Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the Hammer and Grind podcast. And on this episode, we're going to be talking about a little secret. that successful contractors don't want you to know. We're going to spill the beans here. Stick around. It's going to be a great episode. So one of the things that I hear all the time from contractors is, man, I need to get more leads, need more leads, need more leads. And while I've done episodes on like the 33 ways, now 36,36 ways you can market your business. What I would do if I was starting the contracting business tomorrow or tomorrow, like those are all things that we talk about traditional marketing. strategies, joining a networking group like BNI, running Facebook ads, having a website, having a Google business profile listing, also known as Google Maps. Like all of those things are your traditional marketing methods, vehicle wraps, you know, yard signs, billboards, radio, like all of those things, right? Those are all traditional marketing methods and those all work. Depending on how much you use them, your marketplace, there's lots of factors that go into how successful they are, if they are successful, like all those things. We're not getting into that today. What we're getting into is understanding how you can basically create your own clients, how you can create your own lead flow, your own funnel of clients. In other words, how to get them to come to you. instead of everyone else. Okay. And it's not what you're thinking. Now I want to, I want to preface this by saying that a lot of people talk about quality leads, right? What's a quality lead. And that is actually a lie. The lie of, you know, I want a quality lead. What you don't want is a quality lead. What you want is an actual buyer. Because if someone decides today, They want to do a project. They want to get a kitchen, a bathroom, a landscape, you know, new roof, deck, whatever it is. If they're wanting to do that project and they decide today, you know what, I'm going to start searching around for a contractor who can build me a deck. They're not ready to buy today. They're not a buyer, but they're still a qualified lead, meaning that they will eventually become a buyer. Somebody is going to get that lead, right? And so when we talk about quality leads, what most people are saying is I want people that are in the buying cycle. I want people that are actually buyers today. They're calling me today because they're ready to buy today, right? If you're a car salesman, we all know people that just, I'm just looking. If you work in retail, I'm just looking, right? It could be I'm waiting on my wife to go shopping. So I'm going to walk into this sporting goods store and just look at things, even though I have no intention whatsoever of buying anything in there. I'm just wasting time. I'm killing time. Right. That would not be a quality lead because they have zero intention of buying anything. It's just a matter of like, I don't want to be over here. So I found myself here in your place. Right. Some people are like, I just wonder how much it costs to remodel a kitchen. I have no idea. So I'm going to call a bunch of contractors and have them come out and all the contractors are telling me 50,60,70,000. And I thought I could get a whole kitchen remodel for 10,000. That's not a quality lead at all because they can't afford it. They just simply can't afford it. Right. So we're not talking about quality leads in sense of someone who's ready to buy right now. That's what people want. People want buyers, but a quality lead is someone who is going to eventually buy. Their intention is to buy. What happens is because everyone wants to find a buyer, i. e. the person who's going to buy today, you have the highest level of competition at that stage. You have to understand the buyer's journey. There's different stages in the buyer's journey. Right. And so if I know someone's going to buy today, meaning they've already done research, they've already, they already know what they want. They've maybe already even price shop some stuff. They may have talked to a contractor in the very beginning just to get an idea for budget. And that was six months ago. And now they're ready to actually hire someone and they have an idea on price. And now it's just a matter of finding the right person. That's, you know, that's someone who is buying. That's a buyer. And that's what everybody wants. The reality of it is that's the smallest pool of leads, right? Quality leads. Remember, quality lead we're defining as someone who has intention to buy. We're not defining it as what part of the buying cycle they're in. Okay. So if someone is ready to buy right now, they're a buyer. They're in the buying stage. They're a quality lead that's in the buying stage. But that's the smallest portion of a quality lead. That's only about 75% of the buyers,25% of your quality leads are in the buying stage. And so that's where everybody is competing for leads. It's the highest level of competition. The secret is if you create your marketing so that it attracts people at every stage. in the buying cycle, you now open up access to the other 75% of the quality leads. In other words, you're getting in in front of all of your competition. And that is what successful contractors know. They know this either through, you know, accident, they figured it out or they've paid, you know, people to learn that information. They've hired marketing companies, whatever. They know this to be true. And so while