Automate the Boring Stuff: How Painting Contractors Can Sell Smarter with Chris Kiefer

Jon Bryant: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Price Sell Paint podcast. I'm Jon Bryant. We're with Chris Kiefer today. I'm excited to chat with you, Chris. It's about automation and the painting industry, and I love this topic. So much fun. I know you do too. So this is going to be great. Michael's not joining us, so this is going to be way more fun than usual. Chris, welcome to the podcast, man.

Chris Kiefer: Thank you so much, Jon Bryant. My first question for you is why are you so serious?

Jon Bryant: Man, I'm not serious, Chris. You've met me in person. It's just the camera and the mic, everything gets ahead of me and then I'm like, I better be professional.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah, I just had to bring that up because we were talking right before. I'm like, no, I feel Jon Bryant's a funny guy. We've been at conferences and I don't know if you're going to say it's one of your biggest insecurities, but yeah.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. We've all got these alternate personas, right? You're like, this is me when I'm this person. This is me when I'm that person. And it's hard to break out of that. You know, when you meet like a friend from junior high or something, you're like, why am I now junior high version of Chris? They really have.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. If someone doesn't think they have different versions of themselves, you and I can remember that like my mom or my sister, our landline would ring and they'd be like, shut up. And then they're like, hello, this is Mary. And it's like, what? That was so different. You just literally snapped and became a totally different person, you know?

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. So this happens, but I've been told to do better, so I'm going to do better. I'm going to bring the real version. But dude, I'm excited to chat with you today. And maybe we can just start with the quick three-minute overview of what got you here into this position you're in today.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. So this is kind of interesting, I haven't ever explained it this way before, but Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs had a video like 10 years ago that was called "Don't Pursue Your Passion." Have you seen this?

Jon Bryant: I've seen that. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer: It's great. For anyone that's listening that hasn't seen this, look it up. I feel like it's even more applicable in the painting world potentially, because I think a lot of these trade jobs are becoming more popular or mainstream, but they're not like, you know, everyone's like, I want to be a lawyer or a doctor or a firefighter or a singer, an actor, an entrepreneur, a YouTuber. That's what everybody is passionate about theoretically. And essentially Mike Rowe says, just follow the opportunities that are in front of you and then take them all very seriously and invest yourself and your energy to becoming the best at whatever the thing is that's presented to you.

And it's not like I saw that 10 years ago and was like, I'm following that. But I have accidentally done that I would say, or maybe subconsciously there was some intentionality there. The short story is I was growing up, I loved Legos and K'NEX and just like engineering, stereotypical engineering toys. So everyone was like, you're going to be an engineer. You hear that enough. So when college came, it was like, what are you going to do? I'm like, well, I know I like basketball and apparently I'm an engineer, because that's what everyone's told me. So I'm going to go to engineering school and I got an engineering degree and I tried it out in the real world for six months, hated it.

Which is another great piece of advice depending on the age of people listening. Like if you're thinking of changing jobs or going to a different career, maybe you should job shadow for a day or better yet, like three months before deciding to commit four years of your life in college to doing that thing. I never did that. I just was like, yep. And then I went down and I heard they made a lot of money. And so I got into my real job, hated it. It was miserable. The culture of the office, it was just not fun. I'm looking at the guy in the corner office on the 30th floor in this building in Portland, and I'm like, that guy looks so unhappy. So if I stick here for 30 years, work my butt off, then I get to be the unhappy guy in the corner office that never gets to see his kids.

I left that, started a marketing company and did that for six years and I had no business experience. I didn't know how to run a business, but I learned so much and I would say entrepreneurism is like the best self-improvement program that you can sign up for. It's grueling. It's tough. I had to learn sales, marketing, everything. And then I wasn't making much money because knowing now I was charging like a third or a fifth of what I should have been for a marketing company. We had eight employees at the time that were all mid-20-year-olds, just working our tails off, working 60, 70 hours a week and making $30,000 a year. We had so much fun, but I ended up having to take a job. I was looking one day for like a real job that I could make a better living in, and I stumbled across Webfoot Painting.

