EP: 206 Chris Badran w/ RP One and Rocket Bookings - Maximizing Dispatch Boards and Nurturing Customer Relationships

Are you looking to optimize your HVAC business outreach and nurture your customer database for better results? Look no further! In this episode of HVAC Revealed, Chris Badran, Co-Founder of RP One and Rocket Bookings, shared valuable insights on how to fill dispatch boards and effectively nurture your customer base.

Key Takeaways from the Episode:

• Clear and concise messaging is crucial for text message marketing campaigns. The call to action should be transparent and easy to understand.

• Automation is key! Automating the sales funnel can significantly improve results, saving HVAC business owners valuable time and effort.

• Omnichannel marketing is effective. Utilizing multiple touchpoints, such as telemarketing, email, and SMS, can significantly enhance the success of outreach and lead nurturing.

Check out the full episode of HVAC Revealed to learn more about Chris Badran's insights and to understand how RP One could benefit your HVAC business. 

Find Chris:
On The Web: https://www.callrocketbookings.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-badran-07a529208/

Join Our Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed
Presented By On Purpose Media: https://www.onpurposemedia.ca/
For HVAC Internet Marketing reach out to us at info@onpurposemedia.ca or 888-428-0662


Sponsored By:
Chiirp: https://chiirp.com/hssr
Elite Call: https://elitecall.net
On Purpose Media: https://onpurposemedia.ca 

Transcript

INTRO: 0:09

Welcome to HVAC Success Secrets Revealed, a show where we interview industry leaders and disruptors, revealing the success secrets to create and unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Now your hosts, Thaddeus and Evan.

Evan Hoffman: 0:24

Hey, welcome back to another HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. We are live here in Memphis, Tennessee, having ourselves a great time at TrueGrit. Joe Crisara's event with Service MVP got on Chris Badran. He is the co founder of RP One also of Rocket Bookings. So we're going to be talking all about how to fill your dispatch boards, even when calls are a little bit dead and how to make sure that you not only Get the dispatch boards full and make sure that you got your technicians going out, but how to really nurture that database and keep a relationship there. Cause that's really what it is. It's all about just relationship management with your customers so that they continue to come back and use you versus going out to find others. So thanks for joining me, man.

Chris Badran: 1:02

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Great show. Great event. People are awesome and we're meeting a lot of really fun, cool people here.

Evan Hoffman: 1:08

So you were running rocket bookings. Which is outbounding filling out dispatch boards, but all through the phone call. You were using other methods to be able to reach out to people as well, but where, what was the birth of RP 1? How did it get started?

Chris Badran: 1:22

Sure. Actually both companies, RP 1 and Rocket Bookings, really started with a need in the industry. And it started with the problem of how do we keep these technicians busy at absolute air flow? So a few years back before that company was sold massive company located in Southern California and if you've ever been to SoCal, it's awesome to live there, but it's not great for heating and air. So the weather is super mild, depending on the season, it could be anywhere between, anywhere between, nine to 10 months of shoulder season. So for these companies that had a database and they had all these guys previously, the options were, they had to just keep buying more digital leads, digital marketing. When the leads get fewer and farther in between in shoulder season, they start getting real expensive and what happens is these big companies with the big marketing budgets are able to allocate the spend and they drive the leads up a little bit and they win the market during the shoulder season. Rocket Bookings was really created to give contractors a way to turn into their database and keep those guys busy utilizing what they have instead of going and buying more and it was highly effective. So that's how the rocket bookings company was born over the last couple of years of doing it. We use a lot of different softwares, right? A lot of different things for tracking SMS, calling everything you can think of there was a lot of products out there, but nothing really just felt 100 percent what we needed. Nothing was really customized to the trades, right? With the call to actions and how you actually handle the calls after the event. So we set out to build our own software about a year ago and it's been under development for a long time. We just got to the place where we started using it internally, probably about four or five months ago and very recently it got to the place where we thought it was ready to license and other contractors could utilize. So that's how we got started Rocket Bookings and RP One was born, it was all born out of a need for something, and it was built from the ground up, and I think that's why it's so successful and, that's why it works so well. It gets pretty complicated when you're building out something like that.

Evan Hoffman: 3:04

Yeah, people look at the end result of softwares, and they think it's so easy, and many intricate things with it and by the way, anyone who has gotten into coding, I respect so much cause it is, it's not easy. So frustrating when something breaks because there's a comma in the wrong spot and it's just the most frustrating thing.

