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Most contractors react to a slow month the same way. Spend more on ads, buy more leads, knock more doors. But if your funnel leaks, more leads just means spending more money to lose more jobs. The contractors pulling away from your market aren't buying more leads. They fixed five specific leaks first.

In this solo episode, Mauricio Cardenal opens up the exact funnel audit his agency runs on every client. Mauricio is the founder of Contractor Marketing Pros, where he has worked with more than 500 contractors over nine years and generated $150M+ in tracked sales. This material comes straight from a private workshop he ran for 30 contractors, and the feedback was strong enough that he turned it into a full episode.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why 78% of customers buy from the first company that responds, and why your odds of reaching a lead drop 60% after just one hour

• The three baseline numbers you must know before spending a dollar on marketing: average job value, gross margin, and allowable cost per acquisition

• How one company recovered $750,000 in 60 days with a missed-call text campaign, and another generated $250,000 in week one just by calling back abandoned calls

• Real contact rate takes 12 to 14 touches over a two to three week window, not two calls and a shrug

• Why texting like a human converts dramatically better, and the iMessage trick that lifts response rates by roughly 50%

• The industry average call booking rate is 42% according to ServiceTitan, while elite operators book 90%

• A $5M company that moves booking rate from 60% to 70% adds roughly $500,000 in revenue without changing anything else

• How Steven Van Horn's team at Simpson Salute added $4M in tracked revenue through consistent CSR training alone

• Brigham Dickinson's three caller needs that get appointments booked: feel understood, feel cared about, feel reassured

• The night-before selfie video from your tech that separates you from every competitor and lifts show rates

• How Brad Strawbridge used AI to win a $200,000 commercial contract with a proposal delivered in hours instead of the 7 days his competitors needed

• The same 100 leads producing 6 jobs for one contractor and 12 for another, and exactly which two stages made the difference

This one is for the contractor who is tired of paying for leads that never turn into revenue and wants to know exactly where the money is leaking out.

Mentioned in this episode:

Mauricio's Calendar

Mauricio's Calendar

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, so let me, check everything is good.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I'll just take a Brio… Video.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Audio.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Okay, perfect.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, so let's, get this going.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, I'm gonna share my screen.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Where is it?

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, guys.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, let me see if it's… You're the best.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Actually, let me, pull this…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Let me see what the best thing is… Okay…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, let me, where am I?

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Mauricio Cardenal: Okay, desktop 1.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Okay.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Boom.

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Mauricio Cardenal: All right

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Mauricio Cardenal: What's up, guys? This is Mauricio Cardinal. Today is a podcast that I'm gonna do on my own. I'm gonna talk about the 5 funnel leaks and what it takes to be successful in terms of really getting your business, scaling your company. One of the things that I want to highlight is that it takes 47 minutes

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Mauricio Cardenal: for the average home service company to respond to a lead. The main problem

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Mauricio Cardenal: right, that I want to get across this entire strategy, is that you don't need more leads, right? You actually need to fix this first.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And that's the important thing. I've worked with a ton of contractors over the last 9 years, and I've really found a common theme that only the contractors that are scaling, like, consistently growing 20, 30, 50% on a consistent basis, that are actually spending money on marketing, are really getting the best results with their business. A lot of times.

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Mauricio Cardenal: A lot of contractors stink.

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Mauricio Cardenal: They need to spend more money on ads, they need to get more leads, they need more canvassing, all these different things. But if you're actually

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Mauricio Cardenal: if you're actually filling out information, and you're actually pouring it into a leaky bucket, you're gonna actually go out of business. That's not the way to do it. So we're gonna talk about that in this special podcast, solo podcast for you guys that I'm super excited to talk about.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The first thing, right, generating leads is not the difficult thing. There's a lot of ways to generate leads. In this industry, since the 1990s, you have been working with a lot of… there's a lot of ways to generate leads.

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Mauricio Cardenal: the typical way for contractors, depending on the industry, has been a lot of traditional, traditional ways to generate leads. Traditionally, it includes, first, the yellow pages, it includes…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Let me restart that again.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Start that again. Okay.

