Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:10

Hi everyone. I would like you to meet Dave Hansen, president of ClientTether. Dave, welcome to the call.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 0:17

Yeah, thanks a lot, Lance. Glad to be here with you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:21

So, dave, for people who aren't familiar with ClientTether, can you tell us a little bit about what you guys do?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 0:28

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me Lance. So ClientTether is a sales automation platform that was built by franchisors for the franchising industry. We are a CRM tool. Most CRMs are built backwards for franchising. They don't support multi-unit. They have the wrong data structure for the contacts leads, breaking into contacts accounts opportunities like five different data tables, complexity. Our dev monitors. If a dump painter can't use it, don't build it. So the UI is simple to adopt. It has automation tools built in to engage leads rapidly across text call email. You can put a box of brownies in the mail for you, send handwritten notes. It's a pretty robust platform, more robust than anything I'd used in 15 years of managing sales teams in corporate America, which caught me off-guard when I was chatting with the founder and he told me about the platform. So that's in a nutshell, friend dev. We're the fastest growing and top-rated tool in franchise development for franchise brands, fsos, consultants, and we are again top-rated and very fast-growing platform for unit-level operations, which is what we were originally built for eight and a half years ago.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:40

Right, because if somebody has a CRM and follow-up engine that they've made for businesses in general, it doesn't mean that it wasn't built with the actual franchise or franchisees in mind, and this was originally built, like you said, for a painter. This is built in the franchise industry by a franchise or, and it's designed for exactly what you would need with all those follow-ups, and I can only imagine the detail of being able to sift through the data and find your figure out what's going on with people who are crushing it and what's going on with people who are struggling to identify that so you can learn from it and also proactively go in and fix things Right.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 2:25

Oh man, yeah, it's crazy because once you start to get real data in a franchise system and this is like out of the box stuff for us you spend $250,000 with a HubSpot or a Salesforce or a Zoho. You might be able to get to this point, right, but just turn key. With us, you can check a few boxes and do a comparative analysis of multiple locations and see where in the sales flow are they failing and struggling and succeeding. So it also the operational side of the house tend to want to operate in the platform too, because they can immediately, without typically like a field ops person, they'll call a franchise owner and they'll try to interview them and figure out hey, what, where are you struggling? But they don't know and the owners don't know.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 3:06

So they're trying to ask questions and figure out where it might there be a chink in the arm and then they're going to try to figure out how to fix it with us. They just look at the dashboards. Oh, he's really bad at setting appointments and converting leads into estimates, or he's great at that, but he stinks at closing. But most franchisors have no clue what the lead conversion rate is, by source, for example, or even where their franchise is getting all their leads from. Some of that data is invisible to them. Or how are they doing converting the leads we spent the ad fund to create for them? They don't know, but with us you can see it all and then make very intelligent decisions for coaching or for marketing strategy.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 3:44

Right, and if you're just sitting there asking people what they think, it's not as good as the automatically generated numbers that are just being collected as people go through the cycle without because, then it's just, it's accurate and it's like it's not based on what somebody thinks or wants to say.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 4:03

You know, the funny thing is you and I are such we're on the same page. I tell people the only thing that's consistent about self-reported data is that it's inaccurate. Like yeah, that sells people that log calls. They're only going to log the ones that were good, they want to remember, but they don't log everything. It's a waste of their time.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 4:19

And franchise owners are like they're like bad sales guys that just don't want to do administrative work. I don't mean that in a mean way, they're busy, they got to do payroll and they're doing everything right, especially the young, early franchise owners. So they don't have the resources to manually update their CRM tool. But for us, you know, I said to Texas in the platform, I'm sorry, I make a call, it's recorded in the CRM, like I. Usually people save 10% of that wasted sales administration effort Because, again, our platform was built not just for franchise or is in franchisees and friend of pros. It was built for the operator, not for the executive reporting. And as we got great reporting in fact better, I would say more accurate reporting on activity level and sales progression, things like that but it's because the system auto tracks what's happening for you so you don't have to. Then, you know, do your thing and then go report that you did your thing.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 5:11

