May 19, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode of Local Marketing Secrets, Danny Leibrandt is joined by Aaron Weiche, co-founder of Leadferno, a groundbreaking SaaS platform that boosts conversions for local businesses through streamlined text-based messaging. Aaron's impressive career includes leading GatherUp to an Inc. 5000 recognition before successfully exiting, and he's renowned for his insightful talks at major industry conferences like MozCon Local and SMX Advanced.
Tune in as Danny and Aaron dive deep into the essentials of conversion optimization. Discover common pitfalls businesses encounter, practical steps to maximize website leads, and why "speed to lead" can dramatically impact your business growth. Aaron shares eye-opening data from real-world studies, including the shocking average response time from businesses and the incredible potential of optimizing text messaging to enhance customer engagement.
If you're looking to significantly improve how your business converts clicks into customers, this episode with Aaron Weiche is a must-listen.
Aaron Weiche, Founder of Leadferno:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronweiche/
Twitter: https://x.com/AaronWeiche
Leadferno: https://leadferno.com/
Danny Leibrandt, Founder of Pest Control SEO:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/DannyLeibrandt
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dannyleibrandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DannyLeibrandt
Website: https://dannyleibrandt.com
Pest Control SEO: https://pestcontrolseo.com/
Local Marketing Secrets Platforms:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LocalMarketingSecrets
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TCL0LhZbsJS6mzanqnnT1?si=224075c9fbda42f5
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/local-marketing-secrets/id1741176782
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0bb5254-5d6c-4940-8211-085157cc1239/local-marketing-secrets
Podcast Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Conversion Optimization
02:58 Understanding the Conversion Funnel
06:02 Common Mistakes in Conversion Optimization
08:55 The Importance of Speed to Lead
15:11 Optimizing Contact Forms
17:56 Trends in Communication Preferences
25:28 The Shift to Text Messaging in Communication
30:39 Creating a Conversion Platform: The Vision Behind Leadferno
35:16 Understanding Leadferno: Features and Differentiation
40:20 The Role of Automation and AI in Customer Communication
#aaronweiche #leadferno #conversionoptimization #cro #conversionrateoptimization #conversionrate #website #localmarketing #localbusiness #homeservicebusiness #homeservicemarketing #homeserviceadvertising #localseo #localadvertising #seo #marketing #podcast #business
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey there and welcome back to Local Marketing Secrets.
I'm your host Danny Lebrandt andtoday I'm with Aaron Wiki.
If you don't right now, Aaron, he is the Co founder of lead
Ferno, a SAS platform that's changing the game for local
businesses by turning more visitors into paying customers
through text based messaging. Aaron previously LED gather up
growing the company so quickly it landed on the Inc 5000 list
(00:21):
before successfully exiting through acquisition.
He's spoken at over 100 major industry conferences, including
MAZ Con Local, SMX Advanced and Local You Advanced.
And he's a trusted thought leader known for his practical
results focused approach to conversion optimization.
So if you're serious about converting clicks into
customers, Aaron is exactly the guy you want to listen to.
(00:42):
Now, without further ado, thanksfor coming on the show, Aaron.
Danny, great to be here. Thanks for having me on today.
For sure, man. So I want to understand how you
think about conversions. You've been in digital marketing
for over 25 years now, which is insane.
You certainly don't look it. But I, I want to know how do you
think about conversion optimization?
Maybe maybe someone doesn't evenknow what conversion
(01:04):
optimization is and converting leads.
Can you talk about that process and what what exactly that is?
Yeah #1 Danny, I think you're definitely right.
Conversion is an unknown to manyuntil they kind of move further
along the lines of their knowledge, their experience,
whatever else because it in the beginning in digital marketing,
(01:26):
we're just all about acquisition.
We're just trying to get eyeballs as much traffic.
Where can we be seeing, get our post seen, get our ad seen, all
of those different things. And conversion for a lot of
people really doesn't come up assomething to look into until
they're like, wow, I feel like I'm spending a good amount of
money, I'm getting a good amountof traffic, but I'm I'm still
(01:46):
not loving or I feel like there's more juice to to squeeze
out of this into the leads. So, you know, from a really
broad base conversion is and canbe at multiple different phases
in the funnel, but it's really turn.
How do you turn a visitor on your website?
Someone who's clicked an ad, click the post, click the link,
whatever else they've moved to your website.
(02:07):
And then how do you turn them into a lead where instead of
being just a lurker, A visitor, they raise their hand and say,
hey, here's my name, here's my phone number, here's my e-mail
so you can contact me. Here's what my problem is.
My question is my interest is and let me know if you can solve
it or let's have a conversation in in some way shape form or
(02:28):
another. So that's really the the way to
look at conversion. When I talk about different
steps in the funnel, you have the conversion of does your ad
convert right? Your ad is being seen 100 or
thousands of times. Is it actually getting clicked
on to move them to the next step?
Then when they get that next step is just as I outlined, are
you converting them on your website?
(02:48):
And then once you get them into your sales process, are you
converting them from being a lead to actually booked business
or whatever your next step mightlook like?
So once you really start gettingdeep into conversion, then you
realize like, oh, it's just not one little element of the
funnel. There's multiple steps in the
funnel. And then of course, within each
of those, you know, conversion rate optimization, we're looking
(03:09):
at how do we get better at each of those in comparison to, you
know, sports. How do we have a higher batting
average? How do we have a higher shooting
percentage in basketball, whatever that might be?
And again, just to be super basic, are we squeezing enough
juice out of out of the orange, out of the opportunity when it's
presented to us? Yeah, definitely.
(03:31):
Yeah, it is a little confusing and it might even feel
overwhelming for some people because conversions, I mean, you
could technically apply that to any lead generation platforms
that could be Yelp, Google Business Profile House,
Thumbtack, there are like a million of these different
platforms. So at least that maybe we'll get
into that later in the show. But we'll start with the website
because that's that's where youryour tool tool really shines.
(03:52):
And we'll get into that a littlebit.
But First off, just kind of generally from what you've seen,
what do you think are some of the big biggest mistakes in
conversion optimization for someones website that maybe they
don't have a contact form or they don't have a Click to call
button? Like what are most people not
doing? Yeah.
So to take this, I guess, reallybroad based and tap into
(04:13):
probably at the highest level ofmy vision in creating lead Ferno
is I think our world has evolvedto the the, you know, golden
rule of business is how easy areyou to work with?
And this is where I think a lot of people get conversion wrong
in a number of different ways. So one, it could be lack of ways
to convert so they can only callyou or only fill out a form or
(04:38):
only click your e-mail address to reach out to you.
When really at the end of the day, you should be providing any
popular channel that they can reach out to you and letting
them choose what's easiest for them and that's how they're
going to move forward. I also see people, they put a
form up and then they want to ask 18 questions on the form.
So they're super excited to likeget a lot of information and
(05:01):
intensely qualify that lead and that can be great.
The ones that get spit out the other side you have a lot of
information on and it's a very high qualified lead, but you're
leaving all kinds of others on the table that saw that 18 field
form and it was like, no way, I'm not taking 5 minutes to fill
this out. Why do they need all this info?
I just have one question that I want to ask and that's too much.
(05:23):
And they're not letting their sales process doing any of the
work to convert them. Instead of job number one, just
get them to identify themselves so that now you can have a
conversation, answer questions, whatever that might be.
So that's another pitfall. Then you start getting things
like, you know, really weak calls to action when your only
call to action is just a contactor a contact us on your
(05:45):
navigation. You're really not speaking
anything to like, what is our process like?
How fast are you going to hear from somebody?
What can you expect as a next step?
Do you get a free estimate or a free consultation, right?
All of these things are unknownsand all that just adds up to
friction, right? Too many fields, that's
friction. Not offering the the easiest way
that I want to communicate as a prospect, that's friction.
(06:09):
Not understanding your process, that's friction.
And friction is what kills conversions.
That what that's what makes somebody say skip it, I'll deal
with it later. Or they jump to the next search
result, the next person in the local pack.
And that person has some of those things and they're like,
well, this is a lot easier. And that's who they start
talking to and working with. Yeah, definitely.
(06:30):
No, I've I've noticed not just in digital marketing, but an
overall trend just in the past 5-10 years or so is ease and
convenience. Like when you look at a giant
like Amazon, Amazon has grown sobig because it's so easy and
they almost, I forget the word, but basically they took that
(06:51):
model of one Click to purchase. They make it as easy as
possible. So I think that's the same way
we need to be thinking about ourlocal businesses, right?
Yeah, well, let's face it, you know, we've moved into a, a
stage of things where options are abundant, right?
It's very rarely back in the day, it's like, OK, I need to
get my piano moved or tuned. And there might be one person in
(07:14):
a geographic area that's in the phone book to look at.
So competition very low. Well, now I'm going to type in
a, a web search and I can find so many of them from all around
me. So I, I have options.
I have choices. So when you look at that, we've
really evolved into a service based economy and who's going to
provide me the best service or once I start to breakdown what's
(07:36):
most important to me, the most trusted service, the fastest
service, the cheapest service, the most valuable service,
whatever any of those things canbe.
And it's important to embody those.
And I completely agree with you.I've cited Amazon as a really
easy thing for people to see andunderstand because 99% of us,
probably 99.9% of us are consumers of Amazon.
(07:58):
So we've experienced that ourselves in what are those
benefits? You know, early on they were one
of the first sites to bring reviews and social proof where
they're like, OK, if we want people to buy things online when
they can't see them and touch them and feel them, we need to
use reviews to build that trust so that they put it into their
shopping cart and go from there.And then obviously we all, you
(08:20):
know, you buy enough things online, you hit the fatigue of
filling out bill to ship to all of those different things.
So they're like, yeah, we'll just store this and we'll just
make it, you know, even a one click just buy item now and
you're you're out the door. They realized having to add in
shipping or find out shipping inthe process was a pain.
So they just said, great, we're going to create Prime.
(08:42):
Most of our products are going to qualify for Prime.
And so you get free shipping within just a matter of days.
And now you don't have to to think about shipping or the
price changing once it's in the cart and you add where you're
located. So all of those things, guess
what Amazon did? They made it easier to work with
them and definitely part of whatcatapulted them into the
stratosphere that they're in now.
(09:04):
Yeah. And now no one thinks about
using any other delivery service.
So I think in that way, local businesses almost have to become
like the Amazon of their area. You have to become like way
easier to work with than everyone else.
It is like by far easier to workwith you.
And even though the market is very competitive, like I told
you, I work with pest control companies.