So I had all this marketing knowledge. They hired me as a marketing manager and I dove in. I had all this six years of knowledge and marketing and the engineering side of me, I definitely think like an engineer. That led me to Webfoot and I was there for three years. We helped, I helped grow their business and doubled in size from roughly 10 to 20 million, scaled new concrete coating services for them. And I had all this unbelievable opportunity at a relatively young age for a marketing manager that hadn't worked in painting before, but it was because I had six years of literally doing every aspect of running a marketing company for 25 different businesses that we worked with at the time.

I was at Webfoot and in the process of being at Webfoot, I automated so much of the business. And that is where we get to today, about two years ago, two and a half years ago. I worked out an arrangement with the owners of Webfoot to transition out of that job. I helped hire the replacement for me as the marketing director there. And then now I do automation consulting and implementation for painting companies. So that was maybe the five-minute version, but that's how I got to where I am.

Jon Bryant: So it all came full circle. I mean, I think it's important. You're on Paint Scout X and we don't get into the background so much of why people have authority in the space because we just don't have the time for that. So I think it's great to understand it and to put those two things together is really helpful. There's a lot of people that do marketing in the painting space that don't have the type of chops that you have. They've never actually really done it. It's kind of like, this seems like a good space for me to market into, but I don't actually know the space. So it's just helpful to get the lay of the land for you. And I think it's kind of helpful for our discussion, which hopefully will help a few people here.

For me really, it's about picking your brain about the future here. You work on automation, Boolean automation and review. And I think I'd love to get some insights just for the listeners to maybe, they're at a place right now where they are thinking about automation or they've done a little bit of automation and maybe it was overwhelming to them. Or maybe they're like, this is going to be overwhelming for me. So let's maybe dive into that. The future here of the painting industry. Do you think it's everyone running one person administration with everything being automated? What do you see?

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. So I'll start with when people say the word automation, I think there's an interesting thing that I have come to realize in talking to business owners. AI is another one of these things. When people hear AI, they now are thinking that things are that automation was doing and has been doing for 10 to 15 years. The masses are now like, oh, AI can help draft an email for me or whatever. But AI is doing more than automation has been in the last 10 to 15 years. But I also would add in a third word, and that's integration.

So I feel like the reality is that integration, automation and AI are kind of all the same thing and they just are different levels of awareness in the population. And I would say that what that thing is that we're talking about is eliminating the mundane, boring, mindless, repetitive tasks in a business. That's like what at the core people are talking about eliminating.

Jon Bryant: It's funny how we have to come up with these really sexy business words that nobody understands just to say that. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah, exactly. It's like I feel like everybody has known for a long time, like, man, this is like I do this task literally 100 times a week. And then only now, this is my opinion, now that there's AI and artificial intelligence and we have ChatGPT, people are suddenly like, I wonder if I could get rid of doing that. But it's like people and smart businesses, big corporations have been eliminating repetitive tasks for 25 years ever since computers came out.

And so that's just different evolutions of it. I would say that currently with AI, yes, you are able to do more than you could historically. Actually, I would say maybe not even more. You are just able to achieve stuff that would have taken a hundred hours to program can now be done in 15 minutes. And that's what AI is doing is just making it like that thing that 1% of 1% of businesses did 15 years ago that cost them a couple million dollars to solve can now be solved by a solopreneur with a $20 ChatGPT subscription.

At the end of the day, the future and where businesses are heading is like, how do we do more with less? How do we do more marketing with less marketing spend? How do we get more leads with less spend? How do I do more revenue with less overhead, do more revenue per sales rep? It's the same story that's been happening since the beginning of time in human history. We're all trying to be more efficient and we're trying to be more capable and leverage the tools. And I would even, this is getting maybe too theoretical or meta, but it's like it's the same thing with farming equipment, right?

As humans, we were like, man, it takes me a long time to plow this garden. Like how am I going to plow an acre or a hundred acres? And it's like, what if we had a bigger tractor or a plow? And all these things are just, it's the same thing that we've been doing forever. And yes, the goal is a painting business that is run with the fewest number of people. Is that one, is it zero? We're trying to get to it runs with zero people. And I think, I mean, realistically, I guess the way I think about it, we have to end up getting there at some point. But I think that's a quote unquote long time from now. But that's, to me, it's like, why not try to continue to advance in that direction? Because what's the alternative? Like I'm like, no, that's never going to happen. I'm going to keep all five people that other companies are eliminating. I don't know if that makes sense. That's how I think about it.