you're out there marketing for the, hey, if you want a kitchen remodel, give us a call at 1-800-WE-SUCK-IT-RUNNING-ADS, right? That's those kind of ads. Because we're like, hey, you just woke up and you're ready to buy today. So call us. You don't know anything about our company, but we want you to call us today. Because we ran an ad that just said, call us today. That's what we think marketing is. That's not. Think of anything you bought in your life of substantial value, cost, a new truck, a bass boat, a motorcycle, a jet ski, whatever. You didn't wake up that morning and then just buy it unless you're just completely irresponsible. It was a process that you went through. You started doing research. You started looking at the options. You know what? I want to buy a jet ski because I think it's going to be fun. I rode one one time at my buddy's house and I had a blast and now I want to buy a jet ski, but I don't know anything about jet skis. I asked my buddy, he says, oh, you got to buy this Sea-Doo, blah, blah, blah, blah. But another one of my coworkers or guys says that he has a Yamaha and it's the best. And I don't know, is the Yamaha the best? Is the Sea-Doo the best? I don't know. I need to do some research. So what do I do is I go online. I look at reviews. I watch YouTube videos of people giving reviews. I go to the Yamaha dealer and talk to that salesman. I go to the, the C2 dealer and talk to that salesman. And I'm trying to gather information so I can make the right decision. You're not buying that jet ski the moment you wake up, right? If I go to the Yamaha dealership and he's like, yeah, man, we have a. We actually have a booklet here and we even have it on the website. You can get it too. But it's like, here's a booklet. You know, here's 15 things you need to know before you buy a jet ski. And I take that and I go home and I read it. And it's all centered around things like, you know, consider how many people you're going to take. Is it just going to be you or are you going to have three or four? What kind of vehicle are you going to be towing it with? What kind of licenses do you have to have or insurance or registration? What's the upkeep like, right? Like things that are educating me on stuff that I never knew about. That provides a ton of value versus if I go to the Sea-Doo dealership and they're like, yeah, this one, this one right here will work for you. It's a very popular one. Everyone buys. We can sell that one to you for, you know,12 grand or whatever. I have no idea what they cost. I have no idea. I never bought a jet ski. We can buy, we can sell you this one for 12 grand. No problem. Like that guy is trying to sell something. He's looking for a buyer. He sees that you're in there tire kicking or what he defines as tire kicking, meaning you're not ready to buy yet. And so he immediately dismisses you as someone who's not serious and he doesn't want to waste his time because somebody else just walked in who seems like they're a serious buyer, right? The Yamaha dealership in this case. has a piece of information that answers a lot of questions that I have and provides value. The C-Due dealership didn't give a crap because I was not a buyer today. And so when you look for buyers and you're just looking for buyers, and then you start disqualifying them through trying to even use the principles that I teach, the strategies and the techniques that I teach. And you're like, yeah, Brad, I talked to this guy today and they said they weren't going to be ready for six months. And I was like, well, call us back when you're ready. And I'm like, bro, you just literally missed a potential sale. You just lost the sale right then. You think you're like, oh, you're not ready yet. I don't have time to mess with you. I'm only looking for quality people. I'm looking for quote buyers, right? And so now you missed that sale because you missed out on the opportunity to educate. Here's what you guys need to understand. Clients, prospects, customers, whatever you want to call them. They don't go to customer school. They don't know how to be customers. But if you train them early on in the process of like, this is what it's like to do a bathroom project. This is what it's like to remodel your kitchen. This is what it's like to build a deck. And you say, here are seven things you need to consider before you build a deck. Here's 11. The top 11 feature requests that we have in new kitchens and why you should consider them in yours, right? This information that is questions that I have, if I give that out, I'm now educating them. And then whenever you educate, you become the expert. What do you think I'm doing with these podcasts? What do you think I do with my videos and my content? I'm educating you. so that you can see me as the expert. I'm helping people at different stages in the journey. I had a client sign up last week who hasn't even started his construction company yet, but because he'd been listening to my podcast and because he'd gotten value from it, he knew that when he started his business, that he was going to join the profit club. That would not be possible if I hadn't invested in the educational part. But for the last two years, I mean, this is episode, I think 155, maybe I think it's 155,155 episodes that are, you know, average 30 to 40 minutes long. Guys, that is a lot of time. That's a lot of effort. It's a lot of energy to do that stuff. But the reason why I do it is because one, it helps people. But more importantly for me and my coaching