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Mauricio Cardenal: What's up, guys? This is Mauricio Cardinalong with AI and Marketing Home Shervers Podcast. I'm super excited today. Today is gonna be a solo podcast that I'm gonna talk about, and we're gonna talk about how to fix the main problem with your marketing. The main thing I wanna talk about… ugh, let me start, start again. Guys, start again, start again.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright.

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Mauricio Cardenal: What's up, guys? This is Mauricio Cardinal with Contractor Marketing Pros, and I'm…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Alright, let me start again. What's up, guys? This is Mauricio Cardinal with the AI Marketing Show for Home Service Pros. Today is a solo podcast, and when I talk about, you don't need more leads, you actually need to…

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Mauricio Cardenal: I'm gonna do it again. Alright.

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Mauricio Cardenal: What's up, guys? This is Mauricio Cardinal with AI Marketing Show for Home Service Pros. I'm super excited to talk today about this episode. This is a solo episode that I put together that really takes information from the every scene event that I did with contractors. It was a private workshop that I did with 30 contractors, and the feedback I got was tremendous. So, I put together this

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Mauricio Cardenal: Solo podcast for you guys that gives you a kind of access into that information, so you can actually get… really get detailed information to really help your business, and really help you scale.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The main thing that I want you guys to understand is that you guys do not need more leads. You need to fix this first.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I'm gonna talk about the 5 funnel leaks that are costly contractors the best job.

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Mauricio Cardenal: It's not a lead problem. Leads are usually the easiest part. The hard part is actually putting the pieces together so you can scale.

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Mauricio Cardenal: What do I mean by that? Well, there's a lot of ways to generate leads. You can generate leads by going to a lead booker, you could go to Angie's List, you could go to…

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Mauricio Cardenal: you know, a home advisor and start buying leads. You can hire canvassing. You can spend money on Google Ads, local SEO, local service ads. You can do Facebook advertising. You can do traditional direct mail.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Referrals. There's so many ways, there's about 25 ways to 30 ways to generate leads. You go to, events as well.

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Mauricio Cardenal: But the issue is that, most of the time, it's not the actual problem.

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Mauricio Cardenal: We're gonna talk about what is the leak, and identify which leak is costing your business money, so you can fix it, to actually… you can start growing your business in the next 30 days.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I'm gonna talk a little bit about myself, just to brag. I've been doing this for a while, right? I've been doing this for a long time. I've been doing this over 9 years. I've been working with contractors. We got my first roofing client back in 2017. In that time, we've worked with over 500 plus contractors, we've generated over 200,000 inbound leads, and we've generated over $150 million in track sales with the clients that we work with.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, we, we, we, one of the things I've seen.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Consistently working with contractors, is that

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Mauricio Cardenal: I've seen patterns, right? Patterns that people face in terms of actually getting the best results for their business. And if they actually overcome the negative things that are happening in terms of the marketing, then we're gonna actually do this for your business to really get you the best success.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One of the things that you have to understand is, before you actually get into actually fixing the leaks, and actually pouring more money into the gasoline, you have to know what your actual numbers are.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I've talked to many contractors, and you'd be surprised how many do not know their actual baseline numbers. What you need to understand before you actually start doing this audit is you have to understand what is your average job value? How much

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Mauricio Cardenal: does each customer worth your business? It's different for different businesses, it's different for pest control, it's different for roofing, it's different for…

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Mauricio Cardenal: different… for plumbing, HVAC, depending on the home service industry you're in, obviously it's gonna change and adapt. That's why it's… you have to understand what business you're in, in terms of recurring revenue or project revenue.

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Mauricio Cardenal: You have to understand what your average job value is. And then you have to understand what your gross margin is. How much money do you keep after labor and materials?

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Mauricio Cardenal: to give you an example, if you have a $10,000 job, if you're replacing a water heater, or replacing a small roof, you're doing 30% margin on that, plus commission, you're basically 35% done, you're probably taking home $5 to $6K on that.

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Mauricio Cardenal: How much can you actually take as a cost per acquisition?

