From the Yellow Chair
From the Yellow Chair
AI-Powered Sales: How Distance Helps Service Businesses Win More
How quickly are you responding to potential customers? In today's instant-gratification marketplace, that question might determine whether your contracting business thrives or struggles. When a homeowner discovers a pest problem at midnight or needs an emergency HVAC repair, they're not waiting until your business hours—they want answers now.
Nick, a serial entrepreneur who has built three organizations to nine-figure revenues, drops a bombshell early in our conversation: "If you do not answer a lead within three seconds, the likelihood of converting that into a deal drops by 8x." This isn't just theory—it's backed by hard data showing that first responders consistently win more business.
The good news? Artificial intelligence offers contractors practical, affordable solutions to this challenge. Rather than replacing your team, AI tools can serve as a powerful buffer—answering after-hours calls, managing overflow during busy periods, and ensuring no inquiry goes unanswered. The technology has advanced dramatically, creating natural conversations that gather essential customer information and integrate seamlessly with your existing systems.
For contractors hesitant about implementing AI, Nick offers pragmatic advice: start by enhancing what you're already doing. Look at areas where leads commonly fall through the cracks—missed calls, delayed responses to web inquiries, limited communication channels—and apply AI solutions to strengthen these weak points. The goal isn't to completely overhaul your business but to optimize current operations with technology that works 24/7.
Perhaps most importantly, we discuss the changing expectations of today's consumers. When your website only offers a phone number, you're limiting accessibility to potential customers who might prefer texting, messaging, or online scheduling. By meeting customers where they are, with their preferred communication methods, you significantly expand your capacity to capture new business.
Ready to stop losing leads and start growing your contracting business? This episode provides the practical insights and actionable strategies you need to implement AI effectively, respond faster to inquiries, and ultimately convert more leads into paying customers.
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From the Yellow Chair is powered by Lemon Seed, a marketing strategy and branding company for the trades. Lemon Seed specializes in rebrands, creating unique, comprehensive, organized marketing plans, social media, and graphic design. Learn more at www.LemonSeedMarketing.com
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We'll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
Oh, what's up? A lemon heads. Welcome to a whole nother episode of from the yellow chair. I am crystal and y'all today. Listen, today I am talking about something that has so many of you contractors riled up, and that is a little bit of AI. But some ways that you can utilize AI to really drive your business forward that are common sense now that I've heard them. Being instant when we are responding to our needs from our market is really going to be a game changer.
Speaker 1:So stop what you're doing, put those headphones in, get ready, go in for your drive or your run, whatever you're going to do, but let's sip some lemonade Y'all. I am so excited. This is a unique thing. So Lemon Seed actually utilizes this company for our own processes that we have in place here, and when I listened to Nick and his team, I had to realize everyone needs to be listening to this message behind why they do what they do. And so, nick, welcome to the show. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself and why they should care about what you have to say today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, a little bit about me in a couple of minutes or less. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my career cutting my teeth, helping companies raise capital, sell their businesses in investment banking although that's a dirty word sometimes. Then I ended up transitioning to more of an operational role where I built and scaled a bunch of fast-growing technology companies before starting a handful of my own. So I've had experience over the past 20-some-odd years building three organizations to nine figures in revenue. So a lot of ups and downs in that process. My goal throughout all those every single organization I've been a part of, whether I started or whether I worked in it has always been the growth function. How do we help grow revenue? And so that's the angle that I approach pretty much everything with.
