Email, Text, or Call? How Painting Sales Reps Should Talk to Customers

Michael Murray: Welcome back to the Price. Sell. Paint., Podcast. My name is Michael Murray and I'm excited to be joined by Jon Bryant. Jon, how are you today?

Jon Bryant: Fantastic, Michael. I always say welcome back like people in their cars are listening to one episode after another, and they're like, "Welcome back? I've been here for hours!"

Michael Murray: Well, we release episodes every two weeks. I'm assuming we have some regular listeners at this point we've heard from. So for those people, welcome back. For others, this might be their first time - they have no idea who we are. They're in for a special treat because today we have a really important topic that's becoming more and more top of mind with some of the tools and technology. It really comes down to communication and when should we use the right communication tools - text messaging, email, phone calls. Should we automate communication and things like that? I know this came up because of something recently in your business. Can you tell us about that?

Jon Bryant: I've experienced this so many times. It's hard to know how different people interpret communication, so setting standards within the business of how we deal with certain situations and what method of communication we should use is important. In this situation, we had a staff member dealing with a customer. The customer messaged in through the PaintScout chat saying, "Hey, I'm looking to add some more work." We're at the end of exterior season.

Keep in mind, I'm not in the business, but I see the messages come through because I'm addicted to the activity and messaging - which is a weird inception moment since I created that and then became addicted to it. The customer said they wanted to add this work, and the person's response was, "Yeah, sorry, we'll deal with that next year." The customer messaged back saying, "No, I don't think you understand - we need to deal with this this year because we're trying to do these things." The person messaged back, "Yeah, that's great, but we don't have time. We'll talk next year."

I'm watching this and thinking, "This is not going to end well." No one can sense tone when you're sending these kinds of messages. They're reading everything with the worst tone possible - texts, emails, messaging through the app. This person inevitably messaged in saying, "I'm so annoyed by this. You don't understand. You're totally blowing me off. I want to talk to your manager immediately." This is making a mountain out of an anthill - the smallest thing that could have been totally avoided with a quick change in the method of communication.

I also have someone I work closely with on a project. I was asking questions and said, "I need that answered by the end of today." They said, "Yeah, I've emailed them." I said, "I need it today." They replied, "Well, if they don't get back to me, at least I have it in writing." I said, "Have you called them?" They were like, "No, then I won't have it in writing." I said, "That's not the point. We just need the answer."

Sometimes using these methods to hide or not getting the method right - it might not be on purpose, but if you get it wrong, it adds friction and complicates a relationship that could be quite easy. We can quickly deal with problems by using the right method, and we can quickly make a massive problem out of a small problem with the wrong method.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. I have so many stories where the nuance is lost in these quick, impersonal types of messaging and communication styles. So many times that can happen. One way you can solve that is just do all communication in person - go back to the 1800s or early 1900s and do everything in person. But that's not possible or practical. We need things to move quickly. We want to be able to service a lot of customers, and that's where some of these technologies can be awesome tools if used correctly.

We're not here to say we shouldn't text message customers or email customers or automate. It's just understanding when is the right time to use the right tool - whether it's a phone call (these things we walk around with in our pockets can be used as phones, which is cool), text message, or email. As a sales professional in our industry, it really comes down to how well you communicate - before appointments, during appointments, after appointments. Even in customer service moments when customers might be upset about something at a job site, the sales rep's often the first one they're going to reach out to because that's who they originally had that trusting relationship with. Sales reps are often very much at the front lines of these communication strategies.

Jon Bryant: Sure. There's the automation piece we want to talk about, and whether it's better in person, by text, or by email. I think the right time for different things exists. Buyer's expectations are changing too, and the need for personalization is changing. Getting ahead of that and understanding how to create a modern communication experience for customers can be really helpful.

Look at Amazon - you place an order, you get a message, there's a notification that it's coming, then it shows up and says it showed up. That's really helpful for that type of experience. Texting is great for that. But when there's an issue, I don't want to be texting specifically with a bot - I have a problem. Tone, timing, and medium all affect how customers perceive you today.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think it's interesting you bring up Amazon. Over the last 25 years, they've changed completely how we think about shopping. I'm certainly old enough to remember when all Amazon did was sell books online. As they started to move into different customer segments and product lines, most of the established core resisted it and said it's never going to happen. You can't buy shoes on a website - you have to be able to go into a store and try them on. You can't buy clothes without going to a store and trying them on.

So many companies that were in popular spots doing big revenue got either taken off the map or faced significant competition from Amazon because they came in and were able to see which part of that in-person experience was so critical in terms of communication and maybe making it easy to return things if you didn't like it. They were able to solve for some of the communication issues that a lot of the established guards said you're never going to be able to do over the internet. Our industry is maybe at the beginning of that type of transformation over how things are done digitally with communication and different tools.

