we're doing something different. People are stopping for pictures and selfies, right? How could branding get any better than that when people actually want to stop you just because you're wearing a sticker on yourself? Yeah?
Speaker 3:100%. I love it, man. That's what it comes down to. You got to separate yourself from the herd and that's how you do it, man. So let me ask you, going back to the call center side of things, what do you think and I know we talked about it earlier there's to me, with a call center and a sales org inside sales org, there's like eight or ten different pieces of the puzzle. There might be more right. What do you think is a great separator between a good call center and a fantastic, phenomenal call center? What's that make or break?
Speaker 4:That's a great question. So you know, having built so many of these, one of the biggest challenges with owning a call center a lot of companies. So not only do we build them from scratch, but we could solve for existing call centers. One of the biggest challenges with companies is they've built their first call center but they're only inferring things from what they're seeing. So what I mean by that is a lot of companies have built their first call center. It's been in business for a few years, but they're only learning from what they see. Having built a couple hundred of them, we've seen the best of what can happen. We've seen the worst of what can happen. So we've taken all of those things and put it into our system.
Speaker 4:So what makes an excellent call center? The software that you use, right? A lot of companies here use CRMs, yet almost all their leads are rotting, and I'm not only referring to the roofing industry, it's every industry. It's an industry agnostic problem, right? So everyone's using a CRM, but very few people are using it for their potential. Same idea with call center software. There's some great platforms out there. We've used them all. We've migrated people from all of them. We've settled on a platform that you were probably using back in the day, called BeachyDial. But what makes us different is it's just like Salesforce. You can buy Salesforce or you can spend a million dollars and customize it to your needs. So we spent the last four years, we have 10 full-time developers and we've done this heavily, heavily modified version of it. Now what does that mean? Higher connectivity with the leads, better cleanliness with phone numbers, more integration with the CRMs, completely customized GUI, and we've really made it our own, similar to how these companies put their own layer on top of Salesforce.
Speaker 4:So software is one thing, right. Obviously, talent right. Where are we hiring from? How are we hiring? What did the interview process look like? How quickly can we get them onboarded? What expectations are set? All of these things that really make a good agent. How's the pay, compensation? How's the stability? How are they treated? How's the ongoing training? What are the expectations? What is the bonus structure which falls under pay? Right, but really gamifying and incentivizing them to be able to earn more, right? You know, we try to pay a little bit lower of a base but really incentivize them to get actions out of it.
Speaker 4:So all these things and more right. How is the call center communicating with the CRM? Is it just uploading new appointments or all of the pipeline stages synced? Like I mentioned earlier, if a sales rep doesn't call a lead after two weeks and that lead is in a pipeline that should be called every two days is in a pipeline that should be called every two days, the sales rep should lose that lead. Right, that should go back to the call center and then reassign to another sales rep. It's very clear. The sales rep is too busy, doesn't care, whatever the reason might be right. So all of these factors and more go into having a successful call center. Another big thing that I see a lot of companies missing out is ongoing training right, that's huge.
Speaker 4:During the first 90 days we make sure that every single agent is trained one-on-one for half an hour a day. Then we can see very quickly how is their script adherence, how is their product knowledge right, how's their opener, how's the rapport building. We can see very quickly what their kryptonite is and then work to resolve it. Because it's one thing if somebody you know isn't performing up to par but really wants to improve it. It's another thing if somebody isn't performing well, took part but isn't coachable. So by implementing a one-on-one training for half an hour a day, you're going to see very quickly whether or not that person is worth investing with long-term or just cutting them loose. And that's where so many companies are missing the mark having that ongoing training, especially for the first 90 days.
Speaker 3:I know a lot of you guys do a paper call. A lot of you guys have call centers. We got AI in the house. We got AI in the house. We got Neil Billick. He's the founder and the CEO of All Rise AI. They're doing big things. I'm a user of his service.
Speaker 5:We are coming in immediately for X-ing contact rates for clients. What we found in my BPO when I ran it and deployed the AI was we had 30 second wait times before the deployment between connections and my guys were making about 500 connections a day times 30 seconds. We were wasting 250 minutes a day per head in a call center.
