HVAC Full Blast

Welcome to HVAC Full Blast, where you get industry inputs for real results. Today, we're discussing how to spark your sales engine and generate leads. Mary Carter from Trane and Steven Ross from Sandler are hanging out with us, sharing insights you won't want to miss. Let's dive into the conversation.

It's an interesting time in the economy, not just this year, but in the cycle of heating and air companies, right? I think what happens is you go through these periods where you've got a lot of small heating and air companies in the market, they tend to get gobbled up by bigger ones. Then you get a period of time with a bunch of bigger heating and air companies in the market, and then people leave those and they go start their own, and then you get a lot of smaller ones and it kind of fluctuates back and forth.

And I think some of the statistics I've heard is a lot more contractors in the marketplace these days, which means you've got people leaving the big companies and going to start on their own.

Yeah, I know. The ebb and flow of that, like it's been around forever, but the dramatic swings of those pitches, right? It's completely ramped up in a way that you're just, you sort of stand back and you're like, wow, you know, are gonna be little guys left? Then you turn over your shoulder and, yeah, there's two more and it's crazy.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think today, I mean, topic we kind of planned on was some creative marketing, self generated leads, how to go out there and find business when you don't necessarily have a huge budget to go and get it.

So that seems to fit kind of where we are in terms of the expansion contraction of large heating and air companies.

Yes, I think what we see a lot, right, is like that low hanging fruit marketing, right? You've got the traditional logos that you're gonna see in heating and air usually revolving like around a sun and a flame and a snowflake and an ice cube. Right? Like, you kind of got your four tried and true and then you've got your good puns and things that you'll see on billboards.

But, you know, so that I always kind of put that in the category of like, all right, we gotta have some low hanging fruit marketing. We gotta have some sort of, you know, but how do we get above that? And also like, why do we care? Why can't I just have a Facebook page and a phone number and keep it moving and, you know, get my referrals out there in the neighborhood and go?

Why do I have to put so much effort into creative marketing? I think that's something that I hear a lot. And I get it. Right?

You know, if if you're not a creative, then this feels like you're Mount Everest. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Some people just, they don't like marketing, they don't wanna do it, they don't wanna think about it. And so outsourcing that and paying somebody else to do it is a great option as long as you have the money. I think a few times in my career and some of the contractors that I've talked to and worked with have been at points in their careers where they didn't necessarily have the money, but in order to grow to the point where they had the money to spend on marketing, they had to do something in the interim to grow.

It's the old adage that sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. You get pretty creative. If you got to figure out a way to do it without maybe the proper resources, then sometimes that creativity yields some pretty cool results.

Definitely, yeah. So what are those kinds of results? What have you seen or any good examples that come to mind?

Yeah, I think one of the starting points is just looking at what is your company spend in marketing now? What should it be spending if you wanted to grow or grow quicker?

I think that's a good starting point. You have to know what's your baseline, where are you trying to get to?

And in my case, my business partner and I wanted to grow, but didn't have a huge marketing budget. We weren't independently wealthy. We didn't come to the business with a bunch of money to put into it. And growth is expensive. So every time you grow, you're buying more vehicles and hiring more people and building onto your warehouse and adding and building out office space. And having to figure out, all right, we're going to spend money on marketing to grow, but then also once you grow, you've to spend the money on the infrastructure to support it.

It's expensive. It's expensive. I had the benefit of traveling the country doing sales training for about a decade before I bought into a heating and air company. And so picked up some great ideas from around the country that really kind of served us pretty well.

I think there's a couple of different categories.

One of them was just thinking about traditional marketing. What are the words that we use to talk about traditional marketing? And so the two ones that I think you need to keep in mind almost always are frequency, how people are gonna see your name and your logo, how often are they gonna see it? And then reach, meaning how many people see it? And you really need both and just one without the other isn't super helpful. So for instance, if you had your logo someplace where only one person would see it, but they would see it every day, well, that's really high frequency, but your reach is real small, it's only one person.

Are you going to be able to grow your heating and air company off that? Probably not. But the flip side of the coin, I think is where we waste a lot of money as heating and air contractors. You could have reach, you could say, Hey, I'm going to run a commercial at halftime in the Super Bowl.