You know, there's tons of pest control companies opening up
(09:26):
everywhere. It's usually very competitive,
but yet most companies still aren't doing a great job,
especially with something like conversions and actually
something I wanted to touch on, which is just like insane.
So I've been watching tons of podcasts you've been on.
And one stat that I've heard bring up, you heard bring heard
you bring up several times is that I think you did a study of
(09:47):
like 220 people or something. And I believe the average time
for people to respond was 17 hours.
Is that right? Yeah, yeah.
So last year we did a study of contact forms, right, Since that
is as we kind of hinted at, thatis often the, you know, 1 lead
magnet that a majority of small business sites have.
(10:08):
So we did a research projects where we filled out 225 contact
forms across mainly home services, but also professional
services. So like Cpas and things like
that and then medical to like chiropractors, dentists and
things like that. And we filled out these forms
completely as like a hot buyer, right?
(10:28):
The questions that we were asking when we filled out this
contact form were like, hey, I have a 10 by 18 patio in my
backyard that I want stone pavers.
I'd like it to be done this month and be ready for summer.
You know what, what's the next step?
So all very buying questions, not just a like, hi, how are
you? Or I might be interested.
We were like giving all kinds ofbuying signals and yeah, the the
(10:52):
overall when we tracked what went on in a number of different
ways, number one was that you know what everyone calls speed
to lead. And the speed to lead in today's
digital age felt like a tortoisebecause it came in at 17 hours,
and 49 minutes was the average across those 225.
That is insane. And yeah, talk to me about why
(11:14):
speed to lead is so important. I remember you've given some
data on it and I think maybe like after 5 minutes it drops
off or after an hour like talk to me more about speed to lead.
Yeah, I mean, really, the basic concept is just to think of
anything. Think of yourself.
How do you feel when you're at the grocery store waiting in
line to check out and it's 3 deep, 5 deep, whatever else, and
(11:34):
you'll see people behind you that maybe have two items
actually walk and put their stuff back on the shelf and
leave because the waiting is toolong.
So apply that now to the same thing.
When people, they have a pressing need, they care about
something, they want a solution and they've done it enough to go
type in a search, find a provider, fill out your form, do
whatever else. And the longer you make them
(11:55):
wait, a few different things happen based on your process and
if they got any type of confirmation that you received
it and when you're going to reply.
They start wondering after a little while like why haven't
they replied to me? Did they even get it?
Was the form broken? Did I put in my info wrong?
OK, so now maybe I'm going to gofind another competitor and fill
(12:16):
those out. So the more time you leave in
there, the more time you leave them to wonder or to lack
confidence in this process, evenmaking it to the to the next
step. And they start looking for
someone else who might give instant or very quick
gratification that we got it, wereceived it, here's our process,
we're following up. Let's go and get your problem
(12:36):
solved. Yeah.
And I think another element of that is not necessarily that you
even have to reply right away, but maybe just even something
like an automated e-mail just saying, hey, we got your form
fill or whatever. Can you talk about that also if
I think it was like 18% sent outthat?
Yeah, Bear even lower than that Danny, like oh really?
So when we filled out these forms, only 15% of them sent an
(12:59):
auto reply, right? And so if you don't understand
what this is, it just means whenyou complete the form, your
system automatically fires back a templated e-mail that says,
hey, we received your submission.
And any type of time frame you give them like we're gonna
follow up via the information you submitted within two hours,
within 4 hours within the same business day with within 16
(13:23):
business up, like state something, give them some type
of time frame that they can expect.
So the fact that this component,which really is and should be a
part of any form solution or anylead solution that you're using
now, it takes you 3 to 5 minutesto set up an auto reply that
that's going to fire for months,years, however long you leave it
(13:45):
up and running. So to take 5 minutes to do that
and be able to set expectations instantly connect with that lead
that you connected with it, it's, it's mind blowing that
that number was so incredibly little to do that.
And again, when you don't, 85% of those were just leaving it
out to did they get it? Are they too busy?
(14:08):
Do they not care? Right?
I've had all of these experiences, right?
And you know, even to the fact where, yeah, forms, forms are
broken, right? That same study, 4% of the forms
we came across were just completely broken.
So we reached out to all those businesses and let them know we
did our good deed to try to clean up the Internet and we're
like, hey, your forms are broken.
(14:30):
But it required those businesseshearing from a customer to do
it. And we've all probably done
things too where we fill out that form and then two days
later we call the business because they didn't answer the
phone, right? Like that's crazy.
Because guess what? There's another 100 prospects
that weren't going to take that time or put that energy to
follow up with you when you should have been following up
(14:50):
with them. So yeah, if you take only one
thing away, like go test your form, what's your auto reply?
Did you let them know, hey, I got you, we got the information
and here's an expectation on when we can reply.
Now we just need to fulfill thator do better to start the
experience off right for the customer.
Awesome. And then what are some general
(15:12):
rules for the contact form? Should it just be as simple as
possible or what should we have on that?
Yeah, I always describe it this way.
Look at every field is like a row of bricks on a wall.
And the lower that wall is for that prospect to be able to get
over the top of or to hurdle, the better off that you are.
And there's definitely some nuances within it.
(15:34):
And studies have definitely shown, especially recently, some
differentiators in how many. I always like to say the rule of
thumb is like what do you need to have a valuable conversation?
It's probably not those 18 fields that we talked about
before, but you definitely want,you know, name, main contact
information, address. If you're a home services
(15:57):
business, that might give you a leg up into, you know, where
they're located. Do a aerial view so you can see
the size of a project, if it's like roofing, things like that.
So there's definitely a lot to look into, but I try to say how
can you ask broad questions thatgive you enough so that when you
take that next step, now you have even further information
that your sales process can be able to pull out of them or to
(16:21):
get to them to complete it if you need everything right in
that first step, you're just asking a lot.
And some businesses maybe by theway, your brand is set up and
your reputation and your web content and all that, you can
get by with that. But the majority of small
businesses can't. And again, I always say, look at
the scenario when, when I look through right lead Ferno, at the
(16:43):
core of our product is we're powering text message
conversations. So I'm able to go through and
see a lot of interactions acrossall types of businesses.
I would say overwhelmingly, if Ijust had to make a
generalization without a stat behind it, most consumers have
one or two things they need to ask or clarify or gain trust on
(17:05):
to take the next step. So when you make it more effort
than asking that one or two things to complete your
information, you're you're really missing the point.
Again, you're not being easy to work with.
You're making the prospect almost have to suffer a little
bit. You're kind of wasting their
time just for them to be like, hey, do you do A and do you do
(17:26):
it a lot or do you do it in my area?
You know, things like that. So that's what I'd usually tell
people is, yeah, if if it was meand you need a number like man,
keep it under 8 questions. If I just had to throw out a
number, the shorter the better. Get what you need and then build
a great sales process to do the rest of the work.
(17:47):
Don't rely on a static form on your website to do the work of
landing all of your customers and converting them and closing
them. Yeah.
Do you have any recommendation for an e-mail sequence or call
sequence after that? Like should you call them after
a few days or e-mail them every day?
I've heard different opinions. I'm curious on your thoughts
here. Yeah.
So it definitely ranges from business to business.
(18:08):
One thing that our study also found right cuz we tracked all
the responses for three weeks after we filled out these leads.
One thing that I saw is people only utilized 1 channel the
majority of the time. So when they're following up
with the lead, if they were going to follow up by e-mail,
71% of the time they were just using 1 channel for any type of
(18:28):
follow up that they did. So to me in this day and age and
especially your form is likely capturing e-mail and phone.
If I send an e-mail and I don't get something back, our process
is e-mail. 1st, I'm going to send a text message hours or
later that next day or early thenext morning and try that
Channel. If that doesn't work, I'm going
to call again. Make sure on your form that
(18:50):
you're, you're saying, hey, we're going to contact you
through these methods that that you're submitting.
So have your, you know, proper policies and opt in consent
built into it. But that one blew my mind that,
you know, people were just using1 channel 71% of the time,
whether it be text only, e-mail only a call only overwhelmingly
we saw that with e-mail. The other thing that we saw in
(19:12):
it was frequency. So out of those leads, 65% just
made one attempt to follow up. And we all know like that's just
you, you again, someone dropped in your lap and you made one
attempt when they might be driving in the car, busy doing
something else. They also, you're contacting by
e-mail and they got 30 other emails, half of which are spam.
(19:34):
They're trying to delete, they accidentally delete your, I
mean, there's just so many things that can go wrong.
You actually have a customer's information and you just give
one shot to try to land that. Like, pretty incredible that
those numbers are so staggering.65% make just one attempt, 73%
use just one communication channel.
Both of those are big mistakes. Yeah, wow, that is insane.
(19:57):
I mean, you know, there's, there's always two sides to look
at things. And I, I do still look at this
optimistically and like, hey, well, you know, if everyone's
doing it bad, then this is somewhere that we can improve
versus. Well, everyone just sucks and
that's horrible. Like, well, this is something
that most local businesses can really stand out with because
almost no one is doing this right.
(20:17):
Also, this just came up in my mind, does does it vary between
bigger and smaller companies? Do you see that bigger companies
are better at this? Man, not always.
I don't. I don't know if I don't know if
size is really the key aspect, right?
It's probably more. Do you have people with
experience that understand how critical this is?
(20:40):
And yeah, when you're bigger, a lot of times you do have more
resources to set up some of those things.
Whether you're staffed effectively, you've made smart
tool and software choices, you've gone through and actually
created like a process, a standard operating procedure
that you know, every lead that comes in as an owner, your team,
(21:01):
whether it's yourself or you have one salesperson or four or
eight that at a minimum, we're going to have three touches or 4
touches. And this is the intervals and
this is what they look like. And here's what our voices in
them that we're reaching out notto be a pest or pesky, but we're
reaching out to them to be helpful.
Hey, you reached out. We just want to make sure you
(21:21):
get the answers you need becauseI know we can help you, right?
And yeah, if you do that in a quick sequence, you make
yourself available and you're doing it through channels where
they know like, oh, sweet, I cantext them, I can call them, I
can e-mail them, I can choose the channel we want to
communicate to do this. And I might even crossover
channels depending upon what's best in the process or what
information needs to be shared. Again, you're making it easy to
(21:45):
do business with. I'm curious, what are the trends
that you've seen over the years in terms of preferred contact
methods? So again, you've been in the
space for a while. I'm sure you have a pretty good
view on this of did people like to use?
