Tough Questions About Painting Sales Software – Answered!

Jon Bryant: All right, everybody, welcome to Price. Sell. Paint. We have a very interesting opportunity here today to talk with Mark from Legacy Painting. And Mark is looking at software to implement for his painting business, and he is not a PaintScout customer. So he's got a lot of great questions, a lot of just deep thinking that's going into this process of trying to select something and make the best decision for his company.

So we get to dig into some of these questions, talk about the why, talk about the how. And yeah, Mark, you want to tell everyone who you are, where you're from, what you do?

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me on, Jon. Appreciate it. Yeah, my name is Mark, last name Glinskiy. I own and run Legacy Painting out of the greater part of Seattle, Washington. Beautiful state. We finally are getting sunshine and it feels like spring and summer, so I'm super excited for it. Painting exteriors now, which is good.

Jon Bryant: Super rare in Seattle. I lived there for six months, Mark, and there was one day of sun. Yeah, one day in six months.

Mark Glinskiy: Oh, really? No way. I'm sorry for that. There's actually more than that, but last year was probably the record of consecutive non-rainy days and it was incredible.

Yeah, so I run a painting company here. You know, it has its challenges because you can only paint about seven months out of the year on exteriors, maybe eight if you really push the limits. The rest is interior. Currently operating with one sales guy, one project manager, some admin staff, and myself. I like to be part of many aspects of my company.

I come from a big background of actually painting—been in construction trades since I was 13 years old. So more than half my life I've worked with my hands. I come from Belarus, right above Russia. In agriculture, when you turn 12 years old, you naturally have the desire to work. That's just how—at least that's how it's been in my family. And all my relatives, especially the men, or the boys, it's just: you have the desire to work. And that's what I had, and I just kind of went at it.

I thought I would go into—I got my associate's degree, got into University of Washington to get my bachelor's. Thought I was going to be a dentist, took some chemistry classes, not for me. And then thought I was going to be like a business advisor or consultant or something like that and went into one quarter through the university and I was like, this is not for me. I'm not a good test taker. I know things very well, but when it comes to tests, I don't perform well and I don't believe school is for everybody.

Jon Bryant: So that led you to painting, I'm going to guess.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, it led me to more full-time painting through that. It did. And then I also wanted to get married, and school was a little bit in the way. And I was like, I could just start making money and I can make it work. And that's what I did. So I started painting full-time and then started a company shortly afterwards. It was not Legacy, it was something else.

I ran it just—I worked as a subcontractor for a few other companies, had a little bit of my own clientele and then decided to kind of shut that one down and just kind of start fresh—new business model, new name, new image, new reputation and so forth. So Legacy is four years old now.

Jon Bryant: Four years old, awesome. And you've managed to get a sales rep involved. That's impressive. Second one you said coming next week. So you guys do residential, commercial, or what's kind of the breakdown there?

Mark Glinskiy: Right now, 80% residential, 20% commercial.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Yeah. Nice breakdown. And are you running with a sub model or employee model, or how do you do this work?

Mark Glinskiy: Full sub model. I started as a sub model because I'd previously worked as a sub, as a painter, and I knew—I saw what worked, what didn't work, what improvements I can make, because I got sick and tired of being a sub. And I was like, "I hate this, I'm doing half the work for this company on the management side." So that's when I just got tired of it and wanted to start my own.

Jon Bryant: Cool. So yeah, Michael and I are here today to answer the tough questions you've got regarding sales software. And I think you said currently—how are you doing things? What's been your approach?

Mark Glinskiy: On the sales side, it's a lot of just custom building. My estimate templates are from Pages on MacBooks, on the Apple computer. And we have a whole template. It's like three pages, very detail-oriented, but it takes time to build an estimate.

There's no like, "Oh, here's a customer's information plugged into the CRM and it gets auto-populated into the estimate template." It doesn't. So you have to plug in the name, the email address, the address, the date, everything like that. So I don't have any automation when it comes to that.

As far as sending out the quote and following up, I actually currently, throughout this whole time, don't have any automated follow-up. I don't think it has hurt me too much because my win ratio is just above 50%, and we're definitely running multiple million dollars a year. So it works for us, but I see that there's room for improvement.

So there's no automation really. It's within two days: follow up with an email or a phone call to a customer. They don't answer, send a text as well. You know, five days, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. That's our process, but it's a lot of hands-on, no automation with that, which is what I'm missing, truly.

Jon Bryant: Congratulations on getting to this point. That's a lot. And I know the pain because I was there too. I know Michael, you've been there too.

So yeah, let's take it into some tough questions—unless, Michael, do you have any questions for Mark before we get going?

Michael Murray: No, yeah. I mean, I appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us and sharing your story and excited to kind of explore PaintScout as a potential option for you. And I know we met you at the PCA Expo down in Orlando and it was awesome just to chat down there and excited to dive in a little bit more. So yeah, let's get into it.

Jon Bryant: So yeah, from your perspective, from what you've been doing and kind of evaluating your options, ask us a couple of your tough questions. What are you thinking?

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, so I initially—I think I've done a demo with you guys like over a year ago. And I thought PaintScout was going to be an all-in-one—sales, project management, completion, everything. And then I hopped on a meeting and I think I cut the meeting short within like five, ten minutes and was like, "Oh, this isn't for me, I'm out."

I kept thinking—and whoever's watching, if you think there's going to be a 100% perfect all-in-one solution for your company, there won't be. I'm sorry, but there just won't be. I know there are some great companies out there—I won't name them—but I've tried them and they don't work for me because of how I run my company, how I like my systems and my processes to go.

