Facility Management Marketing Podcast

Transforming Facility Management Businesses via Lead Recycling

• Javier Lozano, Jr. - Facility Management Marketing & Sales Expert • Episode 189

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Get ready to supercharge your lead generation strategy! As we peel back the layers on an innovative approach that last month alone, netted us over 4,000 leads, most of which were commercial, prepare to view your leads in a fresh perspective. This isn't about reinventing the wheel – it's about borrowing and tweaking successful tactics from other industries to fit your facility management business. A total game-changer, we'll show you how to recycle leads effectively, maximizing their potential and keeping them engaged through regular emails and call tasks.

Let's talk about technology and its role in streamlining your lead recycling workflow. If you thought HubSpot was just a CRM tool, think again. We’ll illustrate how to utilize HubSpot's reassignment tool to reassign AEs to thousands of contacts, and set up emails, SMSes and triggers to keep the workflow running smoothly. But the magic lies in tailoring this approach to your facility management company and the specific services or products you're offering. 

Lastly, we’ll look into the heart of organic growth and its significance in your business. Why just reach out to potential listeners when you can turn them into subscribers? Subscribing to our email list opens up a world of opportunities – from exclusive webinars and training that help grow your business, to updates on our exciting new courses and offerings. So, buckle up and prepare for an exciting ride as we revolutionize marketing in the facility management industry.

Speaker 1:

So you're probably asking yourself how to successfully grow a facility management company in today's digital age while still remaining profitable. You know that marketing should probably be in the mix, but you may not know the best approach, the new strategies or which digital platform is market on. So how do you use marketing to grow your effort business today? That is a question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Haverio Lozano Jr, and welcome to the Facility Management Marketing Podcast. A lot of going on. I've got a lot of stuff to cover, but I'm going to break these topics into different things, so you'll probably be listening to a bunch of stuff that is probably going to be coming out. Oh man, october, november, possibly into December, and it might be a few months, a few weeks older, but in my opinion, some marketing stuff ages, some marketing stuff does not, and the stuff that I'm teaching you guys is evergreen kind of stuff, so it works very well for a while. So, anyways, what I want to dive into today is a topic that we've been talking a lot about in our company, about generating leads and then recycling the leads, and so this is kind of a new strategy that we've implemented within our organization. So let me kind of paint the picture. We generate anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 leads per month, depending on the type of strategies that we're implementing, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm not inflating these numbers. Last month, I want to say, we generated like 4,100 or 4,200 or something like that, and I want to say like 3,000 of them or so were commercial leads, like the type of leads that our team wants to work, because those tends to be the better type of lead to convert. So we do this on a regular basis, and our ad strategy does very well. Here is the challenge, though, is because we generate so many leads, because people are just kind of like they're fascinated by how they're able to get a quote. We, you know, leads aren't worked. I'm not going to say they're not worked to this fullest, but they're worked and then like, sometimes, that person may not be ready to be buying a wrap.

Speaker 1:

Now, again, if you're new to this podcast and you're like okay, why are you talking about this? I thought you were talking about facility marketing. I am, and I always do this. I always tell stories and strategies and things that we're doing in our company, and I'm going to teach you how you can use it for facility management, marketing. Okay, so it can be done. I promise you like a lot of the stuff that I that I literally run podcast on episodes on are things that I've actually physically have done in the facility industry. Okay, and if it's not been in the facility industry, it's been obviously in my position. Or if it's not been in my current role or I'm working, it's been in other industries.

Speaker 1:

And just because you don't see the strategy right now and be like, well, it doesn't work until I'm you know someone in my space does it, that's just a stupid, that's a stupid statement, that's done. And I'm saying this because just because you haven't seen it in your industry doesn't mean that it's not going to be successful. Okay, you always want to model what other industries and spaces are doing and take note, I didn't say copy, I said model. You see what they're doing, like, oh, that's interesting, oh, I like what they're doing there, and then start taking note and see how you can massage that to fit your business, your company, your strategies, whatever. That is Okay, all right, let me get back off my my high horse on this one.