Did people like calling more back in the day and now it's
more text messaging? Like what is the main preferred
(22:06):
contact method and how's that changed over the years?
Yeah. So I would just point and have
anybody look at how they communicate in their personal
life and how much we gravitate and have moved in the last
decade towards text messaging. Messaging, right.
We will have group text with families, friends, interest
groups, hobbies, things like that far more than we will have
(22:28):
the family, you know, reply all e-mail that that's not going on,
right. Like, yeah, that's not how we're
going to communicate. So we've seen that movement.
What I really think kicked text messaging off more was COVID in
the pandemic and businesses needed to be instead of people
walking through their door dealing face to face, they
(22:49):
needed another way to communicate.
And text messaging really presented that and because of
where people were gravitating. So I think it was happening
anyway, but I think COVID just fast forwarded that from
ordering from your favorite local restaurant just to do pick
up curbside and then texting, I'm here and then saying, OK, it
brought texting as a channel into that business and so many
(23:10):
other, so many other businesses and sales processes and things
like that. We actually two years ago did a
formal survey study of this of 2000 consumers.
And what what we found overwhelmingly is like text
messaging is that number one communication channel.
In our survey, 37% said text wastheir number one communication
(23:30):
channel. And then number 2 was phone at
30% and then e-mail was almost half of texting at 19.6%.
So we see those shifts and we can see a number of reasons why,
right Text messaging is asynchronous.
We also get an alert when we geta new message that we can handle
that notification however we want.
(23:53):
We're able to do it with a very small mental load.
When we take a phone call, that's where all of our
concentration has to go. So if we're in a meeting at
work, we're in the bathroom, so many different areas.
If we have to take a phone call,we specifically have to focus on
taking that phone call. I can be doing anything else and
read a text message or fire off a quick reply.
(24:13):
Then text messaging, like thankfully, most of us use it
with brevity. So it gets to the point.
We're not writing a bunch of fluff, We're not sharing a bunch
of other random stories. We're using emojis.
We're using, you know, we're thumbs upping and Harding or
thumbs Downing messages. Yeah, right.
We're just using all these little cues and signals to keep
the messaging brief and the interaction focused on
(24:35):
accomplishing communication for,for what we're looking to do.
And then our text messages are much cleaner than the e-mail
address we've had for 20 years that we've used to sign up for
every discount, every mailing list, you know what, what have
you, where our emails are just inundated.
So it's really easy for e-mail to get buried into a spam filter
(24:57):
or 1 of 80 messages that when you open your inbox in the
morning or part of it and you just somehow miss it or
something else is above it that's more important that you
need to reply to and all these other things.
So when we did this research four years ago when we were
looking at Lead Ferno as a number one, we're about
conversion, what we found is text messaging is that cleaner,
(25:19):
clearer channel that has much more signal than noise to it
than the other channels that exist out there.
Definitely. It also seems like it's much
more prevalent with the younger generation that like, I'm just
thinking about how I order food versus my parents.
My parents, anytime they get food, they always order sorry
(25:39):
over the phone. So they're always calling the
place like, oh, you know, I haveto, I have to wait for someone
to get to the phone. They didn't pick up.
Every single time I'm ordering food, I go to Uber Eats and then
I order it on the app and then I'm maybe texting the delivery
person on the app, but there's rarely ever a phone call.
And I kind of get annoyed if they call me.
They're like, oh, is this the right address?
I'm like, come on, dude. That's like the whole point of
(26:00):
this is that it's meant to be convenient.
I don't need to talk to you thatyou just deliver it to my house.
So it, it seems like that's alsomuch more relevant in the
younger generation. So yeah, I, I think text
messaging is definitely kind of the new meta of communication
and that ties right into your tool.
So that's, that's essentially what your tool does.
Can you give people some background, maybe even like, so
(26:21):
you were in the agency space forabout 15 years.
Tell me about how you then transition to the software space
and how you started this this company lead Ferno.
Yeah, One point of clarificationjust on so your judgement isn't
wrong. Young people are more mobile
first, right, like and messagingfirst, app first, things like
(26:43):
that. But interesting enough, that
same study we did, the highest differentiator and the audience
that texted the most was the agecategories of 35 to 54.
Really well. Yes, they they texted over 44%
of the time said texting is their number one channel.
And then phone calls were secondat at at like 23%.
(27:05):
So texting to phone calls almost2 to 1 and almost 3 to one over
e-mail. So that was one.
Believe me, I was a little bit surprised.
And it's a very common thing to say.
Oh, you know, younger early adopters often times the only
way that that they know and things like that.
So I always point out to people like don't think that because
(27:25):
and that that age group that 34 to 35 to 54 like for almost all
home businesses, like that's your target market right there,
that's the disposable income, all of those things.
So keep that in mind. All right, interesting.
Yeah, get getting to your question now.
So let's look at it this way. I started off my career in
(27:46):
digital marketing in the digitalworld in the late 90s to really,
you know, in the nineteens as some would call it that were
born after that. But I start off building small
business websites and as things evolved right in the early
2000s, search engines became more prevalent.
Eventually Google came on the scene and things like that.
(28:07):
And so businesses were not only looking to have a presence, have
a website Euro, but how can I get found that people don't know
I exist when they're typing in looking for underground dog
fencing, pest control, roofing, all of these different things.
And so naturally I gratitated into graduated into not only
building websites, but how to get those websites found.
(28:29):
And then from there, social cameon the scene, Twitter, Facebook,
all these different animal animals and continue to compound
what was going on. So I was working inside of
agencies that we worked both with small businesses, the
medium businesses and really thethe the gamut.
As I went along within that world, building websites, apps,
search campaigns, social campaigns.
(28:51):
One thing that I think always stuck with me that led to the
idea behind Lead Ferno is how dowe create this website
conversion in a box, right? You create this website and you
needed a different solution or whatever to plug in a form, you
know? Then I needed to think about an
e-mail provider. I need to think about all these
different things and just felt kind of really janky where I
(29:12):
wanted to create something like,all right, if we had this one
tool solution, how can that power what's on our website and
where our leads come into one place?
They're not swimming in my e-mail that also has 80 existing
customers and spam and marketingand vendors selling me and
everything else. This is a place where only leads
go so I can treat them specially, I can respond to them
faster, make things happen and whatever else.
(29:34):
So that was definitely one aspect that I learned out of it
that went into the building of Lead Ferno and then the other
pieces in the six plus years when I was leading Gather Up,
which is a online reputation platform to help people capture
Net Promoter score, capture online reviews, monitor online
reviews, respond to them. All those things is I saw
overwhelmingly across the 10s ofthousands of businesses that we
(29:57):
worked with, how important communication was in earning 5
star reviews and a great experience.
I can't remember the stat off head, but when we like took a
section of, you know, millions of reviews, we look at nothing
more as like a a single theme affected super poor reviews and
(30:17):
super great reviews than communication, lack of
communication, poor communication, you know, not
saying the right things in the communication.
All those things like those werehuge swingers between A1 star
review and a five star review. So I kind of lumped both of
those experiences together and said, OK, I want to create a
conversion platform in lead for know that makes conversion easy,
(30:38):
simplifies it for the business and then for the prospect gives
them what they want. Well, they want to use a quick,
fast channel that they're communicating through the most,
like text messaging. They, they want that as an
option and they want to know thebusiness got their message right
away and they have a Direct Lineof communication to them instead
of running if they're buried in spam, right?
Like we know if we text someone,they got that text right, that
(31:03):
we're not wondering like, oh, check your text for spam or
check your other folder in text,right?
We just don't have any of those things.
So our confidence in text is super high.
So why not let people communicate through a super
confident channel? And then we looked at how do we
help solve the problem, as I alluded to earlier, where it's
only a contact page. So the first kind of flagship
(31:25):
feature we created was a set of floating buttons.
If anybody thinks about a live chat solution or something like
that, floating buttons that are in the lower right that appear
on every single page. So it's always in front of the
consumer, like have a question? You can text us.
Need something, text us right now.
And there's a number of different elements we can talk
about that. But so we put that and made that
(31:47):
part of it. So there's a call to action on
every single page. Then we built our widget much
different than others, where others are just like an icon.
So you have to know, oh, these two little chat bubbles mean
there's a live chat, or here's aphone button, which maybe means
call or maybe means text. Ours has different elements.
So you can configure it. So you're able to say like text
(32:10):
us, text me, message, contact. You also can include like your
reputation, so you can say 4.9 stars out of 350 reviews or you
can say our average reply time is 5 minutes or 30 minutes or
two hours. And then you have like a
freeform secondary button that says you know, if you're a boat,
Marina can say questions on a boat, if you're a pest control
(32:33):
company, you know, unwanted pests or get a free estimate or
$100 off first service. So you can really configure
these three different elements that are in our buttons to build
social trust and proof, give a call to action that lets them
know what's in the next step or what can you get by contacting
us. And can you let them know that
(32:54):
text messaging is an option? And we do offer the other
options as well. Since then, we've layered on
things we you have, we have a form builder, so you can build a
contact form that goes straight into starting a text messaging
conversation as well. So we'll replace that contact
form on your website that our research showed is sometimes
broken. LAX auto replies, gets buried in
(33:17):
spam, is responded to really slow.
Let's make that instant with text messaging.
An auto text reply they get in one second in the app they use
the most with the notification and have just built a ton of
other tools around that to make conversion easy.
And I should I always like to thrown out even though text
messaging is what we feature andwhat we offer.
(33:38):
I'm by number means telling a business everything needs to go
through text. Not at all #1 text message can
be your conversation starter. And then from there you can say
great, I have a few more questions.
This is easiest over a phone call.
Can we do a phone call text messaging, open the door.
Now you can do whatever you needto over a phone call or over
e-mail. If the customer prefers to stay
(34:00):
in text messaging, great, then stay there, satisfy their needs,
earn their confidence, get them to like you and and land the
business over text messaging. So even in our widget, when you
Click to open it, you have the options where the majority in
the market just say what's your name, phone number and start
that. We actually you can place call
to actions of Click to call. You can request a call and say,
(34:22):
hey, I'm a phone person, but I want you to call me.
Call me in the afternoon, call me in the morning.
You can link to any other forms or pages on your site or like
your Calendly link or a booking link.
So we look at it. Since those buttons are
available on every screen, let'sbe able to put your top four
conversions available within it.At the end of the day, we're
going to show you. We're going to generate you more
(34:43):
clicks and more leads through any of those channels.
And again, make it easy. Let the consumer choose, but a
lot of them are going to choose text messaging.