Jon Bryant: Should we dig into a couple of these communication methods?

Michael Murray: Yeah. Give us a broad outline - when's the best time to call, when's the best time to text or email, maybe even in person? How should we think about that? Then let's dive into some nuance in each one.

Jon Bryant: The way I've come to realize these mediums work best is when they're used in terms of relationship. I think email is a great method when it doesn't require much of an intense relationship. You can send it off, send a quote by email, send out mass emails, communicate that way. It's a low barrier to personalization. Then you ramp it up with texts, then a phone call, and then in person.

That's how I've always seen building relationships - it's worked that way. When I need to address an issue, I sometimes go all the way to the top of that because it's about relationship, being understood and heard. That in-person element is just so important. Working our way back, I feel like they have an urgency and importance as you go up the scale - email, then text, voice call, in person. And then family - being in the will is probably the next one!

Michael Murray: I don't know where we put pager. Is that still on the list?

Jon Bryant: Pager? Fax machine!

Michael Murray: Yeah, I agree. I think that's the right way of thinking about it. It's how important is the conversation? How critical are the details that we don't let things get lost in tone and translation? The more critical it is, the more likely we need to be in person or over the phone. A lot of less emotional conversations can definitely happen with an email or text message.

Jon Bryant: One of the rules I have for myself with texts is what I call the three-text limit. If we have to send three texts back and forth to each other, I'm just going to call you. We've escalated it far enough. A two-minute phone call can avoid 47 text messages.

Michael Murray: Are you old enough to remember sending text messages before smartphones?

Jon Bryant: I think it was my first phone.

Michael Murray: I was running a painting business when I was in school at that point. I remember if I had to send a text that was more than three words, I was just calling the person. You used to have to click - I think the number two was A, B, and C, so if you wanted C, you had to click it three times, then go to the next one. It was awful. Somebody listening is going to relate to that. I like reminding myself how old I am.

Alright, so let's talk about these each in a little bit more detail. Where do you want to start?

Jon Bryant: Let's start with email. I think email as a baseline is good for documentation. It provides clarity and professionalism. In our systems, we've sent estimates by email, formal follow-ups summarizing meetings or calls. But there's an issue when it gets anything more critical than specific data or when we already have a good relationship. I think people generally in these types of communication lean toward a negative tone. So I'm always a little wary of that.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think of email as not very personalized. A lot of emails I get are marketing messages or sales-related stuff. We use it to send out proposals and document those types of conversations. I think email is really good when I might need to go back and reference it - almost like a digital file box of conversations. But it's not where I want to be having any sort of emotional conversations or anything that might involve a back and forth. Other than maybe a quick, simple answer to something, I don't think trust is really built over email. It can certainly be lost over email, but I don't think trust is built over email.

Email plays a really important part, but if we're doing follow-ups as a sales rep using email, I think that's probably a problem. That's one of the places I would try to lean away from. If you're doing follow-ups over email, it's probably late - we've been following up, we're not getting an answer, and it's more of a breakup email. A lot of companies use something similar where it's like, "Hey, we haven't heard from you in a while. We've been trying to get in touch with you about this painting project. If I don't hear from you in the next two days, we're going to assume you're not interested, and we're going to go ahead and close this out."

Something like that is pretty formal. We're trying to document the fact that this conversation has taken place, maybe hoping to get a response from them that we could then take. If somebody responded like, "Hey, sorry, I haven't gotten in touch with you," I would then take that and turn it back, and I would call them. I would want to take that into a phone call to try to move that along the sales process.

Jon Bryant: It also leaves it on their time. That message resonates well because you've had a hard time connecting with them - maybe they've had stuff happening. But if you start texting or calling a lot, it starts to piss people off. An email is a nice thing to just leave as a "when you're ready to check this out" message.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think that's important. That's like thinking about asynchronous versus synchronous conversation - asynchronous where we don't have to both be communicating at the exact same time, like "get to this when you can," versus a phone call which only works very synchronously. If you don't answer, there's no communication. That is a really good point - this can be something like "get to this when you can." But again, to the example you started today's conversation with, if I need an answer today, email is probably not the best way to do that.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Do you think there's a world where trades businesses operate without email?

Michael Murray: It's hard to imagine. It's such a part of our world. For me as a business owner, it's even worse now with all this AI-generated email that I get every single day. Stuff gets lost, and I'm just bad at this. I don't want to spend my day in my inbox. I hate it. It's not a good productive place for me to be, or I think for most people to be.

