Arin Darcan sits down with us to talk about the process of successful lead follow-ups, what an ideal appointment setter is, how to make better calls with your clients, and more!

For the full show notes, head on over to:

https://reflectivemarketing.com/podcast/Arin-Darcan-Building-Better-Bridges-Between-Clients-and-Leads

Krystal Hobbs 0:04

Welcome to Beyond the Tools, the podcast that helps contractors attract more leads, grow their business, and finally get off the tools. In each episode, you'll discover marketing tactics that work. You'll get actionable insights from other successful contractors, and connect with experts to help you grow. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs, owner of a social media agency that helps contractors attract and convert more leads. Get ready to take your business to the next level so you can finally enjoy the fruits of your hard labor. Ready, let's go!

Hey, contractors, welcome back to Beyond the Tools. Today's guest is Arin Darcan from Team Follow Up, Arin started Team Follow Up when he essentially got sick of his clients complaining about the quality of their leads and decided to do something about the problem. At reflective, I've been working with Arin's team for a number of months now, because honestly, we were having the same issues, we were seeing that our clients were really struggling to manage the volume of leads that we were generating. And they weren't following up quick enough, often enough. And ultimately, that was really impacting their results. So today, Arin and I dig into the process for following up with your leads some of the things that he's found to be really successful, to get someone from becoming a lead initially, to actually getting to that first appointment, we talked about what to look for in an appointment setter, and some tips and tricks to maximize the performance of your calls. So check out this episode, because you're gonna learn a lot about how much work really goes into the lead follow-up process, and how to do it more effectively. Welcome to the show, Arin, so excited to have you here.

Arin Darcan 2:10

Awesome. Thanks for having me Krystal, I’m excited as well. This is great.

Krystal Hobbs 2:14

So I'm very curious to hear how you got started in this business? When did you realize that lead follow-up was such a big problem?

Arin Darcan 2:24

It started with my Facebook ads agency, actually, I still do run a Facebook ads agency and a Google ad agency. The first thing was that I just kind of got frustrated that with marketing, you can't guarantee results. And if something goes wrong, Facebook will ban their account, as if you're dependent on another firm to execute your job effectively, which is quite aggravating. So that portion didn't sit well with me. It wasn't particularly dependable in the beginning. But, as I was doing so, I observed that many of my clients were complaining to me about the quality of the leads. And I said to myself, "Okay, let me take a look at this point of view.” But look into it. And I'm like, "Well, this lead we created for you on Tuesday, you didn't call until Thursday afternoon?" So, that's around two days. And it kept happening over and over. And as a result, the clients will leave. And I was becoming very irritated. So it was just a combination of Facebook banning people and this, and I was said, "There has to be someone who can fix this.” I did a ton of research and I just couldn't find anyone doing what I thought was good enough. I found some companies, but there weren't many people doing what I thought was good enough. So, yeah, I started Team Follow Up.

Krystal Hobbs 3:51

That makes perfect sense. And I've had conversations with more typical contact centers in the past, and they don't always grasp the process, in terms of leads coming in and it is a little more of an inbound issue. They do, however, have a call-out. That kind of thing.

Arin Darcan 4:13

There's also the fact that when you get to a certain level of a call center, you're working with people, right, and so you have to have like really solid structural sort of structural processes, right, processes that are very clearly laid out very clearly mapped, because there can't be room for human error. As an example, if you're, especially if you're working with foreign workers or something like. You can't rely on them to do what they want. You had to tell them exactly what to do and when to do it. And so, when a customer wants to use a call center, they are in a situation where they may have their own method they think they want it, such as sending the text out at a specific point or having this happen at a certain time, and most other similar "call centers". They just cannot accommodate that. They only need to say no, you follow this as if we were going to compel you to get inside this box. That is all you can do. And if you don't want to do it, then you can't come over. And that's also not fair, because every single client is different, especially if I'm working with agencies who are white labeling my service to their clients and other such things. We must also be adaptable in this area. So, certainly, there are a lot of problems like that.

Krystal Hobbs 5:22

So I guess when you start working with a new firm, like us, you guys do a terrific job phoning our clients’ leads for us. How do you go about working out a process that works, or how did you first figure it out?