Yeah, that's a really frustrating thing, I think for a lot of people is I have to work and then I have to type all this stuff in and report on what I did, which seems like I'm doing twice as much work, and then you want me to do more work than I was doing before, but now I'm actually reporting, so I feel like I'm doing four times as much work and I'm frustrated. And so having a system that can just auto collect it just freeze you up, because, man, it's not really the big fish that eats the small fish, now it's the fast fish that eats the slow fish, and so this allows you to be nimble and fast and react and not overwork your people on things that aren't going to produce a result in the moment, yeah, and if I can add on to that, if you don't mind the thing, that the most time consuming part of generating revenue is the top of funnel follow up and engagement, Right.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 6:01

So if you think about how do we help create an explosive growth factor for a business? You look at all of the places where they're spending their time that has a low yield and then you try to automate or eliminate those things and then you get them spending all their time in high yield activities. Well, on the sales part of the business, the high yield activity is on the phone or in the customer's home or getting them in the club or whatever. It is that, that real customer interaction. That's where you want all of your human capital focused. Right, but the problem is 80% of our human capital is focused on chasing, following up, doing things that aren't hyper productive but must be done to get to the highly high yield activities. So we've tried to eliminate the need to waste the time on those low yield activities that are necessary to get to high yield. So we have had a gal.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 6:54

I was at a conference this weekend and she told me, Dave, and she's only worked with us for three weeks, four weeks maybe. She said you've created a problem for me. I was supposed to be less busy when I rolled out your platform, but I'm more busy. I was like, oh Jessica, why do you say that? She said well, I used to have all this stuff that I was doing chasing leads. None of that anymore, but I have so many people booking appointments with me. She has 111 active deals in her pipeline now. For a single person, that's an insane amount of volume. She's like I'm not sure what to do about it. Man, we might have to hire a new person to work, to have the conversations and get people to review and FDEs. And she's incredibly busy because we just eliminated a whole chunk of the work she was doing but created scale. Now they have to maybe scale up in a good part of the business where they can create more revenue.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:45

Yeah, that's. I think that's the ideal.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 7:50

No self-person wants to follow up on leads. I've never met one that's like oh, you know what I want to do today? I want to just randomly call people who have not responded to me yet. Like, no one likes that.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 8:00

I just imagine one of those roles from a movie where someone's like hello, hello, just calling, just following up, just wanting to give you a ring, just checking in. I heard you called. It's like you know nobody wants that and yeah, you feel like you're chasing people that don't want to talk to you. If you could just talk with people who want to talk to you, who are excited, engaged and want your help to get through the process, that's the ideal. So definitely having that system and you know. And the other thing is is, when I think about it, right in the name, client tether, holding on to those clients. You know, can you walk us through kind of the process that people go through with client tether, from, let's just say, initial conversation and engagement to developing that person maybe into a franchisee and then, once that franchisee is in operation and running?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 8:55