Chris Badran: 3:21

The way it works is, you build something, it works and then as soon as you add something, you add it to the software and then it breaks everything else behind it. it's been a long process, but it's been fun. We've learned a lot. We learned a lot of different ways, have not do things and I think it's really starting to pick up the pace now and over the next few months, all the development behind the scenes that's been going on for so long, it's really going to start coming to light and I'm really excited for RP One and its customers for what it's going to do. That's great.

Evan Hoffman: 3:46

Let's talk about nurturing the database then and keeping it active. Because obviously one of the things that I'm sure you guys are experiencing is, bring on a new customer. Here's our list. Go out and hit it hard and the Enengagementate at which you get out of that list is going to depend greatly on how that list has been nurtured over time and what the experience was like when they were in the home and everything else. So what can companies be doing now, even if they're not outbounding as much heading into the summertime, especially in HVAC what can they be doing throughout summertime so that they can nurture that list so that in the fall. Or next spring when it comes time to nurture that list and hit them up with an offer?

Chris Badran: 4:24

That's a really good question because I get this question a bunch in the call center. They say what is a response rate. What does the booking rate look like? And all these, people want statistics and it's not that simple, right? Depending on how exactly how you're saying how the customer list was nurtured and how they've engaged with them and the experience and what does the brand look like? How memorable are they? What market are they in? It's all over the place, right? The important thing is, and I could speak to this when we first started rocket bookings, We started working with some really big companies, right? And in the beginning, we would get so excited because they're like, Oh, here's this list. There's 120, 000 people on it. It's been this company's 25 years old and we were like, Oh, my gosh, we're going to get so many calls on the board. Then you start getting into it. And this is why RP one is so cool too, because in the beginning it was just telemarketing, but telemarketing is it's hard, right? And it's expensive to have us based people sitting there. They can outbound call someone who's not expecting a phone call. Build a promotion, sell them, close them, and then schedule it in the service line. That's not easy. It's not cheap to do. And so we don't have a big turnover rate. Those people get paid right now, 401k benefits, et cetera. So when we get those lists, we are so amped, right? And then when you start going through the list, we're making tens of thousands of phone calls because it's such a large list and what we start finding out is, 7 percent of the people don't live in the service range anymore, right? 5 percent of those people. Something went wrong at some point on one of those calls and it never got fixed. So they don't like that company anymore. They're not going to use them again. Some of those numbers are disconnected and some of those people are deceased and we were able to start seeing these trends of big companies who are running so many calls, but they're not nurturing these people. So there's three ways to contact your customers and then, the main ways are telemarketing, SMS and email, right? Besides that, you can do other things. You can send them postcards, you can send them cookies, handwritten notes. So it's so important that you engage with these people and you don't forget about the customers that. Didn't get sold something, right? And that's usually how a campaign starts when we start working with companies, we help them scrub down their lists and we help them target the people who they want to see. So I'll speak to HVAC cause that's what we're doing right now. We want to remove any of the club members. That's a really easy phone call to make, right? Any CSR in the office could pick up the phone and schedule a pre booked appointment, right? Or prepaid appointment we remove any of the 1 to 4 year old systems when we're targeting service type calls. Because if I send you back to that, it's probably not going to result in a high average ticket and then besides that, it's, we do narrow down a drive range that makes sense for you guys. When you run a promotion, something like a 79 tune up or 119 water heater flush. We want to make sure that we're not dispatching these texts like all over town. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to drive an hour and 15 minutes one way and then an hour back at those costs, right? So it's the results vary. I would say that companies that keep in touch and they have that, those better brands that's really recognizable and memorable. They do tend to see better results with something like this, right? We encourage people to stay in touch with their customers early on, build that relationship and the other thing guys is his tags in the CRM. All these CRMs have the ability to leave notes with these customers and when we come to scrub your guys's list, some of you guys are really good at this and some people need some help with it. But I encourage you to leave as much information with those tags as you possibly can because it's going to really help you get to work faster and know who you're targeting when we do something like this.

Evan Hoffman: 7:46

Yeah, that makes sense. What would be some examples of tags that you would want to see that would help separate and segment out that list? So it's a good starting point.