And I can share some stats on studies on things we've seen
with that. So make sure that you offer
that. So that's a very long version of
20 years of experience, agency building websites, reputation
(35:05):
reviews, what people care about.And then just our mission to how
do we make conversion easy for the business and for the
consumer? Because that's a that's a win
win. And that's how you land more
business. Yeah, awesome.
Love that. And I'll just reiterate that
it's not just one kind of means of communication.
It's not just to text because like you said, even though it is
(35:26):
mainly text, it still varies across all the different ways to
communicate of call or form fillor whatever.
So we need to provide all of those options because consumers
might want to do one or the other.
So love that. Something just to dive a little
bit deeper into the, I guess, like the tool itself.
So for people that maybe are unfamiliar, you've probably seen
(35:48):
maybe on an agency website or another home service website
that there will be like a a little chat tool in the bottom.
So that's essentially what lead Ferno does.
But Erin, can you explain how your tool is different from
something like Podium or other competitors?
Yeah. So I think there's a a couple of
different things that we can break down here.
I'll try not to get too high on my soapbox on the first one.
(36:11):
Yeah, but that is like live chatversus what we do, which is, you
know, what we call like web to text.
So let's take a look at those. So live chat.
So the great thing about this isit can't it can be an instant
connection between a prospect ora customer in a business.
What we so often see with small businesses is it's not actually
(36:33):
that right? You can go in and it might
capture your information and then it needs to ping somebody
on the other side that is already wearing 12 hats at the
business is maybe back in shipping or loading up a truck
with supplies or on the other line with a customer.
And it lets you know like, oh, live agents not available,
please, Please wait. And you have no idea how long
(36:54):
you're going to wait. And we've all been on live chats
like that where 5-10 minutes later we quit or the live chat
solution says, oh, we don't havean agent available, give us your
e-mail. Well now I just went from an
instant connection to maybe the shittiest business connection of
e-mail that can get buried, spameverything else.
So we just did a complete 180 onI know I can e-mail you.
(37:17):
You have a contact form, you have your e-mail address.
I chose live chat because I wanted instant.
You promised me something that now I can't have.
It's also difficult for that business because I can tell you,
I've used live chat for myself. I've trained teams and had them
use it. There's a pressure to live chat
that can overwhelm your employees.
And it's not something most of them are like, Oh yeah, that's
(37:38):
awesome, I'd love to do that. It's a certain type of
personality that thrives under that pressure and feels OK with
it when they're like, oh, I haveto hurry up and reply and I have
to say the right things. And all those are so most
employees do not love live chat.So you'll maybe get one person
in the company willing to do it.So now when we look at just some
of those things and compare it to the web to text solution.
(38:00):
So now instead of having to be live, you can still have instant
communication, but now you're doing it asynchronously.
The person starts the conversation, asks a question
and they know because they sent it by text that you did get it.
And if you're using a system like lead Ferno, you get an auto
reply. Like great, we got your
question. We're gonna, you know someone
will be with you shortly. We can get into there's things
(38:20):
like that that our system automatically does to send one
auto reply during business hours, another one after hours.
So if someone texts you at midnight, it'll tell them like,
hey, our office opens at 8:00 AM.
That's when we'll reply to your text and they're like, cool,
talk to you then to make that really easy.
So now it's more manageable. And now you have your team,
every single person, if you havea ten person team, all of them
(38:41):
text. And so if you ask them to use a
text messaging app, they're like, OK, easy enough, right?
And so, and then all of your conversations are centralized
and lead Ferno, basically think of us, we're a text messaging
app strictly for your business, focused on your business.
So it's just like using the the training part super easy too.
You don't have to worry. Did I select that I'm live in
(39:02):
the live chat right now or am I not on live?
All of these different things that can go wrong, frustrate
your team and replying frustratethe prospect and the customers.
All that's removed and then there's a ton of feature set
that we've built into it. So think of your own text app on
on your iPhone or or on your Android supercharged with
another 20 features that have things like the auto replies,
(39:25):
save messages, keywords, reminders, transferring
conversations, right. If I'm helping someone and I'm
like, oh, you're a better fit for this person on our team.
Their specialty is this. I can transfer that text
conversation to them. They get a notification.
Now they can talk to the customer, customers getting all
the messages from the same number.
It's not like, oh, you got a text Cheryl for that.
(39:48):
And then Cheryl will text you and help you or I'll tell Cheryl
to text you. Be on the lookout.
It's like, no, you keep them right in the same thread Cheryl
jumps on, Hi, this is Cheryl. I'm the perfect person to help
you with that, and then you go through that situation.
So yeah, simple enough. It's a business texting app with
a whole bunch of features to make workflows easier, reporting
easier. The conversation's easier for
(40:10):
you than if you're trying to manage it just by putting your
own number and asking people to text you on your website.
It just won't work well. OK, cool.
And then yeah, you already talked about automation a little
bit, but I want to dive more into automation and also
potentially AI chat bots. Where do those come into play?
Like should you, can you potentially just automate your
(40:31):
whole sequence? And should you, you know, maybe
if it's, you know, a situation that is a little bit more
complex and should you use AI totalk back and forth?
Where do you stand on that? Yeah.
Oh man, Danny, it's like you've been part of our conversations
for six months. Inside lead for no that are
continuing to go on. I can tell you as we're
recording this, where our stancehas been so far is we are very
(40:54):
pro automation, but not full automation, right?
And there's a few different things behind that.
Number one, at the at the end ofthe day, there's still a little
bit of a gap between expectations on what a bot, what
an AI agent, what those things can deliver, especially in a
sales process, right? Some of the things missing from
(41:17):
AI are empathy, motivation, verygood at step A to step B to step
C to step D when you layout processes, very good if you pump
them full of information to answer questions.
But that's a lot different than a salesperson who's getting paid
on Commission wanting to get that deal closed or someone who
(41:37):
you know, is able to have empathy and understand persons
in a hard spot. And we they really want to get
it scheduled sooner than later. And that's a deal breaker within
that process. So we have a number of things
again from those auto replies, we have a feature called
keywords. So your auto reply can be hey,
thanks for contacting Aaron's pest control.
(41:58):
If you're a new customer type new if you're existing type
customer and now we can segment them and if it says, hey, I'm
new, be like great. The first thing we want to know
is, you know, what's your address?
So we can give you an estimate. So now you found out it's a new
customer and you have their address and now a human on your
side can pick it up. And that leads already been
qualified by using a couple of our features together for
(42:21):
automation. Now all of that being said,
again, this is ongoing. We have already started to spec
out what happens if we turn the whole lead process,
qualification process into AI, right?
And it's still, we're just constantly tweaking, testing all
kinds of other tools that are out there and can it get to the
(42:41):
results that we wanna see where we would know the last thing we
wanna do is waste a lead opportunity, right?
They are too precious. No matter what you're doing,
you've paid money to get that lead, whether it's a billboard,
a digital ad, whatever else. We're all about getting as much
out of that as possible. The last thing I want is
somebody coming back and be like, hey, that's great, you
(43:02):
helped me capture these 40 leadsthis month.
But here's these five that couldhave added to my bottom line
that the AI agent failed on or just didn't go far enough or
didn't care enough to do these things.
So all about efficiency, all about making it easier for the
team to respond. And that's why we have a number
of the features that we do Do I think it'll get there?
(43:25):
Yes, I think it'll get there andwe'll have things where AI is
doing a fantastic job and you can still connect with a human
when you want to. I just don't think it's there
yet. And I think there there are
great tools that have already put into place out there.
There's a middle ground there that I think most small
businesses shouldn't care to waste as touch points and
opportunities with leads that they shouldn't sacrifice at this
(43:47):
point yet. Large businesses, yeah, they can
probably shed some of those. It's all about process and a
numbers game and it and everything else and they'll take
the low hanging fruit and have, you know, less friction doing it
and be OK with it. But it's not there yet.
But I do think it will be. So who knows what that
conversation, my answer would look like in six months from now
(44:08):
or whatever else. But it likely will happen or
it'll be a choice where the business can say, do I want a
human or AI to man this for me? Do I want to mix?
At what point does it cut in so that that is likely coming from
us? Yeah, awesome.
Yeah. OK.
So kind of the same way with AI call answering, it seems like,
you know, I've looked at a lot of these different tools and a
(44:29):
lot of people thought it would already be out by now, but it
seems like the AI call answer call answering tools still
aren't really there. There's still a little bit too
much delay or it still sounds a little bit too robotic.
So same way with that chat tool.So maybe we'll see that in six
months or 12 months, but that should be exciting to look into.
Maybe I'll have to interview younext year to get an update on
(44:50):
that. There you go.
I'd throw another guest suggestion if you're interested
in that space and I can connect you.
There's a product called Hey, Rosie, that's AAI answering and
the founder Jordan Gall is a brilliant SAS marketer,
entrepreneur. And yeah, they're, they're
making some waves with their tool on it.
And and again, that all again, same thing kind of comes down to
(45:12):
that AI solution. If you're a business that's
missing phone calls, things are going to voicemail, you're doing
projects yourself, so you can't take those calls, then that is
likely a very big step up that now you can actually get someone
answering, asking a few questions, qualifying, setting a
next step, things like that instead of a voicemail that you
(45:32):
know that that's just so difficult.
So I again, some of these thingsdepend upon your situation and
where you're at and what you're trying to solve for.
But there are ones starting to solve those that like, does it
take you all the way to Z? No, but are you currently only
getting to C and this tool can take you to F or G down the
line? Yes.
And so maybe that's the right next step for you.
(45:54):
Awesome. Well, I think this has been a
great podcast. We'll wrap it up here.
Aaron, where can people find outabout you, your services and
everything you do? Yeah, easiest way to connect
into things go to leadferno.com.People always want to say lead
inferno. No, we're cute with marketing.
You sometimes add letters, sometimes remove the Inns.
Gone. So it's lead ferno.com, a lot of
(46:16):
what we've talked about today. If you go to our blog, you will
see research, you'll see highlights on our features, so
many different things where you can learn about the solution.
I'm pretty social, easily accessible on LinkedIn.
I don't post as much on Twitter anymore, but you can still
connect with me there and feel free to ask any questions there.
(46:36):
We have a recorded demo that's always available on our site.
Otherwise you can connect a personal request a one to one
demo as well. Love answering questions,
teaching people more about the solution and see even if it's a
good fit for them. Awesome.
Cool. So all of those links will be in
the description and anything else you'd like to plug or
mention there in. I would just say, Danny, I
always appreciate people having me on podcasts.