You're going to get in front of a whole lot of people, but they're only going to see that ad once. If they only see it once, it doesn't resonate enough, and they haven't seen it enough to really stick. If they need your service in the future, they're not going to remember, Oh, here's that company I saw in the Super Bowl.

So reach might be great, but without the frequency to support it, it's wasted money. So I think that background is very helpful when you start thinking about how I going to reach the kind of customers I want to reach? Am I going to reach enough of them through whatever I'm about to do? And am I going to reach them often enough that it sticks? So I think that was kind of the, how do you grade your marketing efforts? I think that's kind of step one.

Yeah. I think what immediately comes to mind in my head as an analogy is like when you're on a road trip and you're going down the road, you know you're eventually probably gonna stop and eat. That's usually part of, you know, a staple of any good road trip, in my belief.

And you're seeing the signs, right? You see them every single exit. And there's a couple brands out there, right? You probably see every exit, right? And you just think about the frequency of that. But then every once in a while, and the reach is literally everyone driving on the road.

Success. And eventually, you might have started on that road trip thinking, yeah, I'm gonna get a sandwich. And next thing I know, I'm having tacos.

Why did that happen?

About the marketing around me influenced that decision? Maybe nothing.

Maybe it was just my choice. Marketing, I think that's where marketing gets a bad rep, right? Because it's like how much of that paid off in the buying journey of that customer? But more on that later. This is really interesting. Frequency, reach, can't have one without the other, you gotta find the balance. Where is that in heating and air?

Yeah, I think also the other thing that I always try to do is piggyback off the manufacturers. So I figured, hey, these folks, they spend lots of money on marketing. They've got people with advanced degrees in marketing. So if they're doing something, they're doing it for a reason. And so therefore, if I can kind of mimic what they're doing, that probably at least points me in the right direction.

So it's kind of interesting. I mean, in terms of what are we gearing, I mean, what's a manufacturer gearing their products for? What are they building them for? What are they designing them for?

Who needs those products? Like where do those products really fit? What problems do those products solve? So I think that's a great starting point in terms of thinking through, okay, who am I going to go get?

And from a marketing standpoint as a contractor, who's the target market for this product?

And what do I do to get myself in front of that target market? Because they're building it for a reason, so what's that reason? They see a market, what's the market? So I think that's a good thing to keep in the back of your mind too, is who's really gonna get the biggest benefit out of this piece of equipment?

Think that at the manufacturing point, what's really interesting about that to me, as someone who's worked close to manufacturer marketing is you're absolutely right. Right? The value props are, you know, the sell sheet with the features and benefits. The reason those are on the sheet is because that is what has proven to be why we need to create the product in the first place.

Right? But it's such an easy opportunity for, know, now a representative selling the product, you know, a dealership to say, and this is also how it aligns with our values to the customer. And it kinda creates this incredible, you know, inroad to walk the walk with each other so that you're really doubling down on that message. You're building your credibility, authenticity.

And I love that. I think that's a great way to look at the products that you sell for kind of, let's just say the manufacturers goal is sustainability. Well, maybe that's not necessarily your go green initiative, but business sustainability is, Being able to stay in business and walk that walk with the manufacturer is. So now all of a sudden you're taking maybe a marketing buzzword, but it becomes part of your values.

So that you can stay in business. Think that's a great point.

Yeah, I think for me, here's where it became really relevant. I went to go work for a pretty small heating and air company. We had about fifteen employees, and this is two thousand and seven.

And my wife had a job, she was a school teacher, we had two kids, I had a job. I was making okay money as a sales guy for a small heating and air company, but I wasn't making great money. And my wife comes home one day and says, Hey, I'm going to quit my job, I'm going to be a stay at home mom. And so in my head, I'm like, Okay, so our income just dropped and our expenses just went up. So the math used to work and the math isn't mathing anymore.

Oh, yeah.

Quote our faith in the generation of words.

Yes.

So I go sit down with the owner and I'm like, Hey, I got a cell board next year. He's like, Yeah, you do.

And I said, So I think you need to spend more on marketing. And he's like, Well, I'll tell you what, Steven, why don't you go home tonight, think about it, and tomorrow bring your checkbook and whatever you write the check for, we will spend one hundred percent of that on marketing.