business, it actually develops buyers, right? It develops quality buyers. which is what I'm doing. And you need to do the same thing in your business. Now, here's the beauty. Once you create a piece of content or a document, a PDF, whatever, pictures, program, whatever it is, once you create it one time, you don't have to create it anymore. My podcast, if I stopped today, if today was the last podcast I ever recorded, the last 155 episodes, would live on in perpetuity until, you know, I quit paying the bill for the hosting or whatever. They're out there. They're working for me while I'm sleeping. A lot of my clients come in because they listen to my podcast. The same with my TikTok videos. People watch and consume my TikTok and then they become clients because I'm educating through the journey. I'm trying to get people early on in the process. Now, here's the thing, guys. If you go after people early in the process, you will still attract buyers. But if you only go after buyers, you won't attract people early in the process. You see how that works? So start targeting people at different points. Now, if you go super deep into this, you know, some people say there's four stages, there's five stages, there's three stages. It really doesn't matter like how many stages. I mean, there's not like 27, don't get me wrong, but somewhere between three and five stages. of where people are in the buying process. I like to say there's basically four, right? You can target at different stages. So number one stage would be something like, if you've ever thought about remodeling your bathroom, but you don't know where to start, download our free beginner's guide to remodeling your bathroom, right? And in that guide, I'm going to have information that's pertinent to someone who's just starting the journey. Now, if I have that, someone who may be ready to buy may still download that because they may be like, oh, maybe there's some stuff in there we missed. So I'm still going to download this even though I'm further along in the journey. But if I post something like on social media and I'm like, hey, we got some openings. We had some openings come up next week. If you need some work done, give us a call. That's just purely targeting buyers, people that are buying today. That's a different type of... marketing strategy. If I want to get people in this second or third stage, depending on how many stages you say there are, where they've done some research, maybe now that they have some realities of things cost more than what they may have initially thought, I might have a piece that says, if you've been in the market for a new bathroom and you're shocked by how much things cost, Here's our guide of five ways you can save money in your bathroom remodel, right? That's targeting someone in the middle, but also people in the beginning and people in the end might download that. Okay. I'm targeting different levels of the buying process. You create this information and you put it on your website. You put it in your marketing. You put it in your social media so people are aware of it. And then you collect their information. You click their name, email, and or phone number. And now once you have that, you can put them into a nurturing campaign, which is just simply once a week, once a month, whatever, once a day. I wouldn't recommend that. But like once a week, once a month, once a day, and you're sending emails and or text depending on which route you go. I would personally would recommend emails. And then you're just sending them information. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business. Imagine being part of a community of winners where you can find out exactly what they've done to be successful. That's exactly what you get when you join the Profit Club. But it's not just a community. You get lifetime access to all of my course-related material, including all future material that I add. But wait, there's more. Each week, you'll get access to three group coaching calls to talk about sales, marketing, and business problems and answer any questions that you may have. Still not convinced? How about personalized one-on-one coaching to help you overcome your limits? And here's my promise to you. I guarantee you will double your investment within 90 days or I personally will work with you one-on-one until you do. So don't wait. Elevate your game with The Profit Club today. Now let's get back to the show. So if I create a document that says, you know, here's 11 things you need to know before, or I forget what I said now, here's 11 things to help you plan for your project, right? They download that. And then next week they get an email that says something like, you know, here's five new trends in bathroom remodeling. And then next week is an email. And by the way, these can be blog posts. and or what we call lead magnets, which is what I'm going to get to here next. But these can be like PDFs, you know, Word docs, whatever, or and or blog posts. And by the way, when you like when you attach a blog post to an email and they click on it, it takes them to your website. It helps with your SEO on your website. I call it like double dipping where you're like getting you're hitting them with one marketing piece, which leads them to go to your website, which drives traffic, which makes Google think it's important, which makes it more relevant, which makes it show up more. which increases your SEO, your search engine optimization, which basically means it increases your popularity. Okay. So