So after talking with many people over this last half a year, I've really kind of branched out and just been connecting with people, went to the expo and met Michael and Jon. Incredible human beings. And then I understood that bigger companies, they don't use an all-in-one software. They can use two to three to four systems or programs that just connect together, integrate together very well. But each one now is operating at 100%.

And so once I knew that I was like, "All right, let me go back to PaintScout because I think they're the solution for me to keep good track of my sales, of my estimates, close ratios," which I track myself in a custom spreadsheet—it’s not hard, but having it in a program is really cool.

But as for questions: Jon, I know I exploded you earlier with a lot of questions and you were like, "Hold up, save those questions for later." So I guess my big theme is, Jon, you were saying that you also use Zendesk for a CRM for your company. And oddly enough, I do too. And I've never met another construction company that uses that platform.

I do use it a little differently than you though, because I use it for project management and not sales management. So for me, my biggest question for you was going to be: Jon, how do you operate Zendesk with PaintScout? And once that job is landed, what does that look like? What's that process look like of uploading customer information? What comes out through PaintScout?

How do you do that estimate? How customizable is that estimate template? And kind of if you could walk me through what that process looks like, because I know you have Zapier integrations within that, which is really cool. And so I'd love to get a good understanding because I've stretched out my decision to go with PaintScout. By the way, I'm not a PaintScout customer yet. I'm hiring another salesperson this next Monday, so I need a system over this weekend and I need to set it up.

So you got—today's the day, Jon, sell me. Show me why I need this basically and show all the viewers.

Jon Bryant: Okay. I want to start actually—I want to throw it over to you, Michael, because you, I think, have a better perspective on that all-in-one approach than I do, because I've always gone with a multiple-tools approach. And so I think just to talk to Mark's point: where did you end up landing here in terms of this whole discussion?

Michael Murray: Yeah. So I think I was going to make a joke. I think this is a good podcast because we get to see Jon sell and we get to learn about PaintScout. So there's some super cool benefits here.

But yeah, I can share my experience. I've shared a little bit in some of the episodes and chats and stuff. So I became a PaintScout customer at the very beginning of 2021. Before that, for probably four to six years, we were using a different software that's very popular in the industry. I'll just share: we were using Estimate Rocket. And Estimate Rocket is a good software.

But the reason that we made the change was what had happened over time. Estimate Rocket is a good all-in-one option. I would describe it as within our industry, it's probably one of the better all-in-one options. But what happened was that as we were growing as a company, the problem with any all-in-one solution is that there are inherently compromises that have to be made within software to get it to do more things.

Just based on practical constraints, right? You can't put all your developers' time into each piece of the software when you've got 10 different things that it's trying to accomplish. So over time, as we were using Estimate Rocket, we continually found ourselves going out and finding another piece.

We would have a different timekeeping solution and eventually a different CRM solution. And so eventually we got to the point where really all Estimate Rocket was doing for us was creating a quote and sending that bid.

And then when I found out about PaintScout and met Jon and learned about that, I realized that we weren't using the best option for that specific piece. The analogy that I use—I feel like it resonates the most—is these all-in-one softwares are basically like a paint-and-primer-in-one. And there's a time and a place for that. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it is not the best primer. It's not the best paint.

And at some point, as a company grows, similar to doing a painting project, you're not willing to make the sacrifices that come with a paint-and-primer-in-one. You require the absolute best primer and the absolute best paint. And yes, it takes a little more effort, a little more cleanup, but we realized that sacrifice of having to set up some of those automations and use Zapier and maybe pay somebody to help us get the systems to work really well together was well worth it in the ability to scale and have systems that were going to scale with us and not force core compromises in our sales process.

And it's been—Mark, I shared it with you—our numbers have increased significantly. Our pricing and selling aspect of what we're doing now that we use PaintScout is so much better. It's so much easier for us to train sales reps, give accurate pricing, see our numbers, make changes, and raise our win rates. So that's a little bit of my own experience. Again, I think Estimate Rocket, for example, serves an awesome purpose in our industry. I think it's great software. But from my own experience, we got to the point where we outgrew it a little bit and needed something that was a little bit more best-in-class in that specific slice.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So I think that's way better than I can explain it. And I think you've kind of come around to that idea, which is important, right? Like an all-in-one is, at a certain level, going to function super well, and we need to acknowledge that's a great choice.

But I can tell you a bit about my story and why this product exists, Mark, and I'll tie in Zendesk Sell because I think it's really important.

We had a painting business kind of mid- to late-2000s. And it was really just a chance to try business for me. Anyways, after a couple of years, we got to a point where the process that I went through was: I had a spreadsheet, I put all that information into a Pages document, just like you do. And I emailed that to the customer. That process, once I started to time myself, took over two hours—meeting with the customer, coming back to my own home, typing in the stuff.

I like my things to be really nice and look good. I probably took too much time on that end typing it all in. I don't know how long it takes you, but I started to get kind of bogged down. I was generating a lot of leads and I couldn't do four estimates a day. It just was impossible for my life. And then I didn't know how to pass that job off.

And so PaintScout came from this need to combine that stuff, which was that I needed to get laser focused on sales, but I already had a program that I used for scheduling because I wasn't trying to use an all-in-one to begin with. So that was where I felt like the biggest issue in my life was pricing and selling paint jobs quickly, and that was going to drive my business.

So I spent all this time designing this product. For those who wonder about software, it's not as easy as you might think. I don't recommend it to my worst enemy to design a software program. It's a lot.

Mark Glinskiy: I was thinking that was going to be my next step for business and then I got talked out of it real quick.

Michael Murray: I tried to do that once. We tried to design software. After about $40,000 and many months of frustration with absolutely nothing to show for it, we decided that, yeah, we're not doing this.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, if you have extra to throw away, do it.