Opposing goals, man, right?

Yeah. Well, I think when you own a heating and air company, you're probably spending every penny you've got on marketing. I mean, there's not a lot of extra cash floating around in a small business. So his point was basically if I had the more money to spend on marketing, would have already been spending it. So it was kind of on me to generate some more leads, get creative, figure out how to grow my little niche of incoming leads. Because if I was waiting on them to do it, it was gonna take a long time, longer than the nine months, it was gonna take that kid to pop out. So that was kind of my first, Oh crap, I better learn something about generating my own leads and learn something about marketing.

I was pretty fortunate. I had a pretty good sales coach who had come from outside heating and air. He wasn't used to this idea of, Hey, we're going to send out a bunch of direct mail pieces and see how many leads come in. He's like, No, no, you got to go find it.

He helped me think through this concept of, Okay, what are you selling? Who gets the greatest value out of that? And how do you find more of those people? And then some of it's just dumb luck. It's just going around and talking to your existing customers and figuring out what did you like about what you bought? Why did you buy it?

What was that driver? And sometimes if you're a really good salesperson, maybe you figure that out on the front end. I wasn't really good back in two thousand and seven, so a lot of times I was figuring it out on the back end.

It's a little bit of a journey, a process, but hopefully we can maybe share some ideas today and help people jumpstart their marketing or self generated leads.

Yeah, because maybe the direct mailers. Right? I get them all the time. I see them.

At one point, I was, you know, like like, comparing them against one another and trying to see what they were. But now, I mean, it's really not uncommon in one of those home improvement direct mailer envelopes for you to see like three roofers and six GCs and two heating and air guys and, you know, some some good quality steaks from a foreign land. Like, that is kind of like the package that I get in my area a lot. So the direct mailer, kind of like the basic marketing, is that effective?

Does it work?

Yeah, great question. So two things about that. One is I'm a big believer in direct mail for a lot of reasons, but the caveat is frequency and reach. So let me give you some examples. Let's say you send out one thousand postcards, and at zero seven zero dollars a pop, that's roughly seven hundred dollars So we're going to send out seven hundred dollars worth of postcards, we're going to see what kind of response rate we get. Well, you're going to get about a one percent response rate off direct mail.

And so out of a thousand, that's like ten calls.

So in theory, that's pretty decent. You spent seven hundred dollars you got ten calls, so roughly seventy dollars a piece.

That's not bad. That's a that's a pretty decent ROI. Now what makes that work or not work? Well, the first time you send out direct mailers, you may not get a one percent response rate because they've only seen your postcard one time. Only seen your logo once. So your reach was good, but your frequency, you're starting at one.

So with direct mail, you've got to commit to it for probably at least a year. And in that year, that homeowner's got to get your postcard four to six times. And so it's one of those things, it's almost like farming. You got to plant those seeds and then you got to wait for that harvest to come in.

Occasionally you get lucky, you'll send someone a postcard, they pull it out of the mailbox and their air conditioner breaks that day. But a lot of times it's kind of that repeat process there. The other thing that was really interesting for me to see was you have response marketing where we're going to put our phone number or a landing page in something, we want people to call, we want people to click. And so you can see how many people call and how many people click. The other piece over here is branding.

And so the branding, nobody's calling anything or clicking anything, but branding affects the response rate over here. So one of the things that was interesting for me to see was if we did a direct mail campaign and we had one going for a long time at one of the companies I was at, but then we added in billboards on top of it. Well, the billboards, we didn't put a phone number because nobody's going to call off the billboard. I mean, see your name.

Anything they're gonna say, Hey Google, and they'll let Google do it. But that's just pure branding is a billboard. But what we would see is if we had billboards going and our direct mail campaign going, we might see as much as a two percent response rate off of our direct mail campaign because people are seeing our billboards on a regular basis. So I think it's interesting to look at what's the relationship between that branding that you're doing.

And we always went with the idea that like, hey, we had a pretty good brand. We had four point nine stars on Google and we had several thousand reviews, but also from a branding standpoint to partner with a national manufacturing brand, that helps. So that when they get our postcard in the mail, they're like, Oh yeah, that company, they were stealing some brand recognition from the manufacturer, transferring that to our brand. And then when that postcard shows up, we're using that to get our response rate up.