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Mauricio Cardenal: how much money can you actually spend to acquire that customer and still be profitable. That's… you have to understand these numbers as a baseline number to understand before you start really spending money on marketing.

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Mauricio Cardenal: When you are spending money on marketing, you have to understand what your budget is, and you have to understand how many customers you're willing to pay to acquire each customer.

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Mauricio Cardenal: It's obviously going to be different depending on the home service you're in. It's going to be different depending on the product you sell. It's going to be different on the time of the year, the location, the competitors. Obviously, smaller markets are going to be less competitive than bigger markets, so you have to understand what the baseline number's in. At the end of the day, I want you guys to understand.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Math… marketing is a mathematical game. It's all it is, right? If you ask… if you do the math in your business, understand your numbers, you'll be successful with the campaigns.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Here are the five stages that we actually talk about. First is speed to lead.

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Mauricio Cardenal: here are the five stages that we actually talk about. The first is…

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Mauricio Cardenal: It's speed to lead. Second is contact rate. Third is booking rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Fourth is show rate, and fifth is close rate. Now, this is basically the most high-level way to look at these different buckets, but if you're running, you know, a sophisticated operation, you would know this on a more level, right? Granular level.

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Mauricio Cardenal: This is basically just an understanding about the actual results in terms of a high-level understanding, because obviously, depending on the business, you can get a lot more complicated depending on what you level up. But typically, this is just kind of the benchmark numbers you have to look at. Speed to lead, contact rate, booking rate, show rate, and then close rate. And these are the ones, the numbers that you can give you as a benchmark, as a glance.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The first one I want to talk about is speed to lead.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I have had multiple, podcast… I've had multiple podcast guests talk about this specifically for a long time. And I've been doing this for a long time, and what I've seen overall is that this is really not a technical issue.

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Mauricio Cardenal: or a knowledge issue, it's just a discipline issue. A lot of people understand the importance of speed to lead, but for whatever reason, they just fail to implement and execute this in their business. So this is really not a skill set, or a knowledge gap, or a tool yet, it's just really a discipline issue.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The issue with this, at the end of the day, you are in the home services space.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Most of the time, the biggest factor in closing deals is speed. So, 78% of customers buy from the first company that responds. It's very important to understand that metric.

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Mauricio Cardenal: There's a 60% drop in odds of reaching the lead after 1 hour. So if you wait 1 hour to respond to a lead, then your chances of actually closing the lead are gonna drop significantly. It's a 9XI or high return when you respond with under 5 minutes versus 30 plus.

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Mauricio Cardenal: There's a lot of different tools you can use to improve these numbers, but at the end of the day, you have to… it's not really about what you use, it's really a decision you make in your business.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I just talked to one of our former employees that actually ended up starting his own service business. He actually is a remodeling company in Florida, and what he did is, basically, he basically copied what we did for our clients.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So we had a…

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Mauricio Cardenal: speed to lead, he had the front end with the Facebook advertising, and then he has, on the back end, go-ahead level to actually respond to the leads in an easy way to understand, and then he has a call center that actually kind of follows up with the lead and calls them, tries to book an appointment. And then he has a dispatch person to actually call and actually confirm the appointment. And that's a really simple system. We set this up for our clients many times, it's not really super complicated.

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Mauricio Cardenal: complicated, but you have to… it's amazing to me that how many contractors do not understand something simple like this. Speed to lead is number one, is a discipline issue. It's not about the technology, the tools, it's about actually deciding you're gonna do it.

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Mauricio Cardenal: here's some things that you can do. Obviously, having a 60-second text, auto-text.

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Mauricio Cardenal: every form call or chat around the clock, having another missed call text back within 30 seconds every time. Another thing you could do is having an AI receptionist after hours.