Michael Murray: I don't have extra.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that's wild. It's a great way to burn money. So if you want to start a software fire, be my guest. But no.

So anyways, this came out of that need. I really like Zendesk Sell. I'm very design-driven. I like things that are simple. I like things that make sense to me and that I can transfer to other people. And so when I found Sell—Zendesk at the time, I guess it was called Sell at the time; it used to have a different name—and we've always used that primarily because it hasn't been bad, but there are great options out there too. I know Michael, you use PipeDrive. PipeDrive is awesome. I've seen it work too. I've seen a lot of options work.

So the flow here, Mark, to get to your question—sorry we're rambling, but we’re good—is this informative for you, helpful?

Mark Glinskiy: Oh no, we're good. This is great, yeah.

Jon Bryant: Okay, so we take our lead form off our website, so it's Gravity Forms. Those directly zap into Zendesk Sell and into PaintScout. So PaintScout gets an estimate created, Zendesk Sell gets the customer. Our admin team will also get calls. We'll get lots of other leads coming in. They're taking all of those in Zendesk Sell. They're moving them into the calendars. So they're making the calls, scheduling them.

Each of our sales reps sees their calendar in there and can manage the customer from there. When it comes to the point of sale, they're going and using PaintScout for the estimate, the work order, and the proposal. So that's kind of the trifecta: internal pricing, work order for the crew to make sure you're getting to the destination and making profit, and an amazing document that goes to your customer that positions you well. That’s very much the "sales" slice that PaintScout is focused on, alongside your broader CRM system.

And that goes back to my initial problem, which is that creating those three documents took me a long time. Our goal was to make that into five minutes. And when you use Zaps properly throughout that process—and now we have a direct integration layer with Zendesk Sell and PipelineDeals—once we get a critical mass, we build direct integrations, but Zendesk Sell automatically communicates back and forth with PaintScout. So when there's an acceptance of a bid, it automatically tells Zendesk Sell, "Hey, this is now a customer" and moves them appropriately with the job type.

That help, Mark, give an idea?

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, yeah, that's really great. As far as—if I could ask, tell me if I ask too many questions and I'm too nosy—say you use a calendar system for your sales guys and they see their schedule. What's that look like? Is that directly through Zendesk or is that also another program?

Jon Bryant: That's direct with Zendesk. Yep. And do you do that through PipeDrive, Michael?

Michael Murray: We—I'd say no, we use Calendly. So customers have the ability to schedule their own estimates on the website. So we use Calendly to make the calendar available. And otherwise, Google Calendars.

Mark Glinskiy: Michael, how has that been for you having availability for customers to schedule their own estimate? Have there been fake estimates scheduled, or what's your process? I'm guessing if someone schedules, someone from your team confirms that immediately to make sure that it's actually a real appointment.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. And that's definitely—we've been doing it. We've had the ability for customers to schedule on our website for years. In different iterations we used to use YouCanBook.me. Calendly allows for routing forms. So we can show different availability based on the customer's zip code, so we can try to get our sales reps to be clustered in parts of town at certain parts of the day. So whatever—Thursday afternoons they're on the north side of town and Friday mornings they're on the south side of town, or whatever.

Calendly allows for that. But then yes, to your point, either the sales rep or an office admin is certainly going to want to talk to that person beforehand to make sure that it makes sense, make sure that somebody's going to be home, that they understand what the expectations are and things like that.

My thought behind it is that most experiences in our industry: you call somebody, you leave a voicemail because nobody has anybody available to answer the phone because it's a small company—maybe you're calling the business owner's cell phone and they're busy painting or whatever. And so you leave them a message and hope that somebody gets back to you in the next few days, right? That happens too often.

Or you go on the website, you fill out a form and again, you wait for a few days wondering if anyone's ever going to respond. And in that meantime, you have not solved your problem of "I need to get an estimate." So my goal is to have a homeowner who's potentially interested be able to stop their search—feel like they've at least checked the box of "get an estimate" with a scheduled appointment. So if they need three appointments, they go on my website—that's one. I've got that. As opposed to if they fill out the form, they don't have that yet because they don't know that I'm ever going to get back to them. And so they're going to reach out to 10 of my competitors or whatever. So anyway, that's the psychology behind why we do it. It puts a little more work on our end, but that's one of those things that I feel kind of strongly about.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah. Do you know your percentage of customers that—from all website submissions, how many percent of that comes from directly-scheduled Calendly estimates versus just submissions that come into your email?

Michael Murray: So most of our stuff still comes through the phone, which is interesting. And we have pretty high volume. You know, there are bigger companies, whatever, but we do a lot of volume in terms of leads. And still more than half of our leads come through a phone call, which is kind of fascinating. And yeah, I was surprised to continue to see that go in that direction.

Jon Bryant: So when that comes through, Michael, you're putting it into PipeDrive through the office, and then you're also scheduling that in Calendly, and it doesn't create an estimate in PaintScout—is that how it works?

Michael Murray: Actually we don't immediately create the estimate in PaintScout. So it's basically going to hang out in PipeDrive. So to your point, whether it starts in Calendly or whatever, it's going to end up in PipeDrive through the automations. And then once we've confirmed the appointment—so based on Mark's question, "Doesn't somebody need to call?"—every appointment needs to get confirmed by the rep. And once they confirm it, they move it to a different deal stage in PipeDrive.

Once it goes to that "estimate confirmed" stage, that's the trigger for a different automation to send that over to PaintScout. And we also love using CompanyCam. So it also sends that data into CompanyCam.

The thought there, again, is: if somebody doesn't end up getting a quote, there's no point in having that clutter up PaintScout with customers that were never going to be quoted. We also use—one of my favorite features in PaintScout is the templates. So you can—I think I might have been showing you that in Orlando—if it's an exterior, we have a template for painting aluminum siding or a template for painting houses built before 1978 because of lead, or houses after 1978 that are wood, or things like that. We have these different things.