(46:58):
If you do a demo, if you sign upfor our 14 day free trial, if
you do anything else like that, contact us and say you heard us
here on Danny's podcast. I'll give you 50% off the first
month. So let's go.
Yeah. Then that gives you some margin.
The next time they see you at a conference, they need to buy you
a beverage or lunch or whatever else.
But you know, just like their businesses, getting customers to
(47:20):
try you is the hardest part. So I say, hey, on top of our 14
day free trial, if I can make that first month just $75.00 for
you to try our tool even longer,let's do it.
And hopefully I win you over thesame way you win your customers
over and turn them into long term business for you.
I love that, Erin. Well, I totally believe in what
you're doing. I love the tool lead Ferno.
(47:41):
I think you guys are doing an amazing job.
So yeah, that's been a great show.
It's been so great having you onand maybe I'll have you on in
the future. Awesome.
Really appreciate, Danny. Thanks for all the awesome
questions. And yeah, I I love seeing other
people in this space geek out over all the things that you
keep bringing on some of your episodes.
So great job. Keep it going.
Awesome. Thank you, Aaron.
Hey there and welcome back to Local Marketing Secrets.
I'm your host Danny Lebrandt andtoday I'm with Aaron Wiki.
If you don't right now, Aaron, he is the Co founder of lead
Ferno, a SAS platform that's changing the game for local
businesses by turning more visitors into paying customers
through text based messaging. Aaron previously LED gather up
growing the company so quickly it landed on the Inc 5000 list
(00:21):
before successfully exiting through acquisition.
He's spoken at over 100 major industry conferences, including
MAZ Con Local, SMX Advanced and Local You Advanced.
And he's a trusted thought leader known for his practical
results focused approach to conversion optimization.
So if you're serious about converting clicks into
customers, Aaron is exactly the guy you want to listen to.
(00:42):
Now, without further ado, thanksfor coming on the show, Aaron.
Danny, great to be here. Thanks for having me on today.
For sure, man. So I want to understand how you
think about conversions. You've been in digital marketing
for over 25 years now, which is insane.
You certainly don't look it. But I, I want to know how do you
think about conversion optimization?
Maybe maybe someone doesn't evenknow what conversion
(01:04):
optimization is and converting leads.
Can you talk about that process and what what exactly that is?
Yeah #1 Danny, I think you're definitely right.
Conversion is an unknown to manyuntil they kind of move further
along the lines of their knowledge, their experience,
whatever else because it in the beginning in digital marketing,
(01:26):
we're just all about acquisition.
We're just trying to get eyeballs as much traffic.
Where can we be seeing, get our post seen, get our ad seen, all
of those different things. And conversion for a lot of
people really doesn't come up assomething to look into until
they're like, wow, I feel like I'm spending a good amount of
money, I'm getting a good amountof traffic, but I'm I'm still
(01:46):
not loving or I feel like there's more juice to to squeeze
out of this into the leads. So, you know, from a really
broad base conversion is and canbe at multiple different phases
in the funnel, but it's really turn.
How do you turn a visitor on your website?
Someone who's clicked an ad, click the post, click the link,
whatever else they've moved to your website.
(02:07):
And then how do you turn them into a lead where instead of
being just a lurker, A visitor, they raise their hand and say,
hey, here's my name, here's my phone number, here's my e-mail
so you can contact me. Here's what my problem is.
My question is my interest is and let me know if you can solve
it or let's have a conversation in in some way shape form or
(02:28):
another. So that's really the the way to
look at conversion. When I talk about different
steps in the funnel, you have the conversion of does your ad
convert right? Your ad is being seen 100 or
thousands of times. Is it actually getting clicked
on to move them to the next step?
Then when they get that next step is just as I outlined, are
you converting them on your website?
(02:48):
And then once you get them into your sales process, are you
converting them from being a lead to actually booked business
or whatever your next step mightlook like?
So once you really start gettingdeep into conversion, then you
realize like, oh, it's just not one little element of the
funnel. There's multiple steps in the
funnel. And then of course, within each
of those, you know, conversion rate optimization, we're looking
(03:09):
at how do we get better at each of those in comparison to, you
know, sports. How do we have a higher batting
average? How do we have a higher shooting
percentage in basketball, whatever that might be?
And again, just to be super basic, are we squeezing enough
juice out of out of the orange, out of the opportunity when it's
presented to us? Yeah, definitely.
(03:31):
Yeah, it is a little confusing and it might even feel
overwhelming for some people because conversions, I mean, you
could technically apply that to any lead generation platforms
that could be Yelp, Google Business Profile House,
Thumbtack, there are like a million of these different
platforms. So at least that maybe we'll get
into that later in the show. But we'll start with the website
because that's that's where youryour tool tool really shines.
(03:52):
And we'll get into that a littlebit.
But First off, just kind of generally from what you've seen,
what do you think are some of the big biggest mistakes in
conversion optimization for someones website that maybe they
don't have a contact form or they don't have a Click to call
button? Like what are most people not
doing? Yeah.
So to take this, I guess, reallybroad based and tap into
(04:13):
probably at the highest level ofmy vision in creating lead Ferno
is I think our world has evolvedto the the, you know, golden
rule of business is how easy areyou to work with?
And this is where I think a lot of people get conversion wrong
in a number of different ways. So one, it could be lack of ways
to convert so they can only callyou or only fill out a form or
(04:38):
only click your e-mail address to reach out to you.
When really at the end of the day, you should be providing any
popular channel that they can reach out to you and letting
them choose what's easiest for them and that's how they're
going to move forward. I also see people, they put a
form up and then they want to ask 18 questions on the form.
So they're super excited to likeget a lot of information and
(05:01):
intensely qualify that lead and that can be great.
The ones that get spit out the other side you have a lot of
information on and it's a very high qualified lead, but you're
leaving all kinds of others on the table that saw that 18 field
form and it was like, no way, I'm not taking 5 minutes to fill
this out. Why do they need all this info?
I just have one question that I want to ask and that's too much.
(05:23):
And they're not letting their sales process doing any of the
work to convert them. Instead of job number one, just
get them to identify themselves so that now you can have a
conversation, answer questions, whatever that might be.
So that's another pitfall. Then you start getting things
like, you know, really weak calls to action when your only
call to action is just a contactor a contact us on your
(05:45):
navigation. You're really not speaking
anything to like, what is our process like?
How fast are you going to hear from somebody?
What can you expect as a next step?
Do you get a free estimate or a free consultation, right?
All of these things are unknownsand all that just adds up to
friction, right? Too many fields, that's
friction. Not offering the the easiest way
that I want to communicate as a prospect, that's friction.
(06:09):
Not understanding your process, that's friction.
And friction is what kills conversions.
That what that's what makes somebody say skip it, I'll deal
with it later. Or they jump to the next search
result, the next person in the local pack.
And that person has some of those things and they're like,
well, this is a lot easier. And that's who they start
talking to and working with. Yeah, definitely.
(06:30):
No, I've I've noticed not just in digital marketing, but an
overall trend just in the past 5-10 years or so is ease and
convenience. Like when you look at a giant
like Amazon, Amazon has grown sobig because it's so easy and
they almost, I forget the word, but basically they took that
(06:51):
model of one Click to purchase. They make it as easy as
possible. So I think that's the same way
we need to be thinking about ourlocal businesses, right?
Yeah, well, let's face it, you know, we've moved into a, a
stage of things where options are abundant, right?
It's very rarely back in the day, it's like, OK, I need to
get my piano moved or tuned. And there might be one person in
(07:14):
a geographic area that's in the phone book to look at.
So competition very low. Well, now I'm going to type in
a, a web search and I can find so many of them from all around
me. So I, I have options.
I have choices. So when you look at that, we've
really evolved into a service based economy and who's going to
provide me the best service or once I start to breakdown what's
(07:36):
most important to me, the most trusted service, the fastest
service, the cheapest service, the most valuable service,
whatever any of those things canbe.
And it's important to embody those.
And I completely agree with you.I've cited Amazon as a really
easy thing for people to see andunderstand because 99% of us,
probably 99.9% of us are consumers of Amazon.
(07:58):
So we've experienced that ourselves in what are those
benefits? You know, early on they were one
of the first sites to bring reviews and social proof where
they're like, OK, if we want people to buy things online when
they can't see them and touch them and feel them, we need to
use reviews to build that trust so that they put it into their
shopping cart and go from there.And then obviously we all, you
(08:20):
know, you buy enough things online, you hit the fatigue of
filling out bill to ship to all of those different things.
So they're like, yeah, we'll just store this and we'll just
make it, you know, even a one click just buy item now and
you're you're out the door. They realized having to add in
shipping or find out shipping inthe process was a pain.
So they just said, great, we're going to create Prime.
(08:42):
Most of our products are going to qualify for Prime.
And so you get free shipping within just a matter of days.
And now you don't have to to think about shipping or the
price changing once it's in the cart and you add where you're
located. So all of those things, guess
what Amazon did? They made it easier to work with
them and definitely part of whatcatapulted them into the
stratosphere that they're in now.
(09:04):
Yeah. And now no one thinks about
using any other delivery service.
So I think in that way, local businesses almost have to become
like the Amazon of their area. You have to become like way
easier to work with than everyone else.
It is like by far easier to workwith you.
And even though the market is very competitive, like I told
you, I work with pest control companies.
You know, there's tons of pest control companies opening up
(09:26):
everywhere. It's usually very competitive,
but yet most companies still aren't doing a great job,
especially with something like conversions and actually
something I wanted to touch on, which is just like insane.
So I've been watching tons of podcasts you've been on.
And one stat that I've heard bring up, you heard bring heard
you bring up several times is that I think you did a study of
(09:47):
like 220 people or something. And I believe the average time
for people to respond was 17 hours.
Is that right? Yeah, yeah.
So last year we did a study of contact forms, right, Since that
is as we kind of hinted at, thatis often the, you know, 1 lead
magnet that a majority of small business sites have.
(10:08):
So we did a research projects where we filled out 225 contact
forms across mainly home services, but also professional
services. So like Cpas and things like
that and then medical to like chiropractors, dentists and
things like that. And we filled out these forms
completely as like a hot buyer, right?
(10:28):
The questions that we were asking when we filled out this
contact form were like, hey, I have a 10 by 18 patio in my
backyard that I want stone pavers.
I'd like it to be done this month and be ready for summer.
You know what, what's the next step?
So all very buying questions, not just a like, hi, how are
you? Or I might be interested.