Arin Darcan 5:42

It's only common sense. Back to my agency for a moment, we were not only creating leads for our clients, but we were also generating cold prospects for ourselves. And we just noticed that with our own leads, there would be a lot of like, we had just built this process of our own leads, then from that, although we didn't do it, as a part of our Facebook ads service. We have a similar follow-up mechanism in place for our own leads. So I kind of replicated that when I built-in follow up and was realized that there's my starting place. And, so far, it's been really good. And I'm sure that as time goes on, I'll be trying to optimize it, better it, and all that sort of thing. But, in the end, it's not like we're trying to please a 1% increase; if you work with us, there's a good chance that before you're maybe following the lead once or twice like I said two days after they came in, right, like going from Friday to then ask phoning up leads within five minutes and then booking in, and then I was phoning them for seven days. Because it's not just a day; it's an entirely different day. So, for example, if we didn't send an email or SMS follow-up on day one, but did on day three, or something like that, these are tiny small things at the start that you don't need to know. Right. So, yeah, I started with a common-sense approach, using what my other Facebook agency uses, and that's how we got started.

Krystal Hobbs 7:09

That makes logic, too. So, thinking back to when you worked with clients and they'd complain about lead quality and that type of thing, what do you think gets in the way of businesses being successful with lead generation?

Arin Darcan 7:26

With lead generation or their lead follow-up?

Krystal Hobbs 7:30

I guess both.

Arin Darcan 7:33

I'm not particularly good at marketing, so I'll leave the lead generating to you for a moment; you'll know a lot more about it than I do about lead generation. But as for the follow-up, it's simple, it's so amusing, it's simple, but it's not easy. Going to the gym is like everyone knows that if they want to look good, you can look better than 99 percent of people on the planet just by going to the gym, spending an hour four times a week going to the gym, just lifting some weights, doing some exercise, whatever, you can look better than most people on the planet. But the same is true for follow-up. If you only picked up the phone twice a day, every day, you'd be OK. Like, he just had a system free for up the leads, you sent the SMS, you did whatever you needed to do. But you just don't do it and it's true; there are numerous reasons for this, particularly if you're a contractor who spends a lot of time on the road. You're out doing this, you're doing that; you're extremely busy people; you don't have time to sit there for two hours every day, simply picking up the phone and making phone calls. So I absolutely understand. So I think the major issue that's holding people back is simply a lack of time and effort, which is a bit of a broad answer. But is that all there is to it?

Krystal Hobbs 8:48

And we absolutely see it in the trades, either with a lot of our clients, sometimes it's the business owner, himself or herself, phoning the leads, which obviously they wear a ton of different hats, and that just doesn't work. Or they just have one salesperson, but the salesperson prefers to work with serious customers. So that's typically a significant detractor from their time, or they have an office manager. And it's the same kind of circumstance. That person has a lot of other obligations, so it frequently comes down to, like, it's such a large time investment to do it effectively and well.

Arin Darcan **9:35**

Isn't that correct? There are two items that you mentioned. So, even if you have the time, if you're a business owner, you shouldn't be doing this, and you shouldn't be doing it to anyone. It's much easier to outsource follow-up or pay my company to do it than it is to do it yourself. It would entail tracking down the labels and trying them out. It will be somewhat advanced. However, if it is not my company, there are other companies out there that you can use and it is easy to get it like your time is worth something, that time you spend following up you could be growing your business, you could be doing so much where you would be getting more return on investment, return on time from outsourcing it. The second argument is that it recently spoke with a lead and our customer, who they originally hired as a Facebook media buyer. And then, as time went on, they started having them do the follow-up for adding all these minor things, and it became completely insane. And, to be honest, that's why they're working with us now; they recognize it, but it's funny how it occurs.

So tell me a little bit more. For the benefit of our listeners here. So your team, as soon as the lead call comes in, they're calling, and then they're calling twice a day for seven days, right?