Yeah, sure, yeah, it's unique because we're, as I'm aware, the only real well, there's one other but the only platform that can do both, like the franchise development and then the franchisee deployment in the same platform. But I'll say we're the only ones that do it. Well, that's a fair statement. So, sure, franchise, let's say, and we've got a really open API framework. Meaning, for those of you who aren't technical nerds, I'll push the glasses up. It just means we can receive data from about anywhere, as long as they can put it in a structured format. We can also receive posts from your website. We can receive emails and parse them. We can even have Zapier connections if I feel like we're all failing if we have to use that. But any type of lead you've got, whether it's digital marketing, web forms, you know, ppc, seo type stuff, organic or social leads, or portal leads or anything can flow right to the platform. So point zero in the process is lead is generated, pushed into our platform. So if I'm the sales guy, I'm at my desk doing something, lead pops in. I don't have to go to my inbox to see it. It flows into the system. We auto attribute where the lead source is, where it comes from and then we contextualize because we know the source, we turn on a. We call them action plans, like a campaign or workflow. It will immediately engage that lead from that lead source, because you're going to talk to a Facebook lead very differently than an organic lead. Organic leads they're a gold mine. They're going to convert it a better rate than any of your other digital leads. So you want to talk to them differently. So that happens. What's going to happen to the consumer is they're going to get an immediate email with, hopefully, a video from that person who they would be talking to, then a text message a minute later, a phone call. Two minutes after that the call goes to me. So I'm at my desk working on something. A leads popped in. I don't even know it yet. That leads already got an email. It's gotten a text message from me and then my phone will ring so I pick it up. I can see it's calling from my client to their account. So I pick it up and it tells me hey, dave, you got any lead. It's Lance Hood. He's in Iowa City from lead source Facebook, press one to have this call connected. So I'm like, okay, I got an idea of who this guy is. I just press one on my phone and now Lance's phone rings and when you pick up it's recording in the CRM, so I don't have to hit the dang a lot of call button. We have a great conversation.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 11:07

Then we start moving through the flow. Right, I screen you and if it's a friend of lead, got to make sure you're at least a legitimate buyer, schedule a follow up appointment to maybe dive deeper, and then we start moving through the flow. Well, as soon as I set that appointment, I can set that in the account in the platform, and as soon as I said it it's going to push it to my calendar. Google or Microsoft, it's going to automatically send you a confirmation. It's going to follow up the day before and it's going to follow up an hour before the text message. All that's automated to make sure you show up, because getting in contact is key. That's the first mile. So getting you to show up to the second appointment is key. That's how you keep momentum moving. And then in the meantime we could be nurturing you with a couple of touches here and there, sharing tips and tricks or things you might want to know about the brand.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 11:50

After that second call you can maybe send you. You're a hot lead. We can click a button and they'll send you an item 23 and an FDD right and a signature process for item 23 confirmation receipts. So that's automated. So the consumer opens up the confirmation receipt page to fill it out and sign it and they can download the FDD from that page.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 12:10

By the way, I'll riff for a second if you don't mind on this. There are platforms out there that make people sign the item 23 before they get access to the FDD. That's actually illegal. Like so be careful about that process. I've run into a few people have systems that do that. Like you're actually violating what the item 23 is, like they're signing a fake document that's not valid. So you got to be careful about stuff like that.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 12:32

So we try to fine tune that process. So we get people in the funnel to fill it out and that's where they access it. But it eliminates that minutia, that milestone you've got to work through. I know people still get people that print, sign and scan. You'll lose 50% of your quality candidates because they just won't go through that process. So make it frictionless at this point.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 12:53

Then candidates moving through everything's great, we don't do when you get to the point of signing multi-party agreements, multi-variate signatures. We say, use docusign or whatever signing tool you're using at that point and then they're signed up. You can create a copy of that record and move it into a different workflow for your operations and now the internal team can be watching it through, moving it through essentially a Gantt chart kind of on board monitoring where that person's at in their onboarding flow. Meanwhile you can then create an account for them and client to other for the unit operations clone from your ideal model account. Two minutes, three minutes later there's an active account sitting there that's already set up with all the automations and workflows and pipeline views and templates and everything you want them to have to operate successfully and that'll be done weeks before they actually need to use it because they got to get trained in things. But it takes minutes to get a fully operational account set up and that'll be just them, their own data set lockdown so they can't see anything else.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 13:53

You don't have to worry about sales rules, routing rules like you do in you know, like, let's say, a HubSpot or Salesforce or other CRM tools that are pretty common. Zoho, that's just a big blob of data and they're trying to parse it out using complex territory rules and if you sneeze on the back end, data bleeds and sometimes you're violating your franchise agreement by sharing contacts across territory lines. So ours is not like that at all, so I don't know if that helps answer your question. There's a lot more Day in the life of a franchise owner proposals, payment process and QuickBooks, online reviews like we can handle all that for the unit, but I don't want to riff too long on that line, so that give you kind of a good idea.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 14:30