Chris Badran: 7:56

Please

Evan Hoffman: 7:56

age

Chris Badran: 7:56

of system, right? Age of system and some people do this and they do it a lot more broadly, if it were up to me, I would say one to four years old, five years plus 10 years, plus a 12 and a 15 plus, right? Really understanding what the age of those systems are. So as you guys age there, sometimes you can create a campaign and if you have that data, correct. You can make a list of a thousand people, book, 10, 20, 30 percent of them, and that could be a really high average ticket, right? So if you can get focused with the information early on, it's a lot easier if you do it as you go, as opposed to trying to do it at a later date. Definitely age the system if they're tenants, if they're landlords if it's property management, if it's commercial, those things really matter too, because when you're creating the list, the outbounding, it's effective with commercial properties, but you're not going to see the same result as residential, right? And when you are running these calls, It's not so much that we don't want to call anyone who's a property management or a property owner. We should just be aware of it going into it because that's going to be a slightly different script in a different conversation We want to get them on scene so that we need to be prepared to do that or at least have them acknowledge the call and get a credit card on file So off the top of my head, I would say those two even if you just did those two alone. It's gonna really help you with your efforts, right? Club members are big. I think most people do the club member tag. It's pretty easy to export based on the CRM.

Evan Hoffman: 9:12

So that makes sense. With the age of the system, cause not all CRMs are able to do this where you can have it continue to add those age numbers as it ages out, So if it was a system from 2012. It's not going to know that it's 12 years old, So even if you have it in that 12 to 15 gap, once it reaches 15, it's not going to automatically move it up to a 15 plus. So how would you recommend or. Is there something that you would do specifically that would allow you to better manage those tags? Yeah, those systems age up because if you're in the four under four years old system But now it reaches seven years and you haven't moved it yet that's an issue.

Chris Badran: 9:48

In a perfect world this is like the service techs making these tags when they're on jobs, right? If you got, if you haven't tagged someone and you haven't seen that system in, five, 10 years, this is where I'm talking about where the data starts expiring and then we don't really know who's working on that system, where that customer is or how old that system is and that's, one of the biggest components of doing this is keeping touch with these people and if people are skipping maintenance for a year, are they working with somebody else or are they just simply not taking care of the equipment? It is something that we help you guys clean up when you get started with us. It's part of the onboarding process. We will go through and help you with the scrub our team is pretty good at it at this point, but at least it gives us a good point and where to start, right? We're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's a little bit more calculated than that and that Really speeds up the process. When you guys get on board with us, that is the longest process is getting the list together and scrubbing it and everything else We have dialed and everything else takes about one business day.

Evan Hoffman: 10:43

To get the messages set up.

Chris Badran: 10:45

Oh, yeah. All the automations, buying the local phone numbers, building out the forwarding, the after hours stuff. It's really the list scrub, right? Depending on how organized it is and how big the list is, sometimes they could take a while, you know, 3, 4 days and that's what we don't want.

Evan Hoffman: 10:59

You mentioned buying the phone numbers and this is something that has come up a lot yeah, we work with customers in terms of some outreach and text messages for follow ups on reviews and things like that. The compliance issues that we run into now governments regulators, they're becoming more and more difficult to work with.

Chris Badran: 11:13

Yes.

Evan Hoffman: 11:14

Trying to clean it up again, putting the consumer at mind to reduce some of the spam calls that they get. Walk us through, some of the things that, that business owners need to be thinking about when it comes to the compliance side of it yeah and then, from RP One standpoint, obviously you're taking care of it for people, but.

Chris Badran: 11:28

That's

Evan Hoffman: 11:29

a huge topic.

Chris Badran: 11:30

And it's becoming a department on its own in just RP One alone. So we have a telemarketing license with rocket bookings. We report to the FTC and the FCC, so we've always had to stay compliant when you use the technology that we have, it's not the same rules as calling someone off a landline or a cell phone. We've always been in tune with it. I will say that over the last 18 to 24 months, it's been changing. It's been cracking down, it's been getting harder to do. They really started getting after SMS probably in the last 18 months. This year there was a big change in January. But I think right now they're really focused with robo calls technology that's coming out. So they're a little diverted right now, but generally guys don't text cold lists. Let me just start there. I get this question a lot and I just want to put it to bed. Yes. There are people who do it. There's people who send that a million text messages. They never get in trouble and then I just don't want you guys to be the person who sends out 200 text message and gets up to a 1500 hundred dollar fine for each one of those messages. So this works best when you work with your customer, a customer relationship, right? Having that existing business relationship does. Insulate the contractors and any transaction that they have after that actually extends that amount of time. So compliance is really big now that's with the ftc and the FCC as far as the compliance of the carriers, that's a whole nother story, right? And I'll try to keep it as clean as possible and not get too nerdy here. But essentially what happens when you guys sign up for something like this is you have to get a 10 DLC mass marketing license, right? The best way that you see the most optimized results is by pre registering what you're say when you get that license, and this is what happens behind the scenes. When contractors sign up with us, we actually go and, we take the business information, the EIN, and we start that paperwork and complete it for them. Now that's the beginning of it, right? As the campaigns go on. They will request changes based off of how many people are reporting to spam. How many people are replying? Stop. How many people are actually engaging with the product or the promotion? So that's not like a set it and forget it thing. It's an ongoing communication, right? And that's where the emails really start picking up and it's, it could be dozens and dozens of emails a day for a single account based on the size of that company. I would say, whether you're going to do it with us or whether you do it with somebody else you need a 10 DLC mass marketing license and that's the difference between some of these products that are out there that don't allow you to actually market to anyone besides maybe like a club member or a house you just left. Cause a lot of companies dip their toe in this, but getting into the compliance nitty gritty it's a whole nother job in itself. So be compliant, it's any upside there is to breaking. These rules is not going to overthrow the downside, but what happens if you're not staying within the lines, right? So that is handled for you guys. If using RP One and it's something that we work really hard to stay compliant with all