Then within PipeDrive, we have a field. So if the project type is, let's just say, "exterior pre-1978," when the data is sent to PaintScout, it creates a draft quote with that template in it so that our rep steps on site and is having a conversation with the customer and they can immediately start putting notes in or measurements or whatever into the correct template because we already know that this is aluminum or pre-1978 or whatever. So these systems talk to each other really well, which is part of the reason that we love using PipeDrive—because it has a really good API and it sits nicely in that integrations puzzle.

Jon Bryant: Is this a good conversation, Mark? Is this helpful right now? I know you have a ton of questions.

Mark Glinskiy: Very, very. Yeah, no—this is great.

Jon Bryant: Okay, what would your recommendation be for a door knocker? Because I'm trying to implement door knocking and teaching that door knocker how to sell on the spot. So he's going to learn how to actually estimate, not just door knock and collect information and then our staff calls and tries to schedule.

So if they come up to a house and a customer says, "Let's do a painting quote," because their neighbor is getting a quote from us, what would be—my initial thought would be, "Oh, since it's just the estimate of the door knocker, he can manually create a job within PaintScout and do an estimate on the spot," where he's not going to have access to the Zendesk profile. Because each account is not cheap with Zendesk, as Jon, I think you're aware of that. So what would you say to that, if you understand my question? Would that be a bad idea, a good idea, or what do you think?

Jon Bryant: So Michael's done a lot more door knocking than I ever have. So I'll defer to him in a second.

Michael Murray: For better or worse. Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Maybe a little PTSD there. Yeah. So PaintScout's created primarily for on-site estimating. That was its number one function. So if you're on site with the customer, you can create the bid in real time with them there by counting, measuring, and using some logic behind what preparation looks like. So it's really powerful to get a price on the spot. And now door knocking—Michael, what do you think? How would you use PaintScout?

Michael Murray: No, I would do exactly what you're describing. I have no problem with that. What we used to do was more of a scheduled-appointment model. So it was not the same person knocking doors that was the sales rep. I think personally, I feel like it's two different skills. And I would be worried that if somebody needs an estimate—if it's a full house estimate—that takes a while and it might really eat up all of the time for door knocking.

But that's something that you'll play with just to look at where the math makes sense. My thought is door knocking is best done at certain times of the day—call it evenings or weekends generally—where you knock on a door and maybe you say, "Hey, I can come back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. and give you that estimate," or somebody else could. "It's going to take 45 minutes." I might only have a few hours of prime daylight. Let's say you're going out from 5 to 8 p.m. on weekdays—if I take that time to do an estimate, that might be 30 doors that I don't get to knock on.

But anyway, that's a strategy question. I think from the software perspective, I see no reason why that won't work well. And I would just set up a zap so any customer data that gets entered into PaintScout in this situation gets sent back to Zendesk. That way at least you're tracking that, and you can send the data of how much the project is worth and how many hours or things like that back into Zendesk.

We do that with PipeDrive, and I would imagine you could do the same thing.

Mark Glinskiy: Okay. Cool. That's right. Because yeah, I could just make a backwards integration. Okay. Yeah. Because my thought process with this is, with the door knocker/estimator—we've done door knocking before and we were either getting information or getting something scheduled, but then there would be a lot of lost connection after our team leaves that house and we can’t even do that estimate, or they don't want it, they change their mind.

At least in the market that I'm in, or maybe the tactic we were using, the script, whatever, it all could be different. But I think it also depends on the type of people that are around here in Seattle versus wherever you guys are at.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I'll say this too though. I think that's where the PaintScout part can come in. I mean, let's just say for the sake of argument, you really want to focus on exterior projects here. We can do an exterior painting quote in PaintScout in about 10 minutes—from start of measurement to showing a customer a beautiful proposal with an accurate price is about 10, maybe 15 minutes, depending on the experience of the user and how well your templates are set up.

So it's not that much time, right? And then obviously after 15 minutes, if you've got a customer who's interested and so it takes an extra 15 or 20 minutes because you're having really good conversations about schedule, "How do I pay you?"—stuff like that—it's like, yeah, it's worth it. At the end of the day, you go sell a $10,000 project, that's okay. You can just hire more people to knock on those doors then. So I can see that strategy making a lot of sense.

Jon Bryant: The other thing I'll add, Mark, with our team, when we're doing on-site stuff like that, sometimes we put a dollar-value limit on the job. So when we have someone who's door knocking, they could sell up to say a $2,000 job.

This happens when our crews are in an area and they want to let the neighbors know. They have a job, they're going to put some door hangers around and then knock and say, "Hey, just letting you know we're in the area." They say, "Oh, I have a job." Those people have access to PaintScout and they can get a bid together. But we often—those people aren't professional sales reps. They haven't gone through all the experience you need to bid out a $10,000 job error-free, or as close to error-free as possible. So we do limit that a little bit.

But the PaintScout element, 100%, you can do on your phone. I mean, I do estimates on my phone—well, I don't really do it anymore, but if I do, I'm on my phone. It's just helpful to have that as an account. You just open it up, pop some numbers in. You're having a discussion about price, even if it's price banding or whatever. So yeah, anyway, that helps there.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great. And within PaintScout—I know my mind really goes quickly, "Oh hey, I'm talking with two other business owners. I have all these questions," right? I'm having a hard time reminding myself of why we're having this conversation here and I want to be respectful to the purpose of this conversation.