I think those are the basic strategies and I think direct mail is very good at it, but two things. One is it's really helpful if you've got a branding campaign going at the same time. Then two, you got to commit to it for long enough to really see those results. What I would usually do is group up zip codes into groups of three. The first group would get a mailer in January, the second group would get one in February, the third one in March, and then back to group one in April. That way I would hit all those zip codes four times in a year and spread out my marketing budget.

But it really is the branding impacts it, the manufacturer brand that you're partnering with, impacts it, And then the frequency that that homeowner gets that postcard or sees your other ads, that impacts it. But direct mail is strong. It's very strong.

I think that's great. So frequency, reach, and then synergies, right? How I use what I got going on with the manufacturer to really level up those first two? I think that's really interesting. And I can confirm your math is mathing on your direct mail example. Okay. Yeah.

Really interesting. Okay. So direct mail, feeling good about that. But let's be honest, is that creative marketing?

You could argue that maybe that's one of those traditional marketing channels. Right? You know, now what you put on it and your branding and your brand voice, maybe that's your creative piece, but, you know, what what does creative marketing mean to you? How how do I go from a traditional marketing campaign to now something a little more creative?

Yeah. One of the and some of this is just luck and some of this is some some things that I that other dealers taught me. But one of the things that I kinda stumbled into was we had a local YMCA association in the city where I lived, and they had a couple of different locations.

And so somebody hits me up and they're like, Hey, will you sponsor my kid's soccer team? And it's one hundred dollars And so part of me is like, If you just sponsor one kid's soccer team for one season, it's absolutely wasted money because there's no frequency and there's no reach. So the one hundred dollars is great maybe from a community participation standpoint, like, Yay, we did something. But from a advertising standpoint, useless, absolutely useless.

I went and sat down with the manager at the YMCA that was over all of those locations and just brainstormed a little bit. I said, Okay, so it's one hundred bucks to sponsor a team? And she said, Yes. And how many teams do you have?

And so we talked through that, and that's per location, and how many locations do you have?

And then how many sports do you have? And so we did the math. So one hundred bucks a team, how many teams per location, how many locations in the city and how many sports are there? And I just kind of back the napkin said, that sounds about like thirty six thousand dollars to me total is what you're trying to raise through these sponsorships.

And the lady said, Yeah, that's about right. That's our budget item. And I was like, What if I just take them all? And so they split it up to where they just billed me three thousand dollars a month and I had my logo on every team, every jersey, every sport at every location.

We had them all. I did it for a couple of reasons. One is my competitors kept trying to piggyback on my marketing, and so I blocked them out. But two, if you think about who's our target market, well, parents with kids.

Think about how many times that Jersey is gonna get washed and how many times that parent is gonna see that logo, probably the mom.

So is gonna be, there's your frequency and there's your reach. And so then I would call that the creative marketing. And then you take your direct mail and you say, okay, well, let's figure out we can pull lists of homes that are eight to ten years old and older and household income and target people with kids. And we go, well, not every kid is going to play sports, but hey, we got a pretty good inroad there.

And so again, that was a way to say, here's how we're going to brand it really creatively. And then the response, now we've to go target those people and try to hit bombard those houses with postcards. But it worked really well. I mean, it was a really good campaign for us and did it for years, partially because it didn't want to give up those spots to competitors.

I'm imagining this banana bowl league of young kids with all HVAC teams.

I mean it was good. It was good.

The frosty freeze outs, know, like things like that.

That's really interesting. And like you said, you're getting all, you're getting your points of frequency and reach right away for almost, you know, as soon as you can print a t shirt, it's there.

That's pretty remarkable.

I love the idea too of just really doubling down with the parents. I got to interact with that all the time, right? Like that's really unique. And also, you do get the feel good of the community impact because I think what that's sometimes where marketing gets maybe a little distorted too.

People will ask, people will absolutely ask you to sponsor and fundraise and can you make the trophy? Can you do the thing? And it's human nature to want to help out and want to do it. But you have to be able to also zoom out and say, is this good for my business?

And one hundred bucks here and there adds up to three thousand a month. And boom, there's your marketing budget that now you're doing on feel good activities. Not really suggesting that people do it that egregiously, but it can happen.

Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing, again, this is maybe my sales coach helping me as a young sales guy figure out how can I go find my own business? It's very difficult if you said to me, Hey, Steven, and I've been in the heating and air business for a long time now. So if you said to me, Hey, which one of your friends is going to buy an air conditioner next? I have no idea because none of us know, right? And so it's hard to go get referrals or find those people because we don't know who they are until something happens typically.

But thinking through what are the manufacturers' designs? Who's going to benefit the most from that? That was my sales coach. So I'll give you an example of something that we thought through and kind of diagrammed on a dry erase board and that actually came to life. So humidity control, I live in the Southeast United States, so humidity control is almost as important as temperature control in a home.

And so obviously some heating and air systems do a better job than others. And those systems tend to be more expensive.

So who's gonna benefit from those the most?

And what was interesting to dig into that was there were a couple of categories of people, like the first one being people with bad allergies.

And I had a customer that was an allergist herself. So she was a doctor and she treated people for allergies. And so we ended up getting into a pretty long conversation about her home and some of the things that were going on in her home. And then that led to her referring people to me.

And this was essentially the crux of the issue was that the number one allergen in the Southeast United States is dust mites. That's what causes people to really have to go get allergy shots, like severe allergies. So they're getting treatment, not just a little bit of Claritin here and there, but treatment. And so dust mites, they don't drink water, they absorb water through their skin.

And so they're microscopic little things and they feed on your skin and they're in your pillowcase and you can't see them, it's kind of gross when you pull up a picture of them. But in a home, if the home's relative humidity is over fifty five percent, man, that is awesome for dust mites. They love it. They can absorb all the water they need.

They thrive, they multiply.

And so people with those allergies in high humid homes, man, they're coming in for drugs all the time. They need Claritin, they need Benadryl, whatever it is, and usually shots and whatever else. If on the other hand, could keep their humidity, which is hard to do in the Southeast, but if you could keep their relative humidity down at say forty five percent, boy, those dust mites are going to shrink up and be unable to reproduce and so on. So those allergies start to go away.

And so all of a sudden there's a huge medical benefit for somebody being able to control humidity, especially when they sleep. So if you think about, we sell, we think about temperature when it's hot outside, but what happens in, say, South Carolina when it's seventy five degrees at night, but the humidity's like ninety five? Because it was ninety five degrees during the day, your air conditioner's not running a whole lot. Those variable speed compressors, the variable speed fans that have that real low setting to pull humidity out, those really benefit people with bad allergies.

Starting to think about that, then all of a sudden that became a, well, all right, so now I found one allergist who would refer people to me. Could I find a few more? And a lot of times those people maybe didn't need a new heating system, or maybe they just needed maintenance done, or they needed to learn the importance of changing their filters. But if we sold a maintenance agreement to every referral we got, that built up over time.

And some of those people bought dehumidifiers or they had their crawl space encapsulated, or they went ahead and bought a new heating and air system because their old one was pretty old and it would need to be replaced anyway. And they're like, yeah, let's go ahead and do it and get the advantage of that humidity control. So over a two or three year period where I was really going after generating my own leads, I did several hundred thousand dollars of fairly high end equipment through leads that came through allergists, believe it or not. Wow.

And so that was one of my better ways to self generate leads.

Yeah. I think what's so captive about that approach is oftentimes when we're on a sales call, we're trying to figure out what is the problem I can solve here. What's my And that's the thing that I'm gonna solve with my solution.

Starting with the allergist, you know what the problem is. You know where the pain is. It's I need some sort of relief from, you know, insert allergen here. Right?

And you can already, you know, really have a leg up on why your product is gonna solve that issue because you already know going in what the issue is. Whenever some of these other traditional marketing campaigns, these leads, we classify them with temperature, Just so happens we do that in any way with the industry. But a cold lead or a lead that I don't have a lot to go on, gotta do so much more fact finding upfront to figure out what I'm gonna solve here. And this approach allows you to sort of check that box number one and go in, hitting the ground running with a good proposal.

Now caveat for that would be don't ignore the fact finding. Right? You might find out some other things along the Yeah.

Yep.

Love that though.