Jon Bryant: Well, the alternative is that we go, we fight it and we're like, you know what, I'm going to get five more people on my staff because I don't like computers. I don't like doing less work. I want to do more, which I think is just, that's a crazy idea. So I think you're right. So maybe we can dive into a little bit here because I want to make sure we try to get the, what did we have, a guy the other day? He said, I'm a cow and you're here to milk me. And I was like, what? I don't understand what that means. But I feel like that might be relevant. Let's figure out where the milk is in the conversation.

Chris Kiefer: Wait, was this on a podcast?

Jon Bryant: This was a guy that worked at the painting company. Yeah, you're going to milk the cow. So let's look at this from a sales perspective, right?

Chris Kiefer: So Michael, I just want to say, did you not hear that joke that just happened? Jon Bryant's funny, he's lighthearted.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's here, exactly. So I think in order to figure this out, let's look at it from a sales perspective. And maybe you can share just a couple of your favorite automations for sales. What do you see out there that you think is cool that we could share with people?

Chris Kiefer: Yeah, I would say I'm going to start with one of the things you should ask yourself before doing any automation is how often am I going to use this? Because there are really cool things that are possible, but at the same time, it's like, is this worth the time to make, to solve this problem? So I say that first, because this first one I'm going to tell you about is silly, but I think it's so cool. And I want to use this because if this took me an hour, let's say, which is probably accurate to how long this took me to solve, in today's world in the future, you might be able to do this in five minutes, or you could even just ask AI. I want this to happen anytime I say X.

So on my phone, basically I can say, "Hey Siri, I'm running late." And then what happens on my screen is there's an interface, this is through Siri shortcuts that pops up and it just says done. It's hard to show my phone right now, but it just says done. And what happened was that triggered Siri shortcut to go look at my calendar and find out what's the next event that's on my calendar that has either started, or the way I do it is the next event, the next ending of an event. So like if I'm late to an appointment, I want to know you have an appointment that ends in 50 minutes that started 10 minutes ago and I need to text that one or whatever.

So what it does is it goes and looks at my calendar, grabs the information of that client, the phone number, their email off of the calendar event, grabs my current location, looks at the address on that calendar event, calculates the distance between where I am now and the driving time to that appointment. And then it texts the contact and says, "Hey Jon Bryant, this is Chris. Just want to let you know I'll be there in 25 minutes. So sorry, I'm running late," or 17 minutes or 10 minutes or five minutes or whatever it is because it's calculating that knowledge that it has.

Again, if you're a sales rep, I made a YouTube video on this particular thing. So if you're nerdy like me and you want to do that, you can go solve this. But the reason I bring that up is like, first of all, I've talked to sales reps that are doing multiple appointments. You're driving down the road, shouldn't be texting and driving until we have self-driving cars. Then you can work on your computer or sleep or whatever. But in the meantime, finding ways to just like, to me this is a fantastic example of we don't even realize as humans, if I was going to send Jon Bryant a text, the calculations that I just did in a split second in my head, those are all things that can be programmed and you can tell a computer to do for you.

And now you can say find my current location, where am I heading? What's the contact number? And then what's the message I want to say. And so you can turn that into, it's called a five-minute text that I would have had to do into five seconds. And I just keep driving, you know.

Jon Bryant: Right. So is that done through the Apple interface or is that done through Zapier? How are you doing that?

Chris Kiefer: Yeah, so it starts out with Siri. To invoke Siri, you use Siri shortcuts and then basically it sends a webhook to Zapier and then all the number crunching and compiling and texting that happens in Zapier. So I'm just using it to extract the location information and the kickoff of the automation. Once, to me, honestly, it's like, for those of you, this is pretty deep and nerdy, but for those of you that understand webhooks, when I realized that you could initiate webhooks from just saying something to Siri, I was like, my goodness, this is crazy because you can now do, you can basically think about anything that you do in Zapier. You could initiate from a simple prompt with Siri.