the next, you know, that week you send out the piece, here's the five latest trends in your bathroom. The next week you have an article that says how colors can affect your mood. You know, how the colors of your bathroom can affect your entire day. And by the way, the guys feel free to like write articles about these because these are good. How, how the simple colors of your bathroom can affect your entire day and why it's important to choose wisely. Who would not read that? Everybody who's in the market for buying a bathroom, having a bathroom model is going to read that article the next week, right? Here's a simple budgeting tool you can use to plan your project the next week. Here is seven questions you should ask your contractor before you hire them. That's going to be on my website too. And by the way, guys, here's a little trick for you on that. Let's say you're lacking in one area compared to a competitor or other competitor. Let's say you're brand new. Let's say you, or maybe you don't do design. Maybe you're a kitchen and bathroom modeler, but you don't offer design services. Okay. Other competitors offer designs, right? We think of those like higher end clients. The way when you're doing stuff like that is you simply focus on the benefits of what skills you have and you don't really talk about the skills you don't have. Right. So I'm not going to say, here's why you don't need a design. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say stuff like. You know, ask your contractor if they, how can I say that? Now I just caught myself, I just caught myself in a snafu. You could say, here's why you don't, you know, you could say, here's why we go off plans. Here's why we use plans or whatever, but you don't talk about why that you don't do the designs in-house. What I was trying to say earlier was that somebody has an in-house designer. And maybe you don't have an in-house designer. You can talk about, you know, why outsourcing plan, why outsourcing design, your bathroom design can be a better process. Does that make sense? Company A who has an in-house designer is saying why having an in-house designer is a benefit. Company B that doesn't have an in-house designer but works with an independent designer talks about why working with an independent designer. is a benefit. They're both talking about the benefits without talking about the other company, right? And so now if one company, if one customer goes to company B and then goes to company A, it doesn't seem like they're contradicting each other. It just seems like they're actually talking about the strengths that they have and not the weaknesses, if that makes sense. So when you put together information like that, you basically... Put it together in a way that makes it seem like hiring you is the best option. I don't mean lying. I'm not talking about lying here. I'm not talking about lying. I'm not talking about deceiving people, manipulating people. I'm talking about you're only talking about the benefits that you're capable of delivering on. Okay? So very clear distinction. I'm not talking about lying to your clients. And if you start bad-mouthing other people, that will actually work worse on you. So only focus on things that you're capable of doing and why that is a benefit. And don't compare it to the opposite. Don't even mention the opposite. You can just simply say, you know, here's why hiring an independent designer is a, you know, is a benefit with working with our construction company, blah, blah, blah. They're not biased, right? They don't, you know, we're not trying to push a specific type of product or service that we like or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever those benefits are, talk about those benefits. Okay. So you can, you can cater it to what your strengths are and, and don't talk about the weaknesses that you have. Obviously you want to try and be better. You want to try and get better and better and better. But if you're at a deficiency right now, you can use it to your advantage. Okay. The next week, maybe something else. It can be something else that they may be looking for. You know, the top five questions that were asked about remodeling the bathroom the next week, the seven. The nine biggest regrets that people wish they would have put in their bathroom after it was too late. That could be like an upsell opportunity. You know, number one, they wish they had, they wish they would have went ahead and got the heated tile floors. Number two, they wish they would have upgraded to the granite countertops because of maintenance. Number three, they wish they would have added the rain head shower head combo instead of just the regular one. Number four, they wish they would have, you know, used frameless showers, got a frameless shower door instead of a traditional frame shower door. Like that can be an upgrade opportunity in this flow before you ever even talk to them about the job. You see how you're providing a ton of value in this process before they become buyers. Now, who do you think they're going to call when they're finally ready to buy? Who do you think they're going to be? They're going to call. Well, they're going to call you first. Now, if you screw up and lose a sale, that's on you. But if you put this stuff in place and you create a nurturing sequence for them throughout the entire buying cycle, it's completely automated. You create it once and you're done. It works for you while you're asleep. You install an automation software, a CRM or