Sitting on Millions? The Painting Leads You’re Forgetting About

Jon Bryant: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Price Sell Paint Podcast. I'm Jon from PaintScout, here as always with Michael Murray. How's the day going?

Michael Murray: Going amazing. It's mid-September, and here in Cleveland the weather is perfect — blue sky, about 70 degrees. Not too hot, not too cold. I wish it would last forever, but we know it won't.

Jon Bryant: Is there a place in the world that's like this every day?

Michael Murray: I think San Diego — that's what they say.

Jon Bryant: I've actually got a trip there this winter. Anyway — today's topic is something we've talked about before: how do we generate sales coming into winter? This episode is about using your database — how you sell to current customers. Everything always has to be painted, and every customer has something that fits that category, but a lot of people focus entirely on the next Google lead, the next Facebook lead, the next mailer.

You've probably never had a repeat customer, right?

Michael Murray: We've had plenty. Our target every year is north of 40% repeat and referral — that number can be too low, and it can also be too high, depending on how much you're trying to grow. There's so much gold sitting in our databases, and it's easy to forget that when everyone's chasing the next lead. So much of the conversation at industry events and in Facebook groups is about showing up in ChatGPT, getting Claude to see your website, running ads on these new platforms — but the easiest thing to do is often just make a phone call and check in on past customers.

Jon Bryant: Let's dig into that. Theoretically it makes sense, but a lot of us forget it. I was talking to a marketing manager at a painting company who was running ROI numbers on their Google leads. Google represents a large share of their leads, so it feels good — leads are coming in. But when she actually pulled the map for the month, out of the last 20 leads, only one converted. That was an expensive job for what emotionally felt like a win. Getting leads gives a dopamine hit, but it doesn't automatically translate to revenue. You might be getting real value from Google leads, or you might just have cracked the code on getting leads without connecting that to what it actually costs you to get the work.

And past customers and referrals have a higher win rate — trust is already built, the conversation is more direct, and there's less competition. It's a strong ROI channel, and it's basically free opportunity sitting right there.

Michael Murray: Totally. One thing I keep coming back to — Brandon Lewis from the Academy of Professional Painters gave a talk a few years back that stuck with me. He asked the room: who has kids? Then: what was the name of the nurse who delivered your child? Nobody could answer. That's supposed to be one of the most life-changing moments in someone's life, and we don't remember the nurse's name — yet we expect customers to remember the name of our company after a paint job, which for most people is a far less significant event. That hit me hard, because I thought we were pretty good at staying in touch, and the truth is we're barely keeping in touch with people at all. We've upped our game since then, but there's still a lot more we could be doing.

Jon Bryant: Great point. We like to think our brand or name is special, but customers just want something painted at a price and value that makes sense. We provide a valuable service, but there's room to do more. You mentioned warranty a second ago — why do you offer one? Is it about caring for the work, or something more?

Michael Murray: A few things. We have a lifetime touch-up promise on all our services — it applies slightly differently to interior, exterior, and cabinet work, but essentially we stand behind it for as long as someone lives in the home. First, it helps on the front end — it signals we'll stand behind our work in a way others might not, which helps close the original sale. Second, we plan to be around a long time and want a strong reputation, so if something goes wrong, we want to know so we can fix it — the last thing we want is a neighbor noticing peeling paint and assuming we did bad work.

But the third reason, most relevant here, is that it gives us an excuse to stay in touch. We're not just reaching out to sell — we can say, "It's been a while, and it's coming up on winter, a great time to get your interior or cabinet touch-ups done." We push those touch-up warranties harder toward winter. It brings us top-of-mind, gets us back in the home, and opens a natural conversation: do you need anything else done, what's your next project? Not a huge percentage of the time, but often enough, that leads to more quotes and more work.

Jon Bryant: I used to be afraid of warranty — hoping nobody would use it because it'd cost me money and look bad. Over time that shifted, and I realized it's a strategic advantage for building trust.