We were like giving all kinds ofbuying signals and yeah, the the
(10:52):
overall when we tracked what went on in a number of different
ways, number one was that you know what everyone calls speed
to lead. And the speed to lead in today's
digital age felt like a tortoisebecause it came in at 17 hours,
and 49 minutes was the average across those 225.
That is insane. And yeah, talk to me about why
(11:14):
speed to lead is so important. I remember you've given some
data on it and I think maybe like after 5 minutes it drops
off or after an hour like talk to me more about speed to lead.
Yeah, I mean, really, the basic concept is just to think of
anything. Think of yourself.
How do you feel when you're at the grocery store waiting in
line to check out and it's 3 deep, 5 deep, whatever else, and
(11:34):
you'll see people behind you that maybe have two items
actually walk and put their stuff back on the shelf and
leave because the waiting is toolong.
So apply that now to the same thing.
When people, they have a pressing need, they care about
something, they want a solution and they've done it enough to go
type in a search, find a provider, fill out your form, do
whatever else. And the longer you make them
(11:55):
wait, a few different things happen based on your process and
if they got any type of confirmation that you received
it and when you're going to reply.
They start wondering after a little while like why haven't
they replied to me? Did they even get it?
Was the form broken? Did I put in my info wrong?
OK, so now maybe I'm going to gofind another competitor and fill
(12:16):
those out. So the more time you leave in
there, the more time you leave them to wonder or to lack
confidence in this process, evenmaking it to the to the next
step. And they start looking for
someone else who might give instant or very quick
gratification that we got it, wereceived it, here's our process,
we're following up. Let's go and get your problem
(12:36):
solved. Yeah.
And I think another element of that is not necessarily that you
even have to reply right away, but maybe just even something
like an automated e-mail just saying, hey, we got your form
fill or whatever. Can you talk about that also if
I think it was like 18% sent outthat?
Yeah, Bear even lower than that Danny, like oh really?
So when we filled out these forms, only 15% of them sent an
(12:59):
auto reply, right? And so if you don't understand
what this is, it just means whenyou complete the form, your
system automatically fires back a templated e-mail that says,
hey, we received your submission.
And any type of time frame you give them like we're gonna
follow up via the information you submitted within two hours,
within 4 hours within the same business day with within 16
(13:23):
business up, like state something, give them some type
of time frame that they can expect.
So the fact that this component,which really is and should be a
part of any form solution or anylead solution that you're using
now, it takes you 3 to 5 minutesto set up an auto reply that
that's going to fire for months,years, however long you leave it
(13:45):
up and running. So to take 5 minutes to do that
and be able to set expectations instantly connect with that lead
that you connected with it, it's, it's mind blowing that
that number was so incredibly little to do that.
And again, when you don't, 85% of those were just leaving it
out to did they get it? Are they too busy?
(14:08):
Do they not care? Right?
I've had all of these experiences, right?
And you know, even to the fact where, yeah, forms, forms are
broken, right? That same study, 4% of the forms
we came across were just completely broken.
So we reached out to all those businesses and let them know we
did our good deed to try to clean up the Internet and we're
like, hey, your forms are broken.
(14:30):
But it required those businesseshearing from a customer to do
it. And we've all probably done
things too where we fill out that form and then two days
later we call the business because they didn't answer the
phone, right? Like that's crazy.
Because guess what? There's another 100 prospects
that weren't going to take that time or put that energy to
follow up with you when you should have been following up
(14:50):
with them. So yeah, if you take only one
thing away, like go test your form, what's your auto reply?
Did you let them know, hey, I got you, we got the information
and here's an expectation on when we can reply.
Now we just need to fulfill thator do better to start the
experience off right for the customer.
Awesome. And then what are some general
(15:12):
rules for the contact form? Should it just be as simple as
possible or what should we have on that?
Yeah, I always describe it this way.
Look at every field is like a row of bricks on a wall.
And the lower that wall is for that prospect to be able to get
over the top of or to hurdle, the better off that you are.
And there's definitely some nuances within it.
(15:34):
And studies have definitely shown, especially recently, some
differentiators in how many. I always like to say the rule of
thumb is like what do you need to have a valuable conversation?
It's probably not those 18 fields that we talked about
before, but you definitely want,you know, name, main contact
information, address. If you're a home services
(15:57):
business, that might give you a leg up into, you know, where
they're located. Do a aerial view so you can see
the size of a project, if it's like roofing, things like that.
So there's definitely a lot to look into, but I try to say how
can you ask broad questions thatgive you enough so that when you
take that next step, now you have even further information
that your sales process can be able to pull out of them or to
(16:21):
get to them to complete it if you need everything right in
that first step, you're just asking a lot.
And some businesses maybe by theway, your brand is set up and
your reputation and your web content and all that, you can
get by with that. But the majority of small
businesses can't. And again, I always say, look at
the scenario when, when I look through right lead Ferno, at the
(16:43):
core of our product is we're powering text message
conversations. So I'm able to go through and
see a lot of interactions acrossall types of businesses.
I would say overwhelmingly, if Ijust had to make a
generalization without a stat behind it, most consumers have
one or two things they need to ask or clarify or gain trust on
(17:05):
to take the next step. So when you make it more effort
than asking that one or two things to complete your
information, you're you're really missing the point.
Again, you're not being easy to work with.
You're making the prospect almost have to suffer a little
bit. You're kind of wasting their
time just for them to be like, hey, do you do A and do you do
(17:26):
it a lot or do you do it in my area?
You know, things like that. So that's what I'd usually tell
people is, yeah, if if it was meand you need a number like man,
keep it under 8 questions. If I just had to throw out a
number, the shorter the better. Get what you need and then build
a great sales process to do the rest of the work.
(17:47):
Don't rely on a static form on your website to do the work of
landing all of your customers and converting them and closing
them. Yeah.
Do you have any recommendation for an e-mail sequence or call
sequence after that? Like should you call them after
a few days or e-mail them every day?
I've heard different opinions. I'm curious on your thoughts
here. Yeah.
So it definitely ranges from business to business.
(18:08):
One thing that our study also found right cuz we tracked all
the responses for three weeks after we filled out these leads.
One thing that I saw is people only utilized 1 channel the
majority of the time. So when they're following up
with the lead, if they were going to follow up by e-mail,
71% of the time they were just using 1 channel for any type of
(18:28):
follow up that they did. So to me in this day and age and
especially your form is likely capturing e-mail and phone.
If I send an e-mail and I don't get something back, our process
is e-mail. 1st, I'm going to send a text message hours or
later that next day or early thenext morning and try that
Channel. If that doesn't work, I'm going
to call again. Make sure on your form that
(18:50):
you're, you're saying, hey, we're going to contact you
through these methods that that you're submitting.
So have your, you know, proper policies and opt in consent
built into it. But that one blew my mind that,
you know, people were just using1 channel 71% of the time,
whether it be text only, e-mail only a call only overwhelmingly
we saw that with e-mail. The other thing that we saw in
(19:12):
it was frequency. So out of those leads, 65% just
made one attempt to follow up. And we all know like that's just
you, you again, someone dropped in your lap and you made one
attempt when they might be driving in the car, busy doing
something else. They also, you're contacting by
e-mail and they got 30 other emails, half of which are spam.
(19:34):
They're trying to delete, they accidentally delete your, I
mean, there's just so many things that can go wrong.
You actually have a customer's information and you just give
one shot to try to land that. Like, pretty incredible that
those numbers are so staggering.65% make just one attempt, 73%
use just one communication channel.
Both of those are big mistakes. Yeah, wow, that is insane.
(19:57):
I mean, you know, there's, there's always two sides to look
at things. And I, I do still look at this
optimistically and like, hey, well, you know, if everyone's
doing it bad, then this is somewhere that we can improve
versus. Well, everyone just sucks and
that's horrible. Like, well, this is something
that most local businesses can really stand out with because
almost no one is doing this right.
(20:17):
Also, this just came up in my mind, does does it vary between
bigger and smaller companies? Do you see that bigger companies
are better at this? Man, not always.
I don't. I don't know if I don't know if
size is really the key aspect, right?
It's probably more. Do you have people with
experience that understand how critical this is?
(20:40):
And yeah, when you're bigger, a lot of times you do have more
resources to set up some of those things.
Whether you're staffed effectively, you've made smart
tool and software choices, you've gone through and actually
created like a process, a standard operating procedure
that you know, every lead that comes in as an owner, your team,
(21:01):
whether it's yourself or you have one salesperson or four or
eight that at a minimum, we're going to have three touches or 4
touches. And this is the intervals and
this is what they look like. And here's what our voices in
them that we're reaching out notto be a pest or pesky, but we're
reaching out to them to be helpful.
Hey, you reached out. We just want to make sure you
(21:21):
get the answers you need becauseI know we can help you, right?
And yeah, if you do that in a quick sequence, you make
yourself available and you're doing it through channels where
they know like, oh, sweet, I cantext them, I can call them, I
can e-mail them, I can choose the channel we want to
communicate to do this. And I might even crossover
channels depending upon what's best in the process or what
information needs to be shared. Again, you're making it easy to
(21:45):
do business with. I'm curious, what are the trends
that you've seen over the years in terms of preferred contact
methods? So again, you've been in the
space for a while. I'm sure you have a pretty good
view on this of did people like to use?
Did people like calling more back in the day and now it's
more text messaging? Like what is the main preferred
(22:06):
contact method and how's that changed over the years?
Yeah. So I would just point and have
anybody look at how they communicate in their personal
life and how much we gravitate and have moved in the last
decade towards text messaging. Messaging, right.
We will have group text with families, friends, interest
groups, hobbies, things like that far more than we will have
(22:28):
the family, you know, reply all e-mail that that's not going on,
right. Like, yeah, that's not how we're
going to communicate. So we've seen that movement.
What I really think kicked text messaging off more was COVID in
the pandemic and businesses needed to be instead of people
walking through their door dealing face to face, they
(22:49):
needed another way to communicate.
And text messaging really presented that and because of
where people were gravitating. So I think it was happening
anyway, but I think COVID just fast forwarded that from
ordering from your favorite local restaurant just to do pick
up curbside and then texting, I'm here and then saying, OK, it
brought texting as a channel into that business and so many
(23:10):
other, so many other businesses and sales processes and things
like that. We actually two years ago did a
formal survey study of this of 2000 consumers.
And what what we found overwhelmingly is like text
messaging is that number one communication channel.