an email autoresponder or something like that. And that will allow this to work in the background without you ever even thinking about it. I mean, can you see here how powerful this can be? You're out there competing for the buyers,25% of the marketplace. I'm out there stealing 75% of the marketplace before you even ever get a chance to sell them. This is the power, guys. This is the secret in how you can create more leads than what you ever really need. Is this an overnight success type of thing? No, it's not. This might take you a year to implement, but you can do it in stages. So the first thing you would want to do is just to create some kind of lead magnet that you can give them to collect their information. You can create a lead magnet that is a buying guide. Like I said, it can be anything. Now, here's one thing too. If you've heard me talk about blog posts, the podcast I've talked about, Creating blog posts, you know, there's a book by Marcus Sheridan called They Ask, You Answer. It's a great book to understand like what kind of information to write blog posts about. That applies here. So don't put on there, here's seven reasons why you should hire us. Please don't do that. Don't talk about you ever at all in any of your marketing. I know that sounds counterintuitive. But guess what? They're going to know it's you because you wrote the article and they found it on your website. They're going to know it's you. So you don't talk about yourself. You just sound like an egomaniac when you do. There's even a strategy that I've never used this. I know it works in some instances where people will actually write a blog post about their competitors. The top 10. Here's the top 10 bathroom companies to hire. And they don't put themselves in the article. They're writing 10 top 10s about their competitors and they're not in the article, but yet they wrote the article. That's like a psyop, you know, where it's a psychology operation where it's like you're getting into their mind. I mean, of course, if you recommend other people, they're going to go check them out. So you kind of have to make sure that you're better than them. That's a strategy I know people have implemented because it shows up on Google. It's a heavily searched Google term. So you will collect that person on Google organically because you have that. And then when they're on your website, then they start reading your other articles and now they become a fan of yours and then you end up selling them. That's the strategy with that. But you create this lead magnet and you answer it with questions that are relevant. You don't answer it with like, here's seven reasons why I think you should hire. Here's seven things that I think are important to you. You need to actually find out what's important. If I put in there the top seven features that people want in the bathroom and I say, oh, people want a soaking tub. And the reality of it is 90% of the marketplace doesn't want a soaking tub. They want to take out a soaking tub and do a wider shower. Then you're going to isolate. You're basically going to polarize yourself from that client. Well, I don't want a soaking tub. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He must be way off in the distance. So you got to be careful like what information you put in there and how you word it. Don't word it like this is what I recommend you should do. Don't tell people what to do. You need to approach this entire strategy from you're just an aggregator. You're just a source, a distributor of information based on what the world is telling you. So you word things like, you know. Based on, and by the way, this can be information that you got from an actual source. Like maybe Home and Garden TV put out an article that said, here's the top seven trends in 2024 for bathrooms. You can take that information, put it into your lead magnet. Obviously, if you steal that, you know, like word for word, you need to cite them. You can cite according to, you know, HGTV. These are the top seven trends. Right. You just cite them and say, this is where it came from. Don't try to steal it like it's yours. Don't be stupid. You know, it doesn't have to be from you is what I'm saying. This is the same with like social media posts. You can literally just go to HGTV, find an article you like, copy the link, share it on your Facebook page and say, hey, check out this article from HGTV about the seven things, seven new trends in bathrooms. It doesn't have to come from you personally. You're just the source. You're the quality source of information that people can go to to get the answers. That's what you want to be. Because if you're a quality source of information, then more than likely, by default, you would be an obvious choice to hire to do my project. Because every piece of information you've given me has been helpful in quality. And if that's just the free stuff, I'm sure the stuff I pay for is going to be even better. You see how that works? So you put that in there and you create information they want. You create a PDF. You can go and hire someone on Fiverr, pay them $20 to design it so it looks pretty. You don't have to be the one that designs it. You can just put the information in there, hire a professional designer, make it look pretty, host it on your website behind a paywall. We call paywalls, which is just a simple form that says, what's your name and email? And, you know, what's your first name and email or what's your name and email or what's your name, email, phone