Speaker 1:I love it and that's how we all should be approaching our businesses, and what actually started a good conversation for Lemon Seed as well. So you know, let's jump in here about how I think what your message is can really help contractors. So, hey, leads are expensive, and one thing that I see is like let me see can be your quarterback, right, your digital company could be your quarterback, but, man, my wide receivers and my linebackers are fumbling the ball when it comes to taking care of the lead and getting those leads booked, and so this is such a time where I'm like man, it is so expensive for us to generate true new customer acquisition and leads for the contractor on the internal side of their business to just fumble the ball. So what do you think it means for the contractor when we can start answering things, maybe more quickly and getting to them with a better response? What does that look like? What have you seen happen there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, happen there, yeah, so I want to say one thing before I even jump into that, which is not only is advertising expensive, the cost to acquire customers expensive, but the value of the leads that you're bringing in. When you start looking at the contract value, the repeat business that are coming in, those are really expensive leads from a revenue standpoint. Right, forget the cost of the lead. The actual revenue that it's bringing in is incredibly, incredibly valuable, especially if they stay with you. We have pest control businesses. They're like my clients stay with me for 10 years, 15 years, yeah, yeah. And so that you know that that 50 bucks a month or a hundred bucks a month that they're paying is extremely valuable.
Speaker 2:And so what we often see are organizations in the trades missing calls, calls ringing, folks hanging up. Um, you know, we always see these Facebook messages. I'll get back to you soon. Right, if you do not answer a lead within three seconds, the likelihood of you converting that into a deal drops by 8x. Right, there is a real. There are some really scary stats here. If you are not, for this whole business is predicated on first to respond, first to close. Right, if I see a cockroach in my house or if I need a, if I have a problem and I'm reaching out and the organization that I'm not that I'm reaching out to does not answer, I'm going to call someone else until I get.
Speaker 1:I have a problem. What if your AC is not working in July? I'm going to keep looking.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. So speed is incredibly important and it shows up in the stats, and we have a bunch of case studies to show it as well shows up in the stats and we have a bunch of case studies to show it as well.
Speaker 1:Well, and you know, right now, speed to lead, right, speed to the lead, and people have such negative connotations about that a lot of times and we just have to get past it. Like there's no way to sugarcoat that, like, yes, we've lived this life as contractors of these lead aggregators just wearing us out, getting down to bottom dollar tire kickers. But really, at the end of the day, what really matters the most is every opportunity is an opportunity. It's just that an opportunity to win something. Um.
Speaker 1:And so, yes, you might run across a few that you're like, man, I rushed to take care of this customer. It's not even a great fit for us. I'm just a big fan of like get the call booked, get out and run the call and you can figure it out later, figure out the specifics of it later. But man, speed wins because if you're not first, you're not even going to get an opportunity at that lead. And so you know, fast response really turns inquiries, I think, into real jobs with long-term engagement and good relationships with those people. So, even again, you know, you just never know and everybody's like, oh, these are tire kicker leads. I get so sick of hearing that Like I could talk about that for days. Like everyone, most people are price conscious out of the gate.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean even your own. I tell my contractors, even you, you yourself are price. You don't just go to a car dealership and be like, yeah, I'll take it at the first price. Most of y'all are like, well, they're so expensive. I'm like that's what they think of you. You've got to build a relationship.
Speaker 2:But even more of a reason to automate that process right, so that you can, you know, remove yourself If you're. If you're saying, hey, I qualify a hundred leads a day, I'm like that. Maybe that's not the best allocation of your time or your team's time, right, no one is, no one is booking because you're qualifying right. So, being able to separate the really high value human enabled activity from things that are repetitive in nature, that can be outsourced to AI and make you more efficient, more effective, those are some of the things that you should be evaluating.
Speaker 1:Well, and as owners, we want more revenue, but we're worried about the admin headaches, right, so do I have to have what all would this entail? And I know distance saw your company. Distance solves this issue, but you're right. Like so, many of these, contractors are looking at things as like what is the workflow for this type of speed to lead? So what have you seen? Work is like just the the overall customer journey when you're using things that like this.
Speaker 2:So we have a few different playbooks that we've seen run. I'll start with voice. I think voice is a really interesting one. A lot of our clients say hey, you know what? We're pretty good at answering the phone, we don't miss that many calls, and I say great. But what happens when you do? Well, instead of converting 60, 70% of those jobs, I'm now converting 10 percent, 5 percent of the calls that I've missed.