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Mauricio Cardenal: and then also smart routing, pushing the lead to whatever is free right now. So, a couple things that are not here that I can talk about that can really help you is this. When… obviously, you guys have fixed hours, so if you have…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Your regular… you know, CSRs answering the phone between 8 to 5,

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Mauricio Cardenal: you obviously are the person, you know, routing. You have that lead route to that in-office, but if you have it

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Mauricio Cardenal: if somebody's… if that… all those lines are busy, they route to a specific area to actually to the call center. If it's… if it's not busy, but if it's after hours, then it routes to the actual after-hours route. So it takes two routes, one where it's…

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Mauricio Cardenal: during office hours, and one when it's after hours, and then whatever, obviously, where it comes in, then that's how you actually get the lead to actually respond, right? That's another thing you can do. Lead two is contact rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: This is a big one, right? Elite benchmark is 90%. What is a contact rate? A contact rate is basically how many leads actually contact… get contacted. So a simple way to understand this is, out of 100 leads.

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Mauricio Cardenal: if you're contacting 90, that's a 90%, you know, contact rate. It's really not that hard to understand, but a lot of leads go unanswered. Actually, a lot of ton of leads go unanswered, and you would be surprised how many people do not actually have this in place.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, if you don't have something like this in place where you're responding to every lead, you're actually have trained CSRs.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Then actually doing any type of advertising is really kind of a waste of money.

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Mauricio Cardenal: That's to be honest, fact. So you should actually understand how to fix this in your business to really figure this out first before actually hiring any marketing company. Because if you hire a marketing company, you're spending a ton of money, then you're not going to get the results that you need. So just make sure you actually understand this.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One thing to keep in mind is that when you're doing the contact rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: you have to span it over a 14 days. This is kind of another way to understand is lead nurturing. So, when you nurture your leads through a 14 touchpoints, through a 2-3 week process, it can actually significantly improve your contact rate to set more appointments.

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Mauricio Cardenal: These are just examples. These are just companies that are actually left money on the table, they just didn't change anything with the marketing, and they actually used this to actually get recovered money. So, one example is from Chirp, which is a podcast guest that I had on, where they talked about a specific account

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Mauricio Cardenal: Which, they generated $756,000.

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Mauricio Cardenal: $750,000 in 60 days from a missed call text campaign.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Another one is a $250,000, which was generated in week one from abandoned call. So here's what that means. Anybody that was abandoned, right, that had a call that came in, but nobody answered the phone, they actually…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Excuse me. They actually… sorry. They actually, called those leads back, and they actually generated over $250,000 in revenue from that. So, obviously, it was a…

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Mauricio Cardenal: pretty big, it was a high volume of leads I didn't contact, but you'd be surprised how many leads do not get contacted. So, again, strive for 95%, maybe 100% is not, ideal, but you should definitely go for 100%, at least.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Here's what, how to… here's something that you should definitely use.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One of the things that can help improve the contact rate and help you turn those leads into appointments is texting like a human. A lot of people, they can use AI to write messages, and it's super simple to create content with AI and create messages. But one of the things that can really help you is when you write

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Mauricio Cardenal: if you're using AI, to make sure it writes in a conversational, human manner. This will improve your contact rate tremendously. Another thing to keep in mind is this. So if you're doing Facebook ads, and a lead comes in, in a form submission or landing page, then make sure the first message references the actual

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Mauricio Cardenal: lead. So, for example, hey, I saw you filled out a form from Facebook, how can I help you? You know, something simple like that. Obviously, reference where the lead comes in. Another factor that I would consider is this, and this really is more dependent on the volume.

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Mauricio Cardenal: because I probably would not recommend this if you don't have a high volume, probably not worth it. But if you are sending messages, if you send messages through iPhone, it's gonna have a much higher response rate. So blue over green is typically a 50% higher response rate. And the reason being is because, obviously, the iMessage is a direct contact. It doesn't come from an unknown number, if you're doing it correctly.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And also, if you're sending messages that are not scalable. For example.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One thing you can do, guys, is when you are sending a video to get a reply.

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Mauricio Cardenal: You can have an owner or a salesperson selling a short video from the iPhone saying, hey.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Thank you for filling out this information. I look forward to connecting and getting, sending a technician or a, you know, a project manager to discuss your project and get to know you a bit. Here's a little information about us, etc, etc. So those are something that can really help you stand out, because it would improve your contact rate. At the end of the day, people don't really want to talk to machines. They do prefer the human touch.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So when you add the human touch to your business, it's gonna help you really get a high response rate. And when you get a high response rate with your funnel, with your leaks, you're gonna get more return from your investment. That's the whole thing about this campaign.