Jon Bryant: Very interesting. So this, I mean, yeah, if you're a sales rep watching, I mean, this is super helpful. Like you said, no texting when you're driving and this happens all the time. So yeah, definitely for those listening, check out that video and maybe we'll put a link in the video description.

Chris Kiefer: And yeah, I'll do that. And I was going to say the one thing, I got off on this tangent, I'm excited about this, but that's, this is an example. For those of you, I would appreciate if some of you were listening and be like, that's so stupid. Like that's going to get used. I'm never late. Or I'm late once a month, which is why I would say, if you're going to spend time, this is what I get to do all the time is make up crazy scenarios and then see if it's possible to automate. That's what I love.

In this scenario, if I was a business owner, that probably wouldn't been automation number one that I would solve, right? Cause it's not that useful. More useful ones I would say are like, this is probably the number one and this is a core, we don't really have a cool name for this yet. Maybe we'll come up with something, but a core automation that I think every client should have is an estimate booking automation. So when I book an estimate, make a list of everything that happens from the moment that your CSR or maybe you book your own estimates, whatever it is. I'm talking to a customer and they say, come to my house at Tuesday at four o'clock.

So from the moment that we agree on a time to the moment that I go to their house and give them a quote, make a list of every single thing that needs to happen between those two points. And I would say you probably end up with somewhere between six and 10 things. And these are simple things like a confirmation email or text, a calendar event gets created, a reminder email and a text, maybe some informational content that you're sending to the customer, a CompanyCam project getting created so you can store photos in there, a Paint Scout quote getting created with the right template chosen, a deal in your CRM, a contact in your CRM. It's like, just start literally, break it down into bite-sized pieces.

And then to tell you that all of those things you can automate all of that at a single point of data entry. So when your CSR says submit, book the call for four on Tuesday, all of that other stuff is either completed or scheduled to be completed in the next five to seven days or whatever it is. And you just saved, I don't know, conservatively 15 minutes of somebody's time for every time you book an estimate. And that's a really, really popular one that I can say, if you are a painting company, what I just told you will save you 15 minutes on every estimate if you go plan that out.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's insane. Yeah, we have, once we implemented that, it was crazy. Because I mean, working at Webfoot, as I'm sure you know, processing leads becomes a massive deal. And so all of this stuff matters. And I think it's even for if you're a smaller kind of shop or smaller contractor, thinking about this problem in this way, it's just going to give you so much more time. And time is really the problem I think for most people. So very cool.

Chris Kiefer: Well, the other thing I would say is in general, when you are talking about automating anything, I think you have to come from a place of like, when I free up my time, or maybe a higher level would be like, what are the projects or problems that need to have somebody's attention or time focused on to solve them well? And like if you can identify what those are, that's good to know first of all, and those are going to change as your business scales.

But if you're freeing up your time, I will say legitimately, and this is through my own self-reflection and journaling, there are many things that I know I should not do as a business owner. This is not worth my time, but I do them because there's this fleeting sense of accomplishment that I get from being like, I just did 15 things today. But it's like, Chris, the one thing that you should have worked on that probably would have taken four hours of your day is your strategic plan on how you're going to get to wherever you're going to get in the next three years. And you didn't spend an ounce of energy on it. And instead you just replied to emails and I was like, yay, I got through 60 emails today or whatever.

And I think it's important to acknowledge that as business owners, when we free up time for ourselves or for our people, you need to make sure that you have abundant clarity on where is this extra time I'm getting going to be applied or redirected. Because if you don't have an intention, you're going to free up your time and then you're just going to fill it with the low friction stuff that you're good at that is urgent but not important at all.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think I'll add to that a little bit too, because I think we have two types of viewers on the podcast. One is business owners, sales managers, and the other is actual people who are passionate and successful sales reps or who want to be. And I think even for that second individual, like if you are a sales rep and you're trying to make your time effective, thinking about it in that way is the same thought process. I would imagine, right? Like you have a limited amount of time to do estimates. You have a limited amount of time to sell. So you want to make that the highest value time you can and allow that. Like if some of this automation, thinking about automation can change the game for you as a sales rep as well. So...