Speaker 2:So why don't we have the AI act as a buffer? When the phone rings three times and we know that we're likely going to miss the call or it's going to go to voicemail, let's have the AI intercept and handle the call for you. So you never have a voicemail, you never have a missed call. So that's a really good use case of basically enhancing your human capability. We also have clients that say I'm not answering the phone at night, and that's a huge missed opportunity.
Speaker 2:You know if your air conditioning breaks? To go back to your example, you're not waiting until business hours to get in touch with a organization. Like you don't care about the company's hours, you care about your hours and as business owners, you need to be ready when your customer's ready and so having the ability to answer and respond to leads, even at one o'clock in the morning. That gives you a competitive advantage and, quite frankly, over time I think that's going to be table stakes. So if you're not doing that today, competitive advantage. If you're not doing that in the future, you're going to be at a disadvantage.
Speaker 1:Well, I remember I was just telling my kids this story. I was like used to there was a day where you would call your friends and they were just not home. So you had to wait for them to get home. Like, because my kids they don't realize. So they're 15 and 18. They don't realize patience of things, because everything is readily available to them. They can call anyone at any time from anywhere.
Speaker 1:Well, even when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, you know, I remember like I would be like leaving a voice message like where are you at? I'm waiting on you to call me back, and then I would be the kid, the teenager that wouldn't leave their room because somebody was going to call me back, right, but now the expectation is immediacy. Yeah, the expectation is that your hours are my hours and no longer. I mean, I remember my grandparents. My grandmother ran a craft store, before Hobby Lobby was a thing. She was running this craft store and we worked in there and she would always tell me like hey, when we close the shop at 6 pm, when we come back in the morning, the first thing you do is check all of your messages and but that's going to be our busy time because everybody's calling, and I remember like I learned that.
Speaker 1:Well, now I'm like it's really not the truth anymore as much because, honestly, the morning time I'm more dealing with technicians than I am dealing with actual customers, because there's so many ways to get in touch with us, and so it's definitely a change of times that most of us really have a hard time coming around to that. Who in the world expects us to give them an answer at one o'clock? Well, technically you do. If you really think about it now, if you want to order something to wear next week, you can go on Amazon any time of the day and not order and get it shipped here. So the whole point here is you can fight instance, instantly responding all you want to. But really what's happening is you're getting further and further away from the new norm of the customer journey, of them needing services.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and so yeah so, but but these AI tools, you know, do you worry? Or at least I worry. So let me put my worries out there. I worry about their ability to speak naturally and to answer, to answer things that, um um, impact the customer journey. I'm going to beat up the customer journey here because, as a brand though as a brand girl, I can't help but make sure, nick, that my experience with my company is very authentic and on brand. So is there things that companies like Distance do to secure the content that it's going to be in my voice, and things like that? How does that?
Speaker 2:work. Well, let me actually tackle that with three responses, because I think you brought up a really good point here. One is if you're using AI voice. 90% of our customers are using AI voice as a backup system, so they're not putting AI at the front of house. On the voice side specifically, right, ai voice is really a tool that's used after hours or used as a contingency system when someone tries to reach out for you and you don't have the time to pick up or you're overwhelmed, and that is a much better experience than missing a call or going to voice mail Well, and consumers understand that better.
Speaker 1:They understand that more.
Speaker 2:Well, the worst customer experience is you don't get back to them, right? Or they leave a voicemail. They have no idea when you're going to call them back, if you're going to call them back. If you're going to call them back, they continue on their merry way to look for a solution provider. So that you know, as an alternative, like, what are we comparing ourselves to on the voice side? Well, we're comparing ourselves to a missed call, we're comparing ourselves to a voicemail, and those are terrible outcomes, right, as a business owner, especially if you look at it from a conversion standpoint. So that's part one. Part two is the actual quality of the voices have improved dramatically. I think a lot of people have this misnomer that AI voice sounds like you know, um or like online circa you know 1999.