Related to humidity, I mean, the the two other ones two or three other ones that really paid off for me.

One was wood obviously is very impacted by humidity. And so if you get real specific, what does that mean? Well, hardwood floor installers, they know the value of controlling humidity and what out of whack humidity can do to a floor. So that was good.

But even outside of that, the other group that, I have an aunt who has a PhD in music and was a professor of music for a long time, and she has a very nice baby grand piano in her house.

Wow.

And she has to control the humidity in her house for that baby grand piano. And that baby grand piano is worth multiple times what a heating and air system's worth, right? And so if she's one, if you've got a customer that has the money to afford a baby grand piano, that's an indicator maybe they can afford a pretty good heating and air system, but two, then they've got the need for it. And so marketing to piano companies and say, again, why would a piano company refer me?

Well, a lot of times it would be a customer who says, Hey, this piano needs to be tuned a lot. There's something wrong with the piano, you've got to come back and tune it over and over again, maybe an indication. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the piano, but the humidity in the house is real high. Or it could just be a customer concern.

Hey, if I take this piano home, is it going to warp? Is it going to crack? Is something bad going to happen?

It gives that piano company the opportunity to say, Well, I don't know, but here's Steven's card. He'll come out and test the relative humidity in your house and let you know, and you can monitor it and so on. And so that leads into smart thermostats and the ability to record that data and track it and see whether it's an issue or not. And then if it is an issue, solve the issue for them.

So those were great leads too. And so piano companies ended up being one where if you're driving down the road, you're on your way to a sales call anyway, and you pass by a piano company, pull over, pull out some cards, go talk to the general manager. And frequency and reach, I gotta go see him multiple times, that general manager. I gotta check-in, I gotta come to their sales meeting and so on.

I gotta educate their sales team. I can't just drop off a card once and expect leads, but great lead source. And then one that's very related to that would be antiques and art dealers.

So oil paintings, very sensitive to humidity, and then antiques that made out of wood, also very sensitive. So if you think of what people spend on oil paintings and antiques, spending a couple thousand dollars more on an air conditioner, if they had to buy one anyway to get one that controls humidity is a no brainer for that customer. So those were some really good ways where, again, I just had to put it in my calendar, stop in and see these companies, drop off some cards, educate them on humidity control in a home a little bit, and then prompt them for referrals. Like, Hey, do you know anybody that could use us? Is there anybody that you've had trouble with in the past that we could help? So those were really good ones for me.

Wow. Yeah. So we've got an allergist, a music shop, an art dealer. These are immediate places you can go today.

And really kind of start, you know, being creative and just putting yourself out there in a different way because, you know, yeah, all super relevant laundries that people face when they invest in those kinds of pieces. And why wouldn't they also, you know, choose what they could in terms of top of the line performance when it comes to controlling the environment? Yeah, I think what I love about kind of what you're saying here is you got to think of the HVAC system as more than just the stat on the wall, right? The compressor outside, the indoor unit, whatever have you, it's doing a lot of different functions. It's taking a lot of different inputs in from the thermostat and from the environment, but you really got to start thinking about, what does this actually do for people's lives in their homes?

And I think one step beyond comfort, like some of these other benefits that we're talking about, really challenging that mindset of I'm just slinging boxes to solutions is going to be the bridge to when marketing can go traditional to creative.

Yeah. Speaking of thermostats on the wall, I made a mistake a few years ago and I sold a communicating system to a couple who, the husband and wife were both blind.

It was a mistake because it was a touchscreen thermostat and they couldn't read it. Their old thermostat had an up button and a down button, and so they maybe couldn't read the display, but if it was too hot, they could press the down button, too cold, press the up button. The communicating system was great, but then all of a sudden now they didn't know how to adjust it and so on.

For me, and this is a few years ago, so we've got some technology that makes that real easy today, but being able to take a thermostat and sync that to, say, one of the home speakers where you could just say, Hey, turn the temperature up, turn the temperature down, was enormous. And so we ended up having to figure some of that out on the front end and made that very accessible for that husband and wife. And then here's where it mattered. They were in a group of families where at least one partner had impaired vision.