Yeah, no, I'm just drinking it all in and listening as you explain that and it makes so much sense If somebody's asking people to sign an FDD receipt before they've received the FDD, they're signing saying that they've received it and they haven't received it yet, and having to be able to push a button to move to the next step. Like you push a button in the system and it sends out stuff. Having it so automated like that is amazing. I assume what you were mentioning there is that once you set up a franchise or they can then set up a new franchise quickly, because this is all pre-defined things and it will just generate a new account for that new franchisee.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 15:13

Yeah, and the pre-defined things are all set with the franchise or right. Every brand has it. I've got several painting franchise systems that I work with. Our founder founded Five Star Painting and then brought in the crew like Scott and Chad that are still in Five Star Franchising. They co-founded that together, but he's been in franchise like 27 years or something like that, so he started another painting franchise years later. We worked with a bunch of people in home services, personal care, pet care, elderly care, like a bunch of service-oriented brands, but the platform was designed for them to operate in.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 15:49

Yeah, and then you have all those tools. Well, so now we have operations and everything. Can you just take a minute and talk about the what do you say? The reporting, analytics and things like that, so that we can dig into the numbers?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 16:07

Yeah, part of what I feel like we do quite well is we simplify data visualization. It's hard A lot of folks when you're in a complex CRM not for this industry. They took the approach that we chose not to, which is, eh, go in and go over here and just make your own reports. You got access to everything you want and figure it out. Or pay one of our people $250 an hour and then they'll work with you for 37 hours and send you a big bill and it'll be pretty much what you need. So instead we looked at what does everybody need to know. We built dashboards for people. We built, I would say, probably the best visual pipeline I've seen in the industry. So you've got the ability, before you even get to dashboards, you've got a visual workflow of like what are all my sales milestones, who's in each step, dates and values and aging reports all in one view. So you can see in your pipelines what's happening with your revenue and also, does anybody have where they have overdue calls? They have a call today. They have automations running, like you can visualize in this color coded to see what's actually happening with your pipeline at a glance, and then you can do things from your pipeline, click and call, like you can do a lot On the dashboarding side.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 17:25

We pre-built a whole bunch of dashboards to show people revenue and all sorts of reports. They need to see the sales cycle, conversion, lead source, lead attribution data and then also what's happening in this pipeline. So from an attrition perspective and I was in a previous company, I used to help run a translation company before this and I was going to have to pay like $6,500, $7,000 or so to a consultant to build a report that would show me where in my sales pipeline are people falling off of the bandwagon. It's ridiculous. I was so mad when they gave me that quote, like are you joking me? You're a data company and they couldn't give me the data because they had five different data tables to try to pull it together. We simplified the data structure for franchising because it's unnecessary. Now we can just, out of the box, we provide a report that shows how many leads came in and then at every stage, how many did you lose, how many did you keep and what percentage are moving forward.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 18:21

What you can see immediately is where are we struggling with our sales process and then you know where to focus your attention to fix it. You might not know the answers. You might just say, after we deliver an FDD, we got a 70% drop-off rate. That's not right. We're going to go build an automation now that we can use, as we send that FDD, to follow up with that candidate and then next month let's see if that becomes 65%, 60% and what happens to the end of the conveyor belt. If you're fixing all the drop-off points, is you just start closing more business, and sometimes it's people. Sometimes your people are in the wrong seats and they stink at setting appointments, but they're great closers. So then you know how to split the process, get a good setter, get a good closer and, man, I've seen a lot of people make serious improvements to their business just seeing the data. Yeah.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 19:09

Well, with that visualization it stands out. And the thing that some people don't think about is that if you start from the beginning of the funnel and work through it, you can increase the amount of people that make it to the end by starting at the beginning and opening everything up. So does it have an ability to color, flag or something? So say, if it's really kind of like what would be considered a non-acceptable number, can it be like have a warning, like a red or something like that, where it stands out, because some people might not know what numbers are good, what numbers are bad, and have an idea of what's normal. It's a great question.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 19:52