Speaker 2:And it does not. It answers questions. If you say your name is, is is crystal, and then halfway through the conversation you say your name is John, it's going to say excuse me, is your name John or crystal? I need to clarify, right, cause it's. It's going to take that information and pipe it into your CRM afterwards and so it wants to make sure that it's getting the information right. So it is a conversation. Anyone who's used chat, gpt or some of these AI tools understands the efficacy of those conversations. I will say on the chat side it's orders of magnitude better than a human. I mean it's fast, it's responsive. You can train it to be more bubbly, less bubbly. Use emojis, don't use emojis. You know there's quite a bit that you can do there. It's very it can very much be on brand, to kind of quote your-.
Speaker 1:Well and I've seen that with some companies that we work with and you know, for Lemon Seed, for ourselves, but I just know that's a common fear is like well, how do you read my like if you're booking appointments for me? You know what, if this customer, you know, needs special accommodations? And my advice is always this do not build processes around the outliers, so might there be something that gets misconstrued maybe, or are misaligned maybe. So there is possibly going to be a few little caveats that slip through. That's something unique, but you can't not launch updated software and complex, more complex things all because of the fear of the one or two big outliers that might be out there. So that's my biggest encouragement to my contractors right now is let's not build processes around outliers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's build processes around the overall comprehensive data and the ability to navigate and update and pivot Like I don't know. I just don't want people getting caught in that you know.
Speaker 2:I totally agree, yep.
Speaker 1:And then the trust factor. You know, you and I talked a little bit about the trust factor already, but you know some owners really worry that it feels so impersonal. Um, and so does it learn? Uh, over time, or do you? How do you start off Well?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's uh, you know it's really from a. From a conceptual standpoint, I think there you need to approach this type of activity with two lenses. I'm both implementing a technology that is doing a job, that is doing work for me. Therefore, I need to approach it from a labor standpoint. I need to train it, I need to set it up properly, I need to give it feedback.
Speaker 2:You can't just plug a tool like this in and expect it to be as efficacious as a CSR. You need to work with an organization like Distance that is going to put care and attention into setting it up properly, into training it properly, and then there is a little bit of work involved to ensure that you're giving feedback right, you're training it, you're giving it guidance so that it improves. In the same way, if you were going to hire someone today to do this job, you'd probably start them off, you'd give them some training, you'd probably listen to a few of their calls, give them some feedback. A lot of those parallels exist today with this tool. The only difference is this tool it's a lot more efficient. It works 24-7. It doesn't take breaks, you know, and it could take a thousand calls at the same time.
Speaker 1:It's not dramatic.
Speaker 1:It's not all the things Exactly Well, so okay. So I think most of our contractors understand that this is a cool tool speed to lead. One of the things that I really loved about what you mentioned earlier is that you have a lot of lessons from scaling these different companies to nine figures, which is a lot of people's goals here, and they're probably thinking I'm struggling to launch one to nine figures, but you know, I just thought we would ask, like, what are lessons that you think could translate over to my service business owners, my contractors, that maybe you did in scaling these different businesses that they could remember and they could take with them?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a few things. I think process is incredibly important. At the beginning, there's no process. You're running around like a chicken without a head just trying to execute.
Speaker 2:But creating a script, creating a process, something that is trainable and repeatable, is incredibly important. And we actually see this quite a bit with folks who are using the AI and, let's say, they dust out their old manual and say, hey, these are the scripts I'm going to use for the AI. And then we implement them and they're like, hey, it shouldn't say that that's in your script. And they realize, oh, my goodness, I haven't revisited my scripts in a long time. So I think making sure that you're putting a lot of energy and focus into those playbooks I think is incredibly important. Number two is hiring the right people. I think ultimately, whether it's AI, whether it's human, whether it's human plus AI, you know, having the right tools and the right people to give yourself the opportunity to grow and scale is incredibly important. I think those are the two fundamental building blocks that you need in order to achieve escape velocity.