And so we picked up probably fifteen to twenty maintenance agreements out of that group and several thermostat installs and five or six installs of heating their equipment. So it, again, just kind of from a reach standpoint, not a large group of people, but we were the only contractor that ever showed up to one of their meetings, kind of their association meetings and did a presentation on how to control your thermostat verbally. And so picked up a bunch of people all at one shot. So that ended up, again, a little bit of dumb luck there, but opened my eyes, pun intended, to some of the possibilities of where our technology could really benefit some people.

Wow, that's so interesting. The accessibility piece, could really expand that into lots of different kinds of people groups, right? With just the visual diagnostics. Now you can help somebody out who's maybe hearing impaired. They're not gonna hear that compressor turn into a wood chipper out there. Maybe they get an alert and they can see what's going on with their system. Yeah, lots of different ways you could spin and hypothesize how that could help.

But again, kind of coming from the manufacturer angle of that, like that's why these solutions are so important to us. And I know that it can sound like we're pushing a different angle every day and their initiatives don't seem to line up with ours, but they really do. At the end of the day, keeping the customer at the heart of what we do is about making solutions that are real.

No one can get a little bit more teaser about their job than me, but I really do believe that when you're looking at products and solutions and putting finished goods out there in the market, it's about giving people what they need, what they want, what makes the world better. And that's a good thing. That's a really good thing.

I think, yeah, the idea of helping people, if you really do help somebody, they'll tell friends and neighbors. I think something like seventy five, eighty percent of people will tell friends and neighbors if they feel like you really helped them out. And so that word-of-mouth is huge, especially small companies or in my case, just individual sales guy trying to beat the bushes and dig up some leads.

I had another funny one that again, kind of stumbled into this, I had a customer that we had to cut some sheetrock at his house and make some modifications.

He was an older gentleman and he said, Hey, I don't want to be here when this is all going on. He goes, Here's my key to my house. Let yourselves in when the installers are here. Clean up after yourself. He goes, But when you're done, if you could take the key over to the maid company, I'm going to have the maid come in and clean up. He's like, I'm just going to the beach for a week. I don't want to be here while this is all going on.

Wow, I love this lifestyle. This is great.

I know, I know.

The job went well, we did the work, it was great. So I take the key over to the maid company and just went in and sat down with the lady that owned the maid company. And I just had some general questions like, very small office. Her entire office was the size of my dining room.

And so I just said, Hey, kind of curious how many maids do you have? And she said, We have eighteen maids. And I was like, don't know, that sounds like a lot. If I had eighteen service techs, I'd have a decent sized heating and air company.

So eighteen maids sounds like a lot. I said, I'm kind of curious, how many customers do you have that require eighteen maids? And she says, Well, we have six thousand customers.

Wow.

And so from a reach standpoint, I'm like, Holy crap. I want those customers. That's six thousand of them, and they all, to your point, what kind of lifestyle If you've got a maid coming to your house, you probably can afford a maintenance agreement, and if the time comes, a decent heating and air system. So just had a conversation with her.

One of her biggest struggles, as for most business owners, the thing that would maybe cost her the most money was callbacks. We talked through that a little bit. As somebody goes out, they clean a house and then a day or two later, the house is dusty again, they may get a callback.

It may or may not have been the maid's issue, it may be that the house would look great, but the heating and air turned on and there's a hole in the ductwork in the attic. The minute the air came on, it sucks dust in from the attic and blows throughout the house. So talking about with her, how do we lower her callbacks?

Is there something I could do to lessen the amount of callbacks that she has? And so what they agreed to do was use me as a get out of jail free card. If the maid had a callback, they would say, Hey, can Steven come out and inspect your ductwork?

So over six thousand customers, we had a few ductwork inspections every month that came out of that.

And so again, the goal was to sell the maintenance agreement. Could we get out there and sell a maintenance agreement?

But also, did the ductwork need to be repaired? Did they need a five inch pleated filter instead of, I mean, were some things we could do.

And then as a result of that, after four, five, six, seven in a month, almost guaranteed one of them would need a new heating and air system. So we would do the maintenance, we'd do an inspection and we'd say, Hey, this one's on its last legs. Do you want to go ahead and do something now?

That made company probably gave me somewhere between ten and fifteen installs a year and then the maintenance agreements and the repair work and the duct modification, all that on top of that.