number, whatever. I would recommend just first name, email. It's the minimal amount of information that people want to give that's required. And then when they download this, you now have their information. And then you keep building out week after week. So let's just say you just created a lead magnet and that's it. That's okay. Put it behind a form, have them download it. Now you have their information, right? You can manually in like two weeks, reach out to them. Hey, we saw you downloaded our information. Just wanted to know if there's anything else we can help you with. Whatever. And then you write the second article and it's like, here's, you know, here's seven things you need to consider. And you put that into your autoresponder or whatever program you're using. And that's automated. And so now you have two pieces of content and maybe you spread that out for two weeks. They download it. Two weeks later, they get the second piece of information. And then you, a week later, you write a third, a third piece that you're going to put in there and you put that in there. And you add that to the next people that sign up. So the first person that signed up, all they got was the lead magnet. The second person that signed up for the next round, they get two emails. And the next round, they get three emails and so on and so on until you build out this funnel that can be somewhere, you know, between. On average, you probably need to have about two months worth, so roughly about eight articles. Two months is kind of a typical. buying cycle for a lot of things. Again, this depends on what you do. You should know this about your marketplace. But if you have like eight articles, you can either do that weekly or space it out, you know, every two weeks or whatever, depending on your buying cycle. And then you eventually put this into an autoresponder or an automation of some sort. And then that does it automatically for you. And then you just have some kind of reminder or follow up to where you actually reach out to them at some point and see if they would like to talk to you and do an actual discovery call. I mean, this is really powerful stuff, guys. A lot of you listening to this will not take me up on this. And because very few people take action, this means that this is going to be a long, long, it's going to be probably another decade before this strategy is completely saturated. where it's normal for every contractor to have a lead magnet. This is very popular in the marketing space for other services, like B2B type stuff, but it's not very used. It's not much used very much by contractors for their clients, but it's a very powerful method. And like I said, you can capture 75% of the marketplace before your competitors ever even get access to the other 25% of buyers. Here's a question. I have a question for you. I'm thinking about creating a training for how to create a lead magnet. And if there's enough demand for that, then I will do that. So here's what I need from you. If you want me to do a training on how to create a lead magnet, like more of the how-to, like do this, then do this, then do this. If you want me to create a training like that, shoot me a message. comment, whatever, smoke signal, I don't care, snail mail, shoot an arrow with a letter on it. Send me the information. Let me know that you're interested. And then if we get enough interest, I will make that happen. Okay. I can't speak to whether it's going to be free or whether it's going to be charged because I don't know. It totally depends on how much demand there is and how much effort I have to put into it. But I'm willing to do this if it's something that you guys think would be valuable for you. So somehow get a hold of me. You can shoot me a message, you know, on Messenger, Facebook Messenger. You can go to the links in the show notes. Send me an email if you want. You can even text me like you can just text me 812-405-4610,812-405-4610. Just shoot me a text. Say, hey. This is so-and-so. I'm a contractor in this area. And I heard your podcast about lead magnet. I'd be interested. And I'll put you into my database so I know to follow up with you. Because whoever reaches out to me, I'm going to save your information and then make sure I let you know if and when that's going to come through. So, yeah, guys, that's all I got. Hopefully this was helpful. Start figuring out some type of lead magnet that you can offer your clients that's going to provide value. Start with that and then build onto it and build your nurturing sequence as well. If you do that, you will catch people. I mean, you'll just basically start printing money. Like you're just going to start getting leads and leads and leads. And your competitors will be calling you like, dude, how are you getting all these sales? Like, how are you finding these people? And you probably won't tell them. Like you'll probably say, you probably won't say, go listen to that podcast because you don't want it to know. I get it. Try it and see what happens. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate it. I really do. Shoot me a message. Let me know if you're interested in that and I will start compiling that and then we'll go from there. But you know where to find me on the socials, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all those places, TikTok, all of them. If you just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast, you'll find me everywhere. And remember, guys, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