Speaker 1:Well and I hate to say this because I really don't want to utilize AI to replace people. I want to use it to be more of a resource and make people that are in current roles be more efficient and more efficient I keep, I'm hung up on that word but more efficient, and so you know. I think that you also need to understand. You know your labor needs, you need to be able to project, you need to know your numbers, you need to know what it looks like. So I mean, I have contractors all the time who, like they can't forecast for capacity because they can't forecast for financials either. So what? You would have known that you there's no way for you to hit that financial goal based off your average ticket If you would have done the math to know you need to hire two technicians.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, I, I, you know, part of part of what we do with distance is, you know, part of it is AI, but the other part of it is funnel building. Right, how do we take something that's coming top of funnel leads, coming in from different sources, and be much more efficient at converting them all throughout that customer journey, all the way to the bottom? And a lot of contractors don't really have visibility into what those levers are, right, when am I getting traffic? Where am I getting my referral sources from? How confident am I that I'm going to hit those numbers tomorrow? What do I need to do to drive those numbers up?
Speaker 2:And so you know, I would say most of the folks that we talk to spend a lot of time thinking about the top side of the equation and then less time and energy is spent looking at the middle and the bottom.
Speaker 2:How efficient are we at converting them across different channels? Right, facebook, if I'm doing Facebook ads, how efficient am I at converting leads? What's the cost to acquire these leads? How much revenue am I making versus going door to door, versus doing, you know, ppc ads versus my affiliate sources? And really, when you start to drill down, um, you start to get some really interesting insights about what's moving the needle and where you should be investing more money. And so a lot of what we do is we help make all of those different funnels much more efficient, because at every point in those customer journeys you're getting a phone call, you're getting an SMS, you're getting a form filled out, you're getting someone coming on your website and do you have the right mousetraps to connect with those folks 24-7, right mousetraps to connect with those folks 24-7, 365 to make the most of that return on investment.
Speaker 1:I love mousetraps. I love that word because it's so literal in my mind. So you know we are busy people now. Again, this just goes back to how different life is now than most people grew up that are running businesses right now. But you know, used to there wasn't all of this distraction and all of these things. Well now, like I have good intentions of you coming out and doing my tune up, but I forgot and I got distracted because my kid called and you know he needs money and I need to go take him to a practice and oh shoot, I was going to schedule that. So you know, there's so much power in these reminders and these automations that are just keeping you top of mind with homeowners and when we neglect to be intentional about that, when we neglect that idea, what happens is we get left behind and then all it takes is one company that's coming in behind you and doing the reminders and just grabbing people in these unique spots to change our direction of business.
Speaker 2:I totally agree with you. Let me paint a picture for you. If the only call to action you have on your website is a phone number, what you're telling your customer is that the only way to get in touch with me is by you calling this number. So what happens to the person who's on the road, got three screaming kids in the back, does not have the time, capacity or patience to jump on a phone call? Well, if you were to have SMS as a call to action, if you were to have live chat, if you were to have different modalities to connect with folks, you will get more people connecting with you. It is very simple Create more opportunities so you can meet your customers where they are, where they want to be, and not necessarily forcing them into your preferred method of communication. That just gives you more surface area to capture and convert leads. You're probably you're probably missing leads today.
Speaker 1:if that is the case, right, well, I mean contractors will go 10 toes down, as I say on. You know we're not going to do online scheduling and I'm like listen, I work in an office, I need to be able to multitask, I need to be able to go, but you know what I can do. I can book my hair appointment. I can book my nail appointments. I can book my kids or not my kids my kids don't go to the vet. My dogs go to the vet. All my doctor's appointments. I can book all of that online because it makes it easier to navigate in a busy life. And so there's have your phone numbers for the people that want to call.
Speaker 2:I'm here for it.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, like more and more people want to see a calendar and see their options and you know you're fighting an uphill battle right now like whereas you could be just slowly but surely rolling out new ways to work with your company, we're so afraid to work with a client Like they might use this 100% For work for work for sure.