Then what happens is I do get some important stuff through an email and then it gets lost. I'm always like, if you would've just given me a call, I could have answered that question in two minutes. But you're sitting there waiting, and I hate that. I don't want to be the bottleneck on something. Email's not a really good spot if you need a quick answer, especially for me.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I'm very much the same. I get so many emails and it's such a weight on my shoulders having to deal with them. I get so few phone calls. When my phone rings, it's like, "Hello! What's up? I want to talk to you!" I think email - people get bombarded. There's so much of it. As sales reps, especially in what we do, which is quite - I mean, we're building relationships, but if we're honest, it's transactional too. We're looking for pretty quick answers. I say transactional not in that we don't care about the customer, but these things happen quickly. In fact, the faster they happen, often the better it is for everybody.

Getting an answer on site when you're with the customer is best case scenario. Then it's a follow-up call, or maybe the best case is you email and they immediately accept, which can also be concerning. It's best if you do a quick call the next day. Or they call you - I love closing by a call because now we have a relationship. This wasn't just - we've built the trust. Email gets in the way sometimes. It's something you hide behind. I think that's a great way to think about it - they build confidence, but they don't really build connection. As a contractor, we're trying to build connection and trust.

We've talked about this before - when people are looking to not get screwed, not get taken advantage of, part of that's getting to know you and trusting you. Email is not going to beat you over the competition.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I do think email has a place in our sales follow-up for sharing of information. I mentioned on maybe one of the more recent podcasts that we use Google Gemini to create some image renderings of what a project could look like. I think that can be a really cool thing if you didn't have a chance to do that with the homeowner live at the appointment, which is also an awesome way to do it. But it can be a great touch point maybe the next day - "Hey, I was thinking about you, excited about your project. I actually put together a quick rendering to show you what that would look like."

That's best sent through an email because somebody can reference it. It's not going to get lost in their text messages. I think it's generally probably something they might have a chance to open and digest on their own schedule, where text messaging is very in the moment. I'm going to quickly respond or not, and it's just kind of out of sight, out of mind pretty quickly.

Jon Bryant: The other thing that just dawned on me is that when you send a text, it's going to be right on a phone, but an email can be opened on a computer. Email open rates are typically moving towards phones as well, but you get a different profile for something like that. It could open bigger or they're going to be able to have that option to open it bigger. If you send it by text, there are ways to get the text on your computer, but you can go back to your computer and see that image in a larger, more impactful way. Sometimes thinking about the way the customer gets that information or the prospect gets that information is important.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I agree.

Jon Bryant: Let's talk about text.

Michael Murray: Talking about text, I think it's awesome for quick messaging, quick confirmations. We all know we're supposed to be on time for an appointment, but maybe you're running five minutes behind. Don't send that in an email. You probably don't even need to call the person. A quick text can go a long way here - "Hey, I'm on my way, just going to be there about five minutes late." Something like that - in the moment, quick messaging.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think where I've seen it used really well is in our world. Being conscientious of a customer's time is really important, and setting up a system where you tell the customer how far you are out, especially for an appointment, can mean a lot for that relationship. It says you're thinking about it and you're present and aware.

I've seen reps use that really well where every appointment, 15-20 minutes out, they're just letting the person know "I'm on my way. Here's who I am." It sets the tone that they care and allows them to have brief check-ins with them later. When I say later, it's not just after the appointment - it's also down the road. Sometimes you have to have sent a text in order to send a future text.

Being able to do a small, unexpected touch later - "Hey, how did the job end up?" or "How did the birthday celebration go?" - something you've connected with, I think is really nice by text. It's almost like a little card alternative.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. We have a lot of automated texts that are really important for what we just talked about, like schedule reminders and different things like that. Texting is becoming more and more a part of what we do. On the hiring side, especially with younger people, it's almost the main way to communicate now. There are more and more customers and homeowners that actually just prefer to do things via text message compared to a phone call because of the asynchronous nature - they can respond a little bit slower.

I would say text messaging is the one that is by far on the upswing. I think email is probably a little bit on the downswing but still relatively flat. Phone calls are probably the one that's the most declining in prevalence. Does that resonate with you?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I'm excited to talk about phone calls too. This reminds me of when people moved to digital marketing from direct mail. With your point about the younger generation texting, it's like, do we really want to succumb to that? That's what they do, so that's what we do? I sometimes wonder in a relationship with a customer - they want to text, but ultimately other businesses are like, "Fine, I'll do what the customer wants," when really a phone call is going to make the difference.

Even though people fight it, that's really still how we operate as humans - direct communication, verbal communication. How much of it do we take as "this is what we should do" and how much do we take as "this is an opportunity to do better"?