Say you do an estimate through—send out an estimate through PaintScout. What's the customer profile look like? Is there a customer profile where, say, if I want to check in on my estimator one, two, or three—what are they doing? What do their leads look like? Did they leave any notes if a customer texted something? Because I know I do that currently through Zendesk, but I wonder—can that be done through PaintScout or is that just off the table, that's not an option of customer lead management within that?

Jon Bryant: So everything you're describing is 100% in PaintScout. It maintains a track record of literally everything that's occurred. So you can see what's going on, as well as dig into what email was sent, what the proposal looked like at the time of the email. So if something changes, you can go back and say, "Oh, customer, this was what it looked like originally."

You can see every view time from a customer. You can see any message they send through. You have a whole track record of the whole thing. That has been super powerful as a management tool, as well as being able to go back and know just what happened should an error occur. So that's all within PaintScout.

Michael Murray: Yeah, you know, correct me if I'm wrong—I think the one caveat to everything you just said is that PaintScout tracks all of the communication that happens within PaintScout. So if you're emailing out of PaintScout, or if you're messaging within—using the PaintScout messaging feature—that's different than a full CRM, right? A PipeDrive or Zendesk is going to be able to connect to maybe your VoIP system, where you can now see recorded phone calls perhaps, or text messages sent from phones as opposed to just from within that system. Or you can see the emails that were sent out of the Gmail account that's linked to the CRM or whatever.

So I think it just depends on what you want to accomplish and the level of granularity. But I think it absolutely serves a really good purpose. Especially when we think of it—for us, that's where our sales reps probably spend their time. But our scheduling coordinator, when she has communication with a customer as far as when we're going to be out to paint their house or whatever, those types of communications are really just done within, for us, PipeDrive—within that CRM.

But specifically to a quote, questions on that quote, and if they send us a message through the quote portal, you can definitely see it in there. That's helpful.

Mark Glinskiy: Because my reason why I ask is, I would plan for my estimators to not have to go into PaintScout and into Zendesk to do follow-up—to kind of know, "Oh hey, which customers did I do estimates with?" I would want them to just use PaintScout and do all their follow-ups within PaintScout if it's set up for that kind of usage. That ties into that one question.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So the answer: you can do auto follow-ups if you want, or you can use the chat function to send a message that comes in as an email. And if they respond to that email, it comes back to the chat function. So you can do both of those. There's definitely power to that.

On our sales team, they're using email and text as well. And so they're updating notes about the customer, about that estimate itself, in the notes section.

Mark Glinskiy: In the notes section of that customer profile within PaintScout. Perfect, okay.

Jon Bryant: Correct, yeah. And what's nice is that when that actually occurs, there's an activity section on the dashboard where it shows "so-and-so left a note." And so you can see all the things they're doing.

Mark Glinskiy: Perfect, okay, I don't need to ask or repeat that question anymore. I think that answers it. I'm a big note taker, I have millions of notes on my phone.

My jobs-in-progress—you can have so many notes of anything that happens on a job. My project manager knows: if a customer's upset because a painter did X, Y, and Z, I want everyone in my company that's overseeing operations to be able to be aware of that or find that note in case a customer calls and starts to complain about something.

That's my big thing: clear communication with the customer and also throughout my company. So something happens, my project manager gets sick and ends up in the hospital in the middle of the night, I know what's going on on each project. So happy we can do that through PaintScout. Because my plan is to not have my sales guys have to use Zendesk personally.

Okay, cool. Okay, what other questions specifically to PaintScout? My mind is going way out of PaintScout now. So we might have to schedule another call sometime very soon, right after this—just immediately hop on a FaceTime call. I'll literally cancel plans with my wife. Let's just talk business.

Hey, it ends up more money in our pockets though at the same time, right?

Michael Murray: They like it when we do that.

Mark Glinskiy: I guess this question doesn't relate, but let me just ask this, Jon, to you and/or also Michael: you schedule an estimate with a customer, right? Lead goes into your main CRM, you schedule it from there, and then it gets populated once it's scheduled into PaintScout. Now, when the estimate is scheduled, do you have automated text or email reminders for the customer? Not follow-up, but reminders: "Hey, your estimate is scheduled with so-and-so person." Maybe give a bio of the person.

Do you do anything like that? Or what's your process with that? I don't have that. I only have a little bit of an email reminder, but I kind of want to make it a little bit more in-their-face reminder: "Hey, we're coming out, this is who's coming out."

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I mean, the answer is no, PaintScout does not do that. It's a fantastic idea and one that I've considered many times—how that works. Because just like you said, I believe our sales team needs to live in this program. And this program needs to be the hub and the truth of their world for sales. And so we need to do things like that.

That's not only a reminder for the customer, but also a reminder for the rep sometimes: "Okay, this is coming up, this is happening." So those have been big thoughts for me over the years of how to tackle that, but currently, that's not what this does.

Michael Murray: And I'll just jump in. So yeah, PaintScout—not yet kind of answer. We do this as a company, though, in my painting company. Calendly has this functionality. So by scheduling all of our appointments through Calendly—whether they come through the office or people self-schedule—we can set up all sorts of text-message reminders or email reminders.

We also have some in PipeDrive. We've created some nice custom automations so that it can look up who is the sales rep and then it can send a specific email to say, "This is—meet Mark, Mark's going to be your sales rep. Here's a picture of Mark. Here's a little bio, what part of town Mark's from and some of his hobbies," and things like that, so that when Mark shows up to your house, you feel like you already know him and maybe there's some commonality there.

As well as then there's, I think, a three-email sequence that's happening in addition to some of the basic text-message calendar notifications. And those emails are going to be around "meet your rep." We do one where it's just sharing some of our Google review highlights, and then another one that just kind of highlights some of the different service types that we do.

"You might have scheduled us for an exterior, not realizing that we do a lot of cabinet refinishing work as well." So just reminding you about that.