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. And so let's dive. I think going to, you asked like, what are the top automations? I gave, so far the second one is high value. Another one, before I say number three, I would say building off of what you just said, when you look at what does it take to sell a painting project? I believe that you have to look at your sales reps and say the most valuable thing that this human, this sales human can do is talk to people in person, talk to them on the phone so I can hear their voice or learn more about the craft, right?

Like to me, those are the three things that we should maximize how much time all of your sales reps are interfacing with humans and learning how to become better at sales or better painting or more knowledgeable in painting. Like those are the things if they do those, that's it. That's like 80% of their time was there, you will have a world-class sales team. And so you then look at, all right, everybody, I want you to keep track of where are the hours in the day going.

And this is where it gets interesting because I would say if you talk to most sales rep, they tell you that they spend a ton of time managing their pipeline or whatever that means. And it's like, I get what, I mean, yes, you still are going to manage your pipeline, but I think that there's a lot of creep that just fills into that bucket. And a lot of it is manual data entry. So like I create the quote in Paint Scout and I want to get all that information from the quote into my CRM. If you architect your automations right, the sales rep literally builds it, sends it to the customer and then goes to the next bid. And then all the information is updated and automatically stored inside the CRM.

And that's the third automation I would say. We call it the bid sent automation, which is just the trigger is when I send the bid, I want a bunch of stuff to happen. And so now all now there's, now their pipeline is up to date. And then the only thing that they need to do is schedule an hour of their day every day for follow-up. And so because in that bid sent automation, at least the way I like doing it, and again, what makes sense for you is going to depend on how do you want to run your sales team?

We were just talking about this before, Jon Bryant, and I will put it in a plug. If you haven't listened to the last, I don't know if it's the most recent or within the last three episodes, the follow-up sales follow-up podcasts that you and Michael did, really, really good. And I would say make your map and plan of what is the perfect sales follow-up process to close a client and what does that look like? And identify that before you do this bid-sent automation that I'm talking about. Because if you don't, I would say a really common issue that I see painting companies or painting estimators make is that we're bombarded with all these cool, fancy, shiny objects that are softwares and AI tools and things that are going to make our lives easier.

And the worst thing you could do is see a demo, sign up for it and be like, this is amazing. The guy said, I'm going to save so much time and then get back to your business and be like, okay, here's all the features. Let's figure out how to build a process that uses these. Right? Instead of the right way of doing it is technology needs to serve the master, so to speak. The master is you and you have to define what do you want your business to do and how do you want it to function and make a plan for that first. And then I like to think of it as like I'm a surgeon just placing the automations in the exact right points of where I want this.

Because the sales process is probably of all the processes in the business is the part where I would say you need to be extremely intentional about where you keep human interaction because there's opportunities to remove human interaction everywhere. But I think good sales teams and companies are very intentional about, I want to make sure that my sales rep has these three touch points. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that needs to happen as well. So let's automate everything else, but we need to make sure that all those automations serve those three touch points so that they can focus their energy on talking to more people.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah. We talked about this beforehand that ultimately when you have somebody at your home or your property, trust is such a major factor. And it's a big, usually it's got to be a person to person thing. Sometimes you can get away with it just by reputation, but somebody has to know there's somebody there to go to when stuff doesn't go right or if they're going to give you money as a deposit, they got to know you're real. You're not just going to run away with it.

So I think what you're saying is so true where we need to know those points that are critical to automation, but not take away the human element because what's interesting, Chris, and we haven't really talked about this before, but when we look at win rates on estimates, the really important factors are the speed to which the estimate's delivered and the speed to which it's either followed up on personally. And it's rare, we see it very rare that estimates get accepted from automated follow-ups. I think it's kind of a bit of a misnomer out there.

At least people are trying to pump the idea that automated follow-ups are what close the deal. And so it's interesting to evaluate this to be like, why for one, why is everybody saying that this is the case? Like it just can't be because the data doesn't support it. But two, over-automation on this can actually affect you in a negative way. It can affect your win rate in a negative way. So I totally resonate. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer: And sorry to clarify, I had to stand up for the last part of this cause I'm getting excited about something, but what was the first thing that you said? The misconception is what?