Speaker 5:That's four hours four hours half their day or half their wages being spent on them waiting for a call. The reason your wait time ties when you're calling out. You have an abandon rate. You have to stay under three%. That's programmed in your dialer If the AI is weeding that out, and I think that's the benefit.
Speaker 3:It's collapsing timeframes, helping your top producers produce, which is what you want them to do.
Speaker 5:People are afraid AI is going to replace call center agents and it may. But right now, use it to maximize your human resources, so leveraging it for the tools it can be to do exactly what you're saying Let the humans do what they can do best. Let the AI get cursed out.
Speaker 3:You're right, I think even beyond the 90 days you got to, always people go back to old habits. You know it takes you break out old habit, then you get back.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, you regress, like going to the gym, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And we talked about regress. Yeah, we kind of we joked around like I don't know, like people drinking or doing drugs and calls that happens.
Speaker 4:Sure, it's a stressful job. It's a stressful job. I mean sales is a very high incident of alcohol abuse, drug abuse. It is a very, very tough job in general. Right, you have have to be just a little crazy or very crazy to be in a sales field.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's not disputed. Yeah, you're not.
Speaker 3:You're dealing with rejection all day long. Man, for every you talk to 70 people you're going to get no, no, no, fuck you, no, fuck you. Don't do this. I remember my I think my first ever sales call ever, when I was 23,. This guy told me go get a real job. And this stung me, man, that guy man. But like then then then I still had a little bit of rope, but like I went home and I'm thinking, damn, what the hell I went to this college? Why would the nyu want best business? Why the hell am I cold calling?
Speaker 3:the guy started questioning my life, man and then all I had to do was get one sale like yo.
Speaker 3:Fuck that guy you know, I'm not gonna care about the guy anymore, but it is. There's a lot you're dealing with. Uh, you know a lot of ups and downs, you know, and then you get freaking crazy for it. But I think I think that's where a good trainer, a good manager, some charismatic person that can help, almost like a therapist, those people become like therapists in your sales orgs. They're making sure that everyone's where they need to be, and that's what happens in professional sports. It's a mental sport when you're doing sales. At the end of the day, each really good team that's won a championship or gone far, they have the head coach or they have someone that's like the backbone, right, Yep. So I think that's another element, aside from the ongoing training. If that's a piece of the puzzle who's the actual, who's the lifeblood? Who's the lightning? What's it? A lightning cord of?
Speaker 4:those freaking calls. I'm not a big sports fan, but I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, I mean, accountability is something that people need, right, even as business owners and business leaders. We still need people to hold us accountable. Like I have a personal trainer. He trains me four to five times a week. I, frankly, wouldn't go right. So that's a degree of accountability. So I think not only do we need to hold the agents accountable, but also the managers and other people involved in the operation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure. So let's talk again about call center doctors. So let's say I'm I'm a roofing company or solar company, whatever, I am right, and I have 10 people on my team. I'm doing some sales, I'm making two, three, four million a year and I want to grow Like what's a step-by-step process. I hear about you, by the way, you've got a great Facebook group. What's the name of the Facebook group?
Speaker 4:It's Sales Talk with Roofing and Solar Pros. We have around 22,000 members, a lot of people in the sales and roofing industry, from sales reps to project managers to electricians to owners really everyone coming together and talking about sales.
Speaker 3:It's a great community. If you're in sales, solar roofing, whatever join the group. It's amazing. I've been in there. I posted there a few times Great community built. But let's say they find a value through there or whatever and they want to join. What's the process? I mean they contact your team and how's it working. What's the onboarding process like?
Speaker 4:We have a lot of different ways you can reach out to us. Most people reach out to us via our website, ccdocscom. You can hit the contact form there. You can book an appointment there.
Speaker 4:You know our onboarding process is very simple. It takes about three weeks to build a call center. There's, simultaneously, we have a great client success team who will walk either you as the owner or, if you're having somebody else implemented on your team whether it's a VP of sales or a project manager and we walk you through all the steps. So not only do we build the call center, we do the recruiting. One of the things that we pride ourselves is updating you daily as the call center is being built. So not only are you going to be on a Slack channel, but also getting an email so you can see step-by-step what's happening. There's nothing worse than paying a substantial amount of money to a company and having zero visibility. So the onboarding it takes about 10 hours. It's about a three-week process and there's a lot of people involved from our team and we can work with somebody from your team or as an owner. If you want to be involved, we'll work with you.