Exactly. We normally find it within, depending on how many leads we receive at the same time. We try to put them in for a call if we get a lot of leads at once. If we get a lot of leads at once, we try to put them in for a call. If we get a lot of leads at once, we try to put them in for a call. If we get a lot of leads at once, we try to put them in for a call. If we get a lot of leads at once, we try to put them in for a call. If they do not respond, we enter them into our power dialer. And then we call them twice a day for the next seven days. So we'll call them in the morning and afternoon most of the time. We can be flexible depending on the needs of particular clients. We weren't attempting to fit you into a box, as I stated at the outset. So, if you want us to call at 7 am and then again at 7 pm, or on Friday at 10 am and 3 pm, or at any other time you specify, we will call twice a day and respond to any text messages sent during that time. Then we'll do it for the next seven days. And, in our experience, if they don't respond after seven days, there's no reason to keep them. Then, if we are able to schedule an appointment for them, we need appointment confirmations. So we'd call up a lead if you wanted us to find out every lead every appointment, and you have an hour before the appointment time only to confirm the appointment, which we do. And even if you have a lead, perhaps we have a lead and they are at work. And they say, "Hey, I'm busy till 7 p.m.; please call me at 7 pm." And even if we finish phoning your account by 4 pm, whatever time it is, we will still find them at 7 pm and schedule an appointment for them. So, yeah, we've got that whole, essentially how to put it is the client takes care of the leads, and then we can really take care of everything for the appointments. So it works really well.

It’s like you're doing calls on call.

Yes, exactly.

Awesome. So, if someone is thinking about it, they are experiencing that problem. They're generating leads, but they're saying things like, "I'm going insane trying to contact people in a timely manner. I know I'm leaving money on the table because I'm not getting back to people quickly." What should they look for in an appointment set or an appointment setting team?

So, first and foremost, I don't want to come across in the wrong manner. But the first thing to notice is how the person sounds. So the first thing I do when we're hiring new appointment setters for Team Follow Up is that, and I really don't mind where they are in the world or what their nationality is. They'll send me their CV, and sometimes I'm like, don't be rude, but I don't care, just send me a voice recording of yourself. That's all I care about, to begin with. Because I can't train that like if you have a really deep accent that people don't understand very well, all they're going to do is hang up the call. So what happens is that they send that, and then I can train everything else off of that. So that is the first priority. The second thing I would always recommend, obviously, a lot of people want to work with individuals in the US because they're used to people being in the US, and then their timezone and all that sort of stuff. But look at Latin America, in my opinion. And that can be an excellent way to find some. I've got some really amazing team members who are very inexpensive hourly rate, and they do I feel like they do better than some Americans, and English as well as some other countries, their culture is really different in terms of work and they work extremely hard. So, first and foremost, pay attention to the voice. I've definitely contacted out to some folks in that field in America; check if you can locate someone there. Another factor is how your systems are configured. But you'd have someone who's realized it's kind of a common thing that someone is reliable, someone you can trust to phone the leads up when you say to phone them up. And if they're skipping work then not show up. Obviously having a good internet and if they don't have good internet, that also won't work.

So, first and foremost, I don't want to come across in the wrong manner. But the first thing to notice is how the person sounds. So the first thing I do when we're hiring new appointment setters for Team Follow Up is that, and I really don't mind where they are in the world or what their nationality is. They'll send me their CV, and sometimes I'm like, don't be rude, but I don't care, just send me a voice recording of yourself. That's all I care about, to begin with. Because I can't train that like if you have a really deep accent that people don't understand very well, all they're going to do is hang up the call. So what happens is that they send that, and then I can train everything else off of that. So that is the first priority. The second thing I would always recommend, obviously, a lot of people want to work with individuals in the US because they're used to people being in the US, and then their timezone and all that sort of stuff. But look at Latin America, in my opinion. And that can be an excellent way to find some. I've got some really amazing team members who are very inexpensive hourly rate, and they do I feel like they do better than some Americans, and English as well as some other countries, their culture is really different in terms of work and they work extremely hard. So, first and foremost, pay attention to the voice. I've definitely contacted out to some folks in that field in America; check if you can locate someone there. Another factor is how your systems are configured. But you'd have someone who's realized it's kind of a common thing that someone is reliable, someone you can trust to phone the leads up when you say to phone them up. And if they're skipping work then not show up. Obviously having a good internet and if they don't have good internet, that also won't work.

Right? Yeah. So I know you mentioned that the sound of their voice is one of the things that you look at, internet connection, reliability as a whole for you when you're hiring part of your team. Is there anything else that you look for?