Speaker 1:

So we generate all these leads and the challenge that we have is that a lot of these leads may not be worked to its fullest, to where the AES are working in different ways. Now, if they have someone that's warm, the AES do a very, very amazing job at capturing that warm lead and then getting it over the goal line. And I can't give you a percentage right now where we've changed our tracking metrics, we've changed our metrics and and ways that we're tracking stuff, and then I can give you a better number. So you can kind of say like, huh, that's interesting, I might want to try to strive for those numbers. So I'm thinking in you know, these numbers should probably be more solidified in the next coming weeks, if not maybe a month or so.

Speaker 1:

So we mean in our director of sales his name is Nick came up with this concept of recycling leads and he's done this before and this is not a new thing. He's, he's seen it done in a lot of industries. It's, it's, it's, it happens. Recycling leads is just like sometimes a new voice, sometimes a new personality, sometimes Whatever it is something new just tends to kind of like ah, I like that person better.

Speaker 1:

And so we came up with a new strategy and recycling leads, and so what we did is that we took a list of contacts that were commercial leads. These are contacts that we're looking to get their vehicle wrapped, okay. And what we kind of did is we looked at them and like, okay, if they were before a certain date and it was a, it was a large list, it was like 15,000 people that were not customers and we're not converted or anything like that. And they were worked. They got several emails and phone calls and text messages from our ae team. Whoever it was assigned to, that member worked, that lead accordingly, did well, and If it didn't kind of go over, you know, like they didn't respond or whatever, they kind of sit in a certain status. So when what we did is we reassigned these leads and by reassigning these leads, now these contacts are getting a new ae account executive that is going to be essentially getting these contacts to learn a little bit more about our company.

Speaker 1:

Now we kind of stumbled upon this accidentally as well too. So several weeks before that we were I was doing some changes in workflows and we had like a rogue workflow slash Active list that basically went rogue Okay. So as soon as I changed a certain a lead status for one of a bunch of leads that we had for one of our account executives. It basically pushed these people into a workflow and it essentially fired off like Thousands I'm not saying like a few, you know a few, or you know 20 or 30 or even a few hundred thousands, okay, of emails and text messages just fired off, okay. And thank God that there is a Mechanism within HubSpot and Google Suites that you can only send up to about a thousand emails in a day, in a 25 hour period, and so, because otherwise we've sent out a lot more, but we definitely sent out over 7,000, maybe 8,000 SMS's and we were, we finally put a, you know we, we finally pull a tourniquet on this thing and and and stopped the bleeding, if you will, and we figured out what happened and we turned it off, we fixed it and it's and it's taken care of.

Speaker 1:

But was interesting that people are replying back. People are like Actually, no, I didn't get a rap. Oh, no, you know, I, you know, I'm glad that you contacted me. And others were like f you, I hate you, which is fine, you get that. And we had a few deals closed and and and the mistake and this wasn't a giant mistake, like when you consider, in the grand scheme of things, we have I don't know several thousands, and when I say thousands, thousands, thousands of people in our database. This is a small, small sliver of that, and that's okay. The beauty about all this, though, is this is that it kind of gave proof to the concept of like recycling leads actually does work, because we had talked about it and we thought about, like how could this work? What do we want to do? And so, when this mistake happened and these people were contacted for several months, and then, if not, maybe, a year or two, and then this kind of like invigorated some people that were like, actually, yeah, I do need a wrap.