Evan Hoffman: 14:19

Yeah. In my mind, it's no different than, trying to do some black hat strategies on an SEO. Yep. It's one of those things. We just saw another algorithm update come out. That's really penalizing a lot of AI content that's written on the internet entire sites where they were ranking really well have seen hundreds of thousands of keywords go away in an instant, because it was all AI generated content, when you try to cheat the system comes back, the system will figure out a way and it will bite you in the ass eventually and so it's, yeah, it's one of those things. You just do it with the right way right up front and then you don't have to worry about it in the end. What's one nugget that you can give that people are under utilizing, When it comes to a text message campaign.

Chris Badran: 15:01

Okay. If I had to narrow this down to one thing I've seen a lot of clients when they get involved with this, I'll, I asked him about their experience and what they've been doing previously and usually the fastest way that I can see is it's really come the connection rate and the reply rate really comes down to. It is lying under the compliance, but another way that you can increase that is by having a clear message, right? When you're building out these campaigns, we really don't do more than three touches. Three touches is when you really seem to start getting a yes or a no without bothering people. They should be spread out. So it's not just boom machine getting somebody, right? But having a clear message in the message With a clear call to action and a clear way to move forward or stop that drip is super important, right? And, it's just like anything, if you have kids at home, you give them two options, they're way more likely to pick one than when you just give them one option, right? So if you are running these drip campaigns and you don't have someone who, or you're not following our example with the scripts that are in the RP One for you, clear call to action, build some value for the clients understand what they're going to get when they do follow your call to action. It doesn't matter what you're selling, whether it's a water heater, flush AC, tune up or Nike shoes, right? Know what they're going to pay for, know what they're going to get and give them two ways to move forward, right? The way that we do it is typically either call us at this phone number. We route that to the office or our call center, depending on how we're managing or you're managing the account or, reply one or yes, or I'm in. So be clear. I know and keep them short don't send out these essays because the harder you make it to move forward with something, the less likely people are going to do it. So that compliance probably trumps that but I would say. If I had to fix one thing that anyone could probably do using any SaaS product, be clear with your messaging.

Evan Hoffman: 16:49

I

Chris Badran: 16:49

love that and

Evan Hoffman: 16:49

one thing I know we've done in the past when we set up these campaigns for people, it was, longer form email. Okay and then the text message would go out an hour later, two hours later. Hey, it's Chris with Absolute Airflow. Just wanted to follow up and see if you got my email for a spring tune up absolutely and so now the text message is that short and that concise, it feels like it's personalized for you and you still have that information there and you're like, Oh no, I didn't, I'll go check it out. Or, Oh, what was it about? If they want to shortcut it and just get the information in text.

Chris Badran: 17:21

I like that too, because it's omni channel marketing, right? There's multiple touches conveying the same thing and that's why I like, the Rocket Bookings is telemarketing and SMS. Now pick one and then, and definitely at least do one of the three. But if you can combine all three together, telemarketing, email touches, and SMS, there's obviously ways to elevate it with direct mail. We work with some companies that they're really granular with their data and they say, Hey, these 1500 people are getting a mailer over the next 30 days. We want to do a telemarketing SMS campaign, right? Those are huge differences as opposed to, people just sending out emails or whatnot, right? So that's when this stuff is really cool when you get it optimized and I like how you guys do that because you guys get it, the multiple touch points, right? Those customers aren't going anywhere.