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Mauricio Cardenal: League 3 is booking rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: 42% industry average. That's according to Service Titan. So, out of 100 leads that come in, about 42% are actually booking appointments. And that is a significant gap.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Just to give you an example, Elite is about 60-65%. A company like A1 Garage, according to what I researched, they have about 90% of their calls come in, and they actually book appointments from those booking appointments, right?

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Mauricio Cardenal: And that's… that's the thing you have to understand. So… If you just…

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Mauricio Cardenal: Fix the booking rate in your business.

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Mauricio Cardenal: you're gonna increase your revenue by not even changing anything else. So, for example, if you have a $5 million company that is doing $5 million, if they just increase their booking rate from 60% to 70%, that's an addition of $500,000 in revenue if everything else stays the same, if the speed delay stays the same, if the actual closing rate stays the same, everything else stays the same. So that's a big change that you have to keep in mind.

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Mauricio Cardenal: With everything else.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One thing is this. You have to train your CSRs. You have to get them to understand how to really book an appointment.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One podcast I have you listen to is from Brigham Dickinson. I interviewed him a few months ago, and he talked about specific things that your CSRs can do to book appointments. This is a big factor, because it's a revenue generator that can help you really get more business for your company.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Here's an example. This is from Steven Van Horn. I interviewed him, earlier this, this year, and he talked about his company, which he scaled, and his company was Simpson Salute. They didn't change anything in their business.

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Mauricio Cardenal: what they did is basically they trained their CSRs, and they added $4 million in revenue just from one training session. From… not one training session, from consistent training sessions throughout the time. So they tracked $4 million in revenue by just fixing their actual booking rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And this is a big deal. And obviously, they use, you know, software to track their booking rate, so they know, out of 100 calls, how many were booked.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Again, the average home operator is booking 42%.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Try to go to 60-70%. If you're just doing this every time, you're gonna actually book more appointments and more sales, and that is a huge opportunity and huge leak you can find that can help you get more business.

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Mauricio Cardenal: League 3.

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Mauricio Cardenal: this is basically from Brigham Dixon. I really recommend you listen to that podcast, but every caller

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Mauricio Cardenal: Has to have 3 needs before they book.

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Mauricio Cardenal: They have to feel understood, so you have to make sure they understand what you're talking about. They have to feel cared about. You can actually measure this through the recording. You have to incentivize your CSRs to understand

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Mauricio Cardenal: how to actually get the best results for booking the appointments, and then also, you have to make them feel reassured. So if you have these three things, make them feel understood, make them feel cared about, and make them feel reassured, then you are really getting a much better result

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Mauricio Cardenal: by booking more appointments from your CSRs. One thing is that I recommend, obviously, stop saying, I'm sorry to hear that. It does sound fake.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Make sure you train your CSRs. You can do this twice a month. Listen to the calls, use call recording software. There's many different ones you can use.

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Mauricio Cardenal: ones you can use is, obviously, GoHighLevel does this as well. Callrail.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Service Titan, they all can record calls. It's for training purposes.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And obviously, you can use AI to analyze the sentiment of the calls, but this is something that you can do that can really help you improve your revenue. When you're hiring marketing campaigns, when you're spending money on ads, any change in your campaigns, and this can really get you the better results over time.

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Mauricio Cardenal: League 4, show rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, once you book the appointment.

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Mauricio Cardenal: what is the show rate? Out of 10 appointments, how many are actually showing up to the actual appointment?

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Mauricio Cardenal: You should strive for 80%.

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Mauricio Cardenal: That's what the goal is. So, if you book 10 appointments, you have 80% show rate, then that's a good rate that you should go for.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Anything under 70% means your confirmation process is broken, and now you're lead. So you're getting appointments, but you're not getting the actual people to show up to the actual appointment, then that is a gap, you can see. So, those are things you can do to improve on this.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And you have to make sure you're tracking this. So, this is something, obviously, that is set up with your tech stack. It's set up with your software. That's why it's so important to be tech-enabled, tech-focused, because when you're spending money on ads, when you're spending money on campaigns, when you're spending real money.