We don't have like a benchmarking or grading type system in there where you could set that threshold. And it's crazy because it varies a little bit by industry, even in franchising like, what's a great conversion rate? I can tell you most data that's out there in the franchising industry is way off. They're like oh, if you're converting 1% of everybody, you're doing great. I've got people that close 2% or 3% of all their dead leads, rehashing them in our system. So I think we can all challenge some of those numbers and look at overall thresholds differently. But for most brands what I recommend is they figure out, let it operate, fine tune it for a little bit and then see where they start to see good conversion rates for their best units and then they use those as their measuring sticks for other units with their ops team to say, okay, how do you know when somebody's out of a healthy range?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 20:46

Yeah, it's a while to know, but it'll vary by business, so we don't have to automatically just kind of preset that and then see a warning flag. But you'll see that in the data when you start doing like a comparative analysis.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:00

Right, you'll see it compared to corporate and you'll see the corporate locations and you'll see it compared to other franchisees and be able to establish those numbers. And if you just feel in your gut that a number isn't effective, then you can start working on that.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 21:14

Yeah, that's good advice. Usually if you've got corporate stores, those tend to be kind of your model accounts. So make sure they are model accounts. Then you've got a really good measuring stick to use when you're doing like a comparative analysis. Check a box here these two corporate stores I would compare against these three locations you know my Illinois locations and then they'll be able to see how you compare against the corporate ideal model.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:39

Are you able to visualize the conversion rates of leads by lead source, so they can get a good amount of knowing where to put their money?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 21:49

Oh yeah, if anyone's, when you're listening to this, you're all probably going to nod your heads at this statement. But one of the most critical things you've got to know is which bucket that I'm putting money into is generating better ROI and more money for me. A lot of people they market into the same channels because they hear oh, ppc, ico, facebook and if I'm a home service guy, angie leads or Thumbtack or whatever Kraftjack connects pros. They start buying these portal leads. But they have no idea sometimes that they might be spending more money than they're getting back on some of these portal leads, or the ROI is so small that they can't afford to cover the key. They can't keep the lights on and pay the overhead costs with those things. So, yeah, absolutely, and we stratified differently. We show how many leads came in by source, then we show how many of them got a quote, then we show how many of the ones that got a quote close.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 22:43

You kind of got a data parfait to look at and it tells something really important. That's why we do it this way. You might have a lead source that has limitless tire kickers and I don't mean to pick on anybody. Let's pick a portal Actually, I won't say anyone's name A general portal lead and you find that you get down the road far enough that you've consumed your human capital. You've sent out estimators to these places. You've sent, let's say, the 40 estimates last month for this lead source and you closed one deal.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 23:11

That was probably a collectively 80 hours of human capital you wasted to get one deal. You got to know that Most people have no idea. Those people are like well, I made $16,000. I spent $8,000. So I'm doubling my money, let's keep going. But what they don't know is all of the data, all the effort that went into getting that $16,000 negates the 2x multiple on that investment. So, yeah, you've got to look at that. You've got to look at it a little differently than most people will show you the data and then you're going to start to realize which ones are truly providing ROI and which ones are not.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 23:48

Right Understanding that time and system per lead, per lead source and the salesperson that's talking with them and stuff. All that data allows you to really hone in on their most effective processes, and sometimes you have a leader there that could help everybody else in the system. You have lead sources that work, and sometimes you may not get enough leads from one individual source, so you're just going to scrape the best ones off the top. And, yeah, I think all that stuff is so important. If we were going to walk people through a process, what would that be? What best practices and things that you've learned about engagement and conversion when it comes?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 24:32

to that.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 24:33

Yeah, let's talk about it and I'll bring up chat GPT, because everyone's hot on that topic. But you want to automate what should be automated. There are tools out there. I respect the heck out of them, but there are tools like Luminai and some tools that have tried to automate the whole initial engagement process and then the rest of the sales process, with chatbots communicating with people. Talk to a salesperson that uses that. They just don't work well. So you want to automate what you should automate, then you want to as soon as the automation has done its job.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 25:03