Speaker 1:

Recycling leads is a strategy that might be very, very useful within your facility organization, and the reason I'm saying this is because a new tone, a new tone of voice, a new personality, a new person might lift up opportunities. I mean, I know for myself, like several years ago, I bought a boat from my dad. He was selling it in Texas, and I was like, maybe I'll buy it, and it wasn't a bad buy, but I'm just I live in the wrong state to have a boat, and so now we're in the process of selling the boat as we speak, and I was working on this company that was going to sell the boat, but then I needed to get more documentation to them about like titles and stuff like that, and my dad had to get me that stuff. And it was long story short. I had spoken to the company that initially got me the person that initially got me started to get the boat online to be sold for like I don't know a month or two months. Well, then, all of a sudden, like I got an email and then a text message and then a phone call from this person, from the same company, but a different person. I'm like huh, interesting. And then this person essentially was like hey, we want to get your boat, you know, up. You know, are you ready to go out? Can take some pictures? Yeah, let's do this. And so it got things rolling and now the boat is on the website. If you want to buy a boat to Monterey, it's a nice boat and you can find it online. So with that, hopefully by the time you hear that it's sold, that's what I'm hoping for. But anyways, with that, that's just an example of like hmm, new person, new personality, just kind of got things going.

Speaker 1:

So then we mapped out what this is going to look like. So Nick and I sat down like, okay, what do you envision this? And I said just write down like what you want this to look like. Like, and then like timetables At what point do we recycle these leads to where they go to a new AE? And so kind of looked at it and then he's like, all right, I think we should have this many emails and I think we should have this many SMSes. I'm like, okay, cool, let's just try it and see what happens.

Speaker 1:

So I built out the whole workflow. So I built out the, the, the emails on what the communication is going to be. I built out the SMSes and what the the text messages are going to be. I built up the cadence of like how often a new message is going to go out. I built out what's called a trigger, what's going to fire this. So what, what? What we did is we wanted to get this as as as hands off as possible from our sales team to where they don't have to go into like a pool and go find leads in there and then get them, you know, pushed in. It's just like it just automatically just gets, gets pushed into a new workflow at a certain point and we just want to be kind of like a continuous thing.

Speaker 1:

But before we did that, we needed to go through a list of several thousand contacts and get them reassigned. So HubSpot has you know, these, these things that you can, you know, reassign AEs, and we essentially just took advantage of that, that tool. And so, from there, the first email that we wrote was like hey, did you ever end up getting a vehicle wrap? And it was very simple If you did, you know, that's fine. If you didn't, you know, I'd love to know why. And you know, and and whatever it is. Well, we sent out, like I think, four or five thousand emails that first go around and we ended up closing three deals within, I want to say, 24 48 hours. I'm not kidding when I say this. We ended up closing three deals within 24 to 48 hours. Ok, I've got the numbers to pack this up.

Speaker 1:

Now you might be saying, well, that's not very good at a 4000 contacts. Mind you, this was a very low lift on. There are sales team, like they didn't have to do anything. It just literally got recycled Like oh yeah, glad that you messaged me. I'm interested. We had like 50 someone people answer. The first email they replied, and then about half of those were like you know, it's too expensive or whatever that is.

Speaker 1:

And so now you might be asking like well, how can I use this for facility management? Well, here's the thing. It depends on what service or services or products you're trying to sell. Ok, now, if you're selling, like you know, ifm type services, where you're basically, you know, the aggregator, if you, you know, and you essentially you know, push off work to different vendors throughout the country, for whatever, it can still work, it just means that the conversation is different. So the way you're gonna kind of map this out is that you'd have an email that goes out a few months. If they're just like they've ghosted you no contact, no communication for several months, then maybe it's like a six month window or three month window. It depends on what your sale cycle is and it depends on, like, how it works for you guys. Like this is all trial and error, but I'm telling you, sometimes you gotta test these things to see what it works, but maybe it's six months, maybe it's six months after you've had, like, you pitch and there hasn't really been a decision. That league gets recycled, gets to another salesperson.

Speaker 1:

The first thing that should be going out is something along the lines of like hey Jack, this is Tom at IFM nationwide. Just reach it out to see if you guys ever made a decision on selecting an IFM for whatever your needs were about a year ago or about six months ago. If you didn't make a decision, no worries, that's great. I hope it's all going well. If you haven't, why haven't you made a decision? And can I help you with anything? And I'm just giving you an example.