Speaker 3:Great, and I was going to say one thing too.
Speaker 4:You too. You've been doing this for a number of years, right, and you don't have. I haven't seen one negative thing about you online a negative review, that's something I have a lot of enforcers that.
Speaker 3:But it's really a testament to doing the right thing, because bad news travels really fast and I'm sure when you're you're dealing with business people, I mean fuck, there's a lot of stress. You know, it's almost like a business owner. Your life's almost like you're. You're bipolar One day you're happy, the next second like it switches so fast and you go from happy to sound like really fast. You know I have a campaign that's kicking ass for me right now Paper Call Two days ago. I'm like what is going on with Paper Call? Do we even want to do this anymore? I remember that team like I'm going to have my best day ever in paper call today.
Speaker 4:Congratulations In the history of your company, in the history.
Speaker 3:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:In that paper call vertical. Good for you.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, with that being said, though 48 hours ago, I'm ready to fucking kill paper call.
Speaker 2:I'm like yo, fuck this, I'm tired.
Speaker 3:What I'm trying to say is you onboard a client, right, and maybe they expect the expectation. Because, again, call center to me is like the silver bullet between success and failure. Good to great Right, and I've seen that happen. I've seen amazing stuff happen. So how do you manage the expectation that, hey, you're going to get this in three weeks, but this isn't going to, it's going to take a little bit of time? And then when do they actually see that ROI?
Speaker 4:So, you know, one of the nice things that we're really blessed with is you know we're dealing with a. You know we're dealing with a. You know, a very established business owner in most cases. So, because we offer a premium service, you know the expectations are typically set during the sales process. Because it is so premium, I think we have a lot more leeway in terms of understanding, right, you know, when you deal with people that don't have a lot of money and I get it you know I've been there before If somebody pays you a thousand dollars, you know they're really determined to have that be successful. Right, they're really counting on it.
Speaker 4:You know, when you're dealing with businesses who have, you know, several million dollar a year income, or tens of millions of dollar income, it's very relative to it, right? So I think that's one of the reasons why we've done you know so well A, by choosing to service a very high level of clientele and, b, why I don't think there's anything negative about us because we've had some failures. Right, there's no company that's offering a sales service that hasn't ended in failures. But I think that the businesses, even in the worst times, understood that we did everything that we could. Right, building a call center isn't like installing a roof right, there is a lot of linear processes.
Speaker 3:It's a lot of pieces of puzzle, yeah, but there's a lot of linear processes.
Speaker 4:It's a lot of pieces of puzzle, but there's a lot of things that can go wrong, especially after it's built right. One of the biggest challenges that we've seen is sales routes burning the leads. I mean, I remember one time we onboarded this big solar group and they had district managers and we were in like 10 different states generating hundreds of appointments a week, but it went bust. Well, what happened? None of the managers were passing on the leads. Everyone had their own system there right. So I think that's one of the reasons why you know it's been so good and people have been so understanding is that, listen, this is a substantial investment. It has the opportunity to add millions to your bottom line.
Speaker 3:We have several clients doing over a hundred Tens of millions. Yeah, yeah, tens of millions exactly.
Speaker 4:We have several clients doing over a hundred deals a month just from cold calling with the call center?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's what's possible. And what were they doing prior? Like what were they doing prior?
Speaker 4:to the center. Most of our companies are doing door knocking prior right, so a lot of our-.
Speaker 3:But what kind of numbers were they doing, though? I mean-? Oh, like 10 to 20 deals a month, 10 to 20.
Speaker 4:So they 10X with you essentially Pretty much yeah, that's awesome. Well, one of the nicest are now piped through the call center. Right, a lot of people don't realize on the doors there's so much money that's ready to be unlocked. So if I go knock a hundred doors and I talk with 20 people and I set three appointments, 17 people said yeah, whatever those 17 people or at least half of them call it, eight people can go inside the call center. So if I come to your door, we had a great chat for two minutes but I couldn't get your electricity bill, couldn't set up a roof inspection, but we had a bit of rapport.