Michael Murray: Yeah. One of the things I see us doing a lot more of is scheduling appointments over text versus obviously still a lot of people calling to schedule their appointment or scheduling their own appointments on our website. I feel like there's an increasing use of messaging tools, whether it's text message or on the website type messaging, where we're using it for scheduling.

From our sales reps, though, I see text messaging as a really helpful way for them to have small little touch points with clients and relationships and people to keep in touch, just like we probably use in our personal life. It shouldn't be a replacement for in-person get-togethers or maybe a longer phone call asking somebody how they're doing. But sending, in our personal life, we probably text each other funny pictures or news articles just to tell somebody we're thinking about them.

You probably don't want to send funny pictures to customers, but there are places where we can use that to help continue a relationship. I don't necessarily think it's a great tool to build an initial relationship.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think it's so important to at least have the discussion as a team of what is okay to send by text. The tone is interesting. Emoji use is also funny. We have someone on our team who responds to everything by emoji. It's like, "Hey guys, we're having lunch Tuesday," and they send an emoji of a fish jumping over the moon. You're like, "So you're in?" And then they send an emoji of a pumpkin. You're like, "Okay, are you in?" "No, sorry, can't make it." What is going on?

We've had to discuss this issue of, guys, emojis don't represent communication. I worry that what we can do with our friends, we should do with our customers. Yes, but professionalism matters. You've got to read the room. I'm not great with emojis. Sometimes I send them and I'm like, "What did I actually just say? How's this person going to interpret it?" I think having that chat as a team, thinking about what is okay - if your company's about emojis, great, but let's rein it in to maybe which ones we send. Just because you think an eggplant is a vegetable, maybe someone else doesn't.

Michael Murray: That one I know! That one I'll use.

Jon Bryant: This is why we hire younger people to help us understand what these things mean!

Michael Murray: All the different ways that completely innocuous emojis now have different meanings. Oh boy. We should move on before we get in trouble.

Jon Bryant: It's that line of showing you care versus going over to be too casual, which is important. I think in the automation discussion, it's really important too.

Michael Murray: I think it's also important because we want to have these friendly relationships with our customers, and that's good. But if we're not careful, when we have to have a difficult conversation - whether it's to ask for the sale or maybe there's some kind of conflict (they need to pay us and they haven't, or they're frustrated because the crew didn't do something, or whatever it might be) - if we haven't also established that professional part of the relationship and it's only just been over here in this friend zone, it can be a problem. We can often misstep at that point, not maybe understanding the seriousness of the conversation and the level of professionalism that needs to be brought to make sure that everybody has the right tone and context and things aren't being lost.

Jon Bryant: Would you ever set a price by text or ask for a job by text?

Michael Murray: Definitely not initially. I have had some pricing conversations with people via text, but it wasn't the first conversation we had about it. I presented it, they got back to me and said they got a better price and were going to go with somebody else. Then I responded with a text message - "Okay, well, I completely understand. Help me understand - what price point were they at?" We just had it just like I would handle any other objection, and we did that through a text message because that's how they started it.

I would also say that at any point if I would have felt like their messaging was like they were getting frustrated, they didn't want to respond, if their messaging was getting short, one-word answers or something like that, I would have just picked up the phone and called them. But I could tell from the tone that I was reading from what they were saying and the length of their messages and things like that that it was probably better.

It also mattered that I had an in-person relationship. I had talked to them over the phone. They had young kids. I can understand that text message might be better than a phone call because of their situation. I can imagine, having had young kids that are now getting older on me, that there are times where kids are crying in the background and you just can't answer a phone right now, but you could easily text with someone.

But I would say less than 1% of the time am I going to think that that's the right way to do it. It's also just so easy to ignore. I don't get to read their emotion in their voice or more maybe in person. I want to see how they respond when we have a conversation about pricing. I also don't want them to be able to hide - it's so easy for somebody to just end the conversation and never pick up your phone call again because why do they need to? They already know what the price is.

Jon Bryant: Exactly. I think providing a price - like you said, not first conversation, but maybe as an additional work order or an add-on - that happens a lot because you have the relationship already. You've gone to the in-person, the phone call, and now text is okay.

I had a sales rep who would text estimates at 11 PM. This was years and years ago. His point was that it's just great to get when you're in your bed and you can just read it in bed. I was like, you're doing too much thinking for the customer and putting yourself in their shoes. Thinking about the time of text also really matters. Do you keep it during business hours or would you care if someone said something after that?