Speaker 1:

So you go in there very open, just trying to get some answers, and some people will reply back to you like look, you guys were too expensive or you guys weren't able to do what I needed you guys to do. Oh well, now we can actually do that. Oh, you can now. Okay, cool, maybe we should reinvigorate this conversation again. So what you're doing here is you're trying to lift some life out of the dead, and you do this by going in there with a very just, nonchalant type of approach. Okay, and so that's kind of what we did with our first email and that got a ton of responses. And then our second email is like I don't know five, six days later and it was something along the lines of like hey, just talk to one of my head designer. He said that there's an open spot available to do a design mockup. I mean, this is something that you can do for your second email.

Speaker 1:

Something along the lines of hey, I was going across some demos that we just did for some customers and they were really impressed with something like X, y and Z. They thought that other facility managers would really benefit from it. Maybe you'd be interested in learning more about this. I'd love to share with you and get your thoughts, your feedback, something like that. Or it could be like hey, we're launching a new product or we're launching a new service that might interest you. Would you be kind enough to kind of learn a little bit more about it to see if it fits what you guys are looking for? Or just give me feedback if you think it's even a good product or service that will help the industry, things like that, where facility managers or just people in general are kind of guiding you and telling you yeah, that's really good or that's not a good idea, that's horrible, that's great, whatever it is. But you get this feedback loop and all of a sudden, so this is in beta now. Yeah, yeah, if you want this, we can do this. You could be one of our trial customers. We just ask that you give us a really strong testimony whenever you're done with it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can do things like that, and so it's just a matter about how you want to kind of like carve this up.

Speaker 1:

But the idea here is that you essentially recycle these leads every I don't know three months, every six months, something okay. And then you change the message. Maybe you change the tonality, maybe you change the offer, maybe you change an approach, whatever it is, but you change something up. But it gives you another reason to go back and ask again. Okay, you're not necessarily asking for the sale, you're asking to see where they're at in the buying process, okay. So sometimes, like for some organizations where the commissions are much higher, and sometimes that, like, some people don't want that to happen, like the salesperson may not want that lead to be taken out of their name, and in those cases you gotta put them to some sort of status that essentially you get to keep, especially if you're limited on lead count but you're dollars that you sell are much higher. So it just depends.

Speaker 1:

Now, could you do this recycle strategy for, like your own email, like your own leads that you haven't talked to in six months? Yeah, totally. It won't have the probably the same effect, but it could still work. You could still probably bring some life back from the dead. But I think this really works. Whenever you recycle the leads and you essentially take these contacts and you reassign them to somebody else, like I said at the end of the day, like if your salesperson isn't gonna work that lead to the death of it, give it to somebody else, cause somebody else might do a better job. Okay, cause at the end of the day, it's the goal of the organization hit certain numbers, and this is just another strategy, this is another tool on the tool belt and so simple strategy that we implemented.

Speaker 1:

Now, I'm not gonna say that it's been foolproof the entire time, mind you. We have lots of contacts in our database and this is not a bragging moment, this is just one of those things. That's just the nature of what we're doing. And so, with that, you know today's feedback that I got from the sales team. They're like hey, we love the strategy. However, whenever text messages go out, we are getting inundated with like some. Some people say like who is this? And we're applying back like I'm spending half a day, a full day, just working these contacts. Whenever I have new leads in the pipeline that I have to be working as well too, and I'm like, ah, that totally makes sense.

Speaker 1:

So we reworked the strategy. We removed some stuff that was kind of becoming a um, how can I say? It was becoming more of like a problem for the team and we moved some messages up a little bit higher until we came up with the right solution. Now, we had to do this because this is direct feedback from the sales team, because we they're they're on a roll, they're crushing it right now. They're doing a good job. That feedback loop is really important for us. It's important for myself, and what this allowed me to do is really just, you know, rethink this.