In our survey, 37% said text wastheir number one communication
(23:30):
channel. And then number 2 was phone at
30% and then e-mail was almost half of texting at 19.6%.
So we see those shifts and we can see a number of reasons why,
right Text messaging is asynchronous.
We also get an alert when we geta new message that we can handle
that notification however we want.
(23:53):
We're able to do it with a very small mental load.
When we take a phone call, that's where all of our
concentration has to go. So if we're in a meeting at
work, we're in the bathroom, so many different areas.
If we have to take a phone call,we specifically have to focus on
taking that phone call. I can be doing anything else and
read a text message or fire off a quick reply.
(24:13):
Then text messaging, like thankfully, most of us use it
with brevity. So it gets to the point.
We're not writing a bunch of fluff, We're not sharing a bunch
of other random stories. We're using emojis.
We're using, you know, we're thumbs upping and Harding or
thumbs Downing messages. Yeah, right.
We're just using all these little cues and signals to keep
the messaging brief and the interaction focused on
(24:35):
accomplishing communication for,for what we're looking to do.
And then our text messages are much cleaner than the e-mail
address we've had for 20 years that we've used to sign up for
every discount, every mailing list, you know what, what have
you, where our emails are just inundated.
So it's really easy for e-mail to get buried into a spam filter
(24:57):
or 1 of 80 messages that when you open your inbox in the
morning or part of it and you just somehow miss it or
something else is above it that's more important that you
need to reply to and all these other things.
So when we did this research four years ago when we were
looking at Lead Ferno as a number one, we're about
conversion, what we found is text messaging is that cleaner,
(25:19):
clearer channel that has much more signal than noise to it
than the other channels that exist out there.
Definitely. It also seems like it's much
more prevalent with the younger generation that like, I'm just
thinking about how I order food versus my parents.
My parents, anytime they get food, they always order sorry
(25:39):
over the phone. So they're always calling the
place like, oh, you know, I haveto, I have to wait for someone
to get to the phone. They didn't pick up.
Every single time I'm ordering food, I go to Uber Eats and then
I order it on the app and then I'm maybe texting the delivery
person on the app, but there's rarely ever a phone call.
And I kind of get annoyed if they call me.
They're like, oh, is this the right address?
I'm like, come on, dude. That's like the whole point of
(26:00):
this is that it's meant to be convenient.
I don't need to talk to you thatyou just deliver it to my house.
So it, it seems like that's alsomuch more relevant in the
younger generation. So yeah, I, I think text
messaging is definitely kind of the new meta of communication
and that ties right into your tool.
So that's, that's essentially what your tool does.
Can you give people some background, maybe even like, so
(26:21):
you were in the agency space forabout 15 years.
Tell me about how you then transition to the software space
and how you started this this company lead Ferno.
Yeah, One point of clarificationjust on so your judgement isn't
wrong. Young people are more mobile
first, right, like and messagingfirst, app first, things like
(26:43):
that. But interesting enough, that
same study we did, the highest differentiator and the audience
that texted the most was the agecategories of 35 to 54.
Really well. Yes, they they texted over 44%
of the time said texting is their number one channel.
And then phone calls were secondat at at like 23%.
(27:05):
So texting to phone calls almost2 to 1 and almost 3 to one over
e-mail. So that was one.
Believe me, I was a little bit surprised.
And it's a very common thing to say.
Oh, you know, younger early adopters often times the only
way that that they know and things like that.
So I always point out to people like don't think that because
(27:25):
and that that age group that 34 to 35 to 54 like for almost all
home businesses, like that's your target market right there,
that's the disposable income, all of those things.
So keep that in mind. All right, interesting.
Yeah, get getting to your question now.
So let's look at it this way. I started off my career in
(27:46):
digital marketing in the digitalworld in the late 90s to really,
you know, in the nineteens as some would call it that were
born after that. But I start off building small
business websites and as things evolved right in the early
2000s, search engines became more prevalent.
Eventually Google came on the scene and things like that.
(28:07):
And so businesses were not only looking to have a presence, have
a website Euro, but how can I get found that people don't know
I exist when they're typing in looking for underground dog
fencing, pest control, roofing, all of these different things.
And so naturally I gratitated into graduated into not only
building websites, but how to get those websites found.
(28:29):
And then from there, social cameon the scene, Twitter, Facebook,
all these different animal animals and continue to compound
what was going on. So I was working inside of
agencies that we worked both with small businesses, the
medium businesses and really thethe the gamut.
As I went along within that world, building websites, apps,
search campaigns, social campaigns.
(28:51):
One thing that I think always stuck with me that led to the
idea behind Lead Ferno is how dowe create this website
conversion in a box, right? You create this website and you
needed a different solution or whatever to plug in a form, you
know? Then I needed to think about an
e-mail provider. I need to think about all these
different things and just felt kind of really janky where I
(29:12):
wanted to create something like,all right, if we had this one
tool solution, how can that power what's on our website and
where our leads come into one place?
They're not swimming in my e-mail that also has 80 existing
customers and spam and marketingand vendors selling me and
everything else. This is a place where only leads
go so I can treat them specially, I can respond to them
faster, make things happen and whatever else.
(29:34):
So that was definitely one aspect that I learned out of it
that went into the building of Lead Ferno and then the other
pieces in the six plus years when I was leading Gather Up,
which is a online reputation platform to help people capture
Net Promoter score, capture online reviews, monitor online
reviews, respond to them. All those things is I saw
overwhelmingly across the 10s ofthousands of businesses that we
(29:57):
worked with, how important communication was in earning 5
star reviews and a great experience.
I can't remember the stat off head, but when we like took a
section of, you know, millions of reviews, we look at nothing
more as like a a single theme affected super poor reviews and
(30:17):
super great reviews than communication, lack of
communication, poor communication, you know, not
saying the right things in the communication.
All those things like those werehuge swingers between A1 star
review and a five star review. So I kind of lumped both of
those experiences together and said, OK, I want to create a
conversion platform in lead for know that makes conversion easy,
(30:38):
simplifies it for the business and then for the prospect gives
them what they want. Well, they want to use a quick,
fast channel that they're communicating through the most,
like text messaging. They, they want that as an
option and they want to know thebusiness got their message right
away and they have a Direct Lineof communication to them instead
of running if they're buried in spam, right?
Like we know if we text someone,they got that text right, that
(31:03):
we're not wondering like, oh, check your text for spam or
check your other folder in text,right?
We just don't have any of those things.
So our confidence in text is super high.
So why not let people communicate through a super
confident channel? And then we looked at how do we
help solve the problem, as I alluded to earlier, where it's
only a contact page. So the first kind of flagship
(31:25):
feature we created was a set of floating buttons.
If anybody thinks about a live chat solution or something like
that, floating buttons that are in the lower right that appear
on every single page. So it's always in front of the
consumer, like have a question? You can text us.
Need something, text us right now.
And there's a number of different elements we can talk
about that. But so we put that and made that
(31:47):
part of it. So there's a call to action on
every single page. Then we built our widget much
different than others, where others are just like an icon.
So you have to know, oh, these two little chat bubbles mean
there's a live chat, or here's aphone button, which maybe means
call or maybe means text. Ours has different elements.
So you can configure it. So you're able to say like text
(32:10):
us, text me, message, contact. You also can include like your
reputation, so you can say 4.9 stars out of 350 reviews or you
can say our average reply time is 5 minutes or 30 minutes or
two hours. And then you have like a
freeform secondary button that says you know, if you're a boat,
Marina can say questions on a boat, if you're a pest control
(32:33):
company, you know, unwanted pests or get a free estimate or
$100 off first service. So you can really configure
these three different elements that are in our buttons to build
social trust and proof, give a call to action that lets them
know what's in the next step or what can you get by contacting
us. And can you let them know that
(32:54):
text messaging is an option? And we do offer the other
options as well. Since then, we've layered on
things we you have, we have a form builder, so you can build a
contact form that goes straight into starting a text messaging
conversation as well. So we'll replace that contact
form on your website that our research showed is sometimes
broken. LAX auto replies, gets buried in
(33:17):
spam, is responded to really slow.
Let's make that instant with text messaging.
An auto text reply they get in one second in the app they use
the most with the notification and have just built a ton of
other tools around that to make conversion easy.
And I should I always like to thrown out even though text
messaging is what we feature andwhat we offer.
(33:38):
I'm by number means telling a business everything needs to go
through text. Not at all #1 text message can
be your conversation starter. And then from there you can say
great, I have a few more questions.
This is easiest over a phone call.
Can we do a phone call text messaging, open the door.
Now you can do whatever you needto over a phone call or over
e-mail. If the customer prefers to stay
(34:00):
in text messaging, great, then stay there, satisfy their needs,
earn their confidence, get them to like you and and land the
business over text messaging. So even in our widget, when you
Click to open it, you have the options where the majority in
the market just say what's your name, phone number and start
that. We actually you can place call
to actions of Click to call. You can request a call and say,
(34:22):
hey, I'm a phone person, but I want you to call me.
Call me in the afternoon, call me in the morning.
You can link to any other forms or pages on your site or like
your Calendly link or a booking link.
So we look at it. Since those buttons are
available on every screen, let'sbe able to put your top four
conversions available within it.At the end of the day, we're
going to show you. We're going to generate you more
(34:43):
clicks and more leads through any of those channels.
And again, make it easy. Let the consumer choose, but a
lot of them are going to choose text messaging.
And I can share some stats on studies on things we've seen
with that. So make sure that you offer
that. So that's a very long version of
20 years of experience, agency building websites, reputation
(35:05):
reviews, what people care about.And then just our mission to how
do we make conversion easy for the business and for the
consumer? Because that's a that's a win
win. And that's how you land more
business. Yeah, awesome.
Love that. And I'll just reiterate that
it's not just one kind of means of communication.
It's not just to text because like you said, even though it is
(35:26):
mainly text, it still varies across all the different ways to
communicate of call or form fillor whatever.
So we need to provide all of those options because consumers
might want to do one or the other.
So love that. Something just to dive a little
bit deeper into the, I guess, like the tool itself.
So for people that maybe are unfamiliar, you've probably seen
(35:48):
maybe on an agency website or another home service website
that there will be like a a little chat tool in the bottom.
So that's essentially what lead Ferno does.
But Erin, can you explain how your tool is different from
something like Podium or other competitors?
Yeah. So I think there's a a couple of
different things that we can break down here.
I'll try not to get too high on my soapbox on the first one.
(36:11):
Yeah, but that is like live chatversus what we do, which is, you
know, what we call like web to text.