In an ideal world, you want to be extremely fast to communicate with the lead. That's key. Speed delete has never gone away. It doesn't make people mad If I take the time to put my personal information in form because I want to know more about what you got. I expect you to get back to me faster today than I did five years ago, and that timeframe is going to continue to get smaller as people are getting instantaneous data everywhere. If I have to you were having internet issues earlier today I'm tapping my toe if I don't have 40 megabits per second download speeds. So just bear in mind that the world has shifted. There's an expectation that you get in touch fast and also there's an expectation that you get in touch in a medium that's going to be useful or helpful for that person. So by age it changes. Like younger folks let's say 35 and younger you better be texting, and or you also want to stay in platform. So if you're doing Facebook lead, lead gen, you want the form to be in Facebook so you can maximize the number of people that convert because they were on that platform in the first place. Don't immediately try to pull them out of platform to get them to a lead form on your website. That's marketing strategy, not sales, but you're going to maximize your lead flow. Then you want to immediately engage those folks with phone calls, with texts, with emails, and the reason why I recommend all three as soon as you can is because different people respond differently to different channels, and so most platforms can automate email drips. Guess what it's the worst? It's the lowest conversion rate, lowest engagement rate. You can make it better with video, but it's not great. So don't rely upon your 2003 technology of email drips. That's been around forever and people's inboxes are cluttered, but use it to support the rest of the process when you synergize.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 26:44

Let's say I need to send a document follow up with a text. After I've sent the email I said hey, check your inbox. I just sent you that quote. A lot of people I can't remember what number, it's like maybe a quarter of all quotes that get sent out Just never get read because they went to a spam folder or somebody missed the email. But if I send a text two minutes after I send the email with the link to the proposal or heck in our platform text, the proposal link, but if I follow up with that, the likelihood that the email getting read goes up tremendously.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 27:16

So in the follow up process of leads, multi-channel you use nurturing. You have to nurture because even as good as our platform is, you're not going to immediately book everyone. The highest conversion rate I've seen across our whole system is like 91% of all leads get scheduled. It's ridiculously high. Out of thousands and thousands of users. That's the top dog and there's a long story there. But he's killing it For franchise systems that rely upon, let's say, like Angie Thumbtack, more portals or a lot of digital. I see numbers as high as like 65%, 75% conversion rate into booked appointments because they're following the roadmap, the plan automation, quick, just speed, delete and then nurturing. So I'd say for lead, follow up, those are the key things. If you're not doing those, you're happy to coach a little bit, even if you're not a client of mine. But you need to fix it because you're wasting money.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 28:09

Right, yeah, no, I think that what you said too, about the texting I forget the numbers Isn't it something like the average text is read within three minutes, or something like that? It's incredibly high, and people see their phone. They may not check their email or see their email, but you're? I have not seen a spam folder for text messages.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 28:32

So, yeah, there is like an Android have one, I think Apple does. To their blocks they come kind of spammer block, but it's very small and they're known offenders. Those are the only people that go in there. So, yeah, it's 90% of all texts read in two minutes, two to three minutes and depending on the demographic that number is even higher, right, you know, between, let's say, 35 and 15,. You know 15 year old every text within five seconds.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 29:00

So you know it's just good. That number is just going to again, it's going to shrink. Now there's more regulation around texting right, tcpa, things like that. So our platform keeps you compliant. You know, as long as you've got a good opt-in statement, then everything else is pretty much automated on our end.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 29:17

Yeah, well, I can tell you that that's a big deal, because I was looking at exploring insurance and I thought I was going to get a call from one person but I got a call from like seven people that work for that company and they were all lighting up my phone and one guy texted me and I texted him back and he texted me back and I started working with that guy.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 29:45