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Mauricio Cardenal: and it's getting more expensive every year, you have to kind of fix these things to actually get the best results for your business. And if you're not doing this, then it's really a fatal responsibility.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Here are things you can do to actually fix the show rate. First is at the booking. You can actually send a message about what to expect. You could talk about what's unique about your business, about your company, your process. What is it to expect once they show up for the booking? Once they show up for the showroom?

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Mauricio Cardenal: once they show up for the actual tech visit, how to… what to expect after a water heater replacement visit, a roof replacement visit? Whatever it is, you have to have, like, a message that can really resonate with the user. And that's something that they can really feel confident that you're actually a real deal.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Another thing you could do is actually, in that message, Make sure that they are…

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Mauricio Cardenal: you know, they are talking about the, the showroom videos and testimonials, they could feel reassured about the actual message. Another thing you could do is, the day before, you can either call to confirm, or

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Mauricio Cardenal: I actually text them to confirm the meeting.

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Mauricio Cardenal: These are the things that you can do. Get them to commit. Ask them to reply. This is a good thing that you can do, so it gets them to actually reply in the message as well. Then, obviously, the day of the meeting, send a reminder, and make sure that they get that message. This all can be automated, and obviously you can have one person that's doing this.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Another thing you can do that can actually improve your show rate is, the night before, just basically take a… have your tech or your project manager send a selfie video talking about 10 to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, about yourself, who you are, what you do, and just kind of give that personal touch.

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Mauricio Cardenal: These are things that are not automated, that can really help you really separate yourself from the competition.

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Mauricio Cardenal: League 5 is a close rate.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, obviously, you have to be tracking your close rate. Out of 10 sits, out of 10 appointments, how many are closing? Is it 20%, 30%, 40%? Obviously, there's things that you can do to improve this. This is an entire…

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Mauricio Cardenal: presentation, attire training, that you can actually do this on your own, but it's not really part of this, but at the end of the day, this… this entire industry is about sales.

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Mauricio Cardenal: It's a very important way to actually get the best results. A lot of people, what they do is actually just kind of focus on this aspect and ignore the other aspects that are really important. But this is the last part, and it's important to understand. Obviously, like, if you are trying to get better, you should invest in training. Invest in training and getting the best results for your sales team, right? These are all important factors to understand.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, obviously, the range changes depending on, you know, what industry you're in. These are just kind of the average range. It just depends on the actual range that you're looking for, but obviously, you have to track this. And sometimes, really having a higher range might not be the best strategy, because if you have a 50% conversion rate, or 60% conversion rate, you might not be charging enough. So, that's something you have to keep in mind.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, obviously, you don't want to leave money on the table. You want to have a certain revenue to actually capture the information you need and the revenue you need to actually make it profitable.

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Mauricio Cardenal: One example, right? I had Brad Strawbridge.

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Mauricio Cardenal: on my podcast a few months ago, and he used AI to close a $200,000 commercial roofing contract, because his proposal was ready in 30 minutes.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So think about that for a second. What he did is, basically, he used AI to gather the information from the user, and then put together a proposal within a couple hours.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The competitors needed 7 days. He did it within a couple hours. And the board said it was the best proposal they'd ever seen.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The thing… the thing is to keep in mind is that speed wins.

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Mauricio Cardenal: when you're actually doing proposals, when you're actually sending proposals and doing all this stuff, this is gonna be… help you improve your close rate. So obviously, this is a way to use AI to actually improve your closing rate, and it's something that you should actually learn more about on how to do this for your business.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Closing rate. Again, so obviously having AI draft your proposal, having automated follow-up, and then obviously using tools like Rilla to roleplay your different sales reps. These are all tools that can help you understand, get better with your closing rate, and you can really get the best results with your accounts.