Mark Glinskiy: That's really cool, Michael. That's awesome.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. Michael, I love the fact that you guys—the way you handle follow-ups and intros, that it's not hard selling, it's actually value-driven. And I think people get that wrong where they think follow-ups or intros are all about getting the job, but really it's about finding alignment in a nice, comfortable way. So I like that a lot.

Michael Murray: Yeah. So we have that pre-estimate kind of sequence. And then, to Jon's point, follow-up—we also have a post-estimate sequence where it is very value-forward. So we'll have "here's some tips on selecting colors for a project" and "colors of the year," and stuff like that.

You get it—whatever, I don't remember exactly—but like two days after the quote is marked as sent in PaintScout is the automation trigger. And at no point are we saying "Can we have your money? Book with us," because I don't want to step on the toes of the sales rep who might be having really great phone conversations or text-message conversations with a client or potential client at this point.

Maybe they talked to them an hour ago and then also this email shows up, and an hour ago the customer was like, "Yeah, we just need another day to think about it," and then they get this email that's overly aggressive and it could turn them off. So I've always been worried that these automations can fail relationally. So we generally just try to see it as these soft little "stay top of mind," nudge, provide-a-little-value type of things.

Mark Glinskiy: I love that because I have the same concern with implementing too much automated follow-up to where if it's a commercial client that we know already—we don't need to follow up with them because we just need to do this one estimate, we had a good conversation, and we've got to wait three weeks until we get an answer, and that's it.

Or any other customers: my sales guy has some good rapport, but then they're getting all these emails like "Don't forget about us" and this and that, and it's like, "Well wait, I just talked to you 30 minutes ago, why am I getting this email?"

So I do have—not a fear—but I always have a thought that that could potentially negatively hit you with some customers, for sure. Okay.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark, we probably have time for two more questions here. Love this though, man. And then we'll schedule our full weekend retreat starting on Saturday morning. Oh no, we’re just doing it here. So get comfortable. Live 48 hours, just Mark, Michael and Jon. Yeah, that's good.

Mark Glinskiy: All right, send me your address, I'll book a flight. Oh gosh. All right, I'll sit on the couch right back here.

Okay, question. I hope you have an answer. Of course you have an answer. Work orders. So PaintScout creates work orders, which is awesome. Now, after a job is signed—right, customer approves—that job goes, that signed estimate, into my Zendesk, into my pipeline of projects.

Am I able to, after the fact that it's signed, have my admin person go back into PaintScout and adjust the work order with more notes, remove some things, whatever—post-signed? Are we able to adjust as much as we want?

Michael Murray: I did that just today.

Mark Glinskiy: Great, perfect, that's all you need to say.

Jon Bryant: That's all you need to know. So the work order functions a little bit differently, but the one thing that does occur is we lock down the estimate. You can go back in, but you have to agree that this is a new estimate, because once you get that signature, we don't want to be messing with the customer signature.

So the work order functions a little separately. That then should get kicked out into an invoice and you should add additional work on the invoice. That's the theory behind it. We want to take that accepted job—everything new or anything changed has got to be approved by the customer. And that just covers your ass at the end of the day and ties directly into how you run your workflow. And yeah, that's a free gift from us to you.

Mark Glinskiy: Of course. Well yeah, and why I say work orders is because we work with subs, right? And so with subs, they don't look at how much we charge for the job, but our payouts are set up at a certain percentage or percentage range depending on the job and what we're able to quote. Okay, great.

Now, as far as change orders, on a scale of one to ten, how easy is it to send a change order to a customer?

Michael Murray: Which one's easy? Ten or one?

Mark Glinskiy: Ten is easy.

Michael Murray: Ten. I mean, 9.9. Yeah, it's about as easy as it could be.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Mark Glinskiy: Awesome. And then I guess I'm just going to throw some just bam-bam questions.

Jon Bryant: Rapid fire, yeah, go for it.

Michael Murray: I will say this, Mark, real quick. A lot of our change orders are sent by our office admin because they're often sitting at the desk where a sales rep might be running around and things like that. So if a crew's out on site and they need something—"Hey, customer wants to add this, customer wants to change something," whatever it is—it's easy enough that our office admin can jump in, create that change, add it as additional work, send an email right back to the customer. Customer can sign off on it and 15 minutes later, crew's rocking it out.

Mark Glinskiy: Now if your office admin does that, Michael, who gets the commission on that revenue of the change order?

Michael Murray: So the way that we do it is the crew—if, again, we’re adding work—the crew leader gets a commission and the original sales rep does. So nobody's fighting over credit.

Jon Bryant: We do a banded spiff, it's called. So based on the project value, the person on site gets so much and the sales rep gets so much.

Mark Glinskiy: Okay, interesting. And then when you send out quotes to customers through PaintScout, do you get notified when they view them or how often they open it? Do you ever get notifications that this person is viewing this estimate right now or something?

Jon Bryant: So the most used page on PaintScout is the dashboard, and it's specifically the activity section. So when we look at hits to the app, the activity shows you who viewed an estimate, whether they accepted, whether a deposit was paid. Not only that, but how long they looked at it for.

And it becomes—it's like a really addictive drug for a sales rep. Because you're now looking—people are hitting this thing at all hours of the day. They wake up in the middle of the night—"So-and-so accepted! Oh, did they view it? Oh my goodness, this is crazy."

That element was super important for me to nail because we deliver so much free value and now we've got to get value back. So, yeah.

Mark Glinskiy: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Michael Murray: Yeah, you can see when somebody downloaded it too. I mean, there's all sorts of different activity types, which is nice.

Jon Bryant: You can also see if they forwarded it to a different email and a different email viewed it. So you see it by email. So that kind of tracks a little bit of that too.