The guy that didn't call me didn't blow up my phone, but just texted me because you know it worked in my schedule and it wasn't annoying, and so it's like having that what you say, adding this thing in. You're going to find with each client what works for them. Some people call them, they'll respond to the phone call, some will respond to the text, some will respond to the email, and I really think it makes sense to stay within platform, because you know that they're using that, that it's familiar and they understand how to use it and they're currently using it and all that. Well, very good. What about what do you have for talking to people about proposal and quote follow up, because you know here we have the leads. But what about proposals and quotes? Because that's where it starts to get real and turn into what is a deal.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 30:36

Yeah, there are three places I'm glad you brought that up Three places in the sales process, like the three buckets where people fail the most. Franchise, fran, dev doesn't matter. Every sales process, high-end systems management software, same problem. Your leading conversion is problem number one, the biggest one. It's your biggest hole in the bucket where you got money just dumping out of your business. Number two, though, is proposals and quotes. So you just spend all that money and time to get to their house and do a quote. You drove there maybe it was a half an hour drive, half an hour back. So an hour of just killed human capital, an hour on site, two hours of invested time in this person, plus all the follow up before to get there. That's an expensive moment for your business, and then your person spends on our platform three minutes, but it doesn't matter.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 31:22

You build a proposal more human capital and you show it to them and they want to think about it. Most businesses and you can pretend like this is wrong. Most of you will be like yeah, it's actually kind of true for us too. They don't follow up effectively. Once they've delivered the quote, they're onto the next shiny object. They've only got one estimator and he's busy all day in estimates, driving around, doing it, quotes, and there isn't a follow up process. So that's a key drop off point. We see a lot of businesses that are just losing money that they could easily scoop up and put in their pocket is not following up effectively.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 31:55

So how do you do it? Send them a quote. There should be an immediate text within, probably within a minute or two of you sending the email or, frankly, our platform delivered the proposal via the text as well, because a lot of people they just want to tap on that on their phone and look at it while they're in a boardroom meeting, in the board but I call them boardroom meetings, but anyway. But that's key. But you want to nurture more than that. You want to have an email the next day set you and it's all value touches. It's not what you get, the quote just following up.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 32:24

If you use the word just as you're reaching out to your customers, you should shoot yourself, because it's like a red flag where people like, okay, sales guy, he has no value to give. But if every time you touch them, send them an email, send them a text, call them three days later, send them another text four days later send them an email seven days after you like you should have a whole sequence to follow up with a bid and a quote, and it should probably be look at your buying cycle. If you say, dave, people make a decision to replace a roof within three weeks, then you should have a three week follow up cycle with once you've delivered that quote, because you'll know at that point they've probably decided to go with somebody else. You might even have your first step.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 33:03

If you go through that nurturing sequence of the proposal, you should have it pushed to another one that goes into a hey, if you didn't buy from me, hey, it looks like you might have gone with somebody else. Let me know if you still need some help. And that's your next touch in the long term follow up sequence, where you still, for 12 months, nurture them, give them tips, share advice about roof maintenance. If you're a roofing company, whatever you're an expert at, that'll help you close more deals and keep them warm, even if they realize they can't afford your services. Then when they are ready, they're not going to Google Roofer, they're just going to call you because you were the guy that stayed in touch with them for the last 12 months.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 33:40

That makes total sense. I really gosh. I know we're running out of time, but I have a couple of questions. One would be language is important, right? We communicate with words, and so I was thinking about retaining and engaging with people. And not only the process is that, but what are the words and language that you've seen? So when you're sending a text, you're sending an email and you're making a phone call, that is all an accumulation of words. What are the things that are really working to connect with people in general?