Michael Murray: I think in our industry, business hours are usually 8 AM to 8 PM, something like that. It just depends. If I'm actively painting at your house, I could probably shoot you a message at 7:30 that the crew's on their way or something like that. But if it's a sales follow-up, I'd say not before 9 AM and definitely not after 7, maybe 8 PM.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, totally. The same rep once asked - I asked him how he was treating his schedule. He said, "Well, nobody really works on Mondays. They're kind of just getting in and getting going, so I don't want to follow up on Mondays. Before 10 AM, everyone's just getting their stuff together, getting their coffee, so I don't want to call them before that. Generally people are shutting it down around 3 PM, so I don't really call after that."

Michael Murray: When does this guy actually work?

Jon Bryant: Exactly! I was like, so you're telling me your schedule is 15 hours a week? And then you send the estimate at 11 PM because they're in bed? It was wild. It obviously didn't work, but it was very interesting. I think talking about this is so important because we make these assumptions that we operate the way we operate and that's okay. Other people are marching to their own drum and sending 11 PM estimates and never following up by phone call. These are critical.

Michael Murray: If you've got to send something at 11, put that in an email.

Jon Bryant: Exactly, that's the right time! Email is great at 11. You're not cozying up in your bed waiting for an estimate to come in.

Michael Murray: You can use that schedule email feature too and just have it hit their inbox, because I'm not responding to your email late at night. Your nighttime reading sounds like it's reading over all the message conversations going on in the company.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's a problem. I need something better to read.

Michael Murray: Alright, so when do we use the phone? This weird thing - actually talking to people, no emojis involved. When does that come into play?

Jon Bryant: I want to use the phone as much as possible. That's just my style. I'm a millennial, I know, I'm old. But our culture has moved away from real genuine connection. Each one of these things moves us further and further away from actually connecting with other human beings. I feel like relationships are important. I'm built that way. Maybe I'm weird, but I'm always encouraging everybody in sales that I meet that the phone is this long-lost secret, this relic, this archeological find that you're going to find on your phone in the phone feature. It actually is the secret to sales.

I remember talking to someone in the last couple of years about their marketing strategy. It was all about mass email and mass text. Early on in my career, I talked with someone in the insurance industry who had evaluated that as a marketing option. People don't buy on transaction that much. They buy on trust, and they build that through relationships.

That really stuck with me - phone is this thing to use in sales all the time. Move it to the phone as fast as possible for the reason you mentioned earlier, which is that you can get direct feedback. You can feel the tone. You can understand if someone's really actually upset or they're just genuinely asking about something. That three-text limit - I move it to phone. If I get an email that I feel has more than just a response or some emotion, I'm moving to phone. Maybe I'm weird that way, but I think it's super important.

Playing devil's advocate, Michael, am I wrong here? Because you do more automation I think than most.

Michael Murray: No, I agree. I think my goal is to automate as much of the email and text message to free our sales reps up and our other people on our team up to do more phone calls and more in-person real conversations. That's what I think is the best use case - not to replace the human element, but actually to allow for more of it.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I think things that involve trust have to involve voice, where we can hear each other and understand each other and connect. Then we're going to get into that in person. So much of communication is just not in the words but in the tone of the voice, as well as in person, the body language, things like that.

It really comes back to: do we believe that it takes trust for a prospect homeowner or commercial property owner to say yes to our bid? If it does, if it takes trust, then it takes a relationship. Then it takes these methods of communication - in person and phone calls.

I would say if you feel like it doesn't, the scary part is then companies don't need sales reps. Zen, you know, what was it, Paint Zen? I think they were purchased by an industrial painting company. For a lot of ways, I think we could say at this point that it didn't work, or at least it was ahead of its time. Their whole model was based on you don't need an in-person quote. You can just come on our website, we'll tell you how much it costs to paint something, and then you can click here to buy it.

I think there's some really cool aspects of that. As a person who likes to automate and things like that, I love some of this stuff. I've even tried to build some things like that. Then what I quickly realized is, wait a minute, we're losing out on the most important part here, which is that human-to-human connection and that trust.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, one thing I found interesting with that example - I watched that early on to see what was happening. It started with being able to do full bids on there, and it quickly moved to "this is too big, a sales rep will call you." It seemed as though if you needed a room painted in a downtown apartment, that was a great method. $500 to $1,000, I think people are willing to spend risking getting someone to come to your house you've never met to do the work.

But after that, bigger decisions require an in-person handhold. I think we're in that territory as painting contractors where these things - if you're sending automated bids or potentially doing virtual estimates, your competitor that goes in person is building a different relationship. Oftentimes when it's a bigger dollar value, that relationship matters more.

That's an interesting observation I saw - in this process of estimating, smaller ticket items, people are willing to do it; larger ticket items, not. So there's something to be taken away from that.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. Again, I would also add, you mentioned before, even a small project for a lot of people, coming into your home, that is still a big amount of trust that's required. I think we have to be very aware of buyers and the decision-making process that they're going through.