There really isn't. Because I said, everything else can be trained. I don't want people to have call center experience. I'm being honest with you. And the reason why is because there are a lot of call centers out there that train people to sound like robots or sound not friendly. Just have a great conversation and it feels they're one of your friends. So in fact, you've got to try, and if someone is from a call center, and I'm not saying all call centers like that, but there's a good chance they will be in, you've got like untrained them and then retrain. I'd rather just have someone that's literally a blank canvas. Maybe you've never done call centers before. And they just sound good. And that's it. We're good to go.

That makes sense. So when it comes to learning the business, or I guess, tell me about that process to understand like, what the appointment setters are gonna say when they call up those leads?

As a result, we have a lengthy onboarding process. So much has changed since we signed you up, Krystal. But when we onboard our clients, we have an onboarding call with I call them the team captain, but effectively, they're an account manager with the account manager. And then I have an onboarding team that is similar to a tech team. And through and not only that, there are several calls after that, before we go live, which is essentially just working with the client, normally, the customer will send us a script of what they want us to say. And in the first instance, we look at it and go, like, we have to remind clients a lot that our team isn't the sales team. We're not the ones that should be trying to find out what their emotional motivation is. My team isn't trained for that. And so a lot of times, they send us some crazy scripts to begin with. And I just didn't like it, it should be a paragraph long and that's it. So then there's a lot of going back and forth with the scripts. Finally, when we first go live with a script, the client will frequently listen to it. And then, after a few days, they say, "Hey, can we make these changes?" For example, I actually heard some of the calls and heard that the appointment setter said this incorrectly? Or maybe the or everyone's reacting in a certain manner to this topic, which I don't like we alter this question a lot, please. And, of course, we can change it the same day, and then we're back in business. So you don't have to worry about getting it right the first time. Things are entirely about just being open to modifying it as we go along.

Yes. And I think that's an important point to like having the right expectations of your appointment setting team. So for you guys, correct me if I'm wrong. Their job is essentially to book the appointment, they can gather some initial, for example, basic information, a couple of questions kind of thing, but they're not really there to qualify, or is that fair to say?

I would say, I think we can qualify hard, we can do hard qualifiers. So for example, yes or no questions, that kind of thing. We can give in, we can say to them, “Hey, I'm really sorry that we wouldn't be a good fit for you right now.” And we can hang up. But to be honest with you, that's the value but my team really, it's literally just someone pressing the call button. Like that's really where a lot of the that like just having someone to actually just, even if I sounded terrible, that's obviously not a good thing. But half of it is just having someone to actually pick up the phone and that make the calls. So, in terms of qualifying and the scripts and things like that, like it's not too crazy. We can do the qualifier.

That makes sense. Realistically, the most difficult hurdle is getting the lead on the other end of the phone to pick up the phone, and your success rate as a business is significantly higher if you can connect with someone in this manner.

We had a client recently who had something like 49 leads, and he was like, “Hey, Arin, we've only got one booked appointment for 49 leads. Can you look into this?” I said, “Of course.” I was 100% into it. And literally, the other 40 just haven't answered the phone. We phone them at the time, we said, we're gonna phone them. And we've done all that, we've done everything we can. I've had other clients say the same thing to me, “Oh, how can we get more appointments?” I love helping my clients and there comes to a point where there's literally so much we can do, and we are doing everything we can do. And if, for example, if everyone's answering the phone, I say 10 people answer the phone, but only five books then we need to be changing the script to adjust in something for sure. Unless they're just unqualified, and it's just the lead, I don't know. But if it's a case, people just aren't answering the phone. Well, we can adjust the times we phone it. But apart from that, the last option is kind of integrate back on the client and just say to them, the lead isn’t in, and that's it. But anyway, half of the battle was just getting them on the phone for sure.

That makes sense. For example, when a lead comes in like they get an email out of it right away, they get a text right away, there are other things in place. And even with your team, from the appointment setting perspective, you're also able to respond to text messages and Instagram messages and any sort of inquiries and information that's coming through our CRM as well, which is hugely valuable.