We started something years ago internally we called the "touch-up crusade" — one free hour of touch-ups anywhere in the house, whether we did the original work or not, as long as the customer had the paint. It generated enormous goodwill, and most of those visits turned into at least a day's worth of additional work. It got us back in the home, and people don't usually look closely at a project after they've paid — they scrutinize everything with a magnifying glass right before paying, then forget about it. Bringing light to a project again — "let me look, my walls look terrible" — creates opportunity naturally.

Michael Murray: For sure. When I think about keeping in touch, there are activities the company should own — marketing-bucket stuff — and activities the sales team should own, and within each, whether we've already done work with someone or not. Across our industry, we're pretty poor at long-term follow-up and nurturing, compared to larger, more sophisticated home-improvement companies doing fifty or a hundred million dollars-plus, who are much better at consistent follow-up.

Jon Bryant: What do you actually do for follow-up, and where do you see opportunity?

Michael Murray: On the company side, that's mostly the warranty outreach — we don't ask sales reps to make those calls. What we do want sales reps doing is reaching out to their own past customers. One thing I wish we did better: handwritten thank-you cards, maybe three to six months after the job, not just at the end. By then the customer's forgotten who we are, so a note like "still thinking of you" stands out.

Slight tangent — with AI and automation everywhere, I think the companies that win going forward will be the ones still doing the things that can't be automated: authentic human connection. AI can do a lot of great things, and I use it constantly, but within a few years that will be table stakes, not a differentiator. What will matter is showing up, shaking hands, having a real conversation, writing a genuine handwritten card — the human things AI can imitate but not actually do. That's what I want our sales team focused on.

Jon Bryant: Agreed. It's interesting watching where people think the opportunity is with these technologies — a lot of it is about making life easier for the business, and people forget a business exists for its customers. An AI answering service might be easier for you, but is it what the customer wants? If I call a company and get an AI answering service, my reaction is: you don't care about me enough to have a person answer.

Michael Murray: I'll push back slightly — we do use an AI answering service, but only to replace voicemail after hours, not to replace our team during business hours (8-to-8 weekdays, six hours Saturday). We tried an outsourced answering service years ago and it was awful — wrong company names, clearly juggling too many clients, and expensive. So we went back to voicemail, and more recently built an AI answering agent that's better than voicemail — it clearly states up front that it's an AI assistant, takes down information, and says a human will call back tomorrow. It's basically a smarter voicemail. I think within 12 to 18 months you won't be able to tell the difference at all, and people will decide for themselves if that's the right approach.

But I don't want to automate the beginning of a relationship — a first lead call is one of the most important and expensive calls we get. And I especially want the human touch with paying customers we already have relationships with — people we've been in the home with, who we might run into at the grocery store. As we've grown, it's gotten harder to have that personal relationship with every customer the way I used to, but somebody at the company should still have it. Automating that away makes the experience worse for everyone.

Jon Bryant: Right — a CRM is fundamentally a database of relationships, and that matters. With the AI answering piece, it's really about what benefits the customer, not just what's convenient for us.

Which leads to my next thought: unexpected, intentional touches. As we head into winter, our sales team is coached to reach out about past jobs, warranties, or just to check in — a certain number of touches every day. That's low-hanging fruit that a lot of us forget when things get slow. The work you do today shows up three months from now. Keep it consistent — reach out and ask, "how's it going, how's it looking, thinking of you." Do you do that?

Michael Murray: Not as much as we should. I think the real gap is consistency — it happens in spurts, usually when the estimate board is slow and we suddenly spend hours texting or calling past customers, instead of building it into a weekly rhythm year-round, independent of how busy we are.

Jon Bryant: Every time I've actually done that process consistently, I think "I should do this every day" — then a month passes, business slows, and I say it again. It's not complicated. We've talked before about the referral tree with my brother Dave — this ties into that: who are your top ten, twenty, fifty, hundred customers, and when did you last actually talk to them? Were you just hoping they'd call you?