Mark Glinskiy: Are you able to see who they sent that email to?

Michael Murray: Email address.

Jon Bryant: Yep, email address, yeah.

Mark Glinskiy: Great. Then I'll know if my customers are sharing my quote with other competitors. Oh, that's awesome. That makes me excited.

Michael Murray: Yeah, that's also a good time to call them. "Hey, it looks like you might be looking at—" No, I'm just kidding, but you might be. "Hey, just happened to be in the neighborhood, following up. How's it going?"

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, that's exactly why I ask: to be able to see which customers are looking at it when, to try to catch them by sending them a text or giving them a call. "Oh coincidence, I was just looking at your quote. Thank you for calling me." So it's like, I want to catch customers in those moments. So very cool. Definitely sign me up.

Now as far as onboarding, I know you guys offer—I know you guys offer helping set things up. I don't know how long it takes you guys to help onboard. I know for an additional fee, you can do things for me, basically. I want to implement it before, definitely before end of next week, where I want to have my bio, some pictures. By the way, I love your guys' presentation. Like the way you can have a presentation, you have a whole menu of "this is who we are, this is what to expect"—I freaking love that. So good job.

Jon Bryant: Oh great. Crazy stat too is that once you start implementing stuff like that—those presentation pages and options—you get an instant boost in your win rate. And it's small but it's significant over a large volume of estimates. It fits right into the "present options, not just one number" strategy we talk about in our guide on building presentations with options. So anyway, yeah.

Mark Glinskiy: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Now, within that—I know you didn't even get a chance to really answer my question and I'm already asking another question. That's how my mind is, I apologize guys.

Jon Bryant: That's okay. I love it. That's Mark. That is why you're joining us today, because that's how your mind works and we love it.

Michael Murray: Entrepreneur.

Mark Glinskiy: Out of your guys' experience, right, and all the data that you have seen, lining up those—whatever you want to call them—those tabs, what do you like to put first, second, and third? Do you like to put your quote in first? Or your story or just some project pictures first, and then price third, price fourth?

Michael Murray: Nobody asked that.

Jon Bryant: You're asking the right questions, Mark. Oh my goodness.

Okay, let me answer quickly your setup question, because the setup for me—if I put on my business-owner hat—is the best money you can spend because it gets you up and going, your presentations get designed, you are set up. And for me, time is sometimes more important—and always more important—than money. And so I am 100% doing that.

Now I know there's a barrier for some people for that cost, but the team puts in so much effort on that end. So we talk all the time about how little we charge for that thing. So yeah, that's the answer.

Mark Glinskiy: Because I could also—

Michael Murray: You're talking about Jon—just to be clear—you’re talking about paying PaintScout to do basically the setup for you. Yeah. I agree. 100%. We did that as a company. I did that and I'm pretty tech savvy. I mean, I've set up all these automations myself and I could definitely go in and do this, but it's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time setting up production rates, setting up all these templates, setting up the presentations that we're talking about now.

I'd much rather just have somebody go in and do the 85–90% of it, and then I'll just come in and put on the final 10–15% touches. It's a game changer. Yeah. It's like Jon said, if you value your time at all, it is money well spent.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, and Jon, to piggyback one more, and then you can get to my question about the presentation order: say I have my own estimate template with my verbiage. Is that something I would be able to send over to you guys and your team would look at it and kind of figure out where to place what things?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. Yep, they do all that stuff. So contracts, production rates, your system of bidding—they'll take your logo and your images and build something nice for you. Then you're giving feedback and editing versus creating. That's what we want to be doing.

So yeah, then your question about how it's actually set out. Michael and I actually have different opinions on this. I think I know—we've talked about it before. It's been a while. But I bury the estimate a little bit. I don't give it to them straight up. You have to learn how to use the navigation in order to get there. Because we don't want someone seeing price and then forgetting about our value.

But Michael, I think you have a different opinion.

Michael Murray: Yeah, we put—I mean, yeah. So for us, the first page is the quote. I don't know that I feel super strongly that it has to be that way. I can see both sides. I definitely see your points, Jon. I think the argument that would be made for putting the quote first is: that is what somebody's looking for.

So in my mind, it's like, I'm not really paying attention to much of the other stuff until I find that. It's kind of like, if I'm considering software like PaintScout, the first page I usually go to is the pricing page. I'm just like, "All right, how much does this cost? Is it $5,000 a month? Is it $500 a month, or is it $50 a month?" And whatever that might be.

Then I'm like, "Okay, I've checked that box," and now I'm like, "What is it? What am I getting?" I'm looking for a recorded demo or whatever it might be to try to learn more about it. And so that's how my mind works. And so I maybe—rightfully or wrongfully—assume that that's how other people are thinking about it. And so that's the thought behind why ours are set up that way.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, okay, makes sense.

Jon Bryant: All right, Mark, I'm getting the—what do they call it when they yank the people off the stage thing—from Michael here. So maybe wrap it up with one more question and then we'll sign off here.

Michael Murray: It's been about an hour.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, geez, I think I have many questions, but they do not relate to PaintScout. But I guess I could just leave it at that, honestly.

Michael Murray: I want to ask—I'm going to ask you a question for you, Mark. So Jon, within your painting company, what would you say is the favorite, maybe even ninja-secret, hidden, maybe not so popularly known thing within PaintScout—power-user secret?

Jon Bryant: So there's two. Yeah, great question. And it's one that we use in order for our price discussion with our customers. And that's that when I originally designed it, I had a hard time having price discussions with customers around areas, because it didn't allow me to get to the root of what they really wanted.

So within PaintScout, there's two separate views. There's an area view, but there's also a surface view. And so you can kind of move back and forth between these two views. And you can say to a customer, "Hey, I know I'm a little bit higher price, but what if we don't do the ceilings? The ceilings are this much."