That was, again, just dumb luck, but establishing that, that was a made franchise of a national company, establishing that relationship. And the benefit to the made company was we were helping them reduce their callbacks.

Did you guys have a financial agreement at all? Were you guys using just Believe it or not, we didn't.

We said, Hey, we'll do the duct inspection for free. But that was on me as the sales guy. I didn't have the money to send a service tech, so my butt was going and doing it. But I was able to fit that in between sales calls.

And like I said, every now and then we'd get a duct replacement out of it or a filter install or a service agreement or something, but it was worth it in the long run. Ten or fifteen installs a year's one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of revenue coming out of a referral source. Was it worth it to do some duct, five or six duct inspections a month? Sure. For me, at a small company where I didn't have a lot of leads coming in to run, it was gold.

Yeah. I mean, and even when you're doing a regular old proposal anyway, you're doing an inspection and putting together a quote. What's any different than this? Right? Wow. That's really neat. And I love the relationship builders there.

You you're a fountain of creative marketing solutions. This is this is cool. I feel like, you know, again, maybe not necessarily the traditional path that you would think of of how am I gonna market my services in heating and air, but all different unique ways in which a heating and air solution absolutely has an applicable path to solve problems for homeowners. We love that.

Yeah.

The upside of that story is I started off by telling you that what prompted me to do it was my wife quit her job and we went from having two kids to three kids.

Four years later, we had five kids.

So not only was she a stay at home mom, but our expenses kept going up. But by generating my own leads while working at a pretty small heating and air company, I tripled my sales over a four year period.

So I was able to afford those five kids. So the joke to some extent was that my wife was the best sales manager that company had ever had because she kept the pressure on to make sure I kept selling, kept generating leads.

I love that.

And the marketing department didn't necessarily sweat all that work to bring in those leads, right? Your heating and air company that you're employed by is still doing marketing. They're still building brand, but then as your boat rises, theirs does too, right? So really good, again, just like another little synergy, another little symbiotic relationship of, we're both benefiting from this in a major way. We love that.

Yeah, was pretty good.

Some of the other ones that we've mentioned in our other podcasts was doing lunch and learns for CPAs around tax credits that paid off, that yielded some good results. That one's certainly applicable this year, like get out there and if you've got a CPA and he works in an office with other CPAs, bring lunch and go talk to them, talk about heating and air systems. I got several really good referrals from CPAs generated through lunch and learns.

So that was a good one as well.

Amazing. Well, it's always fun to kind of, for me to tap into just the creative ways that we can drum up business, keep it interesting, tie to our values. I love hearing all the inspiration and I'm hopeful that maybe as a result of the seeds that you planted here, that either a few folks will take you up on those suggestions or maybe find some new ones. And it'd be amazing to hear back on any that really stuck or were just game changers for salespeople. I'd love to know what that looks like from a self generating perspective.

Yeah. If anybody's listening to our podcast and they wanna send in some creative ones, we'd love to keep that dialogue going because it's certainly a great way. I mean, your closing ratio on self generated leads is like eighty percent, ninety percent. And so just if you can get a steady stream of those coming in, man, it makes all the numbers look good. Every other number in the company looks good.

Yeah, well, we love that and manufacturers love that too, right?

Well, that's great. Well, thank you for sharing all your knowledge and for giving us some inspiration here.

Any final thoughts here on marketing?

Frequency and reach, and who needs it, and how do you find more of them?

The heating and air company that I own with my partner, we grew twenty percent, twenty five percent a year for about seven years in a row, and we never spent more than about three percent, three point five percent on marketing. But we pushed this through our organization. We were training technicians to keep their eyes out for baby grand pianos, and we were getting out to chamber of commerce and talking to people.

There's moms groups called mothers of preschoolers and mops. And so go take some juice and crackers, do a mops group and talk about the different types of air filters and humidity control. I mean, just anytime you've got a chance to talk about what you do for a living, not as a sales pitch, but as education. Hey, here's what we do that helps people. Boy, that's got some legs. So I think you just gotta carve out time and then make it happen.

Yeah, frequency, reach, then little synergies here and there, right? I love it.

Absolutely.

Well, good stuff, Steven. Thanks always for the time, and we'll be back soon.

Back soon.