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Mauricio Cardenal: one thing to understand is that I see this all the time. Actually, the biggest mistake in the space, this is basically directly from talking with a lot of contractors that have been doing this for a long time, is…

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Mauricio Cardenal: the biggest mistake is actually not charging enough. So not charging enough for the work, because when you're not charging enough for your work, everything else goes downstream from that. So you have to have, you have to charge enough money to have enough profit in the campaign to actually get the best results for your business, right? So.

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Mauricio Cardenal: What you should do, typically, this is just basically just kind of things you can work on, is having 3 tiers for the pricing.

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Mauricio Cardenal: I'm giving them two options. Having add-ons and upsells into the property, so making sure you can add those in to increase your customer lifetime value.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And then also, you know, creating upgrades, cross-sells, all these different things that can really help you as well. And obviously, obviously, offering finance. This is a big factor. You'd be surprised how many contractors do not offer financing, but it's a huge factor in closing more deals.

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Mauricio Cardenal: The big thing to understand is this.

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Mauricio Cardenal: And this is the whole, the whole thing about the podcast.

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Mauricio Cardenal: If you have one contractor.

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Mauricio Cardenal: get 6 jobs from 100 leads, but the same… another contractor get 12 jobs from 100 leads. Why do you think that was?

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Mauricio Cardenal: It's not the leads.

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Mauricio Cardenal: This is something that you have to really understand.

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Mauricio Cardenal: We, for us, as a business, we run similar campaigns for accounts.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Right? Why… why do… why do some clients get… results

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Mauricio Cardenal: And some clients do not get results. It's this… this exact reason. So it's this exact reason, right? So, if you actually understand this, and you actually apply this for your business, and actually work on fixing each step, then that's how you get double the output. So, because Operation A, to give you an example, they closed 6 jobs.

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Mauricio Cardenal: They had a contact rate of 55%. They had a booking rate of 55%, a show rate of 75%, and a close rate of 28%.

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Mauricio Cardenal: contact Operation B, right, they fixed two stages. The contact rate went up to 75%, the booking rate went up to 75%, they had the same show rate, and they had the same close rate, and they ended up closing 12 jobs, which is double the output.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Those are things that you have to understand with your job. This is a really key thing to understand about really getting the best results for your business with your marketing ads.

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Mauricio Cardenal: When you fix this, you can start compounding everything after the close. You can start asking for referrals. You can start asking for, jobs, you can start knocking the doors in the same neighborhood. These are all things that can help you as well. You can request reviews.

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Mauricio Cardenal: every review is a geo-asset. Every review is a SEO asset. The more reviews you have in your business, the better results you will get. And then what you can do is obviously have AI run in the background, where they're actually working on these different things in your business to get the best results. Every customer you treat is a gold.

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Mauricio Cardenal: and you should treat it as an asset, and even the small customers can help you get… compound over time. And this is how, like, these bigger companies are, you know, have 10,000 reviews or 15,000 reviews, because they work with thousands of customers over the years, and that, obviously, that value compounds over time.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, find your number, right? What is your… what is your leak?

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Mauricio Cardenal: Fix it in 30 days. So, what is your stage? Like, what is the stage that's the biggest leak? Understand what the numbers are. What is your average customer value? What is your gross profit? What is your speed to lead? What is your booking rate?

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Mauricio Cardenal: Calculate the value, lead volume plus improvement at the weakest stage, and also commit to one action. These are the things that can really help you and your business, and really get you the best results for your business over time.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, just to give you perspective at the end, these numbers come from Service Titan.

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Mauricio Cardenal: Also, they came from the podcast with Ryan Fenn, where he analyzed over 500 million text messages, so I highly recommend you start listening to that one. Another one is from Power Selling Pros, these are all people I've interviewed in the podcast. And these are all real numbers that I've shared with the AI Marketing Show.

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Mauricio Cardenal: These are people that are really in the space, so I'm gonna have the links to each podcast in the show notes, so you can actually see yourself the actual results.

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Mauricio Cardenal: So, again, guys, thank you for listening to this, I really appreciate it. I hope you guys have good takeaways from this, and really start fixing the leaks in your funnel to really get the best results for your marketing. Thank you, guys.