I would also say, if it's not and if it's just a transaction and it doesn't really matter, I don't need to build trust, we're going to commoditize ourselves and we're going to be racing to the bottom. Because now what are we asking a prospect to judge us on? Just our price? Our paint? We can all get the same paint. Really what it does come back to is that trust. A homeowner is willing to pay more to have us do the work compared to maybe somebody else because they trust that we're going to get it done with less headache, less friction on their part.

Jon Bryant: And if there is friction, the person you're dealing with is approachable and can help you figure that friction out. I think that's a critical thing we forget at the point of sale. People are evaluating for good dance partners because stuff goes wrong - we can all admit that. But when it does, how does the person that I'm talking to here going to relate to conflict? I think you judge that better in person.

My vote is phone all the time. Will we see changes in that as it goes forward? Probably. I think people can get frustrated if there's not that option for in person. If you keep moving it away from that, it's like, well, I buy from the person, not the system. I'm a big fan of the phone, Michael.

Michael Murray: Yeah. It's wild. I would just say that there's a lot of opportunity for sales reps to win more jobs by making more phone calls. I think even what I see sometimes on our team is, "Well, I called, I left a message, and then I sent an email. I'm sure they'll get back to me when they're ready."

I always remind people, I won't - if I was your customer and you leave me a voicemail as a sales rep, or I'm your prospect, and you leave me a voicemail, I'm 95% of the time not going to call you back. Not because I'm trying to be rude. Not because I don't even want to - I probably want to do the job. I want this problem to go away. I need this thing done at my house. I need this.

I listen to your voicemail and then I get distracted by one of a million things that are going on with kids and family and sports and business and whatever. It's completely out of sight, out of mind. I can't remember the fact that you called, or I finally do get a chance to listen to it and it's 8:30 at night and I don't want to call you back. Then the next morning it's gone.

I keep reminding our team that it's our job as sales professionals to take that project away from the customer. It's not their job to buy it. It's our job to make buying it easy. Sometimes that means we've got to call them four or five, six, ten times in a week, two, three weeks' span to catch them at the right moment. We can't take it personally when they don't answer the phone or they don't get back to us or things like that. It's just - that's not their job. It's our job. That is our job, is to do that follow-up.

That's something we are constantly talking about - using the phone as your number one communication method, not as a last-minute, last-ditch fallback, tried-it-once kind of thing.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think it's a dangerous game to play as a sales professional to say that the customer's job is to buy from you. It comes up in numerous different ways - "They didn't get back to me," "They didn't do what they said they would do." It's like, do everything you can to make them do no work. They didn't call you to do work for you. They're trying to get you to work for them.

I think it's just an important thing to continually remind ourselves that it's not personal, it's timing, it's a lot of different things. A lot of people are busy. Especially if you're trying to get someone to paint your home or property for you, you don't have the time to do it yourself, so you're probably doing something else.

The one thing to avoid, though - from a customer's genuine point of view, they're trying to also avoid a couple things. As it gets more personal with phone calls, I think they're trying to avoid conflict. A lot of times they don't want to have to say no to your face, so it's up to us to make that really easy to say no. They're also trying to avoid the pushy person.

I think that's why you'll see a lot of customers move down communication chains if they feel that you're being pushy. It's almost a way to identify how the customer's feeling. If they're not taking your call after the follow-up, maybe we can self-reflect a little bit and think, did we give them a good feeling that we weren't going to be pushy, that we were going to be okay with the answer no, that we're genuinely there to help them buy? I love watching that interaction sometimes to help sales reps understand that this is maybe the issue you're having - you've got these people that are just emailing you back. The connection you're making is probably not the best.

Michael Murray: Yeah, exactly. It starts with that in-person appointment, which I think we're both a big fan of. I've done a lot of virtual estimates in our company and realized that while you can sell work that way for sure, you are leaving something on the table. You're not going to sell at the same rate, same job sizes, and things like that because of the connections and relationship building that takes.

If we do a really good job in that in-person appointment and we build that great relationship and we have that bond and that trust built, then you might need the phone call stuff maybe a little bit less. But I think it's still always going to be the most important place for it.

I actually would say that in-person follow-up is a tool that most sales reps do not utilize enough. It's something I used to use more. I would just, after it's been a week or something since I'd given somebody an appointment, maybe I called them, they haven't responded, and it's the, "Hey, I'm in the neighborhood, just stopping by. I wanted to see how things were going, hoping we can get you guys on our painting schedule. What can I do to make that happen?" type of a conversation.