And that is so powerful in the price discussion with the customer, because now we're cost-engineering and we're working with their schedule and their perception of what matches together. Instead of saying, "Hey, this price is nice, but we could take out the bathroom," where we’re doing the walls, ceiling, and trim in the bathroom—and they're like, "Yeah, but we wanted all the walls done."

So that's kind of an interesting difference between the way that we look at paint pricing and customers view their project. So that's really one.

The second is the ability to package and offer options. A lot of people don’t group enough. Customers get a little bit overwhelmed sometimes by the amount of information coming their way. If we price individually, they're going to be like, "Oh, the bathroom—that's $300 to paint a bathroom," and they get focused on these individual numbers. I don't know if that's ever happened to you guys, but for me, I want to have a number and we're talking about a number.

So there's a grouping function in PaintScout that lets you put all those areas together or group surfaces together and present it so it's one package price. And then you can also replicate that package, change some variables, and move that to an option. Now they have an initial price, but you've also given them a grouping of that same project, but you've changed paint or scope and that's changed the pricing. That directly lines up with the way we teach in our content on presentations with options.

Those two things have been just amazing for us in terms of having good, authentic conversations with customers, which is what the whole purpose, I believe, is behind sales and being successful at sales. So—does that help, Michael?

Mark Glinskiy: That's great.

Michael Murray: Love it.

Mark Glinskiy: That was actually a question I thought to ask, but I forgot about it. The way you just talked about grouping is more grouping and not having every line item show every price—because I do not want to do that. I never liked doing that.

Michael Murray: Well, I'm here, Mark. I got you. No, we do. I was going to—if you asked me, I was going to tell you grouping. Grouping is one of my favorite things. Yeah. We don't use—I would say that we don't use the area/substrate view toggle often enough, just in our sales conversation flow, I guess.

But yeah. So yeah, we do—I'm a big fan of grouping. I would say the templates part is something that people might not utilize enough.

Jon Bryant: Oh, templates are amazing. I would say that too. Yeah, that's phenomenal. We just were looking at someone's estimate process and I think I can take it down to about four seconds based on the way they do it for a house—having a proposal and a price and everything and a work order in four seconds. That's amazing. Just the way they do things via template.

Last question, Mark.

Mark Glinskiy: Okay, got time for one more question? Okay, last one, last one. To the both of you, you can answer yes or no quickly, or with a percentage. PaintScout is great for in-person presentations. What percentage of your estimates do you actually present in person and you try to have them signed in person on the spot?

Michael Murray: 95%.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, pretty much everyone.

Mark Glinskiy: Well, what's your guys' close ratio?

Michael Murray: Win rate, you’re asking—not on-the-spot, just in general. Yeah. For me personally, it's just over 50%. Our company is like 45%.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, ours—my win rate over the last two years was 100%, only because I bid three jobs and then I opted out. And then retired. I went out at a high, man. I went out at a high.

Michael Murray: Jon went and did three restaurants, he sold them all and then retired.

Mark Glinskiy: Right. But he sold five. He sold five. How about that?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, those were large-value jobs that I had to put a lot of effort into. So over the years—

Michael Murray: Well, Mark's going to say no to you today, and so now your average is 75%.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that's not how I roll. So Mark, you've got to sign off today so I can keep that 100% going. No.

The power here, Mark—and we see this all the time—is that getting a price on the spot and having a real, actual conversation about price just unlocks everything about the sales process for you and your customer. And if you can do that in a spot where they can't hide, or they're present, versus trying to chase people down, you are going to see your win rate explode. That's just the track record. Yeah. Closure, yeah.

Michael Murray: And at least that closure—you’re going to get better answers, even if it's a no. You just have lower follow-up time and less ghosting and all that. And the more comfortable you are talking about price and value, the easier it is to handle those "your price is higher" moments—very much the stuff we talk about in our content around handling price objections.

Mark Glinskiy: Right. Incredible. Thank you, guys.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Mark.

Michael Murray: Yeah. However somebody's getting there—whether it's paper and pen, a different software, or whatever—I think we should all be striving towards giving the price when we're at the house. It doesn't always happen. There are variables, complications, things that we've got to look up and that's why I think it's not always going to be 100%—it's not possible. But whatever it is, I think that's best practice for sure. It’s not just the painting industry; it's anything home-improvement related. That's best practice for sure.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, yeah, cool, awesome, great.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, cool. Okay guys, I've got to wrap it up. And Mark, I love the questions. Thank you so much for being a part of this and hopefully that was helpful and hopefully we’ll see you make a decision on something here within the next hour and then we’ll close it off.

So anyway, it's a pleasure having you, man. And I look forward to having another discussion too. I mean, we can always talk—Michael and I talk every week about pricing, selling, and producing paint jobs. And we love having people like yourself on who are deep thinkers about the industry and who actually care. And I can feel that in your questions, so thank you.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah. Absolutely.

Michael Murray: I think it'd be fun, especially, Mark, if you end up going the PaintScout route, to do a follow-up in maybe three, six months and just see what are some of the things that you've noticed. And perhaps at that point we could talk some more about some of these ninja tricks, if you will, that we talked about here at the end. And once you've started to use it, some of these things might sink in even better. We can even open up PaintScout accounts here on shared screen or whatever and talk about how you have it set up. That'd be fun.

Mark Glinskiy: Yeah, yeah. Sweet, absolutely. I'll be looking forward to that. Yeah, for sure, guys. Yeah, you too. Take care, guys.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Well, thanks, Mark. We'll let you go and have yourself a wonderful day. Cool.

Michael Murray: Thanks Mark. Good stuff.

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