Evan Hoffman: 18:05

Totally. Totally and then you can tie in the phone call after that and that's the way I've always viewed the text message and email marketing when you're throwing out an offer. One, it shouldn't be the first time that you're communicating with them. First and foremost, make sure that's not the case, right? Just throwing out an offer blindly without any value beforehand usually is not going to land very well. So make sure that you're communicating value up front, but then when you are throwing out the offer, all we're trying to do is clean up the amount of calls that we have to make. Yep. If we can book 20 percent of that list into a tune up, or at least get a 20, 30, 40 percent response rate out of that list, Yep that's 400 out of a thousand calls that we needed to make that are taken care of now. Now we just have to focus on the other six that didn't respond and that's our call list now, right? So it's simplifying the game so that we can touch everyone, but do it in a way that they want to be communicated with. Yeah.

Chris Badran: 18:55

I

Evan Hoffman: 18:55

couldn't agree

Chris Badran: 18:56

more with that cause I think that's how SMS really started at Rocketbookings, right? When you have agents just banging the phones all day yeah and I will say most of our calls do still come from telemarketing, but it was almost like the morale boost and keeping people engaged and keeping it fun that was like, oh, Hey absolutely I don't have to make that many cold calls. Here's a couple warm leads for us especially if you're multi purposing CSRs and you have an outsourced, outbounding for you, this is a really good way to keep them motivated. Building those KPIs off of what they need to do per day and helping them out with SMS is going to really keep people in the burnout rate is going to be reduced drastically.

Evan Hoffman: 19:30

What

Chris Badran: 19:30

kind

Evan Hoffman: 19:31

of averages do you see in terms of, so let's say I'm a company been around for 10 years. I send you my customer list of 10, 000 people of which. Let's say 6, 000 actually have an email. Okay. What can I expect out of that 6, 000 in terms of are going to be good leads that we can eventually nurture and not necessarily book all of them, but how much of that 6, 000 is going to be bad?

Chris Badran: 19:52

If, typically at rocket bookings, we're running seasonal stuff. I have clients that go 12 months out of the year, the companies that are good at service and They're okay with converting those type of calls. Now, if we went for the whole year, it's going to be a lot more than just a season, but I assume that, it's shoulder season now and people may be looking for a solution to get started. What we've seen with the manage accounts that we're running at RP One with text message alone and I just showcased an account today one of our good friends signed up from the Arizona market, which has been really tough and. Last year and this year we've had a lot of contact from that market, but we've been seeing an average Response rate between 20 and 35 percent. Nice and depending on who's managing those accounts because we have packages where We'll give you access to the software and you can use it We'll still train you and build everything out for you or our call center can actually handle some of those phone calls for them We've seen a booking rate, you know based on those variables between 20 to 30 percent of that as well. So it was a much smaller customer list, that example that I showed, but they were able to book over 170 80 tune ups in that market, which has been really hard in the last three weeks. So again, Someone who's never had automation in their business and I remember having this conversation with them, and I was like, how much of your sales funnels automated right now? Things like this and when you guys are saying no to that, those are the ones that have really drastic changes. If you've never done something like this, we're now automating all that work that used to be manual a lot of hard manual work. Those customers are seeing massive swings, massive results very quickly. So we're really excited for them to be able to do that for their business. I think I'm getting a good bottle of wine this year.

Evan Hoffman: 21:25

There you go. I love it. And for those of you that have not listened to the Dustin Van Orman episode that we recorded while we were here as well. Not sure if it's going to get released before or after this one, but go back and listen to that one where he talks about the tune up and how, yes, it's a low ticket offer meant to get you in the door so that you can deliver a five star customer experience. He went in detail on that. So go back and listen to that episode. It's a hundred percent.

Chris Badran: 21:50

And we tell companies that all the time. I'm like, look, based off the criteria that we scrubbed out for you, there's an opportunity around five years old is when things start failing on an HVAC system, right? The people that this thing from buying the equipment has worn off and now people's mindset shift to more protecting the investment. We're not there for just a 79, an 80 tune up. We should be leaving with at least a five star review and a club membership, if not more, right? There's no reason why they can't at least be generating a five star review with some Wow service So I'm looking forward to watching that episode myself.

Evan Hoffman: 22:20

Love it. Love it Where can people book a demo?

Chris Badran: 22:22

You can go to www.rpone.ai, book a demo with us. We have a fantastic sales team that we opened up a lot of calendars to get people in quicker. I know if you booked a demo last month, it was quite a wait time. We've sorted that out for you guys, so you can get in now and talk to us and see if this is a good fit for you guys for shoulder season.

Evan Hoffman: 22:40

Love it. That's awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. Appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you guys some value again, regardless of what software that is that you're using in your business, whether it's RP One or any of the others you want to make sure that you're you have some sort of an outreach system built up your business and more importantly a process to actually connect with your database. Thank you so much for coming on now Appreciate it. Cheers

Thaddeus Tondu: 23:06

Well, that's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/gorups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all. One person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.