Again, with the idea that if you called and you scheduled an appointment and you spent 45 minutes to an hour with me and we did all these things, you have a problem. You have something you are trying to solve, and until you tell me, "Hey, we found another solution that we're really happy with," I'm going to assume that you need me to solve your problem and I'm going to make that really easy for you.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I've never done an in-person follow-up. Probably because I'm too good at hiding behind the phone. I don't know why I've done that.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I would say there's sales reps at our company that have probably never done it either. The last handful of years as I was still doing a few quotes, I wasn't doing it just because I was too busy. But when I was earlier on and my main responsibility was just go sell jobs, and we didn't have maybe quite as much lead flow and otherwise, that works. You will sell jobs. Maybe it's something that people can put into place over the winter or times when they're maybe a little bit slower. It can definitely boost some of those win rates.

Jon Bryant: I think maybe what's changed is the ability to use PaintScout and get the price on site allows us to get a bit more insight on that. I'd say on the bigger jobs, maybe if you have a larger job relationship - let's say a commercial job over $50,000 (everyone's going to be different here) - being able to present that in person is going to give you probably more insight into whether you have a chance.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think what I hear you saying is having that second visit. For sure.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, exactly. Second in-person visit. Because those are the jobs where gaining the decision-maker makes all the difference, or really getting that feedback, because it can go into a void sometimes on the commercial side.

Michael Murray: I think if the goal is to sell as much work as you can, you should never send a quote that you haven't gone over in person.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Which is the power of having a system like PaintScout to have that price while you're there so you can have that discussion.

Michael Murray: Quickly, but if for some reason you weren't able to put it all together in PaintScout, schedule that second appointment, put it together, go back and present it. I think too often we're just like, "Okay, thanks, this has been wonderful, I'm going to send you an email with the quote." Don't avoid that. Go over it first.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. A phone call can work for that too, I think. Giving them a call, letting them know the price, getting a sense of it and sending it. For time, let's talk about automation, Michael, because you have a lot of thoughts on this.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mentioned it - we've been sprinkling this as we went. I think automation has to play a role here. I think we are exploring AI agents and phone agents where we have AI - to call it a robot, I guess, an AI person, I don't know what else to call it - replacing somebody answering the phone, replacing the live messaging on our website, different things like that.

Again, I think it matters: what's the context? What are we asking for? If it's just schedule an appointment, it probably could work. I think it could work. I think the technology exists. It's just a matter of getting it set up in a seamless way for how we do business and things like that. But there's not a lot of trust building here.

A lot of our estimates get scheduled by the customer just through a web form because they don't need to necessarily build trust to get a sales appointment. But then from that point forward, I think they do need to build that trust to spend money with us and invite our team of painters into their home.

We use automation for appointment reminders, confirmations, and then even just some really soft touch points after an estimate. They'll get just every couple weeks, we'll just keep in touch if their project is still marked as open. It's not meant to replace the sales rep. It's not necessarily asking for the sale. That's the sales rep's job. But it's just going to be top of mind - "Hey, here's some colors that are really popular, maybe help you out with picking out colors for your painting project as you're making that decision." That type of messaging, as opposed to "Hey, are you ready to buy?" which is really more what the sales rep should be doing.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that supporting message really resonated with me. We talked about it quite a while ago now, but I think we get tied up in these automated messages being about buying when really it's about supporting your benefits. That's just a very different style.

One thing I wanted to ask you about - you said AI agent for answering the phone, and that's always been something I've experimented with, and when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. The person's like, "Yeah, no, I'm never calling you again." Have you had success with this?

Michael Murray: We have not implemented this. We're still testing it, trying to see, exploring it. I have seen use cases of it working really well. We've probably all seen some of these videos and stuff. Again, I think it does exist. I think it can exist. To your point, I don't think we get enough - both of our companies are decent size. We get a good amount of lead volume. I don't think we have enough though to risk I don't know what, 5%, 10% of people saying, "This was awful. I'm never calling you again."

We operate in a local community. We want to - we're building a brand in a local community and reputation matters and the way that people talk about us matters. I think people are still getting used to this. I think asking a year from now, I think we're all going to have interacted with these tools in good and bad ways, and we're going to start to get a little bit more comfortable with it. So anyway, we're just trying to learn about it and things like that.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. We've started using a chatbot at PaintScout. If you're a PaintScout user and you've had problems, you've probably interacted with our chatbot that we affectionately call Hugh. At first we presented it to our customer service team and were like, "We think this is going to make a difference. We think it's going to help customers get information faster." They were very hesitant - "What if it messes up? What if it says something bad?"

It took us a long time to implement the training - way longer than we thought. We're constantly training Hugh on how to be better. But what it has done is that we still have people involved. There are still people behind the scenes who are actively watching what's going on, but it's amplified their ability to work. I think those are great spots to get automation involved.