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 34:17

Yeah. So let's talk about medium appropriate communications. So we've all gotten the text message from our grandma or an aging relative. That's like five paragraphs long. That's a text that nobody wants to read.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 34:30

Businesses tend to violate that rule all the time. There's like this unwritten rule that it should be as short and brief as possible. You're not going to say hello, steven, I have always wanted to meet with you. You're going to be like hey, steve, I've wanted to meet with you, or hey, steve, let's set up some time. So when you're texting, the tone should be a little more casual and familiar, almost like you're texting one of your maybe not an old college buddy. We're not going to use frat house or locker room language, but like it's going to be.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 34:55

Don't abbreviate everything, but make it more familiar. Abbreviate words, use contractions like stuff like that. Make it and don't say the dang word hello. That's like a marketing word and as soon as I see an email with hello in front of it, I'm like delete, like I know. So that's a big one.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 35:12

Keep it familiar and pleasant and friendly emails. You want to have a similar tone, but maybe you can be a little more formal. I don't think you need to be in home services or Andev. Nobody wants to talk to a stiff, so relax. Keep it brief and texts usually about under 300 characters is my recommendation for all texts. If you can keep it under 150, even better. Your response rate will go up a little. Actually, if it's a little shorter, to the point, emails.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 35:38

You want to use video and but also you want to use. Don't ever say I'm following up every message you send, either, whether texts or email. You should be giving value, so send them something. That's it. Let me give you an example. You'll say something like hey, many of our customers have had questions about how to keep their windows clean after we stop by. Here are two tips you might want to know. Use your old newspapers. Use, you know, use Windex like whatever right, whatever your next product, you want to put your expertise on display every single email, without being salesy, because people don't want to be pushed. They want to, they want to, they want to pull themselves into the deal. Give them a reason to want to do that by helping them trust you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 36:18

Right, answering any objections they might have before they're voiced or come up. Because if you can answer their objections in a video, then they don't have to hold on to that and get worked up about it and they also don't have to feel uncomfortable about asking you. So then you've cleared that out of the way. If they've watched that, you know, and that's a great thing to handle in those follow-up sequences, for sure. And another thing I think is if you teach people something they didn't know, that they didn't know. They've now learned something and now they're paying attention to you, especially if whatever they learn is a value to them. You know Right.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 36:56

Yeah, and you're the expert, right, if you're a roofer, a plumber, whatever, like you know a lot of stuff that they don't know. Your comment I was smiling big because I was just training someone this weekend on what are the top five objections that people have to buy in your service, the top five fears, and you should have a step that addresses each one of those in your nurturing sequence Because by the time they're done going through those, if they're opening those messages or reading what you send them, they're probably going to increase their likelihood to buy by double digit percentages, just because you've eliminated these subconscious fears that they might not have even known they had. But when you service them like, oh yeah, that makes sense, yeah, okay, oh, there's financing options. Good, I don't have to get a second mortgage on my house right now, like I can actually afford this. That's really, really smart. I'm glad you said that.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 37:41

Well, absolutely Well. I know we're running out of time, dave, but I just want to thank you for joining me and I want to encourage everybody go to https://Franpro. vip/GoClientTether and reach out to Dave at Client Tether and see where that goes, because it just seems like it's really very automated and when we've talked behind the scenes in here, you're always learning and it seems like you're putting what you learn into the program to simplify it, because some people, as they continue to evolve and improve, they add on to versus condense and simplify with new functionality. So you don't want to make something so big and cumbersome you have the Titanic that can't do anything but as you want to make it better and more intuitive and simple so that people can actually work and use it.

Dave Hansen (ClientTether): 38:34

I appreciate it. We spend a lot of time. We listen to the market. I wish I could say we were the geniuses. But the geniuses that drive a lot of our innovation are you guys. The people that use the platform say what, if, what, if, and we love that. But always in the back of our minds they're okay, but how do we make it usable, right? How do we make that simple? How do we make it so 95% of all franchises could deploy that resource and not get lost? It's tough, honestly, balancing those things. But thanks for the shout out on that, because we've been working hard at that Absolutely. Thank you, dave. Thanks a lot, lance.