Michael Murray: Just having a defined "best customers" list is something a lot of people skip. Especially in commercial work, you need a key-20 or key-30 list — the relationships you're intentionally nurturing and communicating with.

Jon Bryant: And having visibility into what you've done, when, and how the relationship is going. It can sound a little clinical — "how's your relationship with Susan" — and I don't want to dehumanize it into a system, but with that many relationships to maintain, you need some method, or it becomes chaos and nothing happens.

Michael Murray: True of personal life too — there are friends I haven't kept up with as much as I'd like, not because I forgot who they were, but because life gets busy, days turn into weeks turn into months, and it starts to feel awkward to reach back out. But that's exactly the moment to do it — the other person is usually thrilled to hear from you.

Jon Bryant: So we've covered warranty and unexpected intentional touches. Anything to add?

Michael Murray: Just that everyone listening should set aside dedicated time for calling past customers, rather than waiting for a slow week. Build it into a weekly rhythm — three months, six months, a year, whatever cadence — put it on a recurring schedule in your CRM or calendar: reach out, check in, say hi.

Jon Bryant: One thing that helps is keeping an activity tracker — what did you do this week, tied to points, with a weekly target. We don't know exactly where the next job will come from, but if you're not active, we know it's not coming from you. Some people think sales reps should just run the lead in front of them and move on to the next one — that's a valid approach, but I think you lose a lot by not building relationships. Otherwise you're constantly cold-starting.

Michael Murray: Makes sense for some models — large nationwide companies with 1099 sales reps who come and go probably do take that "just run the appointment" approach. We take a different approach; we want our reps involved with the customer relationship.

We haven't touched on the no-show or no-sale list — leads that never got an estimate, or estimates that never booked. Too often companies treat silence or a "no" as final and never follow up again — a year later, five years later — even though we spent real marketing money on Google, Facebook, flyers to get that person to call in the first place. We built automations for this: drip campaigns on a roughly three-year intentional build, then annual touches after that, until someone unsubscribes. We're not just selling — we try to add value, like sharing color trend content or offering a designer consultation.

Jon Bryant: Is that drip campaign segmented by project type, or does it merge over time?

Michael Murray: It starts specific, but after a certain point it flows into a general bucket — someone who inquired about cabinet painting six months ago might now be thinking about interior or exterior work, so the messaging becomes more general.

Jon Bryant: That's more of a company-level system than a rep-level task — capturing and using the data. Even two or three touch points after the fact would put most companies in a much better spot. What you're describing is that we treat silence as no, and as we've said before, the biggest competitor is often just complacency, not another company. Something else came up, another project took priority — and we assume the worst and write the customer off.

Michael Murray: I can think of customers I personally quoted who came back three years later ready to move forward — life got in the way, budget constraints, whatever. Most estimates get decided within a month or so, and we need to do a good job on that initial follow-up, but there's still real value beyond it. I'd guess most painting companies doing north of a million dollars in revenue, five-plus years in business, have millions of dollars of potential work sitting in their CRM — repeat work, next-project work, or original projects that just never got scheduled.

Jon Bryant: Let's keep it short today.

Michael Murray: Agreed. At the end of the day, this is just a good reminder. It'd be more fun to talk about some flashy new AI tool, but calling people, keeping in touch, writing a handwritten thank-you card, sending a valuable email — none of that is sexy. It's the "eat healthy, do some push-ups" part of the business. We already know we're supposed to do it; we just don't. If nothing else, let this be the reminder — there's still time before winter. Start now, let the small activities compound, and you'll be surprised by the results.

Jon Bryant: Great way to end it. Thanks for tuning in — if you enjoyed this one, give us a like and subscribe. Thanks again, Michael, and we'll see you next time on Price Sell Paint.

Michael Murray: Cheers.

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