Speaker 4:I'm never coming back. The new way to do things is update sales rabbit, update spotio, update rep card, send that lead to the call center and now let that call center continue the relationship and you have so much money sitting there. So what I'm saying is that not only can it generate new opportunities through age leads, through cold calling, but also monetize your existing all of your existing lead channels and you have so much gold sitting there you didn't even realize.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's amazing, god, you get to, you got me. I hit my head spinning and you didn't even realize how many moving parts are in it and there's so many like new things that come out to make it. There's like QA for AI, qa things out there. We just implemented it at AIQA.
Speaker 4:It's incredible. I mean, we're beta testing right now with AI calling. I mean this industry is shifting so rapidly. It's moving very, very fast yeah.
Speaker 3:And you said something that I want to touch upon that I think is important for the audience. I mean, some guys in the audience have calls and some don't, and whether you do or not, it comes down to I always believe I've heard somewhere that in life you get what you deserve or you get what you think you deserve right. So if you're going after small buyers, you think you deserve small buyers. When you go after big buyers, you make that mentality shift. You're going to attract those big buyers and then the point is you made me think I've been doing this shit for eight fucking years. I have one chargeback and it was with a small-ass buyer that he told me we've got to qualify him.
Speaker 3:He told me he had his own call.
Speaker 3:Sir, turn out he didn't, and then he was living and dying off of every single lead, every lead. This person didn't answer. I'm like, bro, I don't have time for this shit. It's a fucking numbers game. What's going on? And I'm like I think we're going to have to give you a refund, like I agree. So I'm like, give me tomorrow.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm like this is when it was just me and like two other people on my team. We were tiny. Now we're way bigger, but I would have had someone else do it. I had to go to dinner with my wife, do some stuff with the kids. I'm like tomorrow morning you have it completed, no-transcript. They're not living and dying off every lead. You can give them some 100 leads if, like, 90 suck, but those 10 are good. That's all they want, sure, and that's. And they'll keep buying and buying. That's you scare your. So I love that you said that, because I think, as media buyers, sometimes you get like, oh, let me take every single fucking deal I can. You got to take the right deals that are going to give you the most bang for your buck at the end of the day, and I think you've mastered that.
Speaker 4:And to touch on what you said for everyone watching this don't deviate from your core principles. Exactly so every time you know we've looked like. So don't deviate from what you offer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, stand firm. There's a book called Never Split the Difference right and he talks about that. You got to stand fucking firm, man. Don't deviate. It's not worth it, it's scary, it's hard to do that.
Speaker 4:Saying no half the time. They'll come back and agree to your terms.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 4:And if they don't, so be it on to the next.
Speaker 3:So you come you negotiate for a second, especially now where you're at, where I'm at, we've been doing so fucking long people know what the real deal they know that we're not blowing smoke and they see us, they respect us. We're doing this kind of shit and bad news travels fast, man like I said so you have.
Speaker 3:That's one thing. I'll say my hat's off to you, because I know how hard it is running call centers. How are you building call centers? I mean, I've done I probably built five or six. You've you've built fucking hundreds, man. So that's incredible, right. And people look at me like I'm a call center whiz and I know a lot about call centers, but this guy's on another whole, nother level. So if you guys need some fucking help with your call center, that's why we bring people like him on the LFG show, because we want to bring the people that know what the fuck they're doing. That can help you go from point A to point Z as fast as possible without all the headaches collapsing timeframes. Any feedback on that?
Speaker 4:No man, you covered it, you nailed it.
Speaker 3:You hit everything. I love it, appreciate you bringing me on here, brother, you're the man. You're great man.
Speaker 4:I mean we're going. You Then go to ccdocscom. That's C-C, as in call center, and docs, as in D-O-C-S, short form for doctors. We also run sales talk with roofing and solar pros. That's on Facebook. You just type that in the search bar. Join our community and let's have some fun.
Speaker 3:Let's have some fun. We got to do an Instagram live or a live one. We'll do one of those one day soon. Hit them baby. When's that? When's that Half an hour? Hit the like comment. Hit the like comment.
Speaker 1:subscribe you guys got to like comment. Subscribe man, make it happen, let's grow this shit, let's grow this shit.