At a painting company, you might still have an office manager. That office manager, you might not need a second scheduler. You might not need - you can amplify with a smaller team to build a customer service experience. I think we need to step back and think, why are we actually doing this? To your point, the trust and what people say about us really matters and local reputation.

I think when you go too far, you lose the personal touch and you lose what people truly want and you lose the opportunity to be better than your competition. So do I think everything should be automated? No. Do I think there's room for very crucial parts to be automated and monitored? Yeah, I do.

Michael Murray: The way I think about it is, is automation making our life better? Is it making the business's, the sales rep's, the customer service rep's - is it meant to make my life easier, or is it meant to make the customer's life easier? If it's truly - if I do everything from the mindset of "is this number one goal, this is better for the customer," and it is, then we're getting some benefit.

I love that chatbot example because you would probably say that the best thing would be if somebody comes on the PaintScout help chat and within 30 seconds, they get a real person who's an expert at everything PaintScout. That person spends all the time in the world with them, walking them through their questions and concerns. That's how it first started. The first three customers of PaintScout probably interacted with you and the development team, and you guys could solve every problem and it was wonderful.

Then three became 30 and became 300, and it was like, "Oh, we better start hiring some team here." Quickly those people can't keep up. They don't know the answers. Now all of a sudden somebody's waiting an hour to hear back from somebody in the chat. Is that the best experience, or would it be better if they got maybe most of their questions answered immediately from Hugh in a chatbot? That might not be the best, but given the circumstances and the trade-offs of reality, it actually is better because a high percentage of people's questions can probably be answered way quicker with that.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. We were talking before the podcast, but I think it's like 85% of people's questions are being answered by Hugh. Then we follow up with our customer service team being like, "How did that go? What did you mean? Did that answer all your questions?" It solves complex things. I think it can handle problems that we didn't even really think it could because it has the resources behind the scenes available and can process that better than ever before. We've been really kind of strangely impressed by it. But it's not perfect. It still needs help.

Michael Murray: I was telling you, I was impressed. I used the chat feature. I was building a quote. It was a pretty complex quote. I needed to get it out that day. I went in and I was really frustrated because I feel like I know a lot about using PaintScout. I've talked to a lot of people about it. I've taught people how to use it. I'm lucky enough to help out on this podcast.

I go on there and I'm upset. Something's broken - certainly not my fault, obviously PaintScout's fault. So I go in and I get Hugh, and I'm like, "What is this? Where's Nastasia? Where's somebody to help me here?" I put my comment in and I saw it was chatbot, and I can message Nastasia from having these interactions. I was already ripping off my email over to her just to get a more immediate response.

The thing responded and was like, "Have you tried this?" I was like, "I don't even know what that is. Wait, what is this?" I did it quickly, and it solved my problem. I was like, "Okay, alright, I'm on board. Delete this email. I don't need to do that." I was very pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I had to interact with Hugh. Good job.

Jon Bryant: Well done. Hugh's out there somewhere smiling, I'm sure. The risk I think is the benefit is what you described, which is that it gets it right. The risk is that automation gets messages at the wrong time for the wrong reason with the wrong message. I think that's just what you have to be concerned about.

Michael Murray: Can the automation understand the context? When somebody is messaging in with certain words that a human might pick up on - this person might be starting to get frustrated - I need to maybe jump on a phone call here and let's get this thing resolved. That's the kind of stuff that we as humans need to be able to do, because if not, then we might as well just be replaced with some automation.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Any other thoughts on automation?

Michael Murray: I have lots of thoughts on it, but I think in terms of today's conversation, it's probably a good place to leave it. It serves a role, but it certainly I don't believe replaces those phone calls, those in-person conversations, and even some of that personalized messaging and stuff.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that's where the magic happens - in the personal element of what we do. I think that the takeaway here is use those things to the benefit of the customer, which I liked what you said, and build good relationships with your prospects and customers, and do that through the methods that make sense.

Michael, it's been great chatting with you today. I think hopefully there's some good insights here.

Michael Murray: Yeah, look at us - in-person conversation! Well, on Zoom. You know what I mean? It's cool technology that we can do this though. So there you go.

Jon Bryant: It is, yes. We take this stuff for granted, and it's fun. Guys, if you enjoyed this podcast, feel free to give it a like and subscribe. We'd love to keep the conversation going with you. And as always, thanks for tuning in, Michael.

Michael Murray: Yeah, or shoot us a call. You could text us. You could email us. Or even better, come say hi at one of these conferences. Those are the best.

Jon Bryant: That'd be great. Or send Michael a fax. He really likes faxes. Great, guys. Thank you very much. We will see you soon. Michael, pleasure as always.

Michael Murray: Take care. See ya.

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