So let's take a look at those. So live chat.
So the great thing about this isit can't it can be an instant
connection between a prospect ora customer in a business.
What we so often see with small businesses is it's not actually
(36:33):
that right? You can go in and it might
capture your information and then it needs to ping somebody
on the other side that is already wearing 12 hats at the
business is maybe back in shipping or loading up a truck
with supplies or on the other line with a customer.
And it lets you know like, oh, live agents not available,
please, Please wait. And you have no idea how long
(36:54):
you're going to wait. And we've all been on live chats
like that where 5-10 minutes later we quit or the live chat
solution says, oh, we don't havean agent available, give us your
e-mail. Well now I just went from an
instant connection to maybe the shittiest business connection of
e-mail that can get buried, spameverything else.
So we just did a complete 180 onI know I can e-mail you.
(37:17):
You have a contact form, you have your e-mail address.
I chose live chat because I wanted instant.
You promised me something that now I can't have.
It's also difficult for that business because I can tell you,
I've used live chat for myself. I've trained teams and had them
use it. There's a pressure to live chat
that can overwhelm your employees.
And it's not something most of them are like, Oh yeah, that's
(37:38):
awesome, I'd love to do that. It's a certain type of
personality that thrives under that pressure and feels OK with
it when they're like, oh, I haveto hurry up and reply and I have
to say the right things. And all those are so most
employees do not love live chat.So you'll maybe get one person
in the company willing to do it.So now when we look at just some
of those things and compare it to the web to text solution.
(38:00):
So now instead of having to be live, you can still have instant
communication, but now you're doing it asynchronously.
The person starts the conversation, asks a question
and they know because they sent it by text that you did get it.
And if you're using a system like lead Ferno, you get an auto
reply. Like great, we got your
question. We're gonna, you know someone
will be with you shortly. We can get into there's things
(38:20):
like that that our system automatically does to send one
auto reply during business hours, another one after hours.
So if someone texts you at midnight, it'll tell them like,
hey, our office opens at 8:00 AM.
That's when we'll reply to your text and they're like, cool,
talk to you then to make that really easy.
So now it's more manageable. And now you have your team,
every single person, if you havea ten person team, all of them
(38:41):
text. And so if you ask them to use a
text messaging app, they're like, OK, easy enough, right?
And so, and then all of your conversations are centralized
and lead Ferno, basically think of us, we're a text messaging
app strictly for your business, focused on your business.
So it's just like using the the training part super easy too.
You don't have to worry. Did I select that I'm live in
(39:02):
the live chat right now or am I not on live?
All of these different things that can go wrong, frustrate
your team and replying frustratethe prospect and the customers.
All that's removed and then there's a ton of feature set
that we've built into it. So think of your own text app on
on your iPhone or or on your Android supercharged with
another 20 features that have things like the auto replies,
(39:25):
save messages, keywords, reminders, transferring
conversations, right. If I'm helping someone and I'm
like, oh, you're a better fit for this person on our team.
Their specialty is this. I can transfer that text
conversation to them. They get a notification.
Now they can talk to the customer, customers getting all
the messages from the same number.
It's not like, oh, you got a text Cheryl for that.
(39:48):
And then Cheryl will text you and help you or I'll tell Cheryl
to text you. Be on the lookout.
It's like, no, you keep them right in the same thread Cheryl
jumps on, Hi, this is Cheryl. I'm the perfect person to help
you with that, and then you go through that situation.
So yeah, simple enough. It's a business texting app with
a whole bunch of features to make workflows easier, reporting
easier. The conversation's easier for
(40:10):
you than if you're trying to manage it just by putting your
own number and asking people to text you on your website.
It just won't work well. OK, cool.
And then yeah, you already talked about automation a little
bit, but I want to dive more into automation and also
potentially AI chat bots. Where do those come into play?
Like should you, can you potentially just automate your
(40:31):
whole sequence? And should you, you know, maybe
if it's, you know, a situation that is a little bit more
complex and should you use AI totalk back and forth?
Where do you stand on that? Yeah.
Oh man, Danny, it's like you've been part of our conversations
for six months. Inside lead for no that are
continuing to go on. I can tell you as we're
recording this, where our stancehas been so far is we are very
(40:54):
pro automation, but not full automation, right?
And there's a few different things behind that.
Number one, at the at the end ofthe day, there's still a little
bit of a gap between expectations on what a bot, what
an AI agent, what those things can deliver, especially in a
sales process, right? Some of the things missing from
(41:17):
AI are empathy, motivation, verygood at step A to step B to step
C to step D when you layout processes, very good if you pump
them full of information to answer questions.
But that's a lot different than a salesperson who's getting paid
on Commission wanting to get that deal closed or someone who
(41:37):
you know, is able to have empathy and understand persons
in a hard spot. And we they really want to get
it scheduled sooner than later. And that's a deal breaker within
that process. So we have a number of things
again from those auto replies, we have a feature called
keywords. So your auto reply can be hey,
thanks for contacting Aaron's pest control.
(41:58):
If you're a new customer type new if you're existing type
customer and now we can segment them and if it says, hey, I'm
new, be like great. The first thing we want to know
is, you know, what's your address?
So we can give you an estimate. So now you found out it's a new
customer and you have their address and now a human on your
side can pick it up. And that leads already been
qualified by using a couple of our features together for
(42:21):
automation. Now all of that being said,
again, this is ongoing. We have already started to spec
out what happens if we turn the whole lead process,
qualification process into AI, right?
And it's still, we're just constantly tweaking, testing all
kinds of other tools that are out there and can it get to the
(42:41):
results that we wanna see where we would know the last thing we
wanna do is waste a lead opportunity, right?
They are too precious. No matter what you're doing,
you've paid money to get that lead, whether it's a billboard,
a digital ad, whatever else. We're all about getting as much
out of that as possible. The last thing I want is
somebody coming back and be like, hey, that's great, you
(43:02):
helped me capture these 40 leadsthis month.
But here's these five that couldhave added to my bottom line
that the AI agent failed on or just didn't go far enough or
didn't care enough to do these things.
So all about efficiency, all about making it easier for the
team to respond. And that's why we have a number
of the features that we do Do I think it'll get there?
(43:25):
Yes, I think it'll get there andwe'll have things where AI is
doing a fantastic job and you can still connect with a human
when you want to. I just don't think it's there
yet. And I think there there are
great tools that have already put into place out there.
There's a middle ground there that I think most small
businesses shouldn't care to waste as touch points and
opportunities with leads that they shouldn't sacrifice at this
(43:47):
point yet. Large businesses, yeah, they can
probably shed some of those. It's all about process and a
numbers game and it and everything else and they'll take
the low hanging fruit and have, you know, less friction doing it
and be OK with it. But it's not there yet.
But I do think it will be. So who knows what that
conversation, my answer would look like in six months from now
(44:08):
or whatever else. But it likely will happen or
it'll be a choice where the business can say, do I want a
human or AI to man this for me? Do I want to mix?
At what point does it cut in so that that is likely coming from
us? Yeah, awesome.
Yeah. OK.
So kind of the same way with AI call answering, it seems like,
you know, I've looked at a lot of these different tools and a
(44:29):
lot of people thought it would already be out by now, but it
seems like the AI call answer call answering tools still
aren't really there. There's still a little bit too
much delay or it still sounds a little bit too robotic.
So same way with that chat tool.So maybe we'll see that in six
months or 12 months, but that should be exciting to look into.
Maybe I'll have to interview younext year to get an update on
(44:50):
that. There you go.
I'd throw another guest suggestion if you're interested
in that space and I can connect you.
There's a product called Hey, Rosie, that's AAI answering and
the founder Jordan Gall is a brilliant SAS marketer,
entrepreneur. And yeah, they're, they're
making some waves with their tool on it.
And and again, that all again, same thing kind of comes down to
(45:12):
that AI solution. If you're a business that's
missing phone calls, things are going to voicemail, you're doing
projects yourself, so you can't take those calls, then that is
likely a very big step up that now you can actually get someone
answering, asking a few questions, qualifying, setting a
next step, things like that instead of a voicemail that you
(45:32):
know that that's just so difficult.
So I again, some of these thingsdepend upon your situation and
where you're at and what you're trying to solve for.
But there are ones starting to solve those that like, does it
take you all the way to Z? No, but are you currently only
getting to C and this tool can take you to F or G down the
line? Yes.
And so maybe that's the right next step for you.
(45:54):
Awesome. Well, I think this has been a
great podcast. We'll wrap it up here.
Aaron, where can people find outabout you, your services and
everything you do? Yeah, easiest way to connect
into things go to leadferno.com.People always want to say lead
inferno. No, we're cute with marketing.
You sometimes add letters, sometimes remove the Inns.
Gone. So it's lead ferno.com, a lot of
(46:16):
what we've talked about today. If you go to our blog, you will
see research, you'll see highlights on our features, so
many different things where you can learn about the solution.
I'm pretty social, easily accessible on LinkedIn.
I don't post as much on Twitter anymore, but you can still
connect with me there and feel free to ask any questions there.
(46:36):
We have a recorded demo that's always available on our site.
Otherwise you can connect a personal request a one to one
demo as well. Love answering questions,
teaching people more about the solution and see even if it's a
good fit for them. Awesome.
Cool. So all of those links will be in
the description and anything else you'd like to plug or
mention there in. I would just say, Danny, I
always appreciate people having me on podcasts.
(46:58):
If you do a demo, if you sign upfor our 14 day free trial, if
you do anything else like that, contact us and say you heard us
here on Danny's podcast. I'll give you 50% off the first
month. So let's go.
Yeah. Then that gives you some margin.
The next time they see you at a conference, they need to buy you
a beverage or lunch or whatever else.
But you know, just like their businesses, getting customers to
(47:20):
try you is the hardest part. So I say, hey, on top of our 14
day free trial, if I can make that first month just $75.00 for
you to try our tool even longer,let's do it.
And hopefully I win you over thesame way you win your customers
over and turn them into long term business for you.
I love that, Erin. Well, I totally believe in what
you're doing. I love the tool lead Ferno.
(47:41):
I think you guys are doing an amazing job.
So yeah, that's been a great show.
It's been so great having you onand maybe I'll have you on in
the future. Awesome.
Really appreciate, Danny. Thanks for all the awesome
questions. And yeah, I I love seeing other
people in this space geek out over all the things that you
keep bringing on some of your episodes.
So great job. Keep it going.
Awesome. Thank you, Aaron.
Host
Danny Leibrandt
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.