Jon Bryant: So the misconception is that we can send an estimate and then it'll get closed or you win the customer over through follow-up, automated follow-up. Like I can just email them and text them to death and eventually they're going to say, yeah, I want to work with you. And actually it's kind of inverse sometimes the correlation. You start to really piss people off if you don't do it right. I don't know, that's what I see. Tell me what your thoughts are.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. So I would say that I love that you brought that up because the idea, first of all, when people say, I don't want to piss off my customers or something, I'm, I don't want to be pushy or whatever. And I would say, first of all, let's define what pissed off means. Like if you're going to use that term, can you tell me what does a pissed off customer look like? What are they saying to you? Because to clarify when someone's like, I've got six texts from you, can you, this is kind of annoying. That's not a pissed off customer, right? I don't think so.

And the other thing is a pissed off customer is like, how dare you, I unsubscribed 16 times, I'm going to sue you, I'm going to tell everybody not to use you. Like, that's a pissed off customer to me. And those are unicorns that you rarely come across. Someone being like, hey, sorry, I didn't get back to you. You don't need to call me anymore because we went with somebody else. Or like, hey, I told you this last time and I got another message. There's a sweet spot.

And I would say you want not automation, but it's mixed. So I'm going to say follow-up is whether it's a sales rep or automation combined. That is follow-up. You want a decent amount of follow-up and a high cadence that can be unsubscribed to or stopped by the customer whenever they want. But don't assume that a customer doesn't want a lot of follow-up. Like it's just crazy to me that the idea of, I'm going to let them reach out to us in a week when they're ready. If you didn't say, if you set that agreement and they're going on vacation and they said, hey, I'll call you.

And you're like, all right, what day, what time? When is that? Okay, I'll make a note. And then if they don't call you five minutes after they said they would, I would call them be like, hey, I know you said you're going to call today. But again, it's all, this is another thing you mentioned in the follow-up podcast episode is I think the follow-up process needs to be a mixture of phone calls from real people, your estimators, text messages that could be sent manually or automated from a rep and emails and all three of those, it's just like a recipe.

If you're trying to make a cake and you're only going to use sugar, cause sugar is sweet and you love sugar and you just remove all the flour and water, it's like, it's all necessary. So thinking that we have to do, in the same way, I'm trying to think of the text, email and call which one's sugar, water and flour. But if you take all the flour out or all the water or whatever, it still doesn't work. You need a mixture of all of it. And so if someone's like, I hate technology, I'm just going to have my sales reps do everything manually. I mean, I just don't think it's as good as if you used a mixture.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's, but the thought process though, behind this is what's key. And I think you alluded to that in that point of saying once you send the estimate what happens. And I think that there is also this idea out there that you can just let the text and email do the work. And I think really it's that personal touch that still matters to people. And it's got to be sprinkled in, right? And so I think you can, I think you mentioned somebody to me before the call, just they send the estimate out and they just hide. They're like, my goodness. I hope they like my price. I hope they go with me and I'll send them five emails being like, are you going to go ahead? Are you going to go ahead? Well, that's not a conversation. That's just you being, you know, maybe poor at business at that point. So yeah.

Chris Kiefer: Yes. Yep. Yeah. Well, the other thing that this person had said was they basically were hesitant to put any automation in on the sales follow-up because all their clients want different things. And I thought that was interesting too, because I do want to work with the client, but I don't want the client to dictate how the follow-up goes. Like if, I don't know if you think this, but they were literally saying they say, what would you like to do next or something like that? Which is kind of, I don't want to get too nitpicky, but my preference would be, all right, so here's the price that I was able to give you on the spot because I use this really sweet estimating tool called Paint Scout. And I made it right here. Here it is.

Talk to your spouse or whatever. And I think I can't remember if this was on your podcast or not, but if you find out that the spouse isn't there, was it you guys that said, find out if you can come back later that evening to go over the price with them in person?

Jon Bryant: I don't know that's never been my theory maybe Michael, but I don't know yeah.

Chris Kiefer: But I was going to say I want to leave room, there are opportunities here. The price is the thing that's the valuable thing. So when you give it can be strategically placed. Maybe you decide not to give it on the spot because they're both not present. I'm in support of that. But I also would say...

Jon Bryant: By the way, that was Russell who was just on the podcast. He was the one who said that. Yeah, yeah. So you like the idea? Sorry.