Speaker 1:

The next phase of this is they're like hey, we want to only have like 20 contacts going to the workflow a day per salesperson. Okay, that's cool, we can do that. So then that's what we're going to be doing next. So the next iteration is going to have roughly 20 contacts going in every single day and those 20 contacts will then be, you know, put into the workflow. They'll get a text message, they'll get an email, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and this whole like workflow, they'll they'll, you know, get recycled.

Speaker 1:

That recycle like strategy is like a 30 day strategy. It's actually, to be honest, it's like 28 days, 27 days, something like that. So 30 days, whatever so, and if nothing happens, then we will probably revisit on re recycling them again. So then they'll get re recycled to a new AE where they get another text message, a few emails, and then after that, like after 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it is, they get re recycled again to another AE. And we do this to kind of stay in front of them. Mind you, they're still getting marketing emails from our team, okay. Mind you, they're probably still seeing um text, I'm sorry, um, they're still seeing ads from us, okay. So there were always front of mind. Unless this person opts out of emails and they don't want to have hear anything else from the AES, and you know they they don't, then that's it and that's fine. So that's the strategy.

Speaker 1:

You can implement this for your facility. I gave you some examples. My recommendation is that it's probably a three to six month window where you then re recycle the leads. If you have HubSpot, you can use HubSpot to leverage that technology to just essentially reassign contacts. And then you're going to want to probably have maybe a 30 to 60 day cadence of emails that go out and then maybe even call tasks. If you just call them, pick it up the phone, be like hey, jack, he just want to follow up on regarding you know what you just had, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's that, that, that would be the strategy. And then you know rinse and repeat. You just keep doing this.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and the nice thing about this is that if you can create this where it's automated on your end, so if you have, like a HubSpot I don't know if Salesforce can do this, but I know HubSpot can because we figured it out but whatever the case is, is that um try to leverage technology to make it as hands off as possible. Now, granted, we are working with like several thousands of leads. I'm talking like I think our database has anywhere roughly about 150,000 contacts. Again, not blow and smoke up your ass Like this. Is true, I look at our numbers all the time, um, and not all of them are like oh, these are a hundred percent amazing, great quality leads Like we. We know that they're not all amazing, we get that, but where I'm coming from is is that this is giving our team some like getting low hanging fruit and this proven itself. It works All right. So, all right.

Speaker 1:

Three things at the end of my podcast I always ask for. Number one please give us a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Number two if you're not connected with me on LinkedIn, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I spend most of my time on there. I respond to DMs. If you are like, hey, I want a podcast episode about this, I'm happy to do it, totally happy to do it. Or if you have questions or comments you're like, hey, I'm loving these kinds of podcasts you're doing about these things. Cool, tell me. Give me that feedback, luke, it's amazing. And the last thing is please share this podcast, this podcast.

Speaker 1:

By the time this episode is out, we're probably over 5,000 downloads. Now you might be thinking that's not that many. To me it's a lot, because we've grown this podcast organically, like straight up, organically. Okay, if you came across this podcast as probably because someone you have shared it with you. You somehow Google something or you search something in one of the podcast platforms that you're using, or I reached out to you via DM, like I personally reached out to you, but like, hey, I've got this new podcast. So with that, if you can do those three things, that'd be great. Other than that, have a great day.

Speaker 1:

All right guys. Thanks for taking a listen to our facility management marketing podcast Secrets. This is your host, javier Lozano Jr. One other ask I've got for you guys is to subscribe to our email list. You can go to boldermediasolutionscom slash email and that way you can get updates on some marketing trends that I'm seeing, some strategies that I'm executing and, more importantly, I'll be actually launching some webinars and training that's gonna help your company use marketing strategies to essentially grow your business. We'll be doing some training, offering some courses, that sort of stuff. So you can always unsubscribe to that email list. It's no big deal, it's not gonna hurt my feelings. This is more for facility managers, I'm sure facility management companies that want to grow their business by using marketing. All right guys, thanks a lot and have a great one.

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Javier Lozano, Jr.

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