Speaker 1:So the other, the last little topic that I thought we could kind of cover here is, you know, and I'm going to jump back to the AI side of things, you know, nick, like where do you think and this is a surprise question, I really didn't give you this as a prep question, so you're welcome but where do you think that most contractors need to be thinking about this AI side of life?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do we not get distracted by the noise?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I've been to a lot of conferences and, as you can imagine, the keynote speaker whether it's me or someone else is always talking about AI and there is a lot of noise. I think everyone can agree at this point that it's a very powerful technology and I don't think we need another keynote to come up there and say AI is important. I think we all get that at this point. I think you need to be very conscious about why you want to use this tool, and you can use it across the board for pretty much everything, so it can get very overwhelming. But the easiest use case, the one that's going to add the most value for you, is to do what you're already doing, but much better. You're already answering the phone. How do we make that better? How do we complement what you're already doing using this technology? First is saying, hey, you know what I'm going to create a whole new flow, a whole new process. That's very laborious, that's very hard. There's a bunch of stuff that you can do that are very advanced, but you got to start with something that is not just accessible, but something that you can get up and running, that's going to add impact to your business right away and when you're touching the revenue line of the equation, that's exactly what happens. And so, for most contractors, where we see the biggest impact is in misleads, and it's not just on the voice side, it's you know.
Speaker 2:Whether you're advertising right, people will come to you and say, hey, I need to spend money on my ads. Whether it's, you know, google LSAs, whether it's Facebook and meta ads, and oftentimes we'll just add, you know, more efficacy on the existing process that they already have. For instance, if you click on an ad right now on Facebook and you go from Facebook to a landing page and I got to read a bunch of information, I got to find a phone number, I got to call. A phone number rings two times, maybe I got to leave a voicemail. There's so many steps there for me to just get someone on the line to answer some questions to see if this might be a good fit.
Speaker 2:Now, what happens if you click on an ad and, instead of doing that whole song and dance, we just started a DM right away, a direct message in the Facebook page. Well, now the time to value is zero. Out of a hundred clicks, you're starting a hundred conversations and you're going to have more conversations, you're going to qualify more leads, and all that's on autopilot, and then the humans can take care of the followups, et cetera. But you are, you're letting the computer do the work of the work to help make your life better, help you drive more revenue, help you drive more leads, and I think that's the mindset shift that needs to happen with a lot of contractors for them to start really getting a lot of value out of these types of technologies. And it's something that you can get up and running super, super quickly. So it's not this three know, three week process, one month process. No, I mean, for not a lot of money and for not a lot of time, you can get up, you can get up to speed pretty quickly and have some impact.
Speaker 1:I love. I love what you said here about it's taking things that you're already doing, so there's no need to start adding all of these complex things that you weren't doing. Look at the things that you're currently doing and how can you make them, like you said, faster, more efficient, you know, just more innovative to gain new customers or to take care of your existing customers. Well, nick, is there any other advice that you would like to give any of our listeners about what you've got going on, or just business in general?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, what I will say is, if folks are interested in learning more about distance, they can certainly reach out. We help a lot of different contractors on the PCO side HVAC, plumbing, electrical I mean just every single category under the sun help do exactly what we've just been talking about, which is capture more leads, book more jobs using chat voice and a bunch of other really cool tools in the ASI.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that. I love that so much. And listen, guys, I just want to tell you I met. We met at a pest control show, didn't we?
Speaker 2:We did yeah, yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 1:Lupita those of you that know, lupita and I were at a pest control show and she comes over here and she goes I've met this guy that you must meet, you're going to love him. And so she. Finally, she brings you by the booth and I was like, oh, I do love this, mainly just because it solved a problem for Lemon Seed of speed to lead. That was not overly complex, so pretty easy to integrate. Now, listen, we all have to spend some time, but pretty easy to integrate and things like that. So but, nick, thank you for joining me today for our listeners. Again, you can learn more about distance at distanceso Is that right?
Speaker 2:That's right, yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, distanceso, and as always, we'll put it in the show notes and when we're sharing this podcast out on our socials, so don't forget to subscribe to. From the yellow chair, leave us.