Chris Kiefer: He's the one that said it. Yeah. So I liked the idea of basically deciding when the right time to give the price is. But whenever you give that price, I think it's the salesman's job to say, so here's how we typically, here's what I can recommend. You take some time. You said you had a couple other bids. I'll reach out to you in a week. Do you have a preference on the day or time that I call you? And just be more directive in your suggestions as opposed to or even saying like, so after this, because I know you're busy, everyone's got a lot of stuff going on, we have a few automated messages that you'll get to just check in, feel free to reply to any of those that come directly to me and I can hop on a call with you, or something like that is fine.

I also would say, even as I said that, I don't like saying they're automated messages that you're going to get because then you're just telling the person, so I don't need to reply to any of those. I'll just wait for you to call me. I like saying, I'm going to revise what I just said there is, so what I typically do is I'll text people two or three days from now and just see if you, as you've been looking at this and looking at other quotes, if you had any questions, let me know. And then I'll call you like a week from now. And then if I don't hear from you, I'll probably reach out again, cause I just want to help you make the right decision.

But I do think that it is okay to preface that how I typically work is I will reach out and I'm going to be proactive. If you guys get to a decision, whether it's yes or no, just let me know whenever that happens. That's the goal. But I would say that's my recommendation as opposed to what do you want to do next? What would you, where should we go from here, Jon Bryant? It's like, I don't know. I feel like there should be some guiding of the client.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. I mean, in our sales process, it's all about the customer is not the expert in our field. And so therefore we need to guide the conversation in order to help them. It's all about helping them get to a decision. And so I totally agree with you on that. Now I know we've got a few more bits kind of left here. So I think you've got maybe two more, two more favorite automations we can maybe cover quickly.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah. So the other big one that I would say is, as far as reviews go, so people that follow Boolean know Boolean has a reputation management review software. And we actually just went through a revamp. We have three clients that are still on our legacy system and they're literally getting moved over today. So our old system is getting killed and we have a new fancy interface and tracking and everything that exists.

One of the things that I was adamant that our new system had was way better integrations. Cause I'm a big fan of integrations these days. I'm a big fan. Yes. I told Natalie she was managing our product. I said, I want to have the most integratable and triggerable software for reviews ever. So anything related to reviews, I want to be able to send webhooks and receive an update information in our CRM, all that stuff. And that's our North star. That's what I want to get to. And so we're adding in those things.

But the reason I bring that up is because the automation that I think everybody should implement is asking for reviews after you do the estimate. So asking for feedback on how the estimate went.

Jon Bryant: That's a huge one.

Chris Kiefer: So if you're a good sales rep, you're closing 50%, maybe most people are probably around 40, 45% of the bids that you go on. They decide to work with you. And I'm, this is my engineering side. This was when I was at Webfoot, I had this realization of, so I'm paying at the time, I think it was like 120 bucks a lead or something like that. And in certain seasons, it varies greatly, but at this one time we're having this meeting, I'm paying over a hundred bucks for a person for us to send someone's time and drive and gas money and all this stuff to an estimate. And 60% of them are saying, nah. And then they go with somebody else and we never do anything with them ever again. We have their email, but what are we doing with those people?

And somebody's idea was not mine, but I was like, we should try this. Well, why don't we ask them to just rate the estimate process? Like how was the presentation? Was it educational? What did you like about it? Just rate our estimator on a scale from one to five and send them to your Google page. And I was like, I don't know, that seems kind of weird. People are just going to be like, why are you asking me to review your business? I didn't even work with you.

But it was a mindset shift of they did actually work with us. We didn't charge them anything, but they got so much value from our estimator coming up, educating them, telling them about all the stuff they didn't know about their house. And it turns out, people are very willing to tell you and leave you five-star reviews. And this isn't trickery. They say in their review, their estimate was super professional. I don't know if I'm going to use them yet, but five stars. And then we all of a sudden started getting, it was probably between five and 10% of our estimates started leaving us five-star reviews. And we never had, I think there was one time we had 12 estimators. So there was a lot of these.