Definitely, because a lot of time people just don't know who you are. And they might reply, “Sorry, what's going on?” And so if you have even someone just to reply, “Hey, we're calling from here.” And for some of our clients, you have like these warm-up questions as well, when, with the text messages, we find that if someone replies to us to instantly say to them, “Hey, book an appointment, tomorrow.” People gonna throwback a little bit, it's a bit too harsh. So we like to be in a position where we can say to them, for example, if you had an insurance lead. We might say to them, “Just to confirm you're under the age of 65?” “Yes.” “Also, you haven't smoked any tobacco product for the last 12 months?”, “No, I haven't.” And then we will go to ask them about the appointment, “Do you want to look at it or not? Let's put you in for an appointment tomorrow.” And that way, they're a bit warmed up, the conversation flowing, it's a lot easier to go okay. And so even that you've kind of got to be careful of just saying straight away, booking appointments via text messages is definitely a big one as well.

Yeah, that's a really good point of tweaking your process and stuff, depending on the medium that's coming through.

And that's the thing about SMS as well. SMS really is undervalued. That's where SMS is really powerful as well. Because if you're not only phoning them twice a day, so they've got these numbers that keep coming through, and then they've got a text message saying who you are. And, it reminds them a little bit, and then that you get a lot more appointments booked in really?

I think I heard or read the other day that text messages have an open rate of 98%, which is shocking.

You might not read all the text messages but at least open them up, even if you're just gonna complete your disregard it.

Awesome. So Arin, I guess any last words of wisdom or thoughts when it comes to properly following up with your leads?

Make it a habit. If I was to say to someone, the current leads you'll get in, I can literally double the number for the same cause I can double the number of appointments. Even if you did it yourself, you can double the number of appointments. If I was to pay you the same amount to do the follow-up like you probably would do it. If you're gonna pay me three grand a month, I'll do the follow-up. That sounds good to me, but then they won't be willing to do it if I told them to double their appointments if that makes sense. So if they're spending $3,000 on leads, and I can double your appointments, essentially, you're getting paid $3,000 to do a follow-up because you're saving that much so you just got to make a habit of it. Definitely do SMS. That's a really big one.

But obviously making sure that if you've got like a phone call appointment with someone, I would recommend doing it. Don't do it in Zoom, to begin with, as we've discovered Krystal. I really recommend doing it over the phone, to begin with, because Zooms vary is you want to make the whole call review or the whole meeting review as frictionless as possible for the lead, right? So if it comes to asking them to join a Zoom Room compared to literally picking up the phones, they're two very different things. And so I definitely recommend that and if someone doesn't turn up to the meeting, have a proper process for that. Don't just try and phone once or twice and then give up like phone them at the same time. Find them at the time of the appointment, and then phone them for 10 minutes after sending them a call SMS is in between that as well. Because people run busy lives, they're late for things. And if they've missed your call, or you don't phone them again, they don't really care anymore. So, things like that. So the no-show stuff was added in there as well. But that'd be the final thing I'd say.

Love that. That was a big learning for me both to not try to force people on Zoom. Sorry to anyone I did that too. And also the double calling.

Especially the contractors that are on the road.

Yes.

It’s funny, though, because you're my client, I want to be positive. Then you'll say no, and I definitely could do it yet. And I'm just pulling my hair out. How do I not be rude, but also just say you're being silly. Anyway, we've got through that point now.

Lessons learned all around. Awesome. Well, thank you, Arin. This has been so insightful. I'm sure some of our listeners are going to be curious to learn more about you and about Team Follow Up. So what's the best way for them to do that?

So I'd say LinkedIn or my Facebook to interview, I haven't been building out most like literally all the growth I've had in Team Follow Up so far has been organic, and like just referrals pretty much. So I haven't really been focusing on websites or anything like that. So I should really, definitely start doing that soon. But for now, my LinkedIn and my Facebook profile to answer you.

Absolutely. And if anybody listening needs help with their lead generation and follow-up. You got the dynamic duo here. Awesome. Thank you so much, Arin, really appreciate you being on the show.

No worries. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Krystal.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Beyond the Tools. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. I'd love it if you could also share this episode with a fellow contractor who is ready to get off the tools and grow their business. And if you want more leads, sign up for our email list at [reflectivemarketing.com](http://reflectivemarketing.com/) where we share weekly marketing insights that you can't get anywhere else. I'm Krystal Hobbs and I hope you'll join me on the next episode of Beyond the Tools. See you next time!