Video Transcript:

Hey Mike Callahan here hanging out at QDS 2020 in Savannah Georgia with Martha Woodward and a bunch of the top industry leaders in the service industry. Big topic lately is conversational marketing and conversational marketing in my opinion is the next shift in buying habits. The quick question I would propose is what’s the commonality of Uber, Netflix, Amazon and what have they done?  Basically what they’ve done is figured out how to deliver real-time buying decisions and availability. The analogy that I would use is imagine that it’s the holidays and you want a new big-screen TV and you’ve got cash in hand then you’re ready to buy this TV so you go out to Best Buy or whatever the electronic store is, and you get to the back you see the TV and you like it so you’re ready to buy it so you go to the cash register basically now and instead of something being there to actually sell you the TV they’ve actually got a clipboard with a form and what they do is (fictitiously now) force you to fill out the form but put your name your address your email all your information and basically when they’re ready to sell you that TV they’ll get back to you so obviously that is not gonna fly. What you’re probably gonna do is pick up your phone hop on Amazon and find the same exact TV and buy it live and with your Amazon Prime it’s probably going to be sitting at your doorstep two days later. The issue that most service businesses have right now is we’re doing just that we’re driving people to a website and forcing them to fill out a form and what we’re telling them is we’ll get back to you and actually sell you the product when it’s convenient for us as a company. If you’re looking at the new shift in buying habits people want real-time decision and the ability to actually buy when it’s convenient for them– this is what conversational marketing tackles, we go in and have real-time buying decisions 24/7 through an automation or a bot Facebook message is a great example. The idea would be is we don’t get rid of the traditional forms on our website because they still work but most people now are not wanting to engage with your brand some people may still want to engage with us we’re leaving it there but what we’re doing is assisting that form with a real-time bot with AI (artificial intelligence) and it’s kind of like to choose your own adventure so if the person is interested in weekly or bi-weekly lawn mowing or fertilization the bot is smart enough to know where the conversation is going and it’s reducing that the repetitive and tedious tasks that we all don’t like to do or delegate so when we do that the bot has a real time buying experience and it can basically alert a real-time person to jump in live on the back end of the bot, if your office is open, to pick up that hot lead, your customer or if you wanted to build it out even more advanced you can tie it in and create an automated pricing tool inside the bot and it’s something that we’ve done the Callahan’s Lawn Care for probably the last four almost five years believe it or not. What happens is that bot goes out to Zillow and grabs the lot square footage or grabs the liveable home square footage for home for cleaning and it gives property specific pricing based on your property in the back. So if we’re just driving people to a static form on our website I feel like we’re basically putting ourselves in the position of the cab driver that got put out of business by Uber basically. This shift is happening in other industries with the service industry on a whole is not paying attention so conversational marketing is having real life time real time decision or conversations with your consumer or potential consumer and hopefully driving a human in to actually work the lead when they’re hot and ready to buy, if the office is not open at least you’re engaging with them will give the ability to close the sale and take them off the market when if we don’t give them that real-time buying experience they’re going to the next website that will. The challenge today is will you adopt conversational marketing in your service business to get ahead of this next technology shifting buying habits. Comments or questions drop below but I wanted to address this because it’s a hot topic here at QDS 2020 in Savannah Georgia. We’ll see you a little bit later today Callahan’s corner where you ask the question we answer them special guest Scott Howard at Service Autopilot actually join me we’re going to talk about leads and how to handle different leads and the status of those leads in the estimating and sales pipeline so we’ll post more information on that later. Main topic here’s conversation of marketing and creating real-time decisions or conversations 24/7. A quick example that was literally we were testing bots on my phone for Simple Growth and what happened is between 10 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. I forgot to actually turn off the notifications my phone vibrated so much for people interacting with the bot that it actually drove my phone right off the nightstand obviously most businesses aren’t open between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. but 80% of the conversation maybe even more than that was happening between 10:00 p.m.and 3:00 a.m. so if your service business is not giving people to have the chance of a live conversation in those off hours where people are searching on the internet after the kids go to bed or the relaxing you’re missing out on a lion’s share of the potential work that you could be selling. Comments or questions drop them below and we will see you later today on Callahan’s corner with special guest Scott Howard