There's one time where an estimator got a one-star review and you go in and read it. And it was like, I waited at my house. No one showed up. And we're like, my goodness. So that triggered a whole process inside the business. Find out that this person's house was in the middle of nowhere. They had no cell service. The estimator had driven out there and gotten lost and was looking and then had to drive back 30 minutes into town and they had another appointment coming up. So it was just a crazy scenario, but we can explain that in the review or in the response. And the next customer is not going to be, I'm discrediting all 800 five-star reviews because one person said that they had a no-show, especially when the business explains what happened.

So that's the other big one is ask for reviews after your estimates. And if that's intriguing again, cause I'm a knowledge share, there's a video on our YouTube channel of how you can do it yourself.

Jon Bryant: Awesome.

Chris Kiefer: But our Boolean system is also capable of integrating with Paint Scout. So when you send a quote, the Boolean software can ask for a review 24 hours later, 48 hours later or whatever.

Jon Bryant: Dude, that's amazing. Yeah, such a great thing to remember, and for everyone listening, just that there's many points in the process that you can get a review. I mean, some of the bad reviews that we've had at our painting company have been they were driving too fast. And it's like, if someone can leave us a review for driving too fast, why can't someone leave us a review for being they were a great driver? So it's like, rate my driving. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer: Yeah, that's actually a great point. Rate my driving. Here's my Google business listing.

Jon Bryant: Exactly. Now that might be, I mean, that's a little far because there's just crazy people on the road, but overall that idea of it can be at the estimate, it could be, you could be at a trade show, you can be anywhere. And Google's Google review rules are such that it just has to be a person that says something. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, that's very insightful, Chris.

Chris Kiefer: It's an interaction with the business. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like, use the analogy of a restaurant. It's like, are you only allowed, if a customer comes in and has, if they eat a meal, they can leave you a review. What if they just have an appetizer? What if they just order a drink? What if they just have water? Any of those people, they interact with people in your business and they can tell Google these guys were great or they weren't, you know. What if they just use your bathroom? Someone comes in, hey, you could use our bathroom. Would you mind leaving a review?

Jon Bryant: And I think though, to your point about automating that too, is important. Making sure that it's something you're not having to think about where you're at the estimate, you're like, can you please rate me and give me a review? I mean, you might be able to say that it might be helpful, but overall it's just that process thinking about what's good for the customer and how it works. So Chris, I want to get to number five and we got to wrap things up, unfortunately. So we're going to leave it on a cliffhanger. So for next time, when we have you back, we're going to start with...

Chris Kiefer: Yes. Yes. Ooh.

Jon Bryant: The last one, how about that? Then we'll move on. So we will tune in again. But man, it's always a pleasure chatting with you. This is fun. I know I get inspired every time I'm talking to you about this, because it brings to light so many things that I need to do and think about differently. So thank you. Thanks for bringing that insight to this podcast and our listeners.

Chris Kiefer: Absolutely. It has been fun and I look forward to many more conversations. Anyone that's listening, if you're a Paint Scout user or you're considering using Paint Scout, I will tell this. I'm going to tell you this, Jon Bryant, and then you're going to get super competitive and go make a bunch more videos, but why not have some competition? I looked and we have a YouTube video that is I think it's automatically create Paint Scout quotes is the title of it.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Chris Kiefer: And I want to say that it's the second it has, whatever the view count was, we can look this up afterwards and the people listening, you can see who wins in months from now, but it has, there's only one video on your channel that has more views than that video. If that makes sense. So we were, someone pointed it out to me. I was like, sweet. We almost have the highest viewed...

Jon Bryant: Yeah, so...

Chris Kiefer: Video on the term Paint Scout on YouTube, but you still have one video that's better. But the thing that's funny about that is that it's a very sought-after topic of how do I automatically make a quote? So I don't have to, I can put in the numbers, but I just want the template to be selected for me. So if you're a Paint Scout user, that's one video you can go look at that's popular, but we've got dozens of videos on our YouTube channel that are automating things related to Paint Scout in addition to a hundred other painting related stuff, but big fans of Paint Scout. You guys have a great tool and we love working with you guys.

Jon Bryant: Thanks Chris, appreciate it man, appreciate your time. And for those who are listening, if you like the podcast, subscribe and maybe we'll make some more. So Chris, thanks very much man. Pleasure